Killer Movie, Killer Moviemaking

Writer-director Patty Jenkins on Monster

by Phillip Williams | Published February 3, 2007

Writer-director Patty Jenkins has hit the ground running with her first feature, the widely acclaimed, Monster, a riveting and dark love story detailing serial killer Aileen Wuornos' tragic descent into obsession and murder. Jenkins, who initially studied painting at the Cooper Union in New York City, fell in love with movies while attending an experimental film course between painting classes. After graduation, she went to Los Angeles and soon earned a union card as a first assistant camera operator.

Over the next five years Jenkins worked on countless commercials, films and music videos for a cast of rising directors, including Dominic Sena, Tarsem Singh, Brett Ratner and the late Ted Demme. Itching to put her own vision on screen, Jenkins signed up for the American Film Institute's Directors Program, where she completed several shorts. Her thesis film, Velocity Rules, was honored by becoming an official selection of the AFI Fest. Jenkins recently talked to MM about the new film, her close collaboration with actress Charlize Theron-whom she directed to one of the most compelling performances of the season-and how to come up with enough coin to get your low-budget masterpiece to the screen.

Phillip Williams (MM): I saw you on Charlie Rose last night with Charlize Theron. There seems to have been a particularly close collaboration between you and Charlize on this picture. It felt as though there was almost a co-authorship, in a broad sense.

Patty Jenkins: Yes.

MM: Did it feel that way to you?

PJ: Oh yeah, we became really, really close. I definitely wrote and directed the script and she definitely acted it, but a film like this is such a performance piece. That person-[the actor]-has to take that on and take it to a level that you can't as a writer-director. She was great to work with.

MM: When you started to piece together this story, what were the things you saw as indications of the sort of story you wanted to tell and how you saw this character.

PJ: I did so much research, and the first draft is almost exactly what we shot. I did extensive outlining and made a lot of decisions ahead of time. I wasn't writing to find the story; I was writing exactly the story I wanted to tell.

MM: How did you approach the research?

PJ: It started with reading and watching everything available about [Aileen], taking in police reports. That was the first layer. The second layer was writing Aileen, which was a hard step to take, because I knew her history with the media. And I knew no matter what my aim was and no matter how earnest I was about that, because she was so jaded and distrustful, [that] even if I made the most beautiful film in the history of mankind, she was going to end up hating me for the fact that the bag was the wrong color or something like that. It's impossible to see yourself in the media in that way.

So I was writing for her and I was planning to sit down and interview her when her execution was suddenly scheduled from out of nowhere. She was very distrustful right up until the end, And then, the night before she was executed, in what ended up mirroring the film in a heartbreaking way, she took a last leap of faith. She decided to open up the personal archive of letters to us that she had written over the previous two years that she was on death row. That was incredible; just the character detail. I was able to go back over the script and, where I had slotted in voiceover stories with hunches, I was able to find the real stories which demonstrated those points.

MM: One of the most amazing things about the film was that, on one level, it was a very simple, almost innocent love story. The way these two characters find each other and the way their love grows existed in stark contrast to the darker reality that was also the story. You had, on the one hand, a very dark tapestry with this beautiful relationship growing in the middle of it. The film seems to me-more than anything-to be a love story. Did you see it that way?

PJ: Oh, yes. In the worst biopics, people just give you a series of events and stay on the outside of it. Every human life has a classical arc. I could look at my own life from age five until now and find some arc that would define it. And that's what you need to do in a good biopic; that's what the good ones do-films like In Cold Blood and Bonnie & Clyde. You focus on a relationship arc or something.

The scene in Monster that made me want to tell her story was the last scene in the courtroom. She was crying and her girlfriend had testified against her and I could see that there was clearly a betrayal going on. She had killed seven people and what else could her girlfriend do? Then, when she stood up and exploded in the courtroom, that was what the whole nation saw and said she was crazy. My whole goal from day one was to say, 'What is the story that led to that moment in the relationship?' Then, you weave within that information about the past.

MM: The characterization of her girlfriend was interesting. She was likeable but also unbelievably selfish. She keeps sending Aileen back out [to work as a prostitute]. 'Go and get the money!' And she knows exactly what Aileen has to do to get it. It's interesting to me that I accepted that so easily, with very little explanation. Normally, something that outrageous would need more explanation to believe.

PJ: I have that same problem at times with films, and the reason I usually find something implausible is because there are either contradictory pieces of information-or they're not coming out of character. [With Monster], it all came back to the creation of complex characters. I think we do this weird thing with scripts sometimes where we tell the audience superficial information and then try to force contradictory superficial information on them. You can't work that way; there's no root to any of it. The problem then is that you are in danger of having so many of the characters' actions seeming ungrounded.

MM: I wondered, since this is really more of a love story than a "serial killer movie," if there were particular films or stories in literature which in any way were inspiring to you as you were writing this picture?

PJ: Yes, tons of them. The movie that I think influenced their relationship the most was Midnight Cowboy. It is essentially a same-sex love story, not a homosexual story; it is a same-sex love story of codependence and of damaged people. And they're following their own fantasy, and it's in the reveal of the failure of the fantasy that they grow to depend upon each other. And there were other movies, which were not murder films, which were influential. The Misfits is one; I read that script a lot. It does exactly what we were just talking about. A character will tell you, in a single sentence, something about themselves. And later in the film, six of these characters will collide and you can watch a six-page scene of dialogue that's so riveting because it's so grounded. You can watch these people talk to each other and you know what inner torment is going on inside them.

A second thing that was a huge influence came from the fact that someone like Aileen had gone far beyond the ability to see herself as any kind of romantic female figure. So I think in order to feel cool, and to salvage any kind of lifestyle, she attached herself to male images. I always had in mind the font and image of a Marlboro ad in mind for the poster. I knew that she was playing a macho hero and that's how she made herself feel good about herself.

MM: Charlize Theron's body language in the picture was amazing; she really seemed to inhabit a space completely alien to her own. I don't know how much you can talk about how she got there?

PJ: I'll tell you exactly how she got there-and it's something I will never forget in my future writing. Even though we had great footage of Aileen, that was irrelevant. Because the thing that made all of that character detail happen was that we got to know such intimate details about her, that all of those behaviors were grounded in a thought process. So, instead of just observing that Aileen throws her hair back all the time, we read where she writes that "Yes, I was homeless, but my hair never looked like that." And you realize that she had bad skin and she couldn't afford make-up, but the one thing she could do was wash her hair with bar soap in toilets in gas stations. There is so much embarrassment about being homeless, and it was a tool for her, this one little thing: I have blonde, pretty hair. She would hang onto that. And even if she couldn't cut it she would try to feather it back and make it look like maybe she had. Those kind of details. Once Charlize understood all of that she just took off and became Aileen.

MM: When you set up your scenes on set, was it a matter of first finding out where the actor wanted to go and then setting up the camera or did you have your camera moves mapped out beforehand?

PJ: It was a little of both. I had very strong feelings about when you wanted to be intimate and when you wanted to be further out. But then we would block it and you would find what those positions were. I had a grid of what kind of shots I wanted, regardless of where they went.

MM: Is finding the shot an intuitive or intellectual process for you?

PJ: It's goes very much the same way as writing the script: it all has to be for a reason. You can see movies where it's not, but in this case I had very strong feelings about it, because it became part of the story. If you at some point, as some people had suggested, used a handheld camera, it implies something: it implies to the audience that they're watching something documentary-like and that therefore implies that there's somebody [else] there. You are talking about an incredibly paranoid, private person, who would never behave as she did if a presence was there. So that was out of the question for me.

MM: Along the same lines, you used music in a very interesting way. You used songs, such as Journey's "Faithfully," which were the teen dating songs of their era. And the actors played those scenes so sincerely, like the one where they found themselves on the rollerskating floor.

PJ: That was why that was such an important scene to me. It's my favorite scene in the film; my favorite scene I've ever done. It was such an important key in telling their story. The point was to bring the audience in and I, as the writer, had to find my own key in. And they actually loved rollerskating-and she loved Journey. And the fact that that transferred just as well to me, and not what you expect from a future lesbian serial killer, was such a great key. Because anyone who went rollerskating from this generation remembers seeing those couples and wishing you could be one.

MM: Why did you become a moviemaker?

PJ: I'm a deeply romantic person and I've always been interested in the arts and though the genesis of everything I do artistically is music, I never wanted to be a musician. Then, the minute I realized I could become a filmmaker, I saw all those things could come together in one art form.

MM: What's up next for you?

PJ: I'm actually writing my next project now. I'm also reading a lot of material, and if something else strikes my fancy I'll do that.

MM: Is it fair to say you might want to go in a different direction; do something very different from Monster?

PJ: It's going to be the same as casting Charlize: it will look like a totally different direction to everybody else, but it's not really going to be. I'm just interested in human beings and why they make the decisions they make.

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TAGS aileen wuornos charlize theron directing interview monster patty jenkins

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