At a media conference in LA, writer-director Sean Durkin talks about his debut feature.

Tell us about writing the script?
I started writing the feature script in 2007, for about two years, but it wasn't quite ready - and besides, it's a film that really needed to be shot in the summer. I wanted a short film, accompanying the script, to send to investors. I wasn't happy with the one I'd made at NYU, and wanted to do something that pertained to the new project. In doing all this research on cults for the feature, I'd found a lot of information about how such cults are built, how people physically arrive at them, and none of that was making it into 'Martha.' So we made a short. We didn't spend much on it, but it wound up getting into Sundance and taking on a life of its own. The short proved instrumental in securing investors for the feature.

Was the idea always to tell the film through two separate timelines?
I thought it would be the best way to represent the character's confusion. It also came out from some of the research I did early on about cults--one of the first things I learned is that in a lot of cases, these groups don't use clocks or calendars or anything that lets people keep track of time. It ties into some aspects of Buddhist philosophy, that there's no such thing as the past, that everything is taking place in an eternal present. So I had the idea of [Martha] getting lost in time as soon as she leaves the compound--lost in time, or maybe stuck in time.

You used a fragile back-and-forth structure
It was absolutely scripted this way. I always had a clear idea how much information I wanted the audience to have. I wasn't really interested in how or why Martha arrives at the cult; that's not what the film's about. I didn't want to define a character by those reasons - it's not as if these groups particularly attract one type of person. I wanted to focus on her as a personality, and let her backstory grow from there. It's left to us to infer said backstory -the flip side of Martha's story was told in the short, "Mary Last Seen," which shares a character - Brady Corbet's dudeishly persuasive cult member Watts - with the feature, and details his introduction of another young girl to the commune. When I was in school I took screenwriting classes and I just couldn't wrap my head around screenplay structure. It could be told to me over and over again and for some reason I couldn't understand it. I'd go and watch those films and so many of them --there's a few that stand out for me like Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow or Panic in Needle Park -- they're not so much about structure but about characters and journey. That was really liberating to see and I connected to that and the freedom of that.

The screenplay wasn't always so spare?
I always write more and cut it down. So that was definitely a tough battle the whole time with writing, directing, editing. It was always working on 'How much is just enough information? How much is not enough? Where do we find the balance? How do we convey information naturally?'My focus always was that I'm interested in seeing a scene play out naturally how people would talk than forcing some conversation that explains what happened. There was never anything totally clear but you do drafts and drafts and drafts of scenes and figure it out. The script that the actors read and that we went into production with was also more full as well. The first thing i did with the actors is say "are any of these lines not working for you?". We'll read it through and right away I'll try to cut a few lines.

You've purposefully left the details of Patrick's group vague--is that to give you more room as a writer? Did you not want to impose too many real-world associations on the story?
I learned as much as I could. I'm mostly interested in the tactics that are used, and the effects that they have--the sense of dependency that's created. I wanted to convey the process of breaking somebody down and reprogramming them, without being clinical. Some of the more particular details were dictated by the location. I knew I wanted to shoot in the Catskills, and I know the area well--we have a farm there. So I thought about what kind of values people would bring to a place like that and what they would be trying to build there. They're probably trying to live off the land, to be self-sustaining while growing the number of people there. I wanted it to be specific to the region, and I wanted it to be believable.

You really downplayed Patrick's character--he's almost peripheral for a lot of the scenes on the farm, and John Hawkes avoids some of the more messianic, commanding traits we've seen in other movies on this subject.
One of the first conversations I had with John was that we didn't want Patrick to be that stock cult-leader figure. John said he wasn't interested in "cult" movies and we never called it a "cult" while we were making it. It's a word we have to use now in discussing the film because it works, but not when we were actually doing it. I would give a lot of the credit for what you're saying to John, and his ability to bring humanity to that character.

One of the things critics have picked up on is the way the film introduces violence: we learn that Patrick and his followers have blood on their hands. Were you worried that this aspect of the film might push it away from a character study and into more generic territory?
I'm more interested in the other stuff and not the violence, but the fact is that for a lot of people, when they get out of a situation like that, that's when they realize the sort of things they were living with--the reality of what had happened to them. They were in a situation much bigger and more severe than simply living in isolation: that things had happened that didn't just involve them.

Does the ambiguity of the final scenes tie into that as well: it seems very possible that a lot of the overt threat of the group coming after her is played so that it's more about her anxiety than anything that's actually happening. Which brings it back to being a character study--the sense of threat has been internalized.
The ambiguity you're talking about is definitely built in. All the choices we made in terms of how things were shot and staged later in the film were done to create space for those exact questions.
"Martha Marcy May Marlene," a time-shifting study of the attempted self-rehabilitation of Martha (first-time actress Elizabeth Olsen), a pretty, suggestible young woman recently escaped from a dangerous Catskills cult, certainly revels in build-up, teasingly withholding key details of the character's circumstances across its broken-mirror narrative - leaving some unaddressed altogether. If the filmmaker is working through personal anxieties in this story, it's certainly not evident in the crisp control with which he braids this material.

The emphasis on misinformation is key, given that you see the entire story being predicated on conflicting notions of untruth.
People who join such groups are told that everything in their life before they got there was a lie. They're basically reprogrammed. When they find out that's a lie, they go back to their old life, but a part of them still believes that's a lie too. So they're stuck in between. Martha's in survival mode, pulling whatever truth she can grab at.They don't remember anything about the first couple of weeks. But they get flashes and then they remember lying to everyone about where they've been. They're always paranoid. Piecing together the past when your identity has been systemically reprogrammed is difficult work. The decision to crosscut between the past and present, Martha never quite able to keep them separate, seemed like the only way to go. It just made sense to me.

Is this uncertainty a fear that you are confronting in your first feature?
I guess I'm most afraid of conforming. Groups that conform in a blind way without understanding what's happening to them, that terrifies me. That was a major fear of mine as a child

Back to Martha Marcy May

Home