Pictured Charlize Theron stars as lesbian Aileen Wuornos and Christina Ricci stars as her lover in this film about the life of the convicted serial killer. Ricci and Theron. Charlize Theron in Monster, which opens this week. Dr. Frankenstien wasn't the only fellow capable of turning a human being into a monster. Tragedy, adversity, and circumstances can lead to an individual's antisocial, criminal behavior and place in society. Such appears to be the case with Aileen 'Lee' Wuornos, a hitchhiking highway prostitute who murdered seven men in Florida and was dubbed the 'first female serial killer' and 'Damsel of Death' by the media. Patty Jenkin's debut feature, Monster, paints a sympathetic yet hardly heroic portrait of Wuornos, who was executed by lethal injection in October, 2002.
Charlize Theron underwent a phenomenal physical and mental transformation to play the stocky, seriously weathered Aileen Wuornos. The film begins as she meets a young, just-coming-out girl named Selby Ward (Christina Ricci) at a Florida gay bar. Initially wary of Selby's motives, the homeless Aileen goes home with her and they eventually strike up a relationship. This leads to Selby running away from her conservative family with Aileen, who prostitutes to support them. One horrendous evening on the job, a john (Lee Tergeson) turns violent, forcing Aileen to shoot him in self defense. This sparks off a habit of murdering and robbing tricks. Eventually, the cops catch on and so does the emotionally immature Selby, which leads to painful decisions, betrayal, and an eventual apprehension ... .
'Aileen's story, from the first time I ever saw [it on the news], was so heartbreaking,' recalls writer/director Jenkins, who was a teenager at the time. 'People wanted to stand on one side of the fence or another. Either Aileen was a horrible, man-hating killer who nobody could identify with at all, or a feminist hero who was always the victim. The fact there wasn't sympathy for this horrible life she'd been through that led up to where she got, while simultaneously acknowledging that she did cross the line, was always sort of heartbreaking to me.'
Documentaries, books (Lethal Intent), an opera (Wuornos, by Carla Lucero) and a TV movie (1992's Overkill, starring Jean Smart) have brought Wuornos' story to light before, although never in such a hard-hitting, sophisticated, narrative manner. Monster is a sort of flipside to Boys Don't Cry, a dark Americana love story where a queer character pushed to the fringes lands in a violent place.
But before discussing Monster with Jenkins and Theron, who sat down for interviews the morning Theron's Golden Globe nomination for Best Dramatic Actress was announced, first some facts about Wuornos.
Born in Michigan in 1956 to a child molester father (who committed suicide by the time she was 13) and an emotionally unprepared 17-year-old mother, Wuornos was abandoned at age 4 and taken in by her maternal grandparents, one a drunk and the other physically/emotionally abusive. Wuornos turned to boys for affection come adolescence and got pregnant by 14. Her baby was taken away and put up for adoption following its birth. Wuornos dropped out of school. After a failed marriage with an elderly man, Lewis Fell, and other relationships with both men and women, the increasingly difficult, rambunctious and antisocial Wuornos ended up in Daytona, where she met Tyria Moore, who would become her greatest love.
Come 1989, the murders began with Richard Mallory, an electronics repair shop owner. Toting along a 'killing bag' that included a .22 and bottle of Windex to clean up evidence, after each murder she would return home gloating to Moore about the cash and good times ahead. Come 1991, tips to the police and fingerprints led to Wuornos' identification and arrest at The Last Resort, a biker bar. Moore went to Pennsylvania and holed up with a sister. She was soon found and enlisted by authorities to help obtain a clandestinely taped confession from Wuornos. Betrayed by Moore, who later went on to testify against her in court, Wuornos nonetheless protected her lover by insisting that Moore had nothing to do with the crimes.
Over time, Wuornos' testimony changed: during initial trials she claimed that every murder was committed in self-defense (it later surfaced that her first victim, Richard Mallory, had been convicted of attempted rape and attempted to harm other women). Later, she insisted this was untrue and all killings were cold-blooded and calculated. When death sentence verdicts were handed down, Wuornos typically spewed insults and hateful remarks to the jury, judges, attorneys (like 'I hope your wife and children get raped in the ass!') and the public. In 1992, Nick Broomfield (Kurt and Courtney) made his first of two works about Wuornos: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Broomfield brings to light a disturbed woman whom an endless parade of individuals and organizations used and manipulated. Lucrative movie, book and TV deals were offered to Moore, detectives/police, and just about everyone involved with Wuornos' case. Even Wuornos' own pot-smoking hippie attorney, Steven Glaser, and her 'adoptive mother' Arlene Pralle, a Christian woman who struck up a friendship with Wuornos after spotting her photograph in a newspaper, were in on the action asking $25,000 for interviews.
Broomfield's new documentary, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (which is at the Gene Siskel Film Center Jan. 23, 8 p.m.), catches up with her as an appeal process is in motion. Now completely paranoid and delusional, Wuornos espouses a bizarre web of conspiracies in which police knew of her identity from even before the first murder but allowed her to keep killing so she could be deemed a 'serial killer' (and rid the world of scum in the process). Wuornos is also anxious to 'get right with God,' demanding an immediate execution date. Gov. Jeb Bush was happy to grant that wish once psychiatrists deemed her competent and sane (an unbelievable prognosis, given the final interview taped just before her execution in which she claims there are diabolical sonic rays being secretly administered in her cell).
A heterosexual with a fine arts background (at 14 she interned for William Burroughs), Jenkins first learned of Wuornos' story when it broke on the news. A follower of true-crime books and films, Jenkins felt Wuornos' story 'would fit so beautifully in a character film.' After completing the American Film Institute (AFI) Directors' Program and short films, she started constructing her Monster.
Letters were exchanged with Wuornos with hopes of meeting and keeping her involved throughout Monster's making. On the night before her execution, the sped-up date of which prevented their ever meeting, Wuornos granted Jenkins access to an archive of letters written to her only friend since childhood, Dawn. Jenkins credits Broomfield as extremely 'generous,' providing footage and an advance cut of Aileen. In addition, Jenkins researched books, court documents, testimonies, and 'anything I could get my hands on.' All this research and access gave Jenkins the upper hand when it came to writing the script and attaching herself as director. It also resulted in numerous monetary offers from industry suits, some of whom had the idea of Monster becoming a steamy lesbian serial killer flick.
'They kept trying to pay me the whole time I was writing it and I kept not taking the money because I knew where they were going to take it,' she recalls. 'Talking to Aileen and all these people [involved in her case] I was really smacked in the face by how serious this undertaking was. So I wouldn't take money until we already had a production date and Charlize was attached. Only then. This also made it so much easier to insist upon being director.'
From the get-go Theron was Jenkins' first choice to play Wuornos. A gorgeous South African model/ballerina/actress who emigrated to the USA in 1994, Theron may seem an unusual prospect for such an unglamorous role. Yet Jenkins saw the committed, talented actress underneath the glamour, not to mention foreshadows of a willingness to forego vanity. 'I woke up in the middle of the night and Devil's Advocate was on TV and it was this extreme close-up of Charlize,' she recalls, 'with red eyes and puffy and snot coming out of her nose, which is so unvain. I was like, 'oh, that's right, Charlize can do it,' wrote it down and fell back asleep. Ultimately, I was much more worried about somebody who's brave enough and strong enough to do what's necessary to play her, and Charlize was.'
Theron was still in South Africa when Wuornos made headlines, so when the script came her way she didn't realize that Monster was based on a real person. She was also unaware of the physical transformation—she gained 30 pounds, wore false teeth fabricated by Art Sakamoto, contact lenses, and had her skin texture/coloring flawlessly altered by makeup artist Toni G.
'When I said yes, I never knew what I was gonna look like physically,' Theron insists. 'When Patty and I talked about the character, we never sat down and said 'this is what we have to do for the physical transformation.' Somehow from just building on the emotional side, the rest just happened. In some weird way Aileen's physical appearance was the mirror to her emotional existence and life. Everything about what she did physically, the way she kind of threw her head and shoulders back, that was being 5'3' living a homeless life saying 'don't fuck with me, man, I'm taking care of myself here.''
Compelled by Jenkins' fresh and unpredictable script, and the equally unconventional love story, Theron not only accepted the role of playing Wuornos but also signed on as a producer. She views Wuornos as 'an extremely resilient human, probably the most resilient person I've ever [come to know] in my life. She had to jump back from some really extreme situations in her life. We all go through some really bad shit in our lives but this woman really went through the ringer.'
Theron herself has endured violent, tragic circumstances during youth: at 15, she reportedly saw her mother shoot and kill her alcoholic, abusive father in self-defense. 'Acting for me is a very personal journey,' Theron continues. 'I don't know how to play other people's emotions. I only know how to substitute my emotions for them. I try to understand the situation or emotional journey this person took and try to make it a personal one. It becomes very cathartic, but in a grave way. You have to turn on the light in some very dark rooms. I've never been to therapy because I feel like my acting is that for me, which is very freeing.'
When word got out that Monster had gone into production, the press hyped up the lesbian angle, says Jenkins, 'and how the lesbian community felt about it and how people felt about two hot women being together and they were so excited ... . But it wasn't about lesbianism. It wasn't about killing. When I look back in history at great films I've loved they're almost never about the context. Like great war movies aren't about war. They're about people and there's some great story. These are human beings—you have to go at least a step further than [sexuality].'
Nonetheless, now the critical accolades and award nominations are pouring in. On the critical reaction, the audiences coming to see Monster, and the possibility of garnering Oscars, Theron is ecstatic: 'I knew when we were making this that we might fill half of some small art house theaters Everything about this movie, the whole process, the risk that we took, the fact the movie we made is out there and I'm really proud of it. All of that is so incredible, and the way people are writing and talking about it. What happened this morning [with the Globe nomination] is like a dream.'
As for what Wuornos might have hoped to result from the telling of her tale, Jenkins can only speculate. 'I don't know that she would have been able to articulate it,' Jenkins muses. 'I think, hopefully, it's what we tried to do, which is explain [that her story is] more complicated than [the public thinks]. She was a very damaged person and could only oscillate wildly back and forth between 'they were all horrible people and deserved it' and 'I'm a horrible person and I did horrible things and you should kill me.' She was never able to articulate the in between. A complicated story.'