The Big Picture

Director William Oldroyd and co-writers Ottessa Moshfegh and Luke Goebel discuss their screen adaptation of Moshfegh’s award-winning novel Eileen, starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway. They talk about the editing process, audience reception to the movie, working independently, and changing the ending. The trio also share the details of their next project together.

After premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the screen adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s award-winning novel, Eileen, is now in theaters with an ensemble cast at its core. While promoting their film’s release, Moshfegh, Luke Goebel who co-wrote the screenplay with the author, and filmmaker William Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth) spoke with Collider’s Steve Weintraub about the work put into adapting this expectation-defying thriller.

Starring Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, and Shea Whigham, Eileen takes place in the 1960s and follows a young girl (McKenzie) through her dreary day-to-day. From the house with her alcoholic father (Whigham) to the prison where she works, Eileen’s life is unremarkable, until one day when the enigmatic Rebecca (Hathaway) is hired on as the prison’s psychologist.

If you think you know where this plot is heading, writers Moshfegh and Goebel assure Weintraub they were careful to stick to their unique vision for the film. Even fans who read the book will be surprised by the altered ending. Oldroyd, Moshfegh, and Goebel discuss how working independently was the right approach and allowed them to avoid having to “sand off any of the edges” of their script. They detail the editing process, share their experience watching Eileen with the audience at Sundance, and share the plot of the trio’s next project together. You can watch the full interview in the video above the article, or read the transcript below.

Eileen
A woman’s friendship with a new co-worker at the prison facility where she works takes a sinister turn. Release Date December 8, 2023 Director William Oldroyd Rating R Runtime 97 minutes Main Genre Drama Writers Luke Goebel , Ottessa Moshfegh

Read Our ‘Eileen’ Review

COLLIDER: I really want to start with congrats on the movie. You never know when you’re making something what the reaction is going to be. I’ve seen films that are amazing get a negative reaction, and things that I thought were terrible people love. I’m curious, you guys made a great movie and people think it’s great, so what has it been like for you guys with the audience reaction to the film?

WILLIAM OLDROYD: I suppose our first sense of an audience reaction was when we premiered at Sundance, and it was an experience because it was a 1,200-seat theater and we had never seen the movie with an audience before. So, to be sitting in that audience and to see the movie on the big screen for the first time with that many people, you really get a sense of whether the audience likes the movie or not and there’s no way of actually escaping that. And as a filmmaker, when you put so much care and attention and love and hard work into a movie, you just hope that people are going to respond to the movie and love it as much as you do. And I think broadly, that’s what I felt when I sat there in Sundance, that people were engaging with it in the right way.

LUKE GOEBEL: Yeah, that was its test screening.

OLDROYD: [Laughs] That was really the testing screening.

GOEBEL: And the gasp of the majority of those audience members at the moment you want them to gasp was so satisfying, and the laughter. Just things landing, it was such a thrill.

Image via NEON

OTTESSA MOSHFEGH: If anything, I’m so happy that we get to show this movie in cinemas because I think the shared experience, especially at certain key moments of the film, is really fun and satisfying and something that I haven’t felt in a movie theater in a long time.

GOEBEL: Yeah, it really leaves people wrestling, too, with concepts of justice and responsibility. People don’t often leave the theater, is what we’ve heard and what we’ve seen. People stay and they sit and they’re quiet, and I think it’s kind of a communal catharsis that’s happening in the theater, and also leaving people to wrestle with some important concepts.

MOSHFEGH: Yeah. Good conversations.

GOEBEL: Nice Christmas chats.

OLDROYD: And I find it very funny. I mean, I found the book funny. I found the script that you guys wrote very funny, but I also find the film funny. It’s a dark sense of humor, but it’s worth saying that you should find it funny, as well.

MOSHFEGH: You should.

GOEBEL: You must.

OLDROYD: You should in a sense, like, if it’s working, it should be funny.

Why Making ‘Eileen’ Independently Was the Right Approach

You guys made this as an indie, and I think that allowed you to be able to do what you did with this film because I do think if a studio had made this, you would not have been as able to take a sharp left turn the way that the film does without maybe more set up.

MOSHFEGH: I think we were really lucky that the three of us could originate and develop this project, and everyone who signed on to work on it wanted to make this movie, not some other version of Eileen. So, we were all in it together and there was never a moment where we questioned whether we had taken the right approach. It was always, “This is the story, this is the character, and we’re not going to sand off any of the edges.”

One of the things I’m fascinated by is the editing process because it’s where everything comes together. How did this film possibly change in the editing room in ways you didn’t expect going in?

OLDROYD: I was lucky that the editor was present throughout the shoot. I always find it helpful that Nick [Emerson] is the editor I work with twice now, once on Lady Macbeth and once on this film, and he’s really such an important collaborator for me. He’s somebody I trust enormously, and so having him there while we were shooting, he could also then feed back, not only because he’s a fresh pair of eyes, [but] he’s not been part of the development process or the adaptation process. He’s just really seeing what’s coming to him each day on screen and he can then judge it sort of impartially, if you like. But also because every day then we can watch the stuff together, we can make sure that it is coming together, he can cut it together, and if there’s stuff that’s missing, then we can go and get the extra shots. We can pick things up as we go through.

I think that our process is fairly straightforward. We just follow the movie as it unfolds. We listen to the film that’s in front of us. So, we’ve had the process of developing the idea, the scripts have been written, and the movie’s being shot. Now, the movie is the thing that’s in front of us and we have to listen to what that thing needs. It’s very responsive, in that sense, to the requirements. Sometimes we have to do things just to sort of refresh our own eyes and shake it up a bit, change a few scenes around, move things about so that we can see it afresh. But for me, it’s very, very important, and I feel privileged because not many people get to sit through a four or five-month edit of a movie, but I think it teaches you so much about filmmaking. The actors don’t sit through it, the crew don’t sit through the edit, but I wonder whether if they sat through something like that they would understand a little bit about what I’m thinking about having been through one. I’m thinking about what I’m going to be doing for the next four months while everyone goes on to their next job, and I’m sitting there thinking, “I wish I had this moment,” or, “I wish we had got that in a different way,” or something. It’s one of the best and most exciting aspects of filmmaking for me.

Adapting ‘Eileen’ to the Screen
Image via Sundance

Ottessa, it’s not often that the person who wrote the book gets to work on the screenplay. Talk a little bit about what it was like editing your own material and trying to bring it into a 120-page script or however long it was.

MOSHFEGH: Well, it was exciting and really interesting to approach the material that I had written by myself with my partner, my co-writer, Luke Goebel, who helped me see the story in a new way for cinema. The character got sort of more multidimensional in that I was seeing her from the outside, whereas before I was just on her inside, sort of narrating through her.

I love the way the film ends, but I believe the book ends in a different way, and I’m curious how you guys decided – without spoilers – where you wanted the film to end, and did you ever think about something else?

GOEBEL: Anytime that you adapt a first-person narrative, I think there’s the question of like, “Is this a voice-over?” And I think we were all really impassioned, emphatic that it couldn’t be a voice-over for several reasons, but we didn’t want to end and we didn’t want to begin with Eileen being safe. There needed to be a danger and a concern for her as a character, that not having a voice-over that tells us how she ends up and that she’s succeeded in making it to old age was essential. And also we wanted all that pressure of the period and the location and the nature of Eileen that Thomasin so perfectly captures, that oppression and repression, to be bottled up until Rebecca arrives on scene, and this glamorous enigmatic presence offers a sounding board for Eileen to reconsider who she could possibly be in this world.

William, I’m curious, when you looked at the schedule for what you needed to shoot, what was the day you had circled as to, “I’m not sure how we’re going to do this in the time frame we have?”

OLDROYD: The basement because it was shot in a day, and that was very, very tight to shoot what must be 10 minutes, I think it must be like 10/12 pages in a day. It’s easy to think, “Oh, well, it’s one scene. We can just shoot it in a day. It’s self-contained.” But there were so many moving parts, so many elements of that scene which we could break down and you could shoot over several days. Yeah, that was a tough, tough day, not just because we were up against the clock, but because of what the actors had to go through to deliver those performances. And it was the penultimate day of the shoot, as well, so everyone was quite tired by that point.

I can’t believe you shot that in a day, but it also helps when you have great actors doing the scene.

OLDROYD: That’s true. It’s really a testament to them.

What’s Next for the Trio?
Image via NEON

For all three of you, I always, of course, like to ask about what you’re working on now, so let me ask, what are you guys excited for next year? Is there anything that you are working on?

OLDROYD: We’re all working together, in fact. We liked each other so much through this process that we decided to try and make another one together.

Is that true?

OLDROYD: Yeah.

Are you adapting another book?

OLDROYD: No, it’s an original idea. It’s an original screenplay based on the sort of facts of a woman’s life from the middle of the last century, a woman who was accused of witchcraft. She was a psychic medium and inadvertently was contacted by a dead sailor and revealed the whereabouts of a sunk naval battleship which got her into a lot of trouble, and so she was then accused of witchcraft in the Old Bailey – tried and convicted, in fact, using the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

MOSHFEGH: In England.

OLDROYD: In England, it happens.

Eileen is in theaters now. Purchase tickets here.