Interview: Karen Moncrieff

Now playing in theaters is writer/director Karen Moncrieff’s (Blue Car) second feature-length film effort, The Dead Girl. Part-psychological thriller, part psychological drama, The Dead Girl examines the emotional ripple effect surrounding the dead body of a young woman, and features an ensemble cast of actors, including Giovanni Ribisi, Toni Collette, James Franco, Mary Beth Hurt, Brittany Murphy, Kerry Washington, and Marcia Gay Harden. Gritty, well-written, extremely well acted, Moncrieff has made a film bursting with ideas and talent, and leaves me curious as to what she will do next. I was fortunate to speak with her recently while she was visiting New York City.

Karen Moncrieff

INTERVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!

Question: With the ensemble cast, and a lot of big names, do you still consider this an indie film?
Karen Moncrieff: Oh yeah. Definitely. We did it on a very limited budget, and certainly the sensibilities behind it are independent-minded, I think.

Q: One of the more interesting twists in the film happens with Mary Beth Hurt’s character in the chapter ‘The Wife.’ What influenced in writing this character and the decision she eventually makes?
KM: The character is based on somebody, a true character, a true person who made a [dark decision]. She dumped evidence in a landfill, her husband was a serial killer. And so I was working in writing the script, kind of working backwards from something I had read about this woman, and just thought… I did find it horrifying, having read about all the women this man had killed, and just thought to myself, ‘Who must you be, that that is the decision you make?’ And as a filmmaker, as a screenwriter, I’m really interested in people who don’t make the decisions that I would necessarily make, who don’t… and I think you see characters throughout the piece who make decisions that are unusual and therefore show you a bit of who they are. When Arden, Toni Collette, the very first character, encounters the body, her reaction is not what most of our… most of us around the table would see a dead body, if we encountered one while we were out walking, and we’d experience some degree of revulsion and fear and concern and hightail it out of there and call the police. And instead her immediate reaction is sort of fascination, and perhaps even identification with that body. And when Mary Beth’s character makes the choices that she makes, we’re seeing… the difference between how she reacts and how we react, hopefully it still seems true to what’s been set up about those characters. But that there is a piece of humanity, a part of humanity that’s trivial, that’s not necessarily the mundane, that’s not the conventional reaction.

Q: Have you ever seen a dead body, or stumbled upon one?
KM: No I haven’t… I’ve definitely seen dead bodies in the research for something else, [where] I spent a good bit of time hanging around a morgue.

Q: What was your reaction the first time you saw a dead body?
KM: More like Arden actually, I guess I was sort of fascinated. Darkly fascinated, honestly, and it was a really complex reaction for me. I’m not somebody who runs screaming from the room at a little blood, that’s not me. But my imagination started filling in, I thought, ‘My god, what have their last moments have been like? What does their family feel like now? What must it be like to work in this place, to see this day in and day out?’ So those were my feelings.

Q: What was the setting in which you saw the body?
KM: It was in a morgue. It was in Tennessee. It was facility where they were on… it was a combination, it was an educational setting and also a forensic setting. The people I was shadowing would… it was in Tennessee, so for them it was a few states around the area, if remains were found, these people would be called, and it was interesting to me [that] the man who led this particular group, he was a forensic anthropologist. He taught classes at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and also he would be the one to respond to calls. And so that was interesting to me and also interesting to me, and that [invested] this particular screenplay, that the people who worked under him and with him were really young and didn’t look gray and drawn and sort of the ghostly people you’d imagine working in a morgue. They were actually quite lively and looked a lot like you. Except the one actually had bleached blond hair [laughs].

Q: I used to have bleach blond hair. What are the pros and cons of the film’s structure? If any one of the links breaks down you may completely lose the audience, yet it works in your favor because you only need the cast for short periods of time.
KM: Well in writing it I wasn’t think about pros and cons honestly. I think the structure came from… I had been a juror on this murder trial. And what occurred to me as I was that juror, is how a portrait of the victim emerged over time. And each of the people who came to testify, who sort of didn’t know one another, who were this sort of artificial community created around this murder, each had a puzzle of the piece of who she was, and brought it to the table, and I had certain assumptions about who she was right at the beginning, and the portrait of who she was emerged and became fuller and fuller and more complex, and I was really interested by that. So when I started to write the screenplay, I tried to mimic that in a way. I wanted individual portraits of women to tell a larger story, to create a larger portrait of the victim. Later, afterwards, I certainly was aware that asking actors to commit for let’s say, only a week of time was really the best way to get the absolute best actors without asking them to… and for asking them to do it for not a lot of money, without asking them to give up their entire spring slot. They could come, do something for a week, and do something that they could really take risks on and challenge themselves artistically. They didn’t have to carry the whole movie. It’s funny, the producers at some point said, ‘Well, we can probably survive two bad actors,’ [laughs] and I said if this piece is going to survive each of these performances has to be absolutely top notch, and you have to absolutely believe that these people are these characters and so I was not willing to give up.

Q: How long did the film take to shoot?
KM: Twenty-five days.

Q: What were the challenges in making each of the episodes unique?
KM: It was a bit of a struggle in that I had written each of these stories to stand on – hopefully each stands on it’s own that contributes to this whole. So in coming to each of the stories, the cinematographer and I, Michael Grady, thought a lot about do we want each of the stories to dictate it’s own look, which is what we finally sort of hit upon, or do we want one approach in terms of camera, in terms of color palette, in terms of production design and all that. And finally I decided that I was going to let each of the characters and the stories inform what colors we used, whether the camera was locked down or hand-held or whether the framing was – for instance in ‘The Sister’ section we use a lot of negative space and we don’t connect her in frame to other people, because my idea about her is that she’s very much locked in her own isolated world and she’s very alienated from everyone else. Brittany’s world is very kinetic and volatile and so in terms of the palate we didn’t control the colors, we let it go wild and be random and chaotic and similarly the camera-style is very different. Whether or not all of that was a successful choice, honestly… I’m a little torn. If I had it all to do over again now, I think I might, maybe restrict what I did, the differences from section to section a little more cohesive. I am aware for instance the very first section feels… because we weren’t using very fluid camera movement and the place itself sort of has all these dead and dusty colors, and it just feels very different from what we get to at the end. Hopefully, the movement, and this is what Mike and I talked about a lot, that the movement is imperceptible, that it’s not like drastic where this is the blue section, this is the yellow section, and this is the black and white section, that hopefully you move through these sections and they all feel right to the characters that are inhabiting these sections, and by the time you get to the end, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, we started where?’ Hopefully that’s the effect of it. I’m still way too close to the movie to see it with any type of perspective.

First Look Pictures release Karen Moncrieff's The Dead Girl exclusively on December 29th with a wide release coming on January 19th.