The Knockturnal sat down with Director Pablo Larraín at a roundtable to discuss his new film, “Jackie.”
A grieving Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) examines her husband’s (John Carroll Lynch) legacy as the nation mourns his death.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about the challenges of telling a story that people think they know so well, and bringing that back to light?
Pablo Larraín: I guess that’s the story of cinema, because there’s a lot of public record—a lot of information that we can all access. Especially in those days, it’s incredible how accurate the information is. You can know literally minute by minute what had happened. But there are a lot of things that had happened behind doors, and that’s where fiction starts, and that’s where I do my job—otherwise it would be a documentary or a historic project. That’s not what we do. I guess instead of trying to tell people things they don’t know, the point is to bring a specific emotion, mood and (the story of) a life that was at risk, to the audience. I guess it’s all there. (Jackie) is a tragic figure, (and she) puts the entire country’s grief on her back and walks with it.
Q: Is there some evidence that she basically created the Camelot myth herself? That it was self-designed after Jack’s death?
Pablo Larraín: There is evidence—which is an interview she had with a journalist called Theodore White for Life magazine, and she quotes, “…Don’t let it be forgot that for one brief shining moment there was Camelot.” It’s a week after (Jack’s death). (This line is from) a record that Jack would play, and if I’m not wrong, one of the composers of that music was his roommate from college. He knew the musical well, and when (the song) came out, he would play the record—especially the last track of the last side, which is the one that has the legend and the myth idea.
I remember when I was starting the production, we were in a meeting and I asked the teams if somebody could get that record so we could listen to it. We got it and I couldn’t believe how interesting it was. I kind of understood what this must have meant—I’m not American so I don’t have the Camelot myth in my bloodstream—but I needed to understand it very well in order to be able to make the movie and to deliver that idea at the end of it. I think it’s a very interesting idea because America is a country without royalty, like all the other countries that were colonized in the last, I don’t know, 500 years. Every king, every queen, every royal member is always a blood thing, a family thing—but the Kennedys somehow became the royal family of this country because the people wanted it and the people needed it. (Jackie became) a queen without a throne, a queen without a king. She’s a very special tragic figure, and that’s what makes it an incredible story.
Q: Why do you think you were chosen to do this American story?
Pablo Larraín: I don’t know. You could ask Darren Aronofsky—Darren was the head of a jury in a film festival in Berlin last year. I had a movie there…and at the after party, we met and we spoke. A week after he sent me a script. I asked him what a Chilean could do with all of this; and he said that maybe it was an interesting opportunity to have somebody who was not American to look at all this from some distance and just connect with the key of the story, which were her emotions and her humanness.
I guess it’s a story of a mother who would not just be the mother of her own young children, but sometimes a mother for everybody around her, and sometimes even the mother for a whole country. She opened this huge umbrella and people just went to her—she had this strength and beauty to be able to move on. I still don’t know how she did it after all she had experienced. I really don’t know how you can actually do that.
Q: Did you have much knowledge or interest in the Kennedy story, being from another country and being born long after all this had happened? Did you know the story before?
Pablo Larraín: Yes, kind of. Not in full detail, but yes. I knew, of course, who the Kennedys were and I knew who Jackie was. But I had a very superficial idea about her. I had this idea that she was a woman only worried about style and clothing and fashion. As soon as I got involved, I started digging and researching and I found her to be one of the most interesting women ever. Her level of sophistication, not just in her physical clothes, but also in that she was a very educated person. Someone who spoke at least four languages, who had an incredible political smell that I bet a lot of contemporary politicians would love to have even one third of. It would be enough for all of them. She had this sensibility with communications—and she cared about history, which is something that I care lot for, and I respect that.
At the same time, she is a figure who you could dig and dig about (for a long time). You could read her biographies, talk to people who have met her, read interviews, but you would never really know who she was. She was a woman who had an incredible amount of mystery, which is always attractive for cinema. Because once you completely understand and see every layer of a character, then it’s not interesting anymore. You need the audience to keep watching and thinking.
Q: The film kind of breaks the traditional definition of what we call biopic. It feels like a horror movie for much of it. Can you tell us about that approach—of making this look completely different from anything that we’ve seen in the last couple years?
Pablo Larraín: I’m not very into biopics as a viewer. There are a few of course, which I love. People like Milos Forman, have made wonderful biopics—like Man on the Moon or Amadeus. But I never intended to make a proper biopic. I understand that in order to communicate this movie, you use that word, because it’s a movie about someone who actually existed. But instead of trying to tell the (whole) story about her and who she was and sort of having a larger picture of her life; I just focus on four or five, maybe six days, on her life. Just to try to understand that sensibility and try to feel what she had felt to go through that emotional path.
Q: Can you speak about collaborating with Natalie? It’s quite a stunning performance. And helping her bring this woman to life?
Pablo Larraín: I always thought she’d play the role. From the very beginning when I was invited, I kept asking for her. Then Darren arranged a meeting and I met her, and we started working immediately. Natalie has the style, the beauty, the elegance, and the sophistication—all that Jackie had, or she at least created or assembled. It’s the mystery; Natalie, on camera, is someone who is very hard to know, hard to really understand going on inside of her. And you wonder and you feel that there is something that is not complete. She’s of course, a great performer, in the sense of technical (acting)—she could play the voice and do a lot of things that are very important, but those things were not exactly the most important to me. The most important was how she handled the grief and held (that emotion) and how her eyes (served as) the door to that unknown existence of terror that the character was experiencing.
Q: Was there a moment in her performance, or in rehearsals perhaps, when you looked at the cut and you were immediately satisfied with it?
Pablo Larraín: We don’t do rehearsals.
Q: Interesting. From the very beginning, her performance was a surprise to you?
Pablo Larraín: Yes. I remember in the beginning, we were shooting in the “White House”—we had a wide shot of her, and I said, “Natalie, can you come closer?” Then I said, “No, no, no, come closer, come closer, come closer,” and then we got a very tight shot. The movie had multiple ways of approaching her, visually. But I understood how to approach the character and how to work with Natalie throughout the close-ups. Because there was a specific sort of position and speed that would connect the emotions, and the way she moved and the way she breathed and the way she looked at things. It was more expressive in the close-ups. If there were moments when I felt confident that it could work, we would do a very tight close-up.
Somebody would open the door, another character, and talk to her, and they would be out of frame. We went to the rooftop of the White House in one scene, and Peter Sarsgaard would go and say to her, “They want the Oval. We’ve got to move.” And there is no procession—she would just take it and take it and take it. At certain moments, she would seem like she was about to explode and just melt—but she would keep standing, because she was trained to be that way, but you could see it in her eyes.
Q: This is a very lean script. You don’t feel overly burdened with dialogue. It works beautifully, because you can see everything on people’s faces. I was wondering if that was something that you were consciously trying to achieve?
Pablo Larraín: I have a very specific method and that’s why I don’t do rehearsals. It’s very hard for me to do rehearsals without cameras and actors without their costumes. The real tension starts when there’s a camera involved. An actor would never behave the same way, at least in my experience. There are great directors, who do rehearsals and they work—every method is possible, but that’s just mine. I never usually have a very clear way of how I’m going to shoot the scene until I’m there; it’s always a process of discovering the mood, the rhythm, and tone of the scene. Then it’s in the editing room. It’s like a controlled chaos somehow.
Q: Has that been problematic in your career? Because certainly producers and studios want to know exactly what’s going to be on screen ahead of time.
Pablo Larraín: I won’t be working with them, then.
Q: What was the art of producing this movie like?
Pablo Larraín: It was produced by multiple companies: Protozoa, which is Darren Aronofsky’s company, Wild Bunch in France, Fabula, our company down in Chile, and LB Entertainment.
Q: Did you find a difference between producing here and in Chile?
Pablo Larraín: Yes, of course. We shot all the interiors in Paris. We built a White House in Paris, and we came here to D.C. to shoot the exteriors only. We spent the most time in Paris. But I guess the problem of cinema at the end is the same. It’s about the actor and camera and the character—it doesn’t matter what language or where you are.
Q: I like how you got her physicality, her movement—that’s part of her whole dynamic in the movie.
Pablo Larraín: It was very important for me. She walked in a very particular manner and she would move in a very particular way, even more so than the way she spoke. Once we had that, we understood that she would move in a specific way for certain reasons—like she walks like this because of this and that, sort of creating a psychological background for this fiction.
Q: Is the journalist based on a real person?
Pablo Larraín: Widely, because there was an interview with her and Theodore White for Life magazine. That’s where the whole Camelot myth was really created. But we also add a lot of other stuff, so we just call the journalist, “the journalist,” without a specific name, and he doesn’t work for a specific media.
Q: Did you use the Schlesinger tape that you mentioned?
Pablo Larraín: Yes, yes, for her—we used some real quotes from the book.
Q: Were there archival footage in the film for the crowd scenes around the funeral? In the streets?
Pablo Larraín: There were some. Some footage had the same grain, because we shot the film in order to create that illusion.
The film hits theaters on December 2, 2016.
