What do Meryl Streep, Judy Davis, Andie MacDowell and Mercedes Ruehl have in common? Each got one of the best roles of her career thanks to Richard LaGravenese. Here the screenwriter of The Fisher King, The Ref, The Bridges of Madison County, A Little Princess and Unstrung Heroes talks about why women are more interesting than men, and what it's like writing a film about beauty for Barbra Streisand.
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"What does a woman want?" Freud asked. And the cacophony of differing voices has been deafening ever since. But if the question had been asked, "What do actresses want?" there would be one clear, concise answer today: Richard LaGravenese.
Think of Mercedes Ruehl and Amanda Plummer rolling around in hysterics during the manicure scene in The Fisher King, Judy Davis's vitriol in The Ref, Meryl Streep's gentle repartee in The Bridges of Madison County, Andie MacDowell's tolerant, bemused mothering in Unstrung Heroes, Liesel Matthews's lonely generosity in A Little Princess. It's no wonder LaGravenese is the Mr. Right of screenwriting right now. Meryl Streep reportedly signed on for The Bridges of Madison County solely because of LaGravenese's script---she hated the book. Barbra Streisand hired him to write her current project, The Mirror Has Two Faces.
It's not clear to me whether this has anything to do with his magical ability to write meaty film roles for women, but LaGravenese lives in New York. When settled in his huge living room overlooking Central Park, I start by remarking, "Lots of people say it's hard to write parts for women. But you write roles that actresses are chomping at the bit to play."
"When I was young, I had two older sisters, and since I was the youngest in my family, my mom took me around with her all the time. I was forever with her when she was having coffee in the middle of the afternoon with her three sisters. And they would talk about men. I absorbed a lot of that. My dad was a presence, of course, but he worked nights a lot, and I would only see him one day a week. As a kid, I'd hear all the women talking about men, about what assholes men are. how men really don't know what's going on. and how women have to put up with them. They'd laugh and roll their eyes.And I thought, 'Women are the people who really know what's going on. I don't want to be one of the men.' It caused problems, believe me. There was an identity crisis there. But I absorbed and listened. I heard lots of things that came out later when I was writing. I'd remember little expressions or the way the women would talk to each other."
"What movies did you grow up on?"
"What was it, 50 years ago when there were all these amazing roles for women? Comedies and tragedies. Those were the movies that I grew up on, the movies my folks introduced me to. Even as a kid I was more enchanted watching Bette Davis than Errol Flynn. I mean, All About Eve or The Little Foxes or The Letter? There was just something about women that fascinated me. Those Irene Dunne movies like The Awful Truth, or Jean Arthur in The More the Merrier. Barbara Stanwyck movies drove me nuts, like Ball of Fire and Double Indemnity. I used to go cuckoo when I would see those films."
"Whoa, big fella," I say, because the 6'2" LaGravenese is practically frothing at the mouth.
"I know, I know," he says. "I just really have an affinity for women. Watching them go through journeys is more interesting to me than watching men."
"So what journey do you send Barbra Streisand on in The Mirror Has Two Faces?"
LaGravenese is the screenwriter of this project--a remake of the French film, Le Miroir a Deux Faces-- which is in production as we speak and due to hit screens in late '96.
"Lately it seems people are more interested in attitude than feelings. I am so bored with that. This film asks, 'What is real beauty? What is real love?"'
Not everyone would have the nerve to take on those touchy subjects in a movie starring Barbra Streisand. "What's the story?" I ask.
"It's about this handsome, intellectual math professor (Jeff Bridges) whose Achilles' heel is that when he's in love with a beautiful woman he loses his mind. He wants to find another way of feeling love, and he meets Barbra Streisand, who's a bit homely... "
"Wait," I say, "Barbra Streisand's going to play homely?'" I'm remembering that she played the shrink in The Prince of Tides in a skirt slit up to her pupik and nails longer than her nose.
"Well, I don't know how ugly. But that's not really the issue. It's about her coming to a point of self-love, so that it isn't any physical transformation she goes through, like plastic surgery. It's just a different attitude." If this attitude stuff worked, Vogue, Allure and the rest would be out of business, I'm thinking, but I keep this to myself, and LaGravenese continues. "Did you ever have a relationship with somebody and it just didn't work out, you just weren't attracted to them, you break up with them, you see them a year later, and they're feeling really good about themselves, and they look fabulous? And you go, 'Wow...why didn't they look like that when we were together?' And, obviously they're the same people?"
Obviously, they've had cosmetic surgery, if you ask me. "So, any horror stories about working with Barbra?" I ask, just for fun.
"Not a one," declares LaGravenese. "I love her. She's a really great collaborator. I went out to California and we spent a week together, 10-hour days through lunch and dinner, just working on the script. And it was great. She's really smart, she's really funny and..."
He stops mid-sentence.
"What?" I plead.
LaGravenese throws his arms in the air and shouts, "And she's Barbra Streisand! C'mon. I got to watch My Name Is Barbra with her in the room, while she was redoing the tapes. I was dying."
I'm laughing, because I think he might be about to break into a chorus of ''People."
"That reminds me, I heard that you used to be a chorus boy..."
"Yes, I did it all. Summer stock, touring, the whole thing."
"'So were you the first straight chorus boy in the history of the chorus?'"
Now he's laughing, "Not the first, it's not something I was very good at."
"Well, thank God you found screenwriting. Didn't you get nominated for an Oscar for The Fisher King?"
LaGravenese nods, yes. "Callie Khouri won it, though, for Thelma & Louise."
"That's interesting, because, besides you, Callie's writing the best scripts for women,"
"We became really good friends, because we were at every award ceremony together. I was really happy to gel the nomination, but I knew I wasn't going to win. Thelma & Louise really hit a nerve, and I loved that movie. If I had to lose, losing to Callie was the best way."
"You know. The Fisher King was the first screenplay I ever read," I say. "I remember being completely blown away. It was so smart and literate. I thought, Holy shit, these screenwriters are smart.' The joke is, I've read thousands of screenplays since, and I've never seen one that comes even close to The Fisher King."
LaGravenese turns a nice shade of pink. "It was the first one I ever wrote, and I had no idea if it was good."
I moan. "You are going to be responsible for at least a quarter of a million assholes coming to Hollywood. They'll read this and say, 'I can do that."
"I worked on that screenplay for years. I wanted to give up on it many times," says LaGravenese. "My wife kept telling me that I had something there, to keep at it. I had gone to school to be an actor--I studied at NYU--but I haled rehearsing and I was always embarrassed, which is not good. I had written skits, so I thought, why not a screenplay? When I finished The Fisher King, my wife and I went away for a weekend to Puerto Rico. I had never gone on a vacation. When I came home, there were 18 messages on the phone machine, because while I was gone, they had sold my script. It felt like in one second our entire lives changed."
"How old were you?"
"Well. I'm 36 now, so I was about 28. I thought it was a fluke, and then they offered me this writing job at Disney. I just took whatever they gave me. because I figured that sooner or later they'd find out that they had made a serious error and I'd be fired."
"But that's not quite the way it turned out," I point out.
"Knock wood," he says, knocking like mad. "I wrote A Little Princess while I was there, although it didn't get made for years."
"So, you didn't find it hard to get into a young girl's head for A Little Princess?"
"What's so hard about imagining loneliness or the loss of a parent or being afraid? I wanted to write something for children, because I love kids and we were trying to get pregnant when I first started on it. By the time it was done, my daughter. Lily, had already been born, which just shows you how long the process was."
"So why is it that so few women's roles are good?"
"Something happened in the '60s. There was a shift in film that started with the sexual revolution. All of a sudden, it was alright to show women being strong and sexy. But because men were making these films, they took that to mean that they could just show tits and ass. And then in the '70s. when, with Jaws and Star Wars, the blockbuster movies were born, films became male-driven. In the '80s, when people like Stallone and Schwarzenegger got so big, the industry changed drastically. A lot of the great works of art in the '70s simply couldn't get made today. Imagine a studio making Five Easy Pieces. The movie business became just a business. Women's voices got reduced a little bit more, and their roles became very sexualized."
"Is all the hoopla about last year being a good year for actresses just an illusion?"
"I think everything is cyclical. Part of it is the audience's responsibility. But also. I think actresses have to initiate their own work, find projects they like and gel them made. I've spoken to some of my friends about this--Marisa Tomei, Elisabeth Shue, Mercedes Ruehl, Jeanne Tripplehorn. These are all smart, talented women. Women have to take more control of their careers. They can't just wait to be cast in a film. Look what a great job Emma Thompson is doing. And if you look back, even under the studio system, when Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn took control of their careers, that's when things really changed for them.'"
"I must say that I was completely wrong about The Bridges of Madison County. I couldn't imagine how they'd ever make that overblown, embarrassing book into a coherent film, let alone into one that's intimate and moving. I'll tell you what I think you did that was a stroke of brilliance. The book was really about the photographer who comes to this place, but you made the movie so much more about Meryl Streep's character, Francesca.''
"Steven Spielberg's company brought me in and said. 'Would you like to take a crack at it?' I had never read the book, so I read it. I must say that I wasn't really that moved by it, but I asked my sister what she thought of it. and she said. 'It's my life.' She made me feel like I was being a little bit of a snob, that this book was touching people very strongly. I wrote this very wild screenplay, a combination of Diary of a Mad Housewife and Brief Encounter. Francesca was having fantasies, stabbing her son, just going nuts, because she was lonely and frustrated. I had a lot of fun with it. When Clint Eastwood came on as the director, he said that he wanted to bring back some of the book, and he helped me him down a lot of that stuff. He was very smart, very knowing about what to keep. But we both agreed that this was Francesca's story. Clint was right about taking a lot of that stuff out. because Meryl communicates all of that frustration with just a look. She doesn't need long speeches to let you know what she's thinking."
"I heard that Meryl Streep agreed to do the movie because your script was so great."
"That's what I heard, too. I read it in the paper. But don't write that..."
"Get over it," I say. "She should be bowing down before you. Remember, the movie she did before Bridges was The River Wild!"
"But I loved The River Wild. She's one of our true heroines. You know, I didn't meet her until the premiere of Bridges. I was nervous, because I'm such a huge fan. I went over and started telling her all this, and she was so sweet. Then she said. 'Write me another script.' That would be my dream."
"Unstrung Heroes has an unbelievably moving performance by Andie MacDowell, and she's not an actress known for her range ..."
"Oh, I think she's fabulous. I believe her responses when I see her on the screen, and I believe her emotions. The character was a strong, loving woman, and Andie really brought all that together. She was pregnant during the filming, so she was so full of love and life."
"Did you work with her during the shoot?"
"No, again I didn't because I had spent a lot of time with [director] Diane Keaton working out the problems. By the time they shot it, the script was in pretty good shape and they didn't need me. Some directors like to have the writer around, some don't."
"How is it possible that the person who wrote The Ref, which is screamingly funny, also wrote A Little Princess, which was so sweet, or Bridges, which is so full of melancholy, or The Fisher King, which was wild and smart?"
"Just like any actor or director, you have different pans of yourself that you tap to create certain projects. There's a part of me that's very dark and cynical, and once I realized that was the tone of The Ref, I got to get a lot of my frustrations out. I also produced The Ref so I got to see it through. And when we cast Judy Davis, that was fantastic, because she brought intelligence and a wonderful sense of danger to the role. A lot of the rewrites I did with her, because whatever didn't ring true for her, she wouldn't say. She won't talk shit. And that just forced me to go to the plate more."
"Who else would you like to write for?"
"I couldn't say, because if I left someone out I couldn't stand it."
"Oh come on."
"I'm frightened by this, because I don't want to miss that rare great, like Mary McDonnell. But definitely Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Anjelica Huston, Sally Field..."
I stop him before he goes through the entire rosier of SAG. "How about some of the younger actresses?" I ask hopefully.
"Elisabeth Shue, Jeanne Tripplehorn. Julianne Moore, who I think is terrific, Robin Wright, who I've loved since State of Grace. Gwyneth Paltrow, Holly Hunter. Marisa Tomei..." I think I may fall asleep before he gets to the end of the alphabet.
"Aren't you in the process of writing Honey West?"
"Yes. Do you remember the show on television as a kid? I remember seeing this scene of Honey West in this tight black cat suit, and she was beating the shit out of this guy. It stuck with me. I got this two-picture deal at Danny DeVito's company (Jersey Films), and this sounded like a good, commercial idea. Believe me, I don't have too many commercial ideas. We watched some of the old shows--it was only on one year, from '65 to '66--and we thought it could be a lot of fun."
"Who played Honey West?"
"Anne Francis. She drove me wild. She had this pet ocelot, and she used to karate-chop men in these sequin gowns with slits up to her belly and these high heels. Really sexy."
"Anyone who thinks Anne Francis is sexy might not be too reliable on the subject," I say.
"What? She's not? Don't break my heart now. You didn't even like her beauty mark?"
"Who do you imagine as Honey West in the film?" Personally, I'm thinking Patrick Swayze.
"I couldn't say. I wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings."
"Look, Richard," I tell him, "just let your imagination go wild."
"No," he chastises me. "I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, especially actresses.
They get their feelings hurt enough. We have to protect people with souls. The rest don't matter, because there's nothing inside of them anyway."
I roll my eyes. "And then you're going to direct a film ..."
"Yes, it's called The Kiss, and I'm working on it now. I'm still searching for the story. It's inspired by these two Chekhov short stories, in the same way that The Fisher King was inspired by the myth of the Holy Grail. It's modem. It's about a woman in her late 40s who was married for over 20 years. And her husband leaves her when he makes a younger woman pregnant. It's sort of inspired by someone I know, who was this wonderful free spirit when she was young. And then she got married and went into a coma! And their marriage fell apart seven years later. She's younger than the woman I'm writing about, but I'm more interested in women in their 40s--I just think their journeys have more weight. And this story is about not being a victim, about taking responsibility and not abandoning yourself when you marry someone. As soon as I started writing this, it started happening to women all around me. So I think I'm on to something good."
"Have you ever directed anything?" I ask.
"No," he says with a shrug. "But I had never written a screenplay before The Fisher King. I'm writing this role because I cannot wait to see an actress dig her teeth into it. It's going to be great. And if I make mistakes? Fuck it...I'm not afraid. If I can make a living as a writer, I can do anything."
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Martha Frankel interviewed Matt LeBlanc for the March issue of Movieline.