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Interview: Martha Marcy May Marlene’s John Hawkes & Sean Durkin

The actor and director on Elizabeth Olsen's debut and cult behaviour.

During the London Film Festival, we had the pleasure of interviewing the two men behind the much-talked about Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Writer and director Sean Durkin makes an outstanding feature debut with the psychological drama, following a young woman's ordeal after fleeing a cult. Elizabeth Olsen gives an astonishing performance, also her debut, as Martha, crippled by a disorientating loss of time and awareness while recovering at her sister's home. Durkin's unconventional film shows Martha's memories of cult leader Patrick (John Hawkes) bleeding into her reality.

Martha Marcy May Marlene hits UK cinemas 3rd February - read our full review here.

We met up with Durkin and the gentlemanly Hawkes (nothing like his unnerving character in Winter's Bone, a performance that earned him an Oscar nomination) for an intimate round table interview.

DIY: John, you worked closely on this film with two first timers. As an experienced actor how was that for you? Did you have to bring anything different because of that?
John Hawkes: Well I didn't have to dumb it down, that's for sure! No, I learn from whoever I work with. Some more than others. I was certainly able to learn a great deal from Lizzie [Elizabeth Olsen] and Sean. For Lizzie, her first lead role in a film, and for Sean, in directing his first feature, they both just seemed fully formed to me. I felt like I was among equals, among peers. So I never really give a second thought to how much experience or not people have if they show up and they know what they’re doing, and these two did. It’s just another experience telling a story basically.

Sean, for you as a first timer how was it directing more established people such as John?
Sean Durkin: I don’t think about those things to be honest. I don’t know, I think stopping and thinking about things like that is really dangerous. I could get nervous about someone like John coming to the set, or Sarah or Hugh, but if anything like that ever crosses your mind you have to push it away because it’s all just fear and that will eat you up. You can’t make a movie if you’re scared. It was an amazing experience overall, just so collaborative with all our actors.

DIY: Elizabeth is obviously getting rave reviews for her performance. For both of you, was there a key moment when you saw what she was doing, and realised it was something incredible?
Hawkes: For me, when I met her. Sean introduced me in my motel - I was interested to see who it was going to be. We all lived fairly communally in this spartan motel that exists in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York. I had no vehicle, and a lot of people didn't, so we would congregate at the bar/restuarant affiliated with the motel. I guess I had been there a night or two, and I met her, and I was struck by the light she threw off and what came out of her. I felt like she was an irrestistible person to all of us. I didn't realise until a couple of days in who her family was, that she was the younger sister of the Olsen twins. I'm kind of glad I didn't know in advance - at that point I was already completely bowled over by her. The first scene we shot was the moment we first meet, where I name her Marcy May; there was a relaxed sense of wonder about her, and a sense of vulnerability that I was impressed by. I had worked with Jennifer Lawrence less than a year and a half before [on Winter's Bone], and I didn't think anything like that would happen again - an out-of-nowhere kid already so skilled in their craft. This can't be happening. In between takes I would think, 'how the fuck are you doing this? I've just worked with a young kid who's going to set the world on fire, and now you are too! I know these things!' It was unnerving and joyous in one piece. I knew she was formidable and would be an excellent dance partner for the rest of the run!
Durkin: I knew very early on in the audition, I had a gut feeling. As soon as I spent five minutes with her, I knew she was it. I remember one moment in the shoot that was so spectacular because of how silent it is, when she's at the lake, looking up at the house, and she turns and sees the car for the first time. She steps into frame in close-up, and her face is transformed. It doesn't look like that at any other point in the film. It's an amazing part. We're two and a half weeks into shooting and at this point we're done talking about the character, and she perfectly captures who Martha is, and what state of mind she's in, without doing anything. There's nothing I could say to her - that's her feeling the character, being it, and creating this amazing moment. It's one of my favourite moments in the film.

There were connections made in my head to the Manson family book Helter Skelter, Leslie van Houten and the link between John singing and Charles Manson singing. Was that a conscious thing on your part or was that just something that an audience member, like myself, might bring?
Durkin: Not conscious in the sense that I was trying to do that - we actually tried to stay away from a lot of those things and approach it in a different way. I’m aware of all those things and read about all those things so I’m sure that some things stick but I quickly got away from those things and became focused on creating our own group and learning from experiences of people that I met and making it specific, emotionally specific, to them and to the farm. The farm really came first, a lot of the character and the way of living grew out of that. From saying, ‘we’re in this region, we have this abandoned farm, what do people do if they take it over? What kind of life do they live?’ It really came very naturally out of all that.



You managed to create a very particular atmosphere and feel to the way that people are living at the farm. I was just wondering how you went about creating that, was there a lot of preparation? Did you spend a lot of time there before shooting?
Durkin: I spent a good amount of time there. A couple of weeks I lived there when we were preparing the film. I spent a lot of time just walking around, finding locations for things and then my production designers came and then that’s when it really started to take shape. We started to craft it to look how we really wanted it to look. That was really exciting. You just kinda feel things as they go.
Hawkes: For my part, I don’t think that I saw the farm until we began to shoot. Maybe the day before perhaps. That was more out of my hands and more of a great gift to show up and have this place be its own kind of character in the movie. And to just look around there and try to pretend and use that to our ends as best we could I guess.
Durkin: It definitely felt alive when we were there too. That was the place that I had first because it’s actually our producer’s family’s farm so we’ve been going there for a couple of years. You mentioned the music before, the music just came from a place where that’s just what happens when you’re sitting around. Even when we were shooting, people would just be picking up guitars - there’s no TVs. There’s a communal living situation, there’s guitars and music. It gave the story the group and its values. It grew naturally.
Hawkes: The fact that there was no cellphone reception or internet really helped us. You couldn’t wander away like everyone does with their device. We were there together, I think that it really informed us as a community in a really fantastic way.

Sean mentioned the grey areas, and a lot of people are going to find Patrick to be a reprehensible character - do you have to find the good in him in order to play him?
Hawkes: Sure, I tend not judge who I’m playing particularly. I don’t think that evil people spend the day thinking, ‘I’m so evil, God I’m so evil, I’m so reprehensible. I’m scum.’ I think that it shows that it was more alive for me to think of Patrick as someone who believed that what he was doing was vital and right and best for those around him. I wasn’t at all interested in approaching him as an evil person. Certainly the story would be really poorly served if the moment we meet Patrick he’s the devil incarnate, he’s some kind of easily identifiable charlatan or conman because the story isn’t about Patrick - it’s about Lizzie’ character Martha. If we’re going to follow her through the film, I think the more interesting and subtle and nuanced and complex she can be the better it is for us, as an audience, to watch her journey. If when she meets Patrick, and I think that’s pretty much the same time the audience really meets Patrick, if he tips his hand too much and we play the ending and know what he is from the top then I don’t think we’re as apt to be as interested in her. If on some level we can believe that, or sympathise or understand why she might fall in with this group of people, or this guy in particular, then I think we’re more likely to be interested in her trip. Which is what the movie is.

DIY: Sean, I read a quote where you said that you hate flashbacks. Is this like your unique take, a little 'screw you' to flashbacks?
Durkin: [laughs] No, I never operate that way - I’m never out to prove anything. It came out of the fact I can’t think of a film with flashbacks that I really like. I never thought of these as flashbacks. For me it’s a completely linear story, because it’s Martha’s emotional journey and it’s linear to Martha’s emotion. So the idea for telling it in this form was that there’s a little bit of this Buddhist based thing in the cult - it was a little bit more in the draft of the script. One of the principles that I thought would be appropriate for their way of living, in terms of their way of focusing on the moment and living off the land, is that there’s no future and there’s no past there’s only the present. So that was a feeling that they were living in, that everything happened in the present. Then for Martha leaving there, she’d be in a state of confusion and fear and she’d be carrying over this feeling that everything happens in the present. In addition there’s no clocks or calendars, which is really common in groups like this, so no-one knows how long they’ve been there. And I also thought that would also play into time, so it seemed to make sense that she’s experiencing it all at the same time. Once I decided it would be the two worlds I started to do that.



Were there any difficulties in the writing or the editing, specifically in matching them up? They seem like bad people and good people in both sides so were there difficulties in that?
Durkin: No, it was all easy! [Laughs] Everytime you sit down to write something, anything, it’s difficult and any time you sit in the edit room it’s difficult. What you said about good and bad people ,that’s really important to me. I don’t believe in good and bad, there’s everybody. People with good intentions do bad things, people with bad intentions do good things. There’s so much grey, so I want to create that. The whole process was very difficult in balancing. Re-writing and re-writing and you try and get the script as close as you can and then you shoot it and realise what you don’t need, and then you edit and realise what you don’t need. It’s this ongoing puzzle piece, like do we switch this around. A few key transitions were scripted so we knew what we were going to do, and storyboarded it that way. And some other ones you find in editing. You’ve got four scenes in a row and all of a sudden you don’t need the two middle ones so the next two fall together and you have a transition that you never thought was there. So it’s this combination and you go through and do all these crazy things. Even five days before we finished the film we were like, ‘is this working?’ and then you have this breakthrough, a twenty-minute breakthrough where you put this piece here, this piece there and this piece here and all of a sudden you’ve got the middle hour of the film working like you want it to. It’s a really crazy process. You just work and work and work and then [snaps fingers] it just happens.

You have this very interesting theme of how with both of her lives, as it were, there are certain restrictions in the way the world is. Were you wanting to draw parallels between the way society expects certain people to behave?
Durkin: No, it really just came from a place of just following what she was doing. There’s definitely a lot of actions that are mirrored and that just came from a place of, as opposed to comparing, just being like, ‘what do people do when they're on vacation at their lake house, and what do people do when they’re living on a farm and working?’ There just happen to be things that overlap and are very similar just because that’s what you would do. So it always came from a place of what would she do, what’s real for her to be doing? As opposed to thinking of it as some kind of social commentary. But I also make a film and believe that I put a certain amount of information in it, it's like a puzzle and you give it a very specific amount of information in every frame - every piece of information, every detail is very carefully placed at the same time and some of that is open to interpretation. Whatever an audience member takes from the screening is good. There’s no right answers, there’s no wrong answers - whatever someone experiences when watching the movie is the right experience because it’s their own. I’m a big believer of that. So any comparisons someone wants to make or say that this is what’s happening is great, that’s totally cool. Were they my intentions? No. Were they on a subconscious level? Who knows. I’m just very open to response and different repsonses.

DIY: I get a perverse pleasure out of people stumbling over the title - was there any discussion about changing it?
Durkin: Not pressure, but discussion. I'm a collaborative person, and I've worked with great people, and anyone who was brought into our circle could say. Well, if you can think of something better!
Hawkes: I think an early review in Variety said 'and the title will certainly change before Fox puts it out'.
Durkin: Fox were really excited about it! I couldn't think of anything else - it's the meaning of the movie.
Hawkes: It made me want to open the script and read it!

Our friends at Filmbeat also caught up with Hawkes and Durkin - watch their interview below.