Interview: Julia Hart (2012 Black List) — Part 2

Julia Hart’s original screenplay “The Keeping Room” put her on the Black List in 2012. The movie is in pre-production starring Olivia Wilde, Hailee Steinfeld, and Nicole Beharie, directed by Daniel Barber. In addition, Hart’s screenplay “Miss Stevens” recently landed Anna Faris to star and Ellen Page to direct. Plus Hart is adapting the Jamie McGuire novel “Beautiful Disaster” for Warner Bros.

Julia and I had a great one-hour conversation covering a lot of territory. Today in Part 2, we dig into “The Keeping Room” and how Julia developed the story world and its characters:

Scott: Do you see “The Keeping Room” as a genre film?

Julia: The Night of the Living Dead is one of my favorite movies, and structurally there’s a lot of similarities. Sure, there aren’t any supernatural or straight horror elements, but also it’s not a straight period piece either. I wanted it to have that sharp edge, that energy you often find in a genre film and don’t often find in a period piece.

Scott: That’s interesting you say that. While the story is a period piece, it has a contemporary feel to it in at least two respects. First of all, the story largely takes place in that farmhouse, so it has that kind of contained thriller feel.

Julia: Yes, that was definitely purposeful.

Scott: Second, it works, too, as a psychological study of these protagonists living with a sense of impending doom, a sort of inexorable creep, a threat of violence that’s getting closer and closer to home. How conscious were you of that dynamic?

Julia: I’m so glad you picked up on all that, because it was very purposeful. I’m a huge fan of horror film and like classic horror film and psychological thrillers, so I definitely allowed that to be an influence on the way I wrote it.

Scott: One movie that came to my mind was Witness. It had a similar narrative structure in that they are characters in a remote farming community, and there’s that ticking clock of the bad guys getting closer and closer, these cutaways back and forth to play that psychological tension of them coming.

Julia: Night of the Living Dead and the original Straw Dogs were both big influences and, Straw Dogs especially because structurally I think it’s such a great example of a home invasion film. So I used that one a lot, too.

Scott: Let’s talk about the three female leads, Augusta and Louise, two sisters. They’re like early 20s and 16, and Mad, a black woman in her 30s. What did you find compelling about this trio? What potential did you think you could exploit with these characters?

Julia: I deeply love women and in this type of movie, in an active thriller, the intimate complexity of female relationships is rarely explored. The fact that the women are usually getting rescued or are the victims in these types of movies… I knew that I wanted to put the women in charge, in the active position of saving themselves. When you think about the examples of female characters like this, there just aren’t enough of them.

Then in terms of the interrelations between the women, as I said, I think the way in which women interact is so fascinating. I don’t have a sister, but I was very interested in exploring that relationship. Then I was also very interested in exploring the relationship between white women and black women in that time period, because that’s not something…the only real example we have is, Gone with the Wind, and, of course, it’s a great film, but the two black female characters in that are so… what’s the word I’m looking for?

Scott: Caricature?

Julia: Yes. I wanted to create what I felt like was a real grounded woman, and I also wanted to fantasize a bit about what that would be like… if it’s just these three women left at the end of the world, what would their relationship be like? Would it be possible for them to become a family in spite of everything? There are obviously a lot of movies about the Civil War, but I hadn’t seen that yet. And it really interested me.

Scott: Since this was a period piece, how much research did you do specifically about this area, this time, the relationships between women, the relationship between races?

Julia: I did some research, but a lot of it was just for my prior knowledge of the Civil War. I actually… my parents are selling their house. They’ve been cleaning it out, and my mom recently found an old diary of mine from when I was about seven that talked about how I wished I was a little girl during the Civil War.

Scott: Seriously?

Julia: It’s always been something that’s been there. I chose Sherman’s March as a backdrop specifically because of the total war tactic, and I chose South Carolina specifically because they were the first state that wanted to secede from the union. Sherman basically told his men no holds barred on South Carolina. I wanted it to be the most vicious and ruthless time and place of the war, in terms of the way that women were treated.

Scott: The story has quite a bit of violence in it. Did writing those type of scenes come naturally to you or was it a struggle?

Julia: I’m actually embarrassed to say that it was easy. I don’t know what that says about me because I’m not a very dark, twisty person. I think people who know me who read it were very surprised. I think I was surprised that I had that in me. The hardest thing for me to write is a love scene. [laughs] When two people are saying nice things to each other, that’s hard.

Scott: In that pivotal scene where there is a rape, where did you position yourself in terms of that as a writer? Were you present there? Were you an observer? Can you describe that experience of writing these kind of violent type of scenes?

Julia: It’s much easier to write that than to have to film it. I don’t have to worry about the latter, obviously. As a literature teacher, any time I read something, I do vividly imagine it, but I think it’s very different than actually seeing this thing in front of you, visually taking place. We’ve had a lot of conversations about that scene moving forward into production. We have a very young girl playing the part who is obviously an incredible actress, but you know it’s definitely riding the line between wanting to show the horror of what was happening to these women, but also not losing your audience. So I think it will be really interesting to see how it ultimately translates, because we want to keep that balance.

Scott: That scene is absolutely pivotal to the story.

Julia: Yeah, there are people who couldn’t keep reading after that scene. I swear two of the jobs that I’ve gotten were because of that scene. Like two of the jobs that I’ve gotten the people who hired me brought up that scene up as why they thought I could do the project that they were hiring me for. I think that’s true in general, right? You don’t want to be vanilla. You want to really rattle people, both rattle them to turn away and also to keep them close, and I think that it’s very important to not… like when you’re going… you can’t half write a rape scene. If you’re going for it you have to really go for it. When I wrote that it wasn’t hard in the actual writing of it, but even now when I look back at it I think how did I do this… I think I must have been possessed when I was writing it or something.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Julia talks about the process of writing “The Keeping Room,” what it felt like to type FADE OUT, and how she reacted to the news her script had made the 2012 Black List.

Please stop by comments to thank Julia for taking the time for the interview and post any follow-up questions you may have.

For Part 1, go here.

Julia is repped by WME and Anonymous Content.