It’s the day after Lucy In The Sky’s TIFF premiere, and Noah Hawley is blissfully unaware that all anyone wants to talk about is the diaper.
Ever since the credits rolled, social media has been buzzing about the fact that his movie – which stars Natalie Portman as a character inspired by Lisa Nowak, the American astronaut who drove overnight from Houston to Orlando to confront a romantic rival in 2007, only to be arrested at the scene – leaves out the detail, never confirmed but lodged in pop culture, that Nowak supposedly wore adult diapers during her drive so she wouldn’t have to stop for bathroom breaks.
That detail is utterly irrelevant to Hawley’s movie, his first feature after years of aggressively cinematic television like Fargo and Legion. Lucy In The Sky is about how a person becomes a tabloid character, but of course it’s the only thing anyone on Twitter wanted to talk about. And now we have to talk about it, too.
So, people are complaining on Twitter that you neglected to include the thing about the diapers. And if that’s what someone takes away from this movie, they kinda missed the point.
Well, that’s the punchline. If you think about what that really means, it means that you want the joke. You want her [reduced] to a joke. Like, “How dare you let her off the hook?” What does it say about you that you want it in there?
As a writer, you’ve always shown a great deal of sympathy for people who are disintegrating. Fargo and Legion have characters who are falling apart and trying so hard to staple themselves together, and Lucy Cola feels like she fits in there, too.
Well, those people need the most help. This is what’s behind the tabloid story: human beings with dignity make mistakes and get reduced to a punchline, but my only goal is to remind you that they’re human. And we all make mistakes – most of us less publicly – but what’s really heroic is what you do afterward. “Okay, I ruined everything and now I’ve gotta live.”
And Lucy In The Sky is more of a subjective presentation of that story, anyway, so we wouldn’t necessarily see the things she doesn’t want us to see.
Right, it’s all very different. Because this is not [Lisa Nowak’s] story. The story was a jumping-off point into an exploration of what a tabloid story is, at heart, and how this woman who was literally on top of the world came back and had an existential crisis and ruined everything. But she also faced some factors along that way that pushed her harder. You know, the idea that Jon Hamm’s character undermines her [professionally] at a critical moment – that’s really what pushes her over the edge. In this film, that’s what’s inexcusable, and probably he doesn’t even realize that he did it.
At one point he refers to Lucy as “our girl” in a NASA email, and it’s a casual objectification among professionals that just lands so hard.
Right! You know, it’s a boys’-club culture, and she’s fighting the whole time to get her spot. And if you take someone who’s never failed at anything and you introduce their first failure at 35, who doesn’t go to pieces after that? You know, the tabloid story is a tragedy.
I wanted to ask about the subjective angle, too. You use shifting aspect ratios to box Lucy in, and a transformational metaphor runs through the whole story that gets messier and messier. We’re in her head for most of the movie, and it’s not a good place to be.
The movie itself is designed to try to create a subjective experience, which is what all the aspect ratios are – as her world gets smaller the screen gets smaller, and as it gets bigger [the screen] gets bigger. But you know, I’m very aware that I’m making a movie in which I’m taking this heroic, charming, gregarious character, and she’s going to make choices that you don’t want her to make and go to places you don’t want her to go, and the movie’s going to darken in that way.
And in the middle of it all, Portman is doing something so precise and specific… people are comparing it to Black Swan, but it’s such a completely different performance. There’s none of the giallo expressionism she had in the earlier film.
She had this destructive, obsessive quality in that movie, and an insecurity. And in this movie she’s all swagger. Like, who is she but Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff? That first week of production, watching her walk across a room – the power, the confidence that she brought with her, is also what allowed her to commit so fully to this mission at the end. It’s like, “I’m going to solve this problem,” and she’s not thinking rationally, but she’s going to solve that problem.
How did you get her on board?
She obviously responded to the script, and we had many conversations beforehand, and part of it was about the material. Obviously there’s a risk factor to telling a story, at this moment, about a woman who fails – especially one in which there’s a man involved. And there’s the danger that you’re making a movie about a woman who is too emotional about a man, which was not my goal at all. And we both have young kids, and really all I want to do is go home to them at the end of the day. I don’t believe that you have to suffer to make great art, so I was like, “We’re just gonna do our best work and we’re going to go home to our kids.” It was a very humane experience in making this movie, which I think she appreciated.
It’s encouraging to see artists start to move away from that self-destructive mindset where you must punish yourself and destroy yourself to make a movie about punishment and destruction.
Yeah, this Fitzcarraldo push-the-boat-over-the-mountain thing. We’ll build another boat. We’ll put it on the other side. It’s not that hard to solve the problem.
Lucy In The Sky has a couple of intense physical moments, though, like a scene where Lucy nearly drowns when her spacesuit springs a leak in an underwater practice environment. How did you fake that?
We did that underwater sequence. In order to fill her helmet up with water [while she’s] upside down, we had to build a rig that allowed her to be upside down and have her helmet fill with water. And she was a very good sport about that. I said, “Leo ate a bear’s liver, you know? This is your bear’s liver.” It’s not that it was easy, it’s just that it was safe.
How many times did she do it?
We ran four or five. She said “Tell me exactly what you need,” and I said, “I need the water to be here [touches nose] when you say ‘I’m under’ so that you’re literally under.” And she waited every time. I always understand whenever you’re putting actors in those kinds of positions it’s like: don’t abuse it. Just be clear with them. All she needed to know was “What do you need me to do, and I’ll get you that. And then we can stop doing this.”
See review of Lucy In The Sky here
@normwilner
