Interview: Arash Amel — Part 3

Arash Amel is one of the bright new talents among Hollywood screenwriters, having penned the 2011 Black List script Grace of Monaco which has been produced starring Nicole Kidman and will be released later this year, as well as set up several high profile projects including “Seducing Ingrid Bergman” and “The Infinity Principle”.

Recently I caught up with Arash for an extended interview in which we covered a whole host of subjects.

Today in Part 3, Arash delves into the story and writing of Grace of Monaco:

Scott: What’s so great is that the story Grace of Monaco is on a very personal level about self‐identity. Who is she? She’s a Princess, a wife, a mother, an actress. You got this incredible backdrop of this geopolitical thing between France and Monaco, between Charles de Gaulle and the Prince, and so you got these dual narratives going on.

How soon did you strike on that and see that as a way that you could bounce those two off against each other and create this wonderful whole of a narrative that you did for the script?

Arash: Well, there was a little bit of moving some timelines around. But by and large everything happened in 1962. The 1962 Franco‐Monaco crisis is actually really well‐documented, even though the French tried to bury it for many, many years, and this was the year that Monaco became Monaco just through serendipity crossed with the story of this woman who was in a personal crisis and thrown a lifeline by Alfred Hitchcock to say “Come back home. Come back. Be Grace Kelly again, I’ll give you a ridiculous amount of money.”

At that time they offered her $1 million which in today’s terms is about $10 million. Unheard of back then, and she said OK. And Rainier said “Yes” though he didn’t like the idea of his wife acting. He’d actually said no to her playing the Virgin Mary the year before but he was happy now to say yes to her playing a frigid, compulsive thief, just because he could see how unhappy she was.

So it all kind of came together in the history, but what didn’t exist in the history books Olivier and I, the director Olivier Dahan, we talked a lot about these scenes, I invented …and when I say invented, I mean imagining the moments that would have taken place within the grey areas that no‐one has documented. But also being free from the constraints of what actually happened, to get to the feelings of the woman and the emotions of her struggles. That’s the importance of cinema and it’s distinct from history.

But from very early on I said “There are two movies here. There’s effectively My Fair Lady, sitting on top of Godfather II.” That was a tremendous help, on set actually for the actors and the director … there was always a female group and there was a male group, and you could see the actors all getting into character all sort of drawing their own sexual politics lines, which was all very interesting to see.

Scott: These snapshot biopics, we seem to be seeing more of that. Jackie, The King’s Speech. I don’t know if you’ve read “McCarthy,” that script?

Arash: Yes. I have.

Scott: It makes a lot of sense because as opposed to trying to do the traditional biopic, which covers a lot of time, people’s lives don’t play out necessarily in the way a movie would play out. So, what you are able to do here is crystallize in a six month period these two storylines that really very effectively, not only tell the Monaco story, but use that as a metaphor in a way, and a backdrop, for what Grace Kelly in a relationship with a Prince was.

And this question, of like you said, Hitchcock offers her this gig with money, “You can go back, you can reclaim that part of yourself.” Or, at first she thinks that she can stay there, but it really isn’t that. It’s really about the choice between going back, and going forwards, which really happens about mid‐way through the story when she starts to embrace this idea about not just being a princess but actually, like, becoming a princess. Is that accurate do you think?

Arash: Yes it is, and it was very conscious. I don’t consider Grace a biopic. It’s a portrait. And when you see the movie, it’ll be very clear how much it’s a piece of cinema than a — what I would call dull — historical biopic. I’ve just spent some time with Olivier in the editing room in Paris working on it, and his style, framing and composition has drawn from Kubrick, Hitchcock and even elements of Lean and Spielberg, all in his own unique blend. There’s as much thriller there as there is drama, so it’s a blend.

But my favorite movie of all time is Lawrence of Arabia. And I think Lawrence of Arabia, people forget, is a biopic. In every shape or form, it’s a biopic. It uses the Arabian Campaign as a construct to paint a portrait, and there’s a lot of invention in it. The family sued Columbia Pictures actually. David Lean’s reply was, “It’s a movie. I’m telling the story of Lawrence within a very compact period of time.”

I think it kind of goes back, and I was very conscious on my part in putting together Grace. I am a great believer in the psychology of character in screenplay. I think that almost any story becomes a visual enactment of the psychological dilemmas faced by the lead character. If you can make that connection, you elevate your characters to a mythic level. If you actually look at the Grace script, the script has a number of strong older male characters who, play for archetype or even try to defy archetype. Whether it’s Rainier, whether it’s Father Tucker, whether it’s Count Fernando who Derek Jacobi plays, whether it’s President de Gaulle, whether it’s Alfred Hitchcock. They are all thematically recurring ghosts in Grace’s own life and her relationship with older men which defined it.

At its core every story for me is really a self‐realization movie. You are looking at somebody who starts with some very clear insecurities, and inabilities to perform certain tasks because of certain personal ghosts and obstacles that stand in their way, and they have to confront them, throughout the course of the movie.

Scott: The Father Tucker figure you talk about is really a mentor figure, and he has a conversation with Grace Kelly where he says “When people dream of marrying royalty they rarely comprehend what it means.” That’s a description, in a way, of the first part of her experience in the script.

Then he gives her a piece of advice, “You came to play the greatest role of your life Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco, Duchess of Valentinois more titles that come with it.” That really set the stage for the rest of the story. That’s a pivotal point in the story, is it not?

Arash: It is and that specific scene, which I believe when we first edited actually I was told it ran at seven minutes but now runs to just over four minutes … sets up the back half of the movie structurally. First and foremost, if your structure isn’t right, I think you’re basically writing yourself into a hole. I always knew that the structure of this movie would be you kind of reach a complete dead end, a nadir for Grace at the mid-point, and then she’s presented with a choice. That choice scene is a classical mentor presenting the dilemma, presenting the obstacle, presenting what the stakes, and then presenting the solutions if she’s prepared to take it.

I think that you can only get a character to truly grow when they are faced with these types of choices. When he says to her those lines…I won’t often lay claim to everything being planned, because I think the beauty of screenwriting is that it is full of surprises and full of happy accidents, but that moment of choice and that moment in that scene is actually one of my proudest. That and the speech at the end.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Arash discusses the challenge of writing the pivotal final sequence in Grace of Monaco.

For Part 1, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

Please stop by comments to thank Arash and ask any questions you may have.

Arash is repped by CAA.

Twitter: @arashamel.