Archive

Amber Tamblyn on the subtext and queer themes of “Paint it Black”

Janet Fitch‘s debut novel White Oleander was a best-seller that was later adapted into a film receiving both awards and critical acclaim. Her follow-up, Paint it Black, is perhaps lesser known, but getting its due in its own big screen version directed by actress and poet Amber Tamblyn.

Premiering tonight at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Paint it Black stars Alia Shawkat as Josie, a young woman whose loss of her artist boyfriend, Michael, has her spiraling into emotional turmoil. But she’s not alone: Michael’s mother, Meredith, played by the perfectly steely Janet McTeer, is also violently grieving, which leads to a tumultuous relationship with the woman her beloved son spent all of his time with.

Both the novel and the film are deep in subtext, and Josie also has lesbian friends like her bestie Pen, played by out actress Emily Rios. Amber herself has been a favorite of queer women throughout her career, from her lesbian role on Two and a Half Men, to her outsider aesthetic that rings true to the LGBTQ community. Paint it Black, Amber’s first turn as a filmmaker, is of that same ilk, with eccentric cinematic storytelling that is both dark and beautiful, just like the original novel.

We spoke with Amber about adapting the novel, the movie’s queer themes and why she’s always making out with Amy Schumer.

AfterEllen.com: I loved the book and then I loved the film, which was great because you never know when you love a book so much if the movie can match it and I was so happy it did.

Amber Tamblyn: You’re officially the first person who loved the book then, so that’s kind of major. You’re the first person whose a fan of the book who’s seen the movie so meaning, most people-it’s kind of, it’s one of-I mean Janet Fitch only has two novels, and that one was less read for some reason than White Oleander so. But it has such a rabid following in a great way. But yeah, most people just hadn’t read the novel yet, so. So you’re the first!

AE: I read an interview where you said the book was very cinematic, which I totally agree with. I would think that might make it a little more challenging, in a way, to then make it into a film. Can you talk about that?

AT: To me, I’m very interested in adaptations of books turned to stories for film that have a heavy protagonist narrative, meaning there’s less action, there’s more interior monologue, you’re hearing what the person’s say; a sort of first-person writing style. And while Josie’s character in the book is not written first-person, you’re certainly in her head the entire experience of it, questioning things, wondering if she is partly to blame because Michael took his life and all those things. And to me, those are the more challenging stories to tell probably, but I knew that. I relied heavily on the poet in myself and thinking like “Well, I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, but I’m gonna try to do it and see what comes out of that other part of my life, and see if there’s a poetic way to tell this story that’s not so linear and isn’t exact in the book.” Because you know, huge parts of the book you just can’t tell. And one of the ways to do that was to almost completely remove the character of Michael from the film.

I’m going to be very curious to see how fans of the book feel about that because he’s a pretty large presence in the book and there’s a lot of flashbacks, and you really see him a lot and get to know him a lot. And one of the ways I felt like I could empower the grief and the emotional obsession between the two women in the film was to remove him so that the audience felt like they felt; the audience felt like “Why did he do this? Who was he?” And you as the audience member become informed solely by what these women are saying as opposed to seeing the truth of whatever the situation was. That’s one example I think in the adaptation.

AE: Keeping Michael in it seems integral to also showing how the two women knew him so differently and had such different ideas about him, so how did you decide how much of him you were going to use?

AT: Well originally when I was doing the adaptation, I didn’t want him to be in it at all. And after thinking about it, I thought, “OK, this is my first movie. That might be a mistake. I know in my head it’s one thing, but what if I get to the editing process, and I have nothing.” But no matter what, I always knew he was just going to kind of be a shadow or actually, which is a better metaphor, a ghost; kind of like a ghost in the film, which he is. Even as a young boy, he kind of makes this ghostly appearance.

So I shot-I knew the places in which I was going to put him for sure, and he does have like one scene that’s in a flashback where you kind of see him meet Josie for the first time. But it was all in, again, in the editing, and a lot of things were moved around according to how that edit went. The film actually turned out quite different from the script, and the script itself is very different than the novel, and I think that’s sort of the creative process of adaptation, is that you keep the same through line all the way through your creation of it-the same emotional truth and you try to stay very honest to the emotional truth of the story but everything else can change. As long as you’re just sticking to that all the way through it and keeping that in mind, constantly. What’s the story you’re telling? You’re telling the story; you’re telling a class story about two women from two different worlds in a struggle for power and a struggle for memory who are in a cloud of grief. Keep going back to that same narrative, and certainly, you keep going back, and you keep trying to make sure that Meredith is as scary and dangerous as possible but that no one ever doesn’t sympathize with her. You want that to be the woman you hate to love; that you’re obsessed with. That you’re like “I want to kill you and screw you at the same time-I’m so confused.”

AE: How I first came to read the book was someone telling me about the subtext in the relationship between the two women. So I’m curious your thoughts on that, and that’s something you tried to play up in the film.

AT: Definitely. There’s certainly aspects of it when Josie breaks into Meredith’s house, and she’s looking at her naked, and you see her nipple, and she’s this gorgeous alcoholic covered in jewels in this house and part of the attraction I think for Josie is this woman has everything she ever had. This woman has money; she doesn’t have to worry about nude modeling or [doing] anything and certainly, a lot of relationships and dynamics-straight, gay, anything-are dependent upon power dynamics between two people. Who’s the top? Who’s the bottom? I think that’s part of the infusion between the two of them is that sense of like -certainly it is hinted at in the book, and it’s hinted at in the movie that there was a severe Oedipal situation going on between the son and the mother. And so of course, why would it not be transferred over on to another person who was as vulnerable as he was?

But it was definitely in the book for me when I read it, and I definitely wanted to push it even a little bit further in the film, just so that it was like on that borderline of what exactly is Meredith to Josie? What exactly-what does she want from her?

AE: And do you have an answer for that?

AT: No. And the moment and the end where Meredith gives that speech, which is also kind of in the book where she’s on the phone and saying “One day you’re gonna look out at the lawn with a child on your hip, and you’re gonna think ‘I could have had a different life.'” Which, frankly, is every woman’s worst fear, right? It is. If you want kids, if you don’t want kids, it doesn’t matter. Your fear is that something is going to come and take away your creative assets and that you’re going to be stuck in a life you never asked for, and Meredith really touches on that. Even when she hears this message between her dead son and Josie, and she says, “Isn’t’ that interesting? He didn’t say ‘Josie and Michael,’ he said ‘Josie or Michael.'” Like, she’s just the worst.

She’s so manipulative, and I think in that moment, which I completely ripped off that monologue moment when she’s talking on the phone. I ripped it off from one of my favorite films growing up, Labyrinth, when David Bowie is saying to Jenifer Connelly, like “Love me, be with me, give me everything you have and I will be your slave.” The whole idea was “Just be mine, and I will do anything you want,” which is like really powerful, especially if you’re David Bowie in spandex. How I’d say no to that!

But I wanted it to feel like that-who says that to another human being? But also, like, that’s putting someone in a hypnotic state at that point, being that direct about what you want: “Come be with me, let me dress you up and treat you like you literally belong to me; your body your everything belongs to me, and I will do anything for you.”

AE: The casting is so perfect for this. Janet McTeer!

AT: The greatest breasts in the history of Hollywood and she knows it, man. She knows it. When I first went and met with her here in LA, she was shooting something, and I went to the hotel-I met her at the pool at the top of some hotel. She’s like laying on a poolside chair with a giant hat on and a black bathing suit with a kimono, with her boobs out on display.

She’d be laughing if she was here, too. She knows how I feel about her boobs. I’m very obsessed with them. So much so that in the color correction, the longest thing we had to deal with in the color correction was my color corrector wanted to dampen down the nipple a little bit, like not make it so prominent, and I was like “No way.” I took a screenshot of it and texted it to her and was like, “The dude is fighting me on your nipple. Your nipple’s a star, and it needs to be shown” and she was like, “You brighten that baby up! You do it!” But you know, she’s a very sensual woman.

To me, Janet is just the embodiment of sexuality. She’s one of the hottest, most beautiful-she’s on that same ilk as like a Tilda Swinton, but I think even more so because there’s a masculinity about her while still being so physically attractive, and that’s what I knew I needed for that role. It had to be somebody that made you feel like maybe their son could have fallen for them and maybe a straight chick could also fall for them. It just felt like someone so powerful in that way they could take over anyone’s sexuality.

AE: The natural question is why did you not put yourself in the lead role.

AT: In totality, this has been a 10-year project, and I wrote it for myself originally. I mean I know I have a young face, but I’m 33 now, and really, that character needed to be in her early 20s. In order for you to believe-it’d be a very different story if Josie was in her late 20s or early 30s. You’d think something was wrong with her. It’s not an impressionable young girl anymore. As I got older, and a bunch of other things came up-I had a book come out and was doing many different things and just getting older-and eventually it was, once we got the financing and the movie was really coming together, I had to have a real hard conversation with myself and go, “You’re too old to play this role.”

It was intended that way in the beginning, but I’m so grateful that I got Alia because she’s just-she’s so extraordinary and the things that she was able to do in this movie-we shot this movie in 21 days. It was so fast and she-there’d be days where it’s like, she’s got back-to-back scenes, she’s in every frame of the film, where she’s getting dragged across the floor and crying or stabbing pianos and all kinds of crazy stuff, and there was never a moment or a half hour she needed to take to go deal with that. She’s such a talented young actress. She really really is and I think this is going to be-I hope this is going to be a great film for her in showing people what a diverse actress she is.

AE: When we first met a few years ago, I remember you telling me that you were queer.

AT: I remain true to that statement. I remember I said that and everybody was like “What does that mean?” I got like a million questions about that. “What do you mean you’re queer?”

AE: In regards to the film, how do you see queerness fitting in?

AT: I think it’s obviously not a huge narrative through the film but I certainly think that complicated relationships between women that go in and out of states of wanting is a reality and I think it’s certainly a reality in current culture where we’ve seen a lot of people come out and say that they’re bi and it doesn’t matter and that sexuality is fluid and it just doesn’t matter anymore. Somebody like a Miley Cyrus can be with a girl and then be with a guy and no one questions it. That to me is an absolutely beautiful thing. And while that’s not prominent in this film, I think it definitely touches on the fact that the relationship between two women is far more complicated than what is shown in most movies, which is pretty shallow and pretty straightforward. It’s either like a romantic buddy comedy where they’re getting drunk and partying and then there’s like one sentimental moment in that, or it’s Grey Gardens. You really get sort of one or the other. I guess that would be some part of it, for sure.

AE: I always love seeing you pop up on Amy Schumer’s show as well, and you’re often making out with her.

AT: Yes, that is tonight’s episode. It’s always me because we’re always doing something or she will text me and say, “Hey girl, I’ve got a sketch for you. Come in on Friday!” and it’s always like some dirty thing she’s doing and whatever we’re doing it just ends up that way. We’ll just turn to each other like, “It’s go time. Mouth to mouth, it’s go time.”

AE: You have a lot of queer women fans from your lesbian role in Two and a Half Men-

AT: And friends, too. Those are my end-alls. My babies.

AE: I as a queer woman love this movie, but do you think all kinds of women will be drawn to Paint it Black?

AT: Oh definitely. That’s my hope. Lena Dunham was such a huge champion of the film, sending letters to festivals and she loves this movie. One of the first things she said to me was, “I feel like young women and especially gay women are going to love the movie just because of the strength of the characters and their connection.” So even though it’s not a film about gay women, it’s still a film about women with a very strong bond relationship that is extremely complicated and the only thing we can alway ask for as women in general when characters are portrayed about us is that they’re complex, at the very least. That to me is the most important thing. There’s no reason not to. To me, those are the kind of characters I’m interested in playing and also filming and writing about.

AE: What’s next for you-acting, directing, writing?

AT: I’m working on a novel and also a TV show for myself with a friend. So hopefully have some news about that in the fall. I just put out a short book called The Punishment Gift, which is a series of really foul dirty awesome love poems. And also poems on unrequited love. Basically, if any of your readers either just had their heart broken or are madly in love with someone they can’t have, this is the book for them. It’s really, really intense, like imagining throwing someone’s girlfriend off of a cliff; things like that. Good times! Hopefully, that will become a full-length book in 2017.

AE: And as for Paint it Black, what’s next after the LA Film Festival?

AT: Fingers crossed it gets a really good response and that it sells. That’s our biggest thing right now. We have distributors coming and I hope that people see the same things that people like you have seen in it and really love it and get it and someone wants to become our home.

Paint it Black premieres tonight at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button