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Film%20Critique
The Subjunctive Arbus
Interview with director Steven Shainberg

by By Cole Smithey

December 07, 2006

Director Steven Shainberg’s long awaited follow-up to his

groundbreaking film Secretary (2002) is an anti-biopic that dares to

read between the lines of its subject’s life rather than replay the

common knowledge events of photographer Diane Arbus’ life.

Only a few factual threads comprise Shainberg’s adventurous

tightrope narrative in which Diane (Nicole Kidman) Arbus’ artistic

awakening that transported her from repressed daughter, wife and mother

to becoming one of the greatest photographic visionaries of the 20th

century.

I spoke to Steven Shainberg at the Regency hotel in Manhattan.







MAUI TIMEWEEKLY: When you decided to make a movie about Diane Arbus, why did you choose to create an imaginary context for the narrative?







STEVEN SHAINBERG: First of

all, I don’t personally have any interest in straight-ahead biopics. I

never walk out of a straight-ahead biopic and feel like I genuinely got

to know who that person was. I think that they deal with too much time,

in general, so they are essentially superficial. They feel like the

greatest hits of a famous person’s life—from dramatic scene to dramatic

scene to dramatic scene.  

I am interested in making a film about somebody that tells you what

you don’t know. It goes into a mystery and it goes into a process. In

the case of this film it was essentially unconscious. She [Diane Arbus]

didn’t really know what was happening to her in 1958. It was a

beautiful transformation that occurred and one of things I have always

wondered about her is how did that happen.

How did this woman, in 1958, at the age of 35, married with two

kids, doing what she considered to be banal work in her fashion

photography studio with her husband, become the Diane Arbus we know?

And that is not a question that can be answered literally.





When did you first have this idea to create this kind of film?







Years and years ago. It was the only movie I could imagine doing

myself. But this is long before I even made a feature. You know, I have

been thinking about this because I was around the pictures when I was a

small kid, and my uncle Lawrence was a close friend of hers [Diane

Arbus] and I was very conscious of her. And to some extent she was

already a kind of mythical figure for me.

So when Ed Pressman and Bonnie Timmermann, who controlled the rights

to the Bosworth biography, said, “Have you ever heard of Diane Arbus?”

I said, “I can’t fucking believe this!” Barbara Streisand was going to

do it. Diane Keaton was going to do it. I would think, “Oh no! I don’t

want to see that movie be made, and even worse, I am never going to get

to make one.”

So, I have thought about it for a long time, how I had to go after

the subject if I ever got the chance. Believe me, when I went in and

talked to them about it, they encountered a guy that was not going to

leave the room. It was a movie I really wanted to make.





What makes Nicole Kidman work for your vision of Diane Arbus?







You have to understand that since the movie is not a literal

vision—it is a dream—I wanted somebody that didn’t look like her, first

of all. I wanted somebody that would take you into that alternative

space. But more importantly what I was really trying to do was find

somebody who I felt could portray the inner transformation that she is

making.

And if you know Nicole Kidman or if you see her work, she strikes

me, and it proves to be true knowing her and working with her, she

struck me as a woman of enormous curiosity—somebody who truly wishes,

like Arbus, to discover other worlds and to experience those other

worlds and to be as intimate as possible with them, to do that with

enormous capacity and sensitivity and openness.

When I sat down and talked to her about the script and who Arbus was

and what this very particular experience is that we were trying to

portray in the film, that is exactly who she seemed to be. And that is

exactly what she goes after in life. So there is obviously not an

external similarity, but I think there is an internal similarity. MTW