Marielle Heller / "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"

more so, sit tight. This is playback good. Yeah, yeah, we get a lot of people are just talking like this way off to the side. Yeah, he does this so he can shoot it really fast, but they fully side with really odd. They're so sensitive that like keys are really sensensitive, so they don't want to interesting. That's cool. When was that last week? It's pretty exacting awesome, all right,

So you're good there, Dan's gonna get out of your hair. Well, I'm here today with Marie L. Heller, the director of Can You Ever Forgive Me? Uh, And we were just talking about Tell You Ride briefly. I'm always curious this was your first tell Your Right experience, right, so you know what did you think of the festival this year? I thought it was amazing. I felt like it was this magical wonderland of cowboys and movies. Um, it's just so beautiful there. You can't believe how beautiful you are.

The places I've been to Sundance a lot of times. Sundance is my creative festival home in many ways, so I don't know, tell you right, felt like maybe what Sundance was when it first started. It feels like a small town. I brought my family, my kid and my son, and it was just a really neat festival. Yeah, it's great because it's not like a paparazzi va. You know, you go to Toronto a week later and it's completely different, totally different. Yeah, I know, you kind of can't imagine

what it was like. I couldn't picture what it was going to be like until I got there and I was like, Oh, I understand why so many people say this is their favorite festival. It's so cool. Were able to see movies while you were there? I only saw a few. I got to see my friend David Lowry's Old Man and again, um, I was mostly going around and doing Q and as. That's a hard thing about going to a festival with your own movie. It's it's hard to see other people's movies. Yeah, absolute, Um, I

would have loved to see more. Well this movie and you ever forgive me? We were joking earlier another long title. Well it works and I love the movie that was. That was my first time seeing at the premiere there and I saw it again last night. Um. You got a lot of stuff I want to ask you about the aesthetic and stuff as well. But first of all, I'm curious about coming off of Diary of a Teenage Girl. What were you looking for? It was really hard. I mean I think there's a lot of pressure when you've

made a movie that was. You know, for Diary, I'd been working on it for eight years. It was my total passion project. It was something I had been fighting and scraping by trying to make for so so long. And it's sort of and I was so proud of it. And how do you follow up something that's been that kind of project for you? Um, And there's sort of the sophomore slump a lot of people talk about, and particularly for women filmmakers, the statistics show women take a

lot longer to make their second movie. So I was really aware of the fact that I didn't want to fall into that trap of taking too long to make something that I think it's just the systemic sexism of our business that women can make a really great first movie and have less opportunities come their way for their

second movie. Um and so, but yeah, I feel like the average I'm gonna I don't know if these stats are still true, but the average for a man who has made a first feature was like three to four years, and for a woman it was like seven to eight years for their second features. So I was aware of the fact that I was getting really great opportunities and offers coming my way, and I really wanted to make sure I made something. I loved making my first movie

and I realized I really like directing. So but I knew I didn't want to make another teenage movie. I was getting sent a lot of stuff that was all about teenagers they want to try to put you into yeah, yeah, and um. So that was a tricky thing of like, okay, but what is what do I want to say about sort of the movies I want to make from here on out and figuring out what I wanted to make Second, I felt like a lot of pressure of like you're setting off on sort of a path of who you're

going to be as an artist. Um and and Carry, who was one of my producers from Diary, sent me the script for Can You Ever Forgive Me? And she's somebody I love and respect a lot. And I knew Nicole Hall of Center and love and respect her a lot. And then Melissa was at the time maybe interested in the script. So it was the opportunity to work with all of these smart, interesting women who want to make cool movies. And so immediately I was intrigued. And then when I read the script, I was so taken by

Lee as a character. I just loved her. I found her to be such an asshole, if I can say that on here in a way that like, we tend to see male characters who are assholes like that, and we don't get a lot of women characters like that. And I found her refreshing. Everything about her was so she says everything that comes into her mind and cares so much more about her intellect than her looks. And I just found her to be a character we don't focus. He's on a woman over fifty lesbian who is a

cat lady basically, and who you know. She's not very glamorous, she's never had kids, she doesn't fit into sort of what the industry norm is for women at the time, and I just found her fascinating, so I immediately got excited about it. That's an interesting point about you know, what seems to be acceptable of leading ladies. I mean there's a couple of examples this year, like Carrie Mulligan and Wildlife is a good example. It's a messy character.

It's not something you would, you know, expect, I guess based on what seems to be accepted. But there's that. There's like Nicole Kidman and Destroyer as well. So we're finally starting to show a wider range of women characters in a way that we've always had this wide range of male characters. It's almost like, if you get female filmmakers making the movies, you'll get that isn't that interesting? What uh did you relate to Lee Israel at all?

Like writer to write the struggle? Like definitely, I think big pet peeve of mine as writers in movies, because I feel like there's always there's always this trope, which is oh, you're struggling to write, and then all of the sudden inspiration hits and it just pours out of you. And it's this like cosmic um divine moment when the truth of the matter is writing is struggling and writing is painful. And I always love it when people are more honest about just how hard and horrible writing can be.

Even though I love writing, it is soul crushing as

an experience and as a lifestyle. And so to have a character who was actually expressing the sort of soul devastation that happens when you're in a place in your life where your writing is not going the way that you wanted to be going, I totally related to and I found to be really honest and was something that I tried to really highlight in the movie too, in an honest way, what it really feels like to be a and especially to be a writer who um identifies

so much with her writing that like she views herself through her writing and wants other people to view her through her writing. So it's it's not just it's her identity, it's an extension of it's an extension of her. So to be in a place where that's not being recognized and where people are sort of shooting on what she wants to write or what she finds interesting. It's it's such a devastation. I I related to that and felt

like that was important to be honest about. So I've got to be a hard thing to figure out how to visualize to the visual medium like this and carry that across, right, Yeah. Yeah, And there's only so many times you can cut to a like a p o

V shot of the blank page of a typewriter. Um. We did a lot of kind of subtle things with sound design to around the typewriter because well we had all of these old electric typewriters and non electric typewriters, but her typewriter that was her typewriter had this sort of hum, which the moment we turned it on, the actual prop on, we all commented on this hum, and we really sort of used that hum as this sort of pressure cooker, like when she's staring at it and

the hum is sort of subtly rising in tone to kind of just show how much pressure she feels in that moment. Whenever you first see the typewriter. Actually, I feel like it's that shot stands out to me every time. It does seem like this contraption of note Yeah. Yeah, the typewriters are sort of their own character in the movie because we have so many. We have all for every every different literary person that she forges from, Dorothy Parker,

town Old Coward, Edna Ferber, Louise Brooks. They each have their own typewriter and with like a little note card with their name on it based on sort of historically what they would have been writing on. And slowly over the course of the movie she gets like twenty five typewriters littering her apartment with all these different ones. But that was really fun getting to sort of figure out who would be with which typewriter. What diligence on her part,

rightly is she was meticulous about it all. She also kept copies of all of her forgeries, which she really shouldn't have done. That doesn't help the case yet, did you were you aware of much of this? No, Like most people, I didn't know anything about Lee. I think that's part of what's so interesting about her too, is she in her time was pretty overlooked. Even you know, a lot of people who I would bring her up

to would say, oh, I remember her obituary. She remember hearing about her forgeries in her New York Times obituary. I wish is a sad state of kind of her career and the fact that she didn't get the recognition she really deserved. But um, I didn't know much about her until I read the script, and then I just

got so excited. And we had we had access to a lot of research and a lot of her personal papers and and Carrie new Lee, so she had gotten a lot of stuff before she died, and I was able to go through all of her personal notes and get to know her in a different kind of way. I want to talk about the loop of the film. I love the lie in the movie. It's such a it's a cozy movie. Yeah, you know, like it winter. Yeah, and and you know, I feel like you were bouncing

around my old neighborhood. Was there Upper east Side stuff going ever east Side, Upper West mostly and then some downtown where Julius is, which is the oldest gay bar in New York. Yeah. We we talked a lot about the lighting before we started filming. Brandon Trost, who's my cinematographer, and I and that we wanted it to feel like we were filming in all these old bookstores. We wanted it to feel like there windows had been painted shut

twenty years ago. There was twenty years of dust floating around the air, but that warm feeling of being in a bookstore when it's snowing outside and there's that specific winter light coming through the windows with dust, keep expecting like a like coffee steam to waft end of the frame. Totally, it's all a little bit coffee steam. The whole movie kind of has a bit of a coffee stained feel

to it. All these old you can kind of smell the books, I feel like when you watched the movie, like you can, I feel like you can smell our apartment too. Yes, I'm sorry for that a kid, I know, even though I'm yeah, not no spoilers, But even though I know that that's Plato, it's still yet to like, I feel like I can smell it too when I watched it. The sound when it is the trash candidates

to it too. Yeah. Did you have any like references visually speaking, like anything that anything you were looking to emulate at all, like that filmically, filmically, anything really artwork, photographs. I mean, we definitely looked at a lot of lesbian writers from the seventies and eighties to kind of establish Lee's look. There weren't a ton of photographs of Lee in her natural habitat, Like the only photos we could find of her were like when she got dressed up

for a book jacket photo shoot or whatever. So it didn't feel like a real indication of her style, and we kind of wanted to. We wanted to root her in this very New York literary world. Um. We gave her sort of a lot of masculine clothes and it was really character based, trying to figure out how she held herself in the world and how she kind of pushed her way through the world and what what that

would feel like. UM. And I don't know, I'm terrible whenever anyone asked me, like, what movies did you watch as inspiration for this, because obviously, like you see a New York movie and everyone thinks of like early Days Woody Allen, It's hard not to it's hard not to think about Manhattan and other movies like that. Um. But we were also just looking at movies from the early nineties and trying to make sure we were making something period wise that actually felt tuned into the filmic world

back then too. In many ways, we felt like we were making an old movie, like it was more of a movie from the seventies or eighties, because it's so character based and not really in the style that we make movies right now. Yeah, it has its own look as a New York movie very much, I think. And also regarding just rooting it in the time as the Paul Simon song that's from right, so it's right around the same time. That's kind of cool. I can't run,

but I love it. I love that song and I love that I don't know if this is a coincidence or not, but I picked that song because it's a song I've always really loved. And since we put it in the movie and he agreed to let us put it in the movie, which was such a big deal, he's been like playing that song again. And my friend went to his concert in Pittsburgh and he played it, and then he played it on s and l I was like, Oh, I think this song is having a resurgence.

Maybe in the small part you can take credit. It's a great song because it's such a great like about town kind of song. Yeah, it's got a movement to it. It It feels almost like score when it starts, and it has these like ma lettas that kind of play at the beginning, and instrumentation that we had been using in our score too, so that when it when we slipped it in, it kind of actually felt like it was already part of our world, exactly what you always

hope to have happened. Yeah, let's talk about Melissa McCarthy. She's outstanding. I think it's her best performance to date. I guess what kind of quality was of the most importance and an actress for this role. It's so interesting because I think it was all about her being able to approach this character without judgment, to find the ways in and to um be willing to be vulnerable. I say vulnerable, but Lee is not vulnerable in the way she presents in the world. She's a very guarded person,

very different energy from Melissa. Melissa's like this light, bubbly, glowing human like. She has the opposite qualities when she walks in a room to what Lee has. Because Lee is like this, she has the weight of the world. She like walks through the world like a boulder or something. She kind of she walks like she has a rain cloud on top of her head a bit and kind of make sure you know about it too. Yeah, she does.

And so it was really about whether Melissa could kind of get into that skin lovely and feel what it is to be walking through the world like that and yet still feel connected to her heart, because we had to be able to feel why she was so guarded and what was causing her to walk through the world with that level of armor on. And Um, she immediately understood Lee in a really nice way. I think we both agreed about who she was and we enjoyed her

as a character in the same kind of way. Um. And she didn't seem scared of her, she didn't seem to judge her. Um. It was very similar to when I first met with Alexander scars Gard to talk about his his part in My first movie Diary. It was so important that he wouldn't judge the character and could find the humanity in a character that could otherwise seem

judged by the world. And I just find it really important when we're telling stories that we're not trying to we're not trying to editorialize, We're really just trying to present somebody's truth and their heart and let them be and let show their behavior in a way that makes us more connected to them without kind of telling the audience how to feel about them. So Melissa just blew me away. I mean every day she came so prepared.

She was word perfect, Like every word of the script exactly has written, no improvisation, no improvisation unless we kind of had talked about it ahead of time, like oh, this little thing, we could add on a few lines here and there, but in general, it was like we were on the script, and she was so in love with Lee's voice and the way that she talked that she didn't want to change it by kind of bringing in her own. You know, Melissa is m So it was really about like honoring who Lee was and the

way she would have walked through the world. She's got some great line deliveries, though, oh my god, she's still so funny. It's just it's a very specific, dry sense of humor. I mean, the one that comes to my mind. I just burst out laughing at it last night, it was that's batshit Marjorie. Marjorie, right, Marjorie, because that's badget Marjorie. Yeah, I know, and there's when she even when she says to Jack when he goes, it's very hard to find a boyfriend at my age, I'm losing my hair, and

she goes, I don't think that's the reason. In this way, that's like kills me every time. She's awesome. Well, the same question kind of for Richard D. Grant, Um, like, what was the utmost importance? What quality did you need that I'm actor playing Jack? And obviously chemistry is a huge part of yes, and they have amazing chemistry. They have amazing off camera. Absolutely, they are such a delight together. I love them. I love that this movie has sparked

I think a real friendship that will last. Um. You know, Richard has just this effervescent quality to him. It's the opposite of Lee. Jack needed to be like so filled to the brim with life, and Lee like lives in the past. She's so caught in her ah what could have been and the pain of her situation and Jack's situation is in many ways more dire, but he's totally happy and content and not thinking about anything but the

present moment. And I had been a fan of Richard since with Nail and I and just find him to be infectious, like he is just an infectious person. You want to stare at him, and he's so I don't know, he's just willing to go to these places that are so wonderfully silly and full of life. And he's got no self consciousness. I feel like he's just really present and raw and puts it out there. And I mean when he shows up in the movie, some one of my friends put it to me. She was like, God,

he sparkles. It's true. He comes on screen and sparkles. And um, so I made the character British. He hadn't. The real Jack Hawk wasn't British, but I knew I wanted it to be Richard and um and and I really kind of it actually was important to me to sort of flesh out his character even more than it had been in the previous drafts. But um giving him both this effervescent, loving life quality, but also that he was said in the context of the AIDS crisis that

he's a gay man in New York. That stuff was lacking in the original Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't a storyline that was was in the in the script. When I came on board, but it was something that I had read the book and knew that the real Jack Hawk had died of AIDS. And it felt really important to me that if we're making a movie about a lesbian and a gay man in New York, that we

don't ignore the fact that it's in AIDS. You know, that they're in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and that in many ways, those two communities had been so separate, and we're coming together in that moment of pain. A lot of lesbians were taking care of gay men who were dying. These commune and these were sort of leaning on each other in a new found kind of way. Um. And in so many ways, I loved that these were two people who, for very different reasons, had nobody left

in their life. You know that Lee had pushed everyone away. And I think the first line I added to the script was Richard's line where he says, I have no one to tell all my friends are dead. Um. And he says it really lightheartedly, but just that slight that dichotomy for his character between this, you know, lightheartedness and the context with which he's surviving, which is everyone he

knows is dead. There's a reason they both need each other, and then their their final meeting was really important to me. That was something that wasn't in the script that I sort of invented based on a line from Lee's book. There was a line in Lee's book where she said that she saw Jack one last time. She ran into him and in doctor's office. He was walking with crutches, and she never said anything to him, but she had

an urge to trip him. And I took just that sentiment and wrote that final scene between the two of them, which I think in many ways gives the sort of great context of their love story and their relationship and the friendship, which I think is the basis of sort of the whole movie. For me, at least, for sure, I have a friend. He's a big with Nail and I fan. You got to meet Richard and tell you're right. I've never seen that dude beam. People who love Richard

love him to such a degree. Both Melissa and Richard have rapid fan bases. But the lucky thing is they're also the kindest people who are so sweet to people that they meet and are It's so nice to see the way that they treat humans in the world. They're both really really humble, normal people. Yeah, and Richard is really funny because he smells everything. He like experiences the

world through his nose. So we'd walk into these old bookstores where we were filming, and the first thing you would do would just walk up to a bookshelf, pull out an old book and just like inhale its smell and then put it back, or like push his face up against some wall and smell the location. He's a real hilarious, wonderful man. I wanted to branch out a little bit away from the movie. You're you're currently shooting the Mr. Rogers film. Yeah, Yeah, it's been called You're

My Friend right now, it's sort of in transition. It's going to be we just keep going to the Mr. Rogers movie. Might as well. Yeah, I mean, what what has that experience been, Like, what did you you know in developing that? Like, what did you learn about Fred Rogers That was surprising? Maybe more things than I could possibly say. It's totally changed my life. Spending the last year Immerston Fred Rogers teachings and philosophy about the world,

It's been such a privilege. I honestly, it's been one of the best experiences of my entire life. UM. I grew up with Mr Rogers. I have a young child and we've been watching Daniel Tiger's neighborhood, so I was pretty familiar with his sort of philosophy of kids. UM, but realizing that he just walked the walk, that it was an actual part of who he was as a person, and his influence on the world was so profound, and everyone who came into contact with him was really kind

of changed for the better by knowing him. And the story is really not a biopic. It's about a journalist who, in interviewing him and getting to know him, really does change his life. And um, it's based on Tom Juneau, who wrote a piece for him about s On for Esquire, wrote a cover story about Fred, and I was talking to Tom about it recently and he was saying, you know, after I met Fred, my writing changed. You can go into my work and see my before Fred and my

after Fred. It has a very different tone. I couldn't couldn't be mean. I couldn't, I couldn't see the world through a sort of cynical lens anymore. It really changed the way I wanted to write. And you've been shooting that Pittsburgh. We've been in Pittsburgh for the last four months. Were you there when when we were not? Weirdly, it was the one week we came to New York to do two days of filming. UM, but we just and then we went back a few days later. And I

just got back from Pittsburgh on Friday. I love that city. It's one of my favorite cities of the country. That city too, and I had never spent any time there until this last year. UM, I had no idea about the city. It's got some of the kindest, most down to earth people. It was such a wonderful place to make a movie. We were we were very rooted actually in the school in the Squirrel Hill area, and that

community has been incredibly kind to us. All of the people from the Fred Rogers company and who worked with a new Fred for a long time, his wife Joanne Bill Eisler, who was the head of his company for many many years, are the people who have like welcomed us to Pittsburgh and made us part of their family. And they all live in Squirrel Hill. So it was in it was more painful than I can even explain.

We got to be back there last week when there was a Unity event and Tom Hanks flew in and um spoke at it beautifully with Joe and Rogers, and we all went and halted filming so we could all go and be at the Unity event together and take a moment to kind of honor what was happening. But it was very weird. It was very weird to get to know a city so well, be so in love with the city, and feel like it was our new home,

and then leave and have this horrible tragedy happened. That's what got me so much about it was knowing how much I love that city and then to see that disease kind of make its way there. Yea, and my family is Jewish, I obviously felt very connected and my Yeah, my kid had been going to school three blocks away from that and the entire time we were there, So it was really upsetting. I mean, I think it's upsetting for every single person in the world, Um, but it

felt particularly personal. Are you editing now? I'm about to start editing. Yeah, So I really wrapped on Friday. We actually did a week of miniatures, which I don't know if you remember from the show, but Mr Rogers had the whole miniature neighborhood where he would pull out from the little yellow house and see the trolley going by. So we took that theme and expanded it in the movie and we have that plus and we so we did four days of miniature shooting, which was so fun.

And Tom Hanks, I mean, and it's too bad. Nobody loves Tom Hanks. It's too bad. He such a bad actor. I know. I got to convince him. I found this young upstart named Tom Hanks and he's really great now he Working with Tom was amazing. He's so wonderful and he really embodied the spirit of Fred. He's he just kind of understood him in a deep cellular level. UM, and it was really very cool to see. We also totally recreated the sets from the show, like exactly perfect

production design. Jade Heally and she you know, just oh, everybody was in heaven. I mean, it was such it felt like a huge responsibility, but it was also really exciting. And we shot in the actual stage where they shot the show, So we were in the actual place where Fred was for forty years. UM and a bunch of people who worked on the show would come in and visit and everybody would go, I mean you would see everybody kind of gasp when they first walked in because

they felt like they were walking back in time. And then people a few people said it even smells right, which was really neat. I had a friend in film school that I think he worked on Mr. Rogers, like school or something like that. Yeah, I mean pretty much everyone in Pittsburgh in the film community worked on the show at some point. Like, we had so many people who worked on the movie who had worked on the program.

Um one of our camera operators who was we were shooting on old two cameras for the show portion of the movie to really emulate what they looked like back then. Cool. He had been not operating back then, and he was one of our operators and pushing those giant things pedestal, this giant pedestal we had exactly that. Yeah, I also wanted to branch out. There's a couple of other projects that that I've read your name attached to, or are you do you know what you're gonna do next after Mr? Rogers?

Or are you I'm not someone who Zach got it doing more than one thing at a time. I kind of have to, like I just go so full, all in on whatever it is that I'm working on. And um, it's even hard to be shooting a movie and promoting a movie at the same time. I've never had to do that before. But like, you know, for two years, can you ever Forgive Me? Was my whole world in life? And then it was done and I put it away, and then it took a number of months before it

came out. So then it's like, now I'm all in on the Mr. Rogers movie. It's all I sleep, breathe, and dream pretty much. Yeah, these are all these these two movies that you've made. Then when you've got coming up and and you know, if you make it to these others, they're all very different movies from what I can tell. I'm just curious, like, do you have like a personal mission statement going forward? Like what are you interested in making going forward? I don't feel like I can't. Yeah,

I don't know. It's until the Mr. Rodgers movie I felt like I just wanted to make movies about women because we just don't have enough of them, and there are so many fascinating women whose stories I want to tell, in whose voices I feel like need to be heard Mr. I keep saying Mr. Rodgers was the one man who could pull me into making a movie about men um But you know, it's just about wherever your heart is

at the current moment. And for me, right now, I've been so focused on raising my kid and thinking about the state of the world and where we are politically and emotionally, and where we are, you know, thinking about Pittsburgh in the hate in the world, and making a movie about kindness and about emotion and about people trying to be better. I just felt right right now. And who knows where we'll be in another year and what we'll feel right then. I'm sure that'll be a nice

salve throughout that. For now, everyone should check Golt Can you ever forgive me? It is in limited release? Now, what's the wide date that it's like it's right, I think it's the sixteen. It'll make it to you eventually, and you should see it. I'm sure it'll be up for many awards, as it should. And knock Wood, but Mario Heller, thank you so much form on the show I'm talking about. Appreciate, really appreciated