Interview (Written): Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland

Sometimes the story behind the story is as compelling as the movie itself. Such is the case with Still Alice, co-written and co-directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. From WGA.org:

Partners both professionally and personally for more than a decade, the team [Glatzer and Westmoreland], who married in 2013, first made their mark on the indie film scene with the 2006 Sundance premiere of Quincaenera, which took home the festival’s Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize. After the white heat of that project’s effusive reception dimmed, the Englishmen labored for seven years in the Echo Park home they share to get a follow-up feature off the ground. They were in production on 2013’s Last Days of Robin Hood, starring Kevin Kline as Errol Flynn, when Westmoreland suspected Glatzer’s health was on the decline. By the time they were asked to adapted Lisa Genova’s bestselling Alice novel for the bigscreen, doctors had confirmed the fear: the writer had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive neurodegenerative disease, better known as A.L.S. or “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” an incurable, terminal illness that affects cognitive function, speech, and muscle control, leading to paralysis, loss of speech, and death.

The myriad parallels between the creative team’s real life and the story they’d been drafted to tell were often emotionally difficult, but ultimately inspiring and liberating, says Westmoreland, 49, who continues writing every day with Glatzer, now 62, though the latter has been rendered mute and mostly paralyzed by the illness and can only communicate by typing with his toes on a specially-adapted iPad. “I don’t believe in fate or destiny,” says Westmoreland, “but if you were writing a story about fate and destiny, our journey with Still Alice would be a perfect example of it. This project came to us at exactly the right time and allowed us to really figure out a lot of the challenges life had presented. The greatest gift for us, though, is how many audience members have told us that the film came along at exactly the right time for them as well.” A good deed, indeed.

Interview excerpts:

It’s impossible to discuss Still Alice without addressing Mr. Glatzer’s own serious illness, diagnosed while the film was in process. How did the illness change the collaborative process for the two of you, and how does it continue to change?

Wash Westmoreland: Before the illness, our writing process was very fifty-fifty. We would generate ideas together, lay out the whole template together, and have a very organic process of writing the script together. Since Richard lost his ability to speak, we have to take more time in order to maintain that collaboration and that equality, which is very important to us both. In the early days of the illness, he was typing very fast, so that allowed us to maintain a certain equilibrium. As we got deeper into Still Alice, his typing started to slow down to one finger, and now he’s only typing with his toe. It is very important to us that people know that Richard’s opinion still has equal value on anything we’re creating together. We’ve adjusted. He says because he can’t talk and his typing has become so slow that what he says has greater importance. He does it all on his iPad. What I’ve found interesting is that he concentrates his thoughts and ideas a lot more than people who can speak.

As you said, you’ve adapted.

Wash Westmoreland: And we’ve really tried to maintain a sense of humor about things. We like to tell people that we’re the Penn & Teller of indie screenwriting and directing!

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This being your first adaptation, what was your approach to the book?

Wash Westmoreland: If there’s source material to be adapted, it’s not very different from if there is no source material to be adapted. It still has to have the things you look for in any movie. It has to have great characters, a strong emotional, psychological dynamic, a good ending, a deeper thing that’s happening underneath the story. All those elements were present in Still Alice. We also felt a certain freedom in the adaptation process. Lisa’s book is brilliant, but it wasn’t like adapting Jane Austen, where the language itself is so famous and so particular that it’s almost sacrilegious to change a thing. So we were able to take the situations and plots within Lisa’s book and figure them out cinematically with a great deal of freedom. It was really an ideal adaptation for us. It gave us a rock solid template to follow, and also a freedom to imagine the variations, the cinematic reality of this story.

Nevertheless, you’ve got to take a manuscript that’s several hundred pages long and figure out how to work it into 120 pages.

Wash Westmoreland: Oh, God, yes. You’ve got nine puppies, and you can only keep five.

Here is a clip from Still Alice:

For the rest of the interview, go here.