“I always wanted to write for movies but didn’t really admit it until I moved to LA and someone asked me if I wanted to write a movie,” says Ottessa Moshfegh, the novelist turned screenwriter behind Eileen. “I studied other movies and loved learning the new form.”
Ottessa’s screenplay credits include Causeway and Eileen, and some of her novels are Eileen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, Lapvona, and McGlue. “It felt totally unnatural in the beginning,” she says of screenwriting.
“There’s two versions,” says her partner Luke Goebel, in regards to their origin story. “One was the dream and one was the reality. When we met, right from the beginning, we were talking about movies, dreaming about movies, which seemed more like play. Then, there was an opportunity.”
Ottessa wrote a draft of McGlue as an adaption, but Causeway, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry, broke the mold for this new craft. “Reality suddenly came knocking with a pretty loud fist,” says Luke.
For their partnership, proximity is a factor, jokes the couple, but it’s also the intangible effect of a “short=hand.” Ottessa says, “It’s really easy to say something or begin to say something and oftentimes, we don’t have to finish our sentences.”
“I feel comfortable saying I have this tiny shred of an idea and knowing it will be fostered and supported rather than just swatted away. In collaborating, you need to negotiate a lot. We do that constantly and it’s safe to agree or disagree, and see things from a new perspective.”
This “shared psychic language” of a life together, “shared pain, pleasure and joy,” comes from “fertile grounds for seeds to grow.” For their latest project, Eileen, the story follows a woman’s friendship with a new co-worker at the prison facility where she works, but the friendship takes a sinister turn.
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