Freda Cooper chats with Miss Sloane director John Madden…
Elizabeth Sloane lives and breathes politics. Miss Sloane the film seems to attract them like a magnet. It premiered in America just after the Presidential Election and arrives in the UK this week in the middle of our own General Election campaign.
The film’s director, John Madden, spoke exclusively to Freda Cooper about its reception in the States, why Jessica Chastain was his first and only choice for the title role and the growth in female-centric films.
The script for Miss Sloane came from a first-timer, Jonathan Perera, who’s an ex-attorney. How did you come across it?
It was literally almost an unsolicited manuscript. He wrote the script absolutely outside the context of the industry. He had no connection with the industry, no representation, and he was prompted by an article that said the Weinstein Company was developing a film on the gun issue. He’d written this script and put it away, thinking it’s not good enough, nobody’s going to want to read this, blah, blah, blah. And then when he saw that the film was going to be called The Senator’s Wife and was going to have a woman at the centre of it. That prompted him to send out a log line about the script and see if anybody was interested. And he got a reply saying, “Like the sound of your script. Can I read it?” He sent that person his script and they became his manager! And a company called Film Nation optioned it: they were impressed by the writing sample, but also because they thought it would make an interesting film but didn’t know how to go about it. And they sent it to eight directors, of which I was one.
So it came to me as a log line initially. It wasn’t on offer to me. And I just burned through it. Before I’d even got to page ten or fifteen, and Jessica was completely installed in my head as the person to whom the film belonged – I just thought it was the most unbelievably good fit – and that’s how it happened. And then I went about seeing if I could get the gig!
It’s amazing when something grabs you like that ……
It’s pretty unusual. I thought it was a very well written script, although it’s not what you see now as it evolved in certain ways, but structurally and content-wise, it was very much the film that is now there. And I thought that if it compels me to read it, I ought to be able to make a film that is equally compelling! Although the ingredients looked odd, because it’s very verbal and very restricted – an interior film largely. So, when you spark to material, that’s always what you’re looking for.
There are many things that are interesting, that you work on for whatever reason, but sometimes they don’t quite gel, or the financing doesn’t appear to be quite solid. But in this case, it wasn’t set up anywhere, so we worked on the film, got it to the place where we wanted it to be and then went out to market. And it was me, Jessica and the script at that point and that was all.
So Jessica was on board that early?
Oh, yes, the moment I finished it I sent it to her. She and I had been trading material in a loose, informal way because we’d worked together before and wanted to do something together again. She’d sent stuff to me which I either didn’t respond to at quite the level necessary for me to take it on, or the timing didn’t work. But this time I said, I’m sending you this, tell me what you think of it, I won’t advertise it beyond saying that I think the role is absolutely perfect for you. I knew she’d respond to it because the character is so interesting. And then she wrote back and said yes, she’d love to do it.
The film’s been described as a political thriller, but there are other elements in there – an expose of political lobbying, a drama. How would you describe it?
It’s not a film that can be perfectly summed up by one label. The marketing people tend to hone in on the political thriller angle and I don’t blame them at all for that. In order to deliver the film and everything else that’s going on in it, you need something that makes the film incredibly compelling. With the way the story unfolds, the way it constantly wrong-foots you, and the way it’s always surprising you, I don’t object to that label.
And it really does wrong-foot you all the way, especially at the end. And she never seems to have any doubts about what she’s doing ….
She’s a funny character. She’s always ahead of everybody else and she’s always clear about what she’s doing. But the doubts do creep in and she starts to make mistakes, probably for the first time. But I think the film is also an expose and an examination of a very intransigent and fascinating political issue. It’s more about political process, a system which has been screwed up in many ways by money. But chiefly it’s about a portrait of an extraordinarily unusual character who’s caught up in very, very unusual circumstances. A role that you’d expect to be played by a man. And it’s a film that’s dominated by several women characters, in ways that you don’t foresee or expect. That’s pretty unusual. But it’s very much about her, and the way people are going to engage with the movie is through her, somebody they can’t bear to begin with. I don’t know a woman who’s seen the film who isn’t absolutely rooting for her at one crucial point in the film and cheering her on, despite the way she does things!
Some of your previous films – Shakespeare In Love, Mrs Brown etc, have women very much to the fore. Do you naturally gravitate towards projects with women in the main roles?
I do, but without being conscious of it or rejecting material because it doesn’t conform to that. I do confess completely to finding women the superior sex, and I think that you’re more likely to find a more interesting story to tell when women are the drivers of the story. Women have everything – the emotions, the power even if they’re not always recognised for that, and there’s more nuance available. And there’s more and more stories coming forward now. This year alone, there was a slew of very strong, female centred films. I like to work with women. I like to work with actresses. And I think the balance needed redressing – not that there’s any political motive in the films that I make – but it was about time that women had more interesting roles. That is shifting and one of the markers that it’s happening is Disney.
When Miss Sloane came out in the States, it was just after the presidential election, and now it’s arrived her where we’re having a General Election. What’s the interest for you in American politics?
They’re so obstruse! And, potentially, more interesting to me. I find the separation of the legislative and executive branches interesting, and never more than right now. With this film, the political context in which it’s released is changing all the time. We never imagined that it would come out in America in the context in which it did.
When we made it, Trump hadn’t even won the nomination – who would have thought he would have run, won and gone on to be president? And who would have thought that the gun issue, one of the most prominent and most divisive issues, would have become almost irrelevant by the time the film came out? Everybody expected it to be a big part of the discussion.
And it turned out that our natural audience for the film, which we expected to be a Democratic-leaning one, was traumatised by what happened – shocked and dismayed. We premiered the film just three days after the election and it was released two weeks after the election – by which time the natural audience for it was flattened. They certainly weren’t in a hurry to go see a movie. But from this perspective in the UK I think there’s a very strong interest in the American political landscape becoming intensified by recent events. It’ll be interesting to see how the film finds a space for itself. For me, it’s about getting people in there. The film can take care of itself once an audience is there because of the unexpectedness of the ride, but the trick is getting past people’s assumptions about what the film may be. It’s an exciting, very engaging and surprising ride.
Miss Sloane is released in cinemas on Friday May 12th. Read our review here.
Freda Cooper – Follow me on Twitter, check out my movie blog and listen to my podcast, Talking Pictures.
