An interview with "Songcatcher" writer and director Maggie Greenwald
by Lindsay Marsak
PlanetOut: "Songcatcher" is all about women in power, and the fact that men are inept. They just keep looking worse and worse in the film.
Maggie Greenwald: [laughs] Really?
PlanetOut: Except for the mountain men, who haven't been spoiled by everything. It's a really strong, prowoman film.
Greenwald: Yeah it is. And I have to say that the thing that's blown my mind has actually been the response of men. Men are adoring the film.
PlanetOut: Really?
Greenwald: Yes.
PlanetOut: Why do you think that is?
Greenwald: Two things. I think that they're really loving the music and the music is really opening their hearts to the story. And I actually think a
lot of them really identify with Aidan Quinn's character as sort of a
man lost in a world that's changing, and not clear what his role is anymore. I think they're really relating to him. I've been very moved by that. I certainly hoped men would like the film, but I knew that my focus was very much the love stories of the women in the film. So I've been really amazed and very moved by that. There's been men standing up and weeping in the audience and going, "Oh, I can't talk." I see guys on the street who I would assume, judging by their
appearance, wouldn't like this film. But they're stopping me in the street and saying, "Thanks, that was so incredible. I was crying."
PlanetOut: I was crying.
Greenwald: I know, but we cry all the time. [Laughs.] I mean,
they do too, but to feel safe to claim they were crying in a public
area,
in a trendy area like the Sundance Film Festival, has been really
gratifying
because I don't intend to exclude them at all.
PlanetOut: I think it was a really strong choice to have the
protagonist of
your film be in love with music. Music isn't hard to relate to. I think
a lot of people are really passionate about that art form. I think it's
a really accessible text.
Greenwald: Yeah, and I think the music is really touching
people and opening their hearts. A really wide variety of people, from
older
men and women to young people.
PlanetOut: Were the schoolteachers originally written as
lesbians?
Greenwald: Yeah, they were, actually. Because I just assumed that a lot of the schoolteachers who [laughs] ... I'll give sort of the long answer at the risk of something being pulled out. As someone whose journey as a woman
and an artist has been rediscovering our buried history and correcting misrepresentations, one of the big misrepresentations for straight and gay women has been that we're not sexual. The ideas of the spinster woman, the career woman who never marries, and that you have to give yourself up to be sexual, you know, heterosexual. We certainly know now that that was yet another lie. Among the millions and millions of women who never married who were known as spinsters, we know today ... that many lived very happy, fulfilled, satisfying lives in gay relationships.
Many of the schools in the mountains were built by women. One of the things that interested me about the period and about those mountains was that that period in America was the period where the first generation of college-educated
women were unleashed on society and were really beginning to have an influence. And part of what they were taught was to be of service. So you find them in the most unlikely places doing things. And they were still pretty much bourgeois women, women who by all rights were born to be society wives. They went to school and got really educated, and
wanted to do more interesting things, like anyone would. So many of the schools were built by a pair of women or three women, usually two.
It just never crossed my mind to make them anything else, other than lovers [laughs]. I have to say, because I would also think that doing something so wonderful like being from high society and saying "we're going to go into the wilderness and build a school and have a great dream" is a very romantic thing. It's something that you have to be very passionate about, and something that would have been very difficult. It would be very easy to fall in love with the person you were sharing that dream with.
PlanetOut: The scene where the schoolteachers are discovered in the woods by Fate was very tangible and real. What did you focus on when you directed that scene?
Greenwald: The focus of the whole movie has always been love, not sex. Jane Adams and Katherine Kerr are great actresses, and I think because of the fact that it was a woman director, and that the whole script and the nature of it is about love and self-fulfillment, it never crossed anybody's mind that it would be anything else. The whole sequence that it's a part of is supposed to be a moment of love being perfect for everyone on a beautiful summer afternoon. The direction for all of the actors was,
"This is a moment when your love is perfect." That was the way the cinematographer and I shot it, inspired by Monet paintings.
Just to backtrack to what you were talking about before, correcting the misrepresentation about women and their sexuality is also why I made the character of Lily sexual. In the opening scene, even though she's so repressed and tight and strident, I felt it was really important
in the beginning to establish her as a sexual creature. So ... she had a sexually gratifying but
emotionally unfulfilling and very safe relationship with a man. We know there were many women who did that, too -- who had lots of lovers, heterosexual lovers, and never married.
PlanetOut: Did you have to edit the film to fit certain time
requirements?
Greenwald: Actually, I have been in that position before, where wanted to keep stuff in, but they were running too long. That was not the case with this
film. The first cut was only about 20 minutes longer than the final cut.
Some of the ballads are 20 verse songs. We didn't shoot 20 verses, some of them we shot 10 verses, just so that I would have the leeway, knowing that 10 was too long, and maybe they've ended up with five in the film. Actually it was really easy to bring it down to its running time, which was a great luxury.
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