Screenplay writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are the duo behind Tim Burton’s “Big Eyes” out today. They also served as producers on the film.
For them this is a story about women’s empowerment and they spent over a decade to bring artist Margaret Keane’s life story to the big screen. You can read our review of the film below:
Film Review: Tim Burton’s ‘Big Eyes’ Starring Amy Adams
Read our exclusive interview with Scott and Larry below:
Congrats on such a wonderful film.
Scott: It’s taken us 11 years to make this movie, so we’ve been really grateful, seeing the audiences’ reactions … and to have it all reach this point.
So how did you originally become involved with the “Big Eyes” project?
Larry: We were working on a project that took place on another planet. We were writing a screenplay about an alien intelligence that gets ruined when a bunch of earth garbage lands on their planet. They start becoming obsessed with M.C. Hammer albums and all these crazy things from earth, and we were looking for examples of weird things that could have landed on this planet and Scott opened up a book.
Scott: An encyclopedia … the book is a lot of fun, it’s from about 25 years ago it’s a collection of books about strange pieces of pop culture, it’s got disco clothing and furry boots and sugary cereal and sixties TV sitcoms and all sorts of silliness and it had a couple pages on Margaret and Walter Keane, and the long forgotten Keane empire. I was sort of astonished by this story, I had never really heard anything about the Keanes before.
So that’s how you discovered the Margaret Keane story?
Scott: We actually started doing a lot of research – very old-fashioned research – where we would look at microfiche or newspapers, and that actually was more the Walter Keane story because Walter was the person who was the public face, but when we started doing that research, we realized we were missing something, we were missing Margaret’s story. So we managed to track her down through her studio in San Francisco and we went up to meet with her, and that’s where we learned all the personal details and all the stuff that would give this movie real heart, the relationship between Margaret and her daughter. I believe Margaret became isolated from all her friends, her conversion to Jehovah’s Witness. So sitting down with Margaret really gave us enough information that we could really write a screenplay from her point of view. We knew that Walter was sort of the big salesman blowhard who would run the plot of the movie, but we knew that Margaret was really the character that had the journey and that we wanted to write a film about. So getting to know her and getting the rights to her and her art was very important for us.
So what was your reaction when you met Margaret? What was your first impression?
Larry: She was very shy, very unassuming, she doesn’t like calling attention to herself. So the of idea two wise guys from Hollywood wanting to make a movie about her wasn’t something she was necessarily looking for. I mean we had to convince her why we thought her story was important, why we wanted her story to be a film and that we were not going to take Walter’s side, we did not believe Walter’s version of the story and we believed her version.
Scott: Back in 2003, people were still coming into her gallery and asking for Walter Keane. People still didn’t really know the truth even after the trial because when the trial happened the Keanes weren’t as famous as they were in the mid-sixties. Walter kind of controlled the press, and so the truth came out in sort of a vacuum. So she was worried that people actually still believed that Walter was the painter and we had to convince her that by telling her story, it would get the truth out there.
So how did you to become a writing duo, do you play specific roles when writing together?
Scott: We work together, I do all the writing and Larry goes on the talk shows. I’m Walter and he’s Margaret, that’s the way it works.
Larry: We were actually roommates at USC film school. We wrote a screenplay when we were still in college, that’s what made us a team and that was about 30 years ago and we’ve been doing it ever since.
So is there a specific creative process when you guys are writing a screenplay?
Larry: We work in the same room together, Scott is on the keyboard. I sometimes lay down. We work a lot together. We use old-fashioned index cards on corkboard, we sort of plot the entire movie out. On a biography we do lots and lots of research… Sometimes we will spend 6 to 8 Months doing research, really becoming historians, like old-fashioned journalists, tracking down as many details as possible. Some people say why don’t you hire a research team, but for us we have to do it ourselves so we know it, so we have all the facts at our fingertips and also the facts that intrigue us are very idiosyncratic and weird so we tend to feel that someone else researching for us would miss the odd details that we love and populate our films with, so we do it ourselves.
What was it like working with Tim Burton?
Scott: Tim’s great, we made a movie with him 20 years ago, it really changed our lives … it was one of the best experiences as writers and I think one of Tim’s best experiences as a director. We all had a great time and we felt that over the past few years we’ve written some things that got made, but nothing we got credit on, so we were always in contact with him, and we brought him on initially as a producer on this movie and then an opening opened in his schedule and we knew Tim was passionate about Margaret and her artwork, so we went to him and offered to switch places where we would produce the film and he would direct it and it all came together really quickly.
We like Tim a lot. What’s great about Tim is he gets our tone, we like to mix comedy and drama together, where in the middle of a funny scene there’ll be something that’s very touching and Tim does that very well … Here there’s a lot of things going on in “Big Eyes” where sometimes it’s a thriller, sometimes it’s a love story, sometimes it’s a comedy, sometimes it’s a very very sad movie about a woman who’s trapped. Tim does it all and turns it into a Tim Burton movie and he gets it right. When he saw that first draft, he sticks to what we write, but he turns it into his own thing. So it is the best for all of us.
While you were writing did you have any idea what actors you thought would represent your screenplay well?
Larry: It’s odd when you’re doing these true life movies, we tend to think of the real people. When we’re writing pure fiction, a lot of times we’ll think of an actor for the part or even an archetype for the part like oh this is kind of a Bill Murray character or … we’re so odd we think of old-time actors a lot of times. When we were writing Walter Keene sometimes we would say that would be a great part for Robert Mitchum … So that whole 1950’s guy, Kirk Douglas, that old fifties guy who controls the scene, but usually we just think of the real people.
Scott: Because we never saw any film or video of Walter, we were sort of imagining our ideal version of him, and it was that Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster man’s man who’s kind of rough around the edges,who’s a flawed driven man. A problem as you start working with a casting director, and she realizes that everyone on your casting list is dead, they’re not available. They’re just not available!
So what was it like seeing Amy Adams bring your words to life?
Larry: With Amy, I say it’s less about bringing the words than bringing the emotion because by design Margaret has very few lines in the movie, we were taking a big risk with the script in that we didn’t give our lead character very much to say, and she really had to carry the movie through the expressions on her face… And telling the emotions. Because Margaret’s keeping a secret for most of the movie, she can’t talk to anyone, she has no one to confide in and it was very remarkable watching Amy capture all of these feelings and contradictions and self-doubt without speaking. It’s very understated, but a really magical performance. She did so much with just her face and the way she looked at Walter and you know exactly she’s thinking.
How is “Big Eyes” different from previous projects that you worked on?
Scott: It’s different in two ways, one it’s the first time that we have ever written a female protagonist where usually the character who is front and center in the movie is the Walter character, like if you look at the movie “Ed Wood” or even “Man on the Moon” with Jim Carrey. Front and center in the movie is this very charismatic guy who has a vision, who is selling something who can’t stop talking, and in this movie we made him the bad guy, and we were telling the movie from this quiet, passive woman’s point of view, but we thought that’s where the story was, that’s really where the drama was.
Out of all the characters in the film who do you relate to the most and why?
Scott: I get a real kick out of Danny Huston who plays Dick Nolan, the gossip columnist. There’s a movie from the 1950’s called “Sweet Smell of Success,” which is all about gossip columnists and press agents desperately hustling each other in nightclubs in New York, to try to get their clients name in the paper and they’re just desperate to do it and they’re all really worried about their careers, but they’re all trying to look really cool. They’re all wearing really nice suits and they’ve all got cocktails in their hands and we were sort of trying to capture that with Danny’s character. I always have a big grin on my face every time Danny comes on the screen, if I could be as cool as him I’d be happy.
Larry: I would say the same thing … We get a kick out of that Dick Nolan character. What’s funny is he came from our initial research, we kept on finding all these quotes from Walter Keane in this gossip column in San Francisco and we had never even heard of this gossip column before … He made it his beat and his column is a hoot and he was obsessed with Walter and Walter realized it was a way to plug his business so Walter would supply him with one quote after another and we got such enjoyment from reading these things, we knew we had to make it a character.
“Big Eyes” is now playing.
