On a cold Friday morning in Seattle, overcast skies and still groggy from sleep, I sat down with writer/director Sean Durkin and Elizabeth Olsen, the breakout star of his first feature film, Martha Marcy May Marlene. The film tells the story of a few paranoid weeks after Martha (Olsen) has runaway from a cult in upstate New York as she finds refuge in her sister and brother-in-law’s lakeside home in Connecticut. Despite asking, Martha either won’t or can’t tell her sister where she’s been as she is quickly swallowed up by paranoia of what will happen now that she’s left. The lines of what’s real and what’s imagined begin to blur and the audience is left to decide for themselves. What exactly could have drawn Durkin to such a project?
Awwww, what a nice cult leader right? Wrong! As innocent as that may sound here, just the thought of it makes my skin crawl after seeing this film, but for Durkin it didn’t end there.
“After working on the script, a friend of mine told me she left a similar situation and she was quite open with me about the experience,” Sean said. He used this information to inform his script, but was also sure to point out that Martha Marcy May Marlene is not her story. Sean did, however, go as far as to ask Elizabeth if she would like to talk to her, but she refused.
“I didn’t want to know too much,” she said. “I was actually happy I came onto the film so late so I didn’t have time to do any research. I wasn’t thinking about this or that situation.”
Thinking along the same lines, I mentioned how I first saw the film at the Cannes Film Festival without any prior knowledge of what the film was about or how it had come into existence. Little did I know, Durkin had been in Cannes the year before with a short film called Mary Last Seen. The film eventually won the SFR Prize, which goes to the most audacious short films in the competition. Even more interesting, the short was created for only $400 using credit cards and was only meant to accompany Durkin’s script for Martha Marcy to help it get financing. It worked, financing for Martha Marcy May Marlene started picking up immediately after that.
I only learned of the short the night before the interview and I was scrambling to find it online after watching the brief trailer (which you can watch to the right, but it’s not safe for work). The full short isn’t available online, but Durkin tells me it will be included on the Blu-ray once it is released.
For those that have seen Martha Marcy May Marlene the trailer for Mary Last Seen should be enough to give you chills as the farmhouse in the background of that final shot is the same farmhouse used in the film, the location where half of Martha’s story is told as she spends two years with a cult. The other half is spent at her sister’s lakeside house and Durkin intentionally broke the film’s shooting in two halves… the farmhouse first and the lake house second. Did that help?
“Oh yeah,” both of them say at the same time smiling. “We lived through it, not only the bad times, but the good times we had during that shoot,” Durkin added.
However, while the shoot may have been split in two, the film maintains its look from the farmhouse to the lake house, one isn’t brighter than the other or more glossy. “That would have been the obvious thing to do,” Durkin said, telling me films such as Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding and Woody Allen’s Interiors all helped inspire the look of the film. The goal was to go for something “gritty and grainy”, Durkin said, but beyond the look of the film I also became intrigued by the music.
After seeing the film in Cannes back in May, I felt I needed to watch it again before sitting down for my interview and, once again, one particular moment stood out.
As Martha is becoming settled in with her new, cult surroundings (though the film is always sure to never refer to it as a “cult”), the leader, Patrick (played brilliantly by John Hawkes), sits down and begins singing what may be one of the creepiest songs you will ever hear considering the situation. Astonishingly enough, the song, despite being titled “Marcy’s Song,” wasn’t written for the film. Neither was “Marlene,” the song that plays over the film’s end credits. Coincidence has never been more… coincidental.
“I was just doing a search online for songs with ‘Martha,’ ‘Marcy’ and ‘Marlene’ in the title and I came across ‘Marlene’ first,” Sean tells me. The music is by Jackson C. Frank, an American folk musician that passed away in 1999, but wrote two songs that profoundly affected this film as well as Sean, “I now think that’s one of the greatest albums ever made.”
| “Marcy’s Song” by Jackson C. Frank |
“Marcy’s Song” by John Hawkes |
“Marlene” by Jackson C. Frank |
Finally, just as I felt I’d built up enough good will between the two I dared ask a question I wasn’t sure they were going to answer and I even said as much before asking. “If you’re not sure, we’re probably not going to answer,” Sean said before adding, “You’re talking about the ending right?”
Right-o Sean!
The ending of Martha Marcy May Marlene is open-ended and brilliantly so. I told them both it was the single most important thing that made me like the film. “Oh really?” Sean said while laughing. I assume he’s read otherwise as some people haven’t been as impressed with the ambiguity of the finale, but while everything leading up to it was very well done, without that ending it isn’t much more than just another film. With it, it’s a mind-bender.
When I asked if there was ever an intention to do it any differently Sean was quick to answer, “No, there’s no other way to end it.” He also wouldn’t give me his personal interpretation of the ending, only saying, “I think we give enough clues and information for the audience to come to their own conclusions.”
Olsen approached the role with a complete sense of reality. “There is a strength to her, such as when she smashes that car window with a rock. Whether you perceive that scene to be real or imagined, I had to approach it as real because Martha thinks it’s real.”
So do I, but the ambiguity of that scene and several others lead up to one hell of an ending and it’s one of the multitude of reasons I was able to sit through this genuinely sinister film twice and I urge you to give it a shot at least once.
Martha Marcy May Marlene hits limited theaters this Friday, October 21. You can get more on the film here and read my review from Cannes after the first time I saw it right here. I don’t plan on reviewing it a second time, but I think by reading just some of the things we discussed here you can tell I fully appreciated it upon my second viewing.
