She intends 'Dead Girl' to spur lively discussions
Karen Moncrieff calls her second film a Rorschach test
LOS ANGELES -- It seems only fitting that a writer-director who titles her movie "The Dead Girl" would have impossibly pale skin, and Karen Moncrieff does. She also has ink-black hair and the sort of black rectangular glasses that scream hipster. The sweater and jacket are black, too, natch.
But the darkness starts fading the minute Moncrieff opens her mouth. She's got an easy smile, an easy laugh, and an easygoing manner at odds with the utter desolation of her follow-up to 2002's not-quite-as-depressing "Blue Car."
Still, over a leisurely lunch, Moncrieff never relaxes completely. She knows full well a movie that more than lives up to the name "The Dead Girl" is a difficult sell, even without the mixed reviews. Then there's the "chick flick" factor that so annoys her, the unspoken assumption that because a movie is mainly about women only women will want to see it. But "The Dead Girl," which opens Friday, was never envisioned as a casual girl's night out.
Using the same sort of multiple-story structure as "Crash," "Babel" or "Syriana," "The Dead Girl" ties five separate chapters together and to the murder of a prostitute played by Brittany Murphy. In effect, Moncrieff has created a series of short films, each with its own title and able to stand on its own. None is easy to watch, but that's OK with her. Moncrieff says she wants to create movies that force people to talk afterward.
"The sections of the film function like a Rorschach test," she said. "People feel the need to dissect it and talk about each section relative to the other sections. I find it really interesting because certain sections really anger people, others find certain sections really moving, different people find different parts really hard to take."
And then there's that smile again, the one she used to full effect in her days as a soap-opera actress: "But there is a certain amount of truth in advertising. No one goes in expecting an easy movie. It's called 'The Dead Girl' after all."
The catalyst for "The Dead Girl" was a murder trial; the victim was a young woman, Moncrieff was a juror. She was left, she says, "with a great weight . . . and this sadness and no place to put it." So she started jotting notes that turned into portraits of five vastly different women connected by a brutal murder. She also saw a chance to talk about violence against women, having been connected to its aftermath through people she knew.
Another aspect of Moncrieff's life appears to have made it into the movie, albeit more subtly. Like "Blue Car," "The Dead Girl" is rife with mother-daughter issues. ("You only have to see my first movie to know I have mother and father issues," she says, laughing. "They know.") This time around she and her husband were also trying to get pregnant. But there were fertility issues compounded by financial ones. The couple only had enough money for one attempt at in vitro fertilization.
"It's such a bad time; you're an emotional wreck. . .," Moncrieff said. "Now I can see [the movie] was sort of a deep exploration of the darkest fears you could have [while] embarking on being a parent."
A month before she finished the script, Moncrieff, now 43, learned she was pregnant. Ruby, going on 16 months, celebrated her first birthday at the premiere of "The Dead Girl." She's clearly Moncrieff's heart, and the new mom is happy to stop talking murder and swap mothering stories instead. But as she put it, "Don't expect 'Baby Talk 2' from me. But she does make a lot of things feel lighter."
Lightness wasn't what attracted Mary Beth Hurt to "The Dead Girl." Talking by phone from her home in New York, she says the intricacy of the characters, the detail Moncrieff put down on paper, made her want to play Ruth, who is married to a man she realizes is a killer, in the vignette called "The Wife."
"Often times films call for personality rather than character," Hurt said. "You can think of a role that needs to be played by Tom Cruise or Angelina Jolie, but these were all individualized characters. I like the fact that Ruth, my character, made a TV dinner in the toaster oven. These things say something about the character. It was all so . . . intricate."
Still, Hurt had concerns. She worried the movie would be gratuitously violent. But she says she was happily relieved when she saw it. With few exceptions, she said, "The Dead Girl" was made as written. She described Moncrieff as loving toward her characters, even the awful ones, and open to sometimes heated discussion on the set. Those tendencies helped attract some top talent to the relatively low-budget film. Among the cast: Toni Collette, Piper Laurie, and Mary Steenburgen; the men, who give some unexpected performances, include Giovanni Ribisi, James Franco, and Josh Brolin.
"Karen was an actress and she speaks to you in actress terms," Hurt said. "She and I often butted heads about things, but I have this phrase -- As long as nobody's hitting then confrontation is not necessarily a bad thing. Compromise on both sides is not necessarily a bad thing."
As a result, Hurt said, "It's the kind of movie I like to go to, where you talk about it afterward and things stay with you. You're not just going in and getting a sugar high."
The chance to star in her kind of movies was what made Moncrieff, who studied theater at Northwestern University and filmmaking at Los Angeles City College, try her hand at writing. She says she didn't want to spend her career in episodic TV, with guest spots on shows such as "Matlock," "Silk Stalkings," and "Diagnosis Murder."
As Moncrieff noted with obvious irritation, "Women are lucky if they get a story; they're lucky if they get an arc. Women are lucky if they get a name" in most movies.
But once she wrote "Blue Car" -- her first full-length movie script and one she understood upon completion was "fiercely uncommercial" -- she realized she cared too much about it to turn it over to a director for hire. She also cared too much to cast anyone but the best actors possible, and she realized she wasn't one of them. So she cast someone else and helmed it herself.
"I know a lot of people who wanted to do what I did. . .," she said. "And I knew lots of people who worked hard and I didn't know anyone who worked as hard as I did. I really did it pretty much 24 hours a day. I'm pretty obsessive. I went after it. Also, I've always been lucky."
That luck held true through "The Dead Girl," which also found financing fast. She says the backers never asked her to change the title or downplay the downbeat. Still, slight changes were made. What she calls magical or surreal elements were eliminated, replaced with something that hewed closer to reality. "Believe it or not," she said, "what you see is a little brighter than what was originally on the page."
At that she laughs that easy laugh again. She gets ready to go home to Ruby. Outside she is engulfed in sunshine and she doesn't look at all out of place.
Lynda Gorov can be reached at lgorov@aol.com. 