Joshua Marston’s first film, Maria Full of Grace, won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. His second, The Forgiveness of Blood, won Best Screenplay at the Berlin International Film Festival. But his third, Complete Unknown, is perhaps his most ambitious yet.
Written with Julian Sheppard, the film stars starring Rachel Weisz and Michael Shannon, and explores the life of Alice Manning, a woman with multiple identities and a remarkable past.
Creative Screenwriting spoke with Marston about the idea for this unique character study, the underlying theme behind the film, and why screenwriters need to get out more.
Rachel Weisz as Alice in Complete Unknown
What led you into screenwriting?
Joshua Marston © 2011 – IFC Films
I had been a still photographer and I was taking a lot of documentary photographs. I found that I was often telling the story of the person whom I was photographing and talking longer than the time it took to take a photograph. I wanted more narrative and more of a storytelling possibility.
I was interested in moving into film and writing the sorts of things that I wanted to make. Not so much as a screenwriter for other people but for myself.
Your new film, Complete Unknown, is a unique character study. Where did this idea come from?
It started from the intention to do something contained and low budget, so we thought: dinner party. We wanted to write a character who was not who she presented herself to be.
Those were the elements we started with and that led to the idea of a guy looking across the room and seeing someone that he thinks he recognizes from his past, but she’s introduced to him by a different name and doesn’t acknowledge or give any indication that she knows him. hich lead to the idea that she’s changed her identity, which lead to the idea that she’s done it more than once.
You pull out of your driveway every morning, you drive to the end of the block, you turn left and go to work. Day after day after day, and then you get to the end of the block one day and turn right, and keep going and take off and do something different and leave it all behind.
I use film as an excuse to go out into the world and research different characters and different people’s lives. This movie is, in some ways, the grandest extension of that.
Rachel Weisz as Alice in Complete Unknown
There’s some interesting psychology in this film—what other research was involved?
There was basic research about the different professions that we have each character doing, and then there was just a lot of psychological excavation. What makes her do what she does? What is her backstory? What’s her motivation?
There was some research about what Michael Shannon’s character does, but it is not a research heavy film, but more about the psychology of these environments. It’s more about imagining and fantasizing and saying, “What if?”
What were some of the cinematic influences for the film?
Story-wise, some of the influences were Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and Catch Me if You Can, but that was as much what we didn’t want to do as what we did want to do. Billy Liar was definitely another one. And then, there as an interesting documentary by a guy named Jesse Moss who’s a friend of mine named, Con Man. It’s about a guy who changes identity repeatedly and ended up getting busted.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale Jr. in Catch Me If You Can
As a viewer, there was a hint of Rachel Weisz’s hobby-collecting eccentric, Penelope from Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom. Did you write these characters with specific actors in mind?
I didn’t write the scripts with people in mind, but Rachel Weisz came up very early on as an actress who is very mysterious and who the camera loves. I knew that I needed someone who could do justice to the mystery of who she is. Mystery was an interesting component in the structure of the screenplay, one of the things that was a challenge in the screenplay of balancing the two characters.
Another challenge was that it’s from her point of view for the beginning of the movie. And yet, in order to make it mysterious, we don’t really understand what she’s doing for the first 20 or 30 minutes. It’s quite an interesting challenge, getting the viewer to hook on to her and to sympathize with her and be interested in her.
The movie is structured, in some respects, as an unfolding of who she is which leads the viewer to hopefully become more invested and increasingly sympathetic and understanding of who she is and what she’s about.
There are some moments of visual contemplation within the film. One scene that comes to mind is when Michael Shannon starts to speak on the elevator and visually changes his mind and stops his sentence. Are these instances within the film written or developed on set?
They’re written. The one that you’re talking about, where he repeats a line, that wasn’t written, but the moments of contemplation are definitely written. I think the moments of contemplation are important for us, the viewer, to have a sense of one-on-one connection or a private connection with the character.
That enables us to get inside their head and also enables us to feel a sort of private personal investment or connection to the character.
Michael Shannon as Tom in Complete Unknown
What do you find to be the most difficult step in the writing process?
After the first or second draft when the script is beginning to make sense, so you’re not as free to meander, and there’s a beat missing, or a scene that needs to be adjusted. Trying to write a scene that fulfills a very specific function and bridges two scenes that already exist. So the parameters are much more defined.
It’s more of a mathematical, logical challenge than a creative enterprise.
Rachel Weisz as Alice in Complete Unknown
Rachel Weisz basically had nine character roles in this film. How did you go about deciding that the last one would involve the research associate and the frog element?
We wanted something that was there in New York that would put her in proximity to Michael Shannon’s character. We also wanted something that was just outside of New York and just far enough away that, story wise, she could draw him away from his usual world and take him into a universe that he hasn’t experienced before.
That’s one of the things we liked about the frogs, but it’s this whole other world that he has never experienced before that he can completely plunge into.
In your opinion, what makes a good story?
Strong character with a strong need in a very specific world.
Joshua Martson with Catalina Sandino Morena on set of Maria Full of Grace © 2004 New Line Cinema
Is there an underlying theme within these nine characters?
Not that you would necessarily know it, but in the writing of it we were conscious of creating a narrative from one life to the next. There is a through line in the sense that she starts off as a free kind of hippie character in Portland in response to her real life having been very structured as a piano prodigy.
Then, after she’s lived without structure for too long and wants something else, she ends up being a nurse which is highly demanding and challenging and has a lot of responsibility to it. After she’s done that for a while, she moves on and becomes a magician assistant, which is about being free and travelling to the other side of the world.
And so we continued like that and followed the logic of, “Well once she’s done that, what would she crave next?” It’s an interesting writing challenge, because on the one hand it would appear that she has all these separate lives that have no connection with one another, but the fact of the matter is her lives lead one into the next.
There’s a larger macro-story of her evolution, which brings her to Michael Shannon’s doorstep because she has become lonely and alienated from this thing that she’s been doing.
We started writing the dinner party, then we started writing the situation where a female character has changed her identity and then she’s done it multiple times, and then as we really began to think about this concept there was a moment when we got very excited by it, because it was suddenly a much bigger idea than this little dinner party that we had started with…
We contemplated scrapping the dinner party and coming up with a whole other movie that would somewhat take advantage of the strange complexity of her character. We ended up back at the dinner party for two reasons: one, because we found that actually emotionally this night is, in some respects, the most climactic moment of her entire life.
This is when she’s hit rock bottom and is reaching out to Michael Shannon’s character, in hopes of saving herself. In that respect, this is the most important moment in her life’s journey.
The other reason why we came back to this dinner party and this story is because it was incredibly narratively challenging to find a through line and a story arc for a character whose life is by definition a series of narrative ruptures through which she keeps wiping the slate clean.
To the outside world, anyway, starting completely fresh. That was challenging and ultimately we decided for a film that made more sense, but for the larger story of who she is, that will lend itself better to a television series, which we’re now exploring.
Rachel Weisz as Alice in Complete Unknown
Do you have any advice for upcoming writers?
I think that my writing is best when I’m most consistent, and have my structure and my schedule, but that also my writing is best when I am not at my desk and I’m out in the world having different experiences! The challenge is balancing those two.
So my advice would be to do both, to have structure, but also to not always have that structure because otherwise you never leave the house.
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