From the "People" Archives:

by Augusta Palmer

Natascha McElhone and Vanessa Redgrave take turns in the role of Clarissa Dalloway.

Photo Credit: First Look Pictures

Academy Award winner Marleen Gorris' newest film "Mrs. Dalloway" is an adaptation of the celebrated stream-of-consciousness Virginia Woolf novel about a woman's thoughts preparing and attending a party. For many Woolf fans, adapting this breakthrough book is sacrilege, but Gorris, renowned for her early feminist films, "A Question of Silence" and "Broken Mirrors", manages to get inside her characters in a uniquely cinematic way. Vanessa Redgrave stars as the famous protagonist and the screenplay adaptation was written by Eileen Atkins. The film opened in select theaters on Friday.

indieWIRE: How did getting an Oscar for "Antonia's Line" affect the way you work? Were your earlier films made differently than "Mrs. Dalloway"?

Marleen Gorris: Yes, well, obviously in the sense that those earlier films were made over fifteen years ago with very, very little money and made under extremely difficult conditions. An example of how difficult they were comes from the shoot for "Broken Mirrors": we had this Amsterdam house on one of the canals. These are very old houses you know - 16th, 17th century. And that house was gutted, completely gutted. It was going to be redone; but we were allowed to shoot in there for the brothel scenes, which are most of the movie. But the house was so old that we started off like this (outlines a slightly sloping floor with a hand gesture) and, in the course of shooting, the floor became like that (makes another hand gesture just shy of being vertical). And the make-up lady had to put blocks on the floor to get the chair right, things like that. We had no heating in that house in the middle of February - these were the unbelievable circumstances. That these kinds of films ever get made is a miracle to me.

But then, by present-day American standards "Mrs. Dalloway" wasn't a very expensive film. It was only four and a half million dollars. And you know, if an American studio had made the film it probably would have been something like sixty million dollars. So, I think in Europe we manage to make quality films for much less money and I hope we continue to do so.

iW: I was amazed by the fact that Natascha MacElhone (who plays the younger version of Mrs. Dalloway) and Vanessa Redgrave (who plays her as an older women) begin to resemble one another. Which is amazing since I wouldn't otherwise have thought they looked anything alike.

Gorris: Nor would I really, but I think that was exactly what I hoped would happen because, in the beginning, the actors asked me, "Well, we aren't going to meet, aren't we?"

iW: I read that you asked them not to meet or to talk about the roles...

Gorris: Yes, and I thought that that was a much better idea because then they would approach the role from the inside and that's actually what they did, you know, otherwise they would have taken each other's mannerisms and approached it off the top of their heads whereas now they went much deeper and I think that is one of the reasons why Natascha, who doesn't look the least bit like Vanessa, at least gives the impression of looking like her; which is a hell of a lot of work on the part of an actress.

iW: I noticed looking in the credits that there were quite a lot of women on the shoot, is that something you strive for?

Gorris: Well, actually there were far more people than normal who worked on this film. Quite a lot of people worked for only one day. And the reason for that was that the filming actually fell into two parts. We started shooting and after two weeks of shooting it turned out that the British producer had no money at all. So everything fell flat on its face and behind the scenes everybody was frantically trying to get the money together. Another producer, another bank. And in the end it was the American distributor of "Antonia's Line", First Look Pictures, who managed to get a bank interested in order to finance it, put two new producers in place and got the British Screen Fund to put up some money, and a bit of money from Holland so that in the nick of time we were allowed to continue.

So after those three weeks most of the crew, of course, had dispersed. Most of them wanted to come back, but some couldn't come back because they'd taken on new jobs. So, in the end, I had to work with three of everything: like three cameramen, camera-people, the most important and the only woman was Sue Gibson [first female member of the BSC]; but because some days she was not available I had to get someone else. I had, I think, three DPs but one worked for two weeks and one worked for the rest, and one worked for one day. And two of them were men, actually. So this happened with a lot of these different functions.

iW: So what do you do when you have a financing problem like the one you had with the British producer?

Gorris: Well, you go berserk. And then you try to save what there is to save. People are wandering off saying, "Sorry, I've got to make a living." And it's quite frankly true, of course. So I was intensely grateful to the American distributors when they took over, because if they hadn't I would never have been able to make that film because there simply was no money.

iW: Has your point of view about male/female relations changed since the earlier films? "Antonia's Line" and "Mrs. Dalloway" seem much less angry about women's roles in society than your earlier films.

Gorris: For me it was a sort of natural progression from those first three films to "Antonia's Line". Only, I wanted to make my first three films first because they, at that moment in time, were the most important to me. And then I was ready to do "Antonia's Line". So, for me, it really was a very natural progression. But there again, some people said, "This film is so different from your previous ones that we can't like this; we can't allow this." So, you know, I thought to myself, Well, as a matter of fact it's not a question of permitting me or allowing me to make films. I make the films that I want to make and the audience will see what they do. If they don't like it, well that's okay, they don't. If they do like it, great. But I think you should at least allow the artist the freedom of speech; the freedom to do what she or he wants to do.