Interview (Written): Bruce Wagner

A WGA.org interview with screenwriter Bruce Wagner (I’m Losing You, Women In Film) about his newest movie Maps to the Stars, directed by David Cronenberg:

Wagner had struggled with “a fair amount of addictions” and considered himself in decline when, in what he describes as “a real cri de cœur, a howl in the wilderness for me,” he wrote the screenplay for Maps to the Stars, a dark tale about a corrupt and grossly dysfunctional Hollywood family and the equally corrupt people in its orbit. He put the script away for many years until he shared it with his friend David Cronenberg, who decided to take it on.

In the film, Julianne Moore plays Havana Segrand the selfish, actress daughter of a classic Hollywood star, struggling for work and receiving therapy from celebrity therapist Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack). Havana blames her late mother for molesting her as a child but is vying for the part to play her in a biopic, but loses out to another actress. She takes as an assistant Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska), the schizophrenic daughter of Dr. Weiss who had been banished to a hospital in Florida after her delusions led her to burn down their house and almost kill her brother, years before. But Agatha returns seeking to make amends, particularly with her brother, Benjie (Evan Bird), a young star and nightmare brat of the first order. From here tragedy ensues as the past bubbles up for Havana and the Weiss family, sometimes in the form of hallucinations.

Maps to the Stars is not exactly a love poem to Los Angeles. Talk to me about L.A. as a location and even as a theme.

Bruce I went to school with children of celebrities, children who were celebrities, I lived next door to celebrities. My father was marginally in the business and I used to go to the drugstore at the Beverly Wilshire to pick up Variety for him, and I would see Groucho Marx. It’s part of the fabric of that world that I grew up in. While all my books are not about Hollywood, it’s a reflexive backdrop for much of my work. I have no interest to make a comment on the mores and manners of Hollywood whatsoever; of the industry of show business. Nothing could interest me less. David [Cronenberg] and I did not want to make a satire. Maps to the Stars is kind of a fever dream. It’s an ethnographic or anthropological study of a dysfunctional family that live in a town that is a bright laboratory of human behavior. But I’ve written about human behavior in extremis all my life, the sacred and profane. Extreme fame, extreme anonymity — if anonymity can be any more extreme than erasure — extreme wealth and poverty, addiction and abstention. I tend to write about those poles. For David there was something about those themes, the way they were handled, and the mutilations presented of body, mind, and spirit that appealed to Cronenberg. Our DNA kind of co-mingled on this project.

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All these characters are loathsome in some way or potentially so. What is required to keep them compelling enough that an audience still invests in them?

I was in the Hollywood trenches for a long time where the mantra was, “The character is not likable.” To me that’s a psychotic mantra, a fetishistic mantra and make sense on no level. If a character is compelling they are compelling. One could say Julianne Moore’s character is grossly unlikable, but if you are compelled by her character and you love Julianne Moore’s performance, you then will modify that and say, “You know, she was likable.” It makes no sense to me, and I run from that kind of definition. Julianne’s and Mia Wasikowska’s characters were really the same character for me, just different sides. It was enormous fun writing Havana because she wore her desperation, fear, and shame on the outside. She had no skin and almost grounded herself by this daily cathecting, daily vomiting forth to the world of her fears. And what emotional scars she had from the incident where she claims her mother molested her, those scars are deep inside.

Mia’s character wore her emotional scars externally, literal scars from a fire, and repressed everything. You would never know what she’s thinking or feeling whereas with Julianne’s, you always did. The irony is that as the script progresses, Julianne gains her self-confidence because she gets this role that she is coveting, which is her downfall. Mia throws her medication away and that’s her downfall. But you have to have some joy and interest; you have to be thrilled as a writer, otherwise there’s no point.

A trailer for Map to the Stars:

For the rest of the interview, go here.