When I interviewed Lisa Cholodenko in 1998, prior to the release of her first full-length film High Art, which featured a career-high performance by Ally Sheedy and a memorable performance by Patricia Clarkson, she mentioned that she had just completed a treatment for a movie called Laurel Canyon. Fast forward almost five years and Laurel Canyon is complete and opening in theaters across the country this week.
Laurel Canyon stars Frances McDormand as L.A.-based record producer Jane, whose musical life is a haze of drugs, alcohol and sex. When her son Sam (Christian Bale), a doctor, arrives in L.A. to begin a residency at a hospital in Los Angeles, he brings along his mousy fiancée Alex (Kate Beckinsale), an M.D. who is working on some research. Both Sam and Alex undergo transformations in Jane's chaotic world, and no one will ever be the same. I recently spoke to Cholodenko about her film work.
GS: In your first movie, High Art, you looked at the New York publishing world and the world of art photography. In Laurel Canyon, you move your focus to the West Coast and the music industry. What is the source of your interest in that?
LC: The story was born less out of a desire to do some exposé on the music industry than it was a natural extension of this character I had developed that was Jane. I wanted to set her in the music industry because I wanted her to feel like she really was of the spirit of Laurel Canyon and had a rich music history up there. While I didn't want her to be a musician or performer, I thought it would be interesting if she was a record producer. It's a strong job for a woman to have and I could sort of believe she was a veteran of this thing and had seen a lot of people come and go. It sort of fit in a character-logical way rather than a desire to kind of plug in the pieces of constructing a story around the record industry.
GS: Jane, played by Frances McDormand, is a rarity in that she is a female record producer who is successful and has been around for a while in her career. Is the character of Jane based on anyone in particular?
LC: I didn't know that much about it (the recording industry) when I started working on it, but I did think about somebody like Daniel Lanois, who is in the movie for a second. He's somebody who's incredibly well known and accomplished and has worked with the greats. He's worked with Bob Dylan and U2. He's a little bit older and has spanned time and I thought, she's sort of the female-Daniel-Lanois kind of person.
GS: He's a great person on which to base that character. Frances went from playing an overprotective rock and roll mother in Almost Famous to an uninvolved rock and roll mother in Laurel Canyon. She totally inhabits the role of Jane and I was wondering if Jane was written with her in mind?
LC: No, it really wasn't. I actually didn't stumble across Fran until about a year and a half after I had written this piece. It was just because I was at the point where there were no obvious choices. I had met with three or four actresses who I, in a general way, really admired, but didn't feel were exactly who I was looking for for this part. Then I got word that she might be interested in a part like this and we met. She really looked exactly like this in the film. She is similar to who she was in the film and I thought, this is one of those wonderful moments that lead you to believe it was sort of meant to be.
GS: Is Jane's bisexuality a product of her artistic and musical environment or is it who she really is?
LC: I always felt like it wasn't an over-determined thing, it was just some organic piece of her. I imagine her as the kind of person that never even really thought it through on those terms. She just felt free to kind of go for who she desired in the moment.
GS: I also want to ask you about accents —in High Art, American actors Patricia Clarkson and Tammy Grimes both played characters who spoke with accents. And in Laurel Canyon, British actors Christian Bale, Kate Beckinsale, Natascha McElhone, and American actor Alessandro Nivola all play characters speaking with accents different from their own. Do you have a fascination with accents?
LC: (Laughs) I don't. I brew up these stories and people in them are from these places. Obviously, in High Art I constructed this character who was this ex-Fassbinder actress and she had kind of a Germanic quality. Then, I liked the sort of counter point of Ally Sheedy's character having the Viennese parent who's a Holocaust survivor or at least from that generation. I just thought that was an interesting subtext. I didn't go on a quest to sort of be shticky or whatever with the accents in that film, nor in this film. I imagined this band to be British. I imagined Natascha McElhone's character to be Israeli, for story reasons. I looked for people who had the accents that fit the characters that I wrote and the people I put in these parts were really just the best people for the parts.
GS: Speaking of the best people for the parts, since co-starring in High Art, Patricia Clarkson has gone on to have a prolific career. Would you like to work with her again in the future?
LC: Oh God, yeah. Hands down, yeah. We're close friends. I think we're both really appreciative of the other. I think we came into each other's lives at the right moment.
GS: You also worked with Craig Wedren again, who as a member of Shudder To Think did the music for High Art. Why was he chosen to score Laurel Canyon?
LC: He became a close friend as did Patty (Clarkson) after High Art and he was really there throughout many of the drafts of the script and I went to him and we talked about the music and we talked about the voracity of my depiction of the industry. He always had hoped that I'd want to work with him again. He's been there through the whole development of this thing and really gets what my sensibility is. I like that idea of turning to people that you came out the gate with.
GS: Have you started thinking about your next film project?
LC: I'm starting an original screenplay which it's really early to even talk about, but I've decided that I'm going to, rather than spending all these years tucked away writing another original, I wanted to have the opportunity to direct something that I hadn't written. So, I believe this summer I'm going to do a film with Kyra Sedgwick that's set in the South based on a novel by Dorothy Allison called Cave Dweller. It's a really beautiful story about family and personal forgiveness. It's a very intimate, sort of psychological story and it appeals to me.