Yahoo News ‘May December’ Screenwriter Samy Burch on the Film’s Provocative Premise: “There’s Something Very Icky About It”
It’s what most aspiring screenwriters dream of: An Oscar-winning actress reads your spec script and convinces one of the leading indie filmmakers of the past 25 years to make it. Then, it premieres at the Cannes Film Festival and sells to Netflix, all in time for an awards season push.
For Samy Burch, the experience is still overwhelming — understandably so, as her team of collaborators on her first produced screenplay include director Todd Haynes, Oscar winning actresses Natalie Portman (who also produced) and Julianne Moore, plus former Riverdale actor Charles Melton, who has achieved acclaim and Oscar buzz for his breakout role in Netflix’s May December.
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Portman plays an actress, Elizabeth, set to star in a movie about Moore’s Gracie, who had a scandalous affair with a 13-year-old boy, Joe, two decades earlier. Gracie and Joe (Melton) are now married and raising adult children of their own. The couple’s happy facade begins to crack when Portman’s Elizabeth arrives to study Gracie to prep for her role, bringing to the surface Joe’s complex and unexamined trauma around their relationship as he prepares for his kids to go off to college.
Burch spoke with THR about her collaboration with Haynes, the tabloid story that served as the kernel for the screenplay’s premise and how the film’s comic undertones fit into the story’s larger human tragedy.
What was the origin of this script?
I was thinking of how all of these tabloid stories from the ’90s seem to be getting reassessed one by one. It struck me at some point with the Mary Kay Letourneau case that those children were probably adults. That idea of an empty house of a couple like that felt really visceral to me. All of the basics came from a conversation between me and my now-husband, Alex Mechanik. Right from the beginning, we knew we wanted to fictionalize it, and it was always going to be on this precipice of high school graduation — the idea that Joe having for the first time to confront what had happened and the media blitz that followed. And this network television actress with something to prove felt like a way in that, with the amount of time and difference, gave more space and more air for these different elements to braid together so we’re not just staring at a horrible re-creation [of what happened].
There is definitely a trend that you speak of — the O.J. Simpson case, I, Tonya, Pam and Tommy. What do you think about those stories has made people, particularly those who grew up in that time, want to revisit them from different perspectives?
I think it’s complicated. We couldn’t escape it. It really has shocked me to learn that there are younger people that don’t know this case. Some of these stories [when we were growing up] are as big and historical [to us] as the JFK assassination. In some ways, we’re still processing that as a society — what the portrayals were. [These stories] are reassessed in a way that we go, “Wow, that wasn’t fair.” And sometimes I think it’s just the same impulse as staring at a car crash. I’m split. There’s something very icky about it, but I think it’s a natural human impulse.
You previously worked as a casting director, so you know a lot about actors. How did Elizabeth’s presence enable you to find the cracks in Joe and Gracie’s lives?
I have been around a lot of actors, a lot of that energy. Elizabeth’s character was a great opportunity to explore this vampiric, cannibalistic element that is happening in a big way throughout this film, which is twofold. Everything revolves around trying to understand Gracie. What is she aware of? Was [her affair with Joe] a natural impulse, like a predator in the jungle? Or is there some amount of calculation and manipulation? Having an actress come in, who is the doppelganger to Gracie, shakes things loose for Joe. It also brings in a lot of the humor, the satire, the critique of this true-crime machine. I think Natalie is so funny in the movie; I mean, she’s everything in it, but there’s so much subtle humor in how insincere Elizabeth is. The mask is on from the beginning, and there are these moments where she lets it slip and we can see how she really feels. She’s really luxuriating in this experience.
As you wrote Elizabeth’s attempts to understand Gracie, did you feel similarly compelled to nail down Letourneau’s inner life?
I didn’t need to do any research, because these were fictional, independent characters I was trying to build and understand. But there’s absolutely what ripples out of trying to find the truth in something, a snake eating its tail. I think there is this impossibility of truly understanding something like this. If you’re a social worker, certainly that’s black and white. But [when] the intricacies unravel, it’s murky. There were so many qualities of mirroring — I mean, it occurred to me a week ago that Charles was a television actor that had something to improve on this movie. There’s the fact that they had no rehearsal, and Natalie was really studying Julianne’s character in order to play her later in the movie. I was sent audition links of those boys [who were auditioning to play Joe in the film-within-a-film]. They would do their real slate, then the fictional slate and the lines. It makes so much sense, of course, with Todd, who’s made an incredible career out of meditations on performance and identity, often mixed together with fame. Not only is there an entitlement that the actress has, but the way we’ve made celebrities out of these criminals, too.
The film takes place in a tight-knit community outside of Savannah, Georgia. How did you take advantage of that setting?
Initially the film was set in Camden, Maine. It was this isolated bubble, which reflects the bubble that Gracie has painstakingly built. Things got practical: [Gracie and Joe’s kids’ high school] graduation is the most important element. The film had to be [set in] spring, and the window of when everyone could film was the fall. So, we looked at places that could look like spring, and Savannah was on the list. I had spent a year there in art school, so I wrote a Savannah/Tybee Island pass. Now I see it as completely essential — it is just that kind of city. It is the most gussied up, gorgeous, beautiful place, but there’s this sense of a simmering kind of rot underneath from its history, and its current denial [of that history].
The tone of the film is interesting. You’ve mentioned the humor and the satire, and there were many times I laughed throughout. Even the Golden Globes classified it as a comedy. But how did you manage that levity within a story that has very dark undertones?
It’s been so interesting the way in which people have responded to the movie. Some people are able to see the dark comedic elements and the heartbreak, and some people are only seeing the heartbreak. I’d be more concerned if there were people that are only seeing our comedy and not taking any of it seriously. And I think some people are maybe misinterpreting what the other group thinks is funny. There is no comedy at the expense of Joe. It always has been designed to give way to something that’s very humane and very tragic.
It is exciting when things are hard to classify. There’s a bit of a litmus test that happens in watching this, especially watching it alone or in a crowded theater. People have different senses of humor. I keep thinking of it as one of those hologram cards — you can see both things depending on how the light hits it. There are a few different types of humor in the script; some of it is more glib, an indictment of the true-crime machine, or of actors, or just everyone’s foolhardy ego in searching for the truth. There’s something comedic about that. But then some moments are release valves. It’s so uncomfortable. The New York Film Festival screening [had] a great amount of laughs, and then they stopped, and you could feel when people were going, “Oh …”
How has it been to see the response on social media?
It’s been very surreal. There have been stages [of the festival circuit] where I’ve thought, “Well, this can’t get any crazier.” And then when it went on Netflix, it was like, “Oh, whoa, there’s even more.” I mean, the highs are so high. I’m not on Twitter, but I’ve seen some stuff. I’ve seen reviews on Letterboxd that have moved me, extremely. That’s what’s so exciting about Todd’s movies, the range of reactions — especially when there’s division in the ranks. It almost feels like people who liked the movie are fighting about why. There are certain things that people have tried to ask me about that I will not answer. I might have my own answer, but I’m not gonna say.
Do you have an example?
Whether or not Georgie [Gracie’s son, played by Cory Michael Smith] is lying about Gracie’s past. I have my thoughts. That’s a more blatant example of something left intentionally ambiguous, but that is really the goal. This is the kind of movie that you see and talk to your friends about. What did that mean to you? How did you feel about that?
This story first appeared in a January standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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