The new film Martha Marcy May Marlene has already secured a few top honors, including taking home the director’s prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Indeed, young director Sean Durkin’s first feature film is a wonderful acted, meticulously paced thriller held together through a combination of Durkin’s efficient style and leading lady Elizabeth Olsen’s performance. This won’t be the last we hear of Olsen, who threatens to break out from the shadows of her older sisters, the famous Olsen twins, with a string of promising films coming down the pike, including Buried, director Rodrigo Cortés’ next feature, Red Lights, and the Josh Radnor-directed Liberal Arts.
Olsen and Durkin were in town a few months ago, and FrontRow joined a roundtable discussion with the movie makers about their latest film.
On researching cults
Sean Durkin: I’ve read every – lots of things about the more famous groups. I found a lot of smaller contemporary local groups that wouldn’t be considered a cult yet. And then a lot of it comes from a friend of mine, not the place, or the style of the group, but more the tactics, the manipulation, and the emotional outcome and her journey in those first couple of weeks after she left. So it is a combination of all of things and just trying to understand the emotion of what it would be to go through that.
Elizabeth Olsen: When I got the part it was two to three weeks before we started shooting, and I was also working on another movie at the time. So really all I would do is try to attack it from a human point of view instead of a cult, larger picture point of view and try and figure out like commonalities between people. I just tried to approach it from this just one, fully realized character that Sean wrote. And then Sean asked me to meet this particular friend that he is talking about. I’m not like portraying her story, and it’s not really any of my business. He shared her story with me, and that was helpful a lot along the way.
On Durkin’s fascination with cults
Sean Durkin: It grew. I wanted to make a cult movie that was modern and not religious. I sort of had this image immediately of doing a cult movie that was naturalistic and could draw you in without – I knew I didn’t want it to be, you know, you get there and there are 25 people in robes. So I felt like I hadn’t seen that, and it built on there. I read about a lot of groups. When I was a kid, I went to a religious school, and I never thought about this during the process, but I think I realized later, I sort of rejected religion a little bit, and not the belief, I’m actually quite a spiritual person, but more of what I – I was seven years old, and I just had these questions because we were in morning prayer, and I just didn’t understand why everyone was repeating the words. I had no judgment against it, I just didn’t understand why people would repeat words they weren’t understanding.
But then I would go to a sports game and I’d be in the crowd and – I lived in England and I’d go to a soccer game and I had my favorite team, and I’d be chanting with 35 thousand people, the songs. So, looking back on it there is an interesting duality there about deciding what is for you and what isn’t for you, even though there are similarities in what you are attracted to and what you turn away from. And I just thought that was interesting. It has to do with people just wanting to belong to something larger than themselves. And I think that is just a very basic human desire. I think when a cult occurs is when you take that desire and manipulate it and turn it into something else.
On Martha / Marcy May / Marlene’s split personality
Elizabeth Olsen: I never thought of it in age, necessarily, but I definitely had this hope because there are so many things that happen out of the norm that Martha does, I had this hope that it all came from this seed that she can do things unexpected, that she’s a really impulsive person. Sean said the word, she’s functioning on “survival mode.” I really liked the idea of her being able to just always be impulsive and that in itself is a very young thing, and then also it also comes across younger when someone seems so naïve to cross societal boundaries that she crosses, that she forgets. But I wanted people to guess. I didn’t think of how people would perceive her, but I definitely wanted there to be an understanding that what she could do was always to be unexpected. Yet it’s accepted.
Sean Durkin: But also the idea that when something traumatic happens, someone can – I read about that the idea that when something traumatic happens, your development gets stuck at a certain age. And then also something about cults is that groups like this who use tactics like those used in the film, the process is very much about stripping people down to a child like state and then reprogramming them back. So I’d always imagine when she got out, she had her original life that had been taken away. And then she had been reprogrammed with this new life, and now that that she had now realized that there were problems with both, she’d be bouncing around in between. But we never talked about things in terms of that, and in terms of performance and just like the filmmaking. It’s a bit on the intellectual side, which is definitely to consider on the writing side, but once we got there it becomes more about being in the moment and reacting and just doing it on an emotional level.
On developing the script during the Sundance writers’ workshop
Sean Durkin: It is not really a workshop, it is more that you go and talk to people and you get feedback. So you go in January you go to this beautiful mountain resort and you go there for five days and you meet people and they give you notes. It is really about thinking and talking about your script as opposed to just working on it. It raises a lot of questions. I can’t remember what changed, just know that it raised a lot of questions and forced me to look deeper. It was really a massive experience for me, it really changed my life. There are always changes. The characters were there, it’s all just a part of the ongoing process. Whenever you write a film you’re always working on the characters, you’re always working on the sequence of the events: do you need another thing here, do you need something else here, is this scene not working. It’s just like the overall things. And then asking and digging deeper – looking more where the characters come from, what their relationships are. Constantly asking questions.
Elizabeth Olsen: Every single character in the script was fully realized right when we got it. It didn’t even matter if you had a smaller part within the larger group, the cult, they were all like fully realized stories. It was really remarkable to see.
On the movie’s open-ended ending
Sean Durkin: It was always my ending. For me that was it, because I wanted the film to be about these first couple of weeks, and that’s where Martha is at and that’s where I believe a woman in that situation is at. Those questions she is asking, the questions you’re asking are the questions she’s asking, and that’s the goal of the movie, to take you through her experience and leave you off where she would be. You can’t have her like – I didn’t want to jump forward five years, or have – just have anything else that wasn’t emotionally true. You can’t have any clear resolution there.
