Everyone's been talking about Martha Marcy May Marlene. Okay, so most of them are referring to it as "Marcia, Morris... that one movie with all the Ms," but it still counts. Martha Marcy, a film about a girl named Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) who temporarily moves in with her married sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) after escaping from a cult and its magnetic leader Patrick (John Hawkes), is the most psychologically chilling movie to have debuted in recent years—and it's not even a horror flick. What's more, every last performance of the film—from those of the aforementioned leads to those of the smallest bit players—is a genuine tour de force. In fact, I could wax rhapsodic all day about the film's impressive array of performances... but why not let Olsen, Paulson, and Hawkes speak for themselves?Hi.
SARAH PAULSON: Hello, hello! I’ll be in the middle.
ELIZABETH OLSEN: Oh, is this on?
So, Elizabeth, Sean said you didn’t actually go and meet anybody that belonged to a cult. Did you want to have done that?
EO: No, we came to that together. Um, there was really only one person that I had entertained the idea of meeting, who was his—I would like to say his main source of understanding the emotionality of this character, but when I thought about it I didn’t want to meet her and feel like I had to tell her story. I also thought it was so private, her life, and there’s no need to invade someone’s privacy for something that’s actually fictitious, um, and, and the questions that I had as far as the experience came when I asked Sean a little bit more about her—so, no, I actually thought that it would be distracting because you want to pay, like, reverence to someone instead of just focusing on the story that he wrote.
You get so immersed in Martha’s world. Did you feel kind of depressed, filming?
EO: Not really. No, I keep myself very separate from what I work on. I’m very clear in my head that I am not the person I’m pretending to be. When you have to relate in some way, you’ll have harder days than others and more draining days than others, and certainly you get more tired than other days; it was emotionally exhausting, but I didn’t feel—we had a great family and we had a lot of fun doing it, so I didn’t feel like I was heavy all the time.
John…
JOHN HAWKES: I’ll speak loudly.
[LAUGHS] You’re an amazing actor. I’m sure you know that.
SP: Well… [LAUGHTER]
JH: Exactly! I’m with you! I don’t know what Sarah’s saying.
Well, you transition from stage to television to film seamlessly. So do you use a different technique when you’re going into different mediums?
JH: I think so. I think it’s all about trying to find your character in a story and how you can best tell that story. That rule doesn’t change. If you’re onstage, obviously, the audience is in a set position far away, and if you’re filming the audience is often a foot away from your face, depending on where the camera is placed, so you may just adjust your performance a little bit that way. The thing about stages is that you can’t be edited, so that’s pretty exciting, but one of the things I love about film is that you can be edited. [LAUGHTER] So it kind of is a double-edged sword there.
Did you base your character on any particular person that you knew or researched?
JH: You know, I often really draw from sources, even family members, people I’ve met along the way, but for this character I took a different tack. I wasn’t interested in trying to ape anyone’s previous performance as a cult leader. There was just no one in life that I wanted to really draw from on this. I wanted it to feel as if Patrick fell from the sky and landed in this place. The whole film is so elusive and deals so much with questions and mystery, I almost wanted the character to be a mystery to the audience and I wanted him to be a mystery to me as well.
Sarah, you’ve also done a fair amount of theatre. Is your experience with different mediums similar to John’s, or do you approach it differently.
SP: I just prefer doing theatre to almost anything, just because—for me—I feel that it’s an experience where it’s the focus or attention paid on the entire journey that the character takes. There’s something about the beginning, the middle, and the end of it, even in the rehearsal process, where I always figure out what to do with the part most clearly on the last day of the performance, and so I love the idea of getting to continue to explore it every night and the fact that every time you go out there it’s a new opportunity. You know, you can have a bad show one night and the next day you can go—I have an opportunity moment-to-moment to change, because the audience only remembers the last thing they saw. [LAUGHTER] So you can have a really shitty false moment and then you can find a way that something really organic is born out of the moment that was really awful and they won’t remember that, really.
So the song that John sings—how many takes did that require?
JH: Three. One of the really wonderful and terrifying things about that is that it was going to be the score of the film for three minutes, and there was going to be no way to edit within it. It would just have to be the take that sucked the least [LAUGHTER] that they ended up choosing, rather than pre-recording the song—as you normally do—and pretending to sing along to yourself. It was a wonderful challenge to basically score live for a few minutes.
Elizabeth, you have a difficult job in that scene as well because that’s sort of a pivotal moment for you but you don’t have any dialogue.
EO: It wasn’t very difficult. [LAUGHTER] A handsome man is singing a song for you; that’s not… you can do that in any situation and that will win someone over.
I know, John, that you got involved with this project shortly after Winter’s Bone. It’s been said that this film is essentially the spiritual successor to Winter’s Bone, and your roles between the two movies are very different but also have a lot of similarities.
JH: Well, I had a really minor trepidation that I might be sort of rehashing old territory, but it was fleeting. They’re very different projects; the characters have an opposite arc, really. It didn’t so much figure in—it’s rough guys in the woods, but their stories are so different and the characters also are so different. I actually felt in a strange way that Patrick needed less research than Teardrop [from Winter’s Bone] did because Teardrop was so specifically regional, for one thing, and there’s also a novel to work off of, whereas this was something where the character could kind of be from anywhere. In fact, the less attachment to any region, the more interesting for him, I thought.
What about the productions? What was it like to move from that production to this production? They were both small films.
JH: You know, I think Martha Marcy May Marlene had less money, a smaller crew.
EO: Re-heh-eally!
SP: I didn’t know that.
JH: Oh, yes, by quite a lot, I would think.
SP: Oh, snap! [LAUGHTER]
JH: I was probably also the oldest person on Martha Marcy May by maybe, what—well, before Sarah got there [LAUGHTER]—by maybe [LAUGHS] 15 or 20 years. But that was really interesting; you know, there were no grizzled teamsters or anyone around on—
SP: Lotta Puma-wearing cool people. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
EO: A lot of hipsters.
SP: Lotta hipsters.
JH: It was an amazing bunch, though, and the really interesting thing about this film was that the crew was so of a piece, they were, they, it felt that every person there outside of a few of us actors were friends already and had worked together already, and that creates a shorthand, and that creates a continuity of focus that’s there before you begin to roll, and that’s really a great gift. They were a young but really, really focused and really interesting bunch of… reprobates, I guess I would say. [LAUGHTER]
The ending is slightly ambiguous in the sense that you’re not sure whether or not what you see is real or in Martha’s head. Do any of you have a specific take on it?
JH: [WHISPERS] No.
EO: I’m more interested in what John would think because he’s, you’re not in that scene.
SP: He’s pushing the microphones away. [LAUGHTER]
EO: For me, I have no idea what’s going to happen afterwards. I mean, it ends where it ends. But I just love how it ends in a transition and it begins in a transition, and it doesn’t tie anything up and give the audience relief. I feel like audiences want the satisfaction, a lot of times, of something tied together or a crazy twist or something, but usually a lot of times they’re unsatisfied with that satisfaction, with that fixed thing. A lot of times they’re like, “I didn’t want it to go that way and it went that way!” So I think Sean really created an ending that, no matter what, I feel like people really do feel like people can’t be like, “I knew it!” [LAUGHTER] And my brother’s someone who does that with every film, he’s like, “I knew it was gonna end like that,” and when I asked my brother about our ending he was like, “…Well, I figured it was gonna end something like that.” [LAUGHTER]
JH: That’s as close as you’re gonna get!
SP: You were like, “No, you didn’t.”
EO: I was like, “You’re such a liar!”
Martha Marcy May Marlene is now playing in select theatres.
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