Among the openly gay writer Michael Cunningham's books are the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours, A Home at the End of the World and the more recent Specimen Days. The first two were made into movies, the first winning high praise and an Oscar for Nicole Kidman, while the second, which starred Colin Farrell and Sissy Spacek, did not reach the audience it deserved.
Evening is a romantic drama set in wealthy Newport, R.I., and travels between the present and a fateful weekend 50 years earlier. The movie's stellar cast includes Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Claire Danes, Hugh Dancy, Patrick Wilson, Toni Collette, Natasha Richardson and Mamie Gummer, Streep's daughter. Windy City Times spoke with both Cunningham and the film's director, Lajos Koltai, who makes his U.S. debut with Evening.
Windy City Times: What was so compelling about Evening that made you not only want to co-adapt the novel but to also executive-produce the movie?
Michael Cunningham: I loved the novel, to begin with. I've been a huge fan of Susan Minot's for years and I read Evening when it came out. Jeff Sharp called me, like, five years ago, saying they had optioned it and [ if ] I wanted to think about adapting it. My mother was very ill at the time and she died about six months after I got the call, and it was a coincidence too big to ignore—the notion that I was being asked to think about finding a way to re-tell this story that was so matched up with what was happening in my own life. I thought, 'Well, just say yes.'
WCT: I haven't read the book, but weren't a lot of changes made?
MC: I very much hope that the heart and the spirit of the story is entirely unchanged but, yes, a lot of the particulars are pretty different. The big problem in adapting Susan's novel was really population control; there are dozens of characters in the book and, of course, a movie can't accommodate 50 characters. You have to winnow and hone. Maybe the biggest change I made was to give Buddy—a character so brilliantly played by Hugh Dancy—a major promotion. Buddy is a peripheral figure in the novel. I just felt attached to Buddy. [ There is ] this romantic, ruined son of this wealthy family and I thought, 'If he had a bigger role, I bet something dramatically interesting could happen between him and Ann and Harris.'
WCT: For a long time, I had a society band that played a lot of these WASP parties at these fancy estates, and at every single event there would be one of those married guys that would get drunk and blatantly ask myself and the other gay member, 'Well, what are you doing later?' Do you think WASP culture is ever going to accept gay people?
MC: I don't really know WASP culture—I relied on Susan for that—but it's my impression that things haven't changed all that much and it's hard to say whether WASP culture is more homophobic than many other subcultures in [ the United States ] or if it is just more fundamentally opposed to different and eccentricity in any form. Gay is just a little too unusual. [ Laughs ]
WCT: Did you write for these actors?
MC: We didn't write with anybody in mind. An independent movie like this, especially without a superhero in it, is incredibly difficult to get made. It took a full five years and we were just focused on trying to write the best screenplay we possibly could. We really weren't thinking about actors early on. At one point, Claire Danes agreed to read for us—twice—and I got fixated on her as Ann Grant, and I continued to rewrite with Claire in mind.
WCT: She is wonderful. I found the whole set-up of the movie to be very familiar—the family and friends gathered as the mother was going through the last stages of her life and the hospice person supervising. As a middle-aged gay man, that scenario of those bittersweet nights must have resonated with you as well.
MC: Oh, absolutely.
WCT: To me, the best special effect of the summer—this is in my review—is the scene when those two acting titans, Vanessa Redgrave and Meryl Streep, are together in that bed.
MC: Oh my God! Can you fucking believe that?!
WCT: I was enthralled—even more so because the entire movie builds to that scene.
MC: I know—Meryl and Vanessa in the same scene in the same bed together—how much better could it be?
[ Windy City Times talks with Evening director Lajos Koltai: ]
WCT: Is the term 'chick flick' or 'women's picture' an okay label for you to describe this movie?
Lajos Koltai: I don't think so. Not at all. It's not about a woman's problem. It's about a problem with a human being who tried to belong to somebody. This is about Buddy—Buddy who is the middle of the film, like a central figure. He's kind of lonely because he's not ready yet and he tries to have everybody around him not go—Harris, Ann and Lila—because he feels safety from them.
WCT: When you say 'Buddy is not ready,' are you implying—and I hope you are, because this is how you took it—that he is not ready to come out as gay because of his circumstances?
LK: Absolutely. So the movie is about decisions. Everybody should go. It's not just for women.
WCT: You establish the dreamlike quality of the 1950s scenes with that first shot of Buddy and Ann—his blood red jacket against the blinding white mansion, the green grass and the blue water.
LK: Yes, Hopper was very influential and so was Wyatt with all those beautiful paintings of blowing curtains and windows. This is always a part of how I work. I grew up immersed in painters and art history in Budapest.
WCT: Did you offer direction to Redgrave and Streep for that scene they share?
LK: That's a very good question, because these actors do want direction. I was sometimes talking to Vanessa during a shot about how to go to sleep; to go back to the dream. She loved it and, of course, I went to Meryl and asked her to do things. It was such an intimate scene and, most importantly, it was the essence of the film and the camera is so unbelievably close to them.
I asked them if we could try different things and [ Streep ] said, 'Yes, I will try to do that for you.' We also talked about the scene beforehand. You also rely on your actors—this is the kind of situation that happens in the moment. It was the kind of scene where you have to let the actors have some freedom. I really believe that finished scene is a piece of film history. I really believe that. Those two are just unbelievable.