By Philip Brown.
Pulitzer Prize winner, Tony award winner, provocateur, family values promoter, and master of fried chicken perversion, Tracy Letts has been many things throughout his career, but above all else he is one of the finest writers of his generation. Raised in the unexpectedly wholesome town of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Letts began his writing career as a divisive playwright in Chicago where he was member of Steppenwolf Theatre. He helped launch Michael Shannon through his incendiary plays Bug and Killer Joe, which went on to be performed throughout the world with controversy following every performance. Then he slid out of shock value with Man From Nebraska in 2004 before winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his 3.5 hour masterpiece of perverse family values, August: Osage County. Along the way he also built up an impressive side career as an actor on stage and screen, including the recent award-winning revival of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Wolf? and a much-lauded supporting role on Homeland.
Letts has begun to slide into the film industry over the last decade by a adapting three of his own plays into feature films. First came two brilliant collaborations with director William Friedkin in Bug and Killer Joe, which masterfully expanded the claustrophobic stage productions into gut-punch genre cinema with a brain. Now, his most beloved play August: Osage County hits screens courtesy of director John Wells, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Juliette Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch, and the Oscar-pumping-powers of The Weinstein Company. With the film in the midst of an awards run, Creative Screenwriting Magazine recent got the chance to chat with the incomparable Tracy Letts about the challenges of adapting his own work for the screen, the origins of August Osage County, his ongoing relationship with William Friedkin, his interest in expanding into original screenwriting, and, of course, his relationship with the good people at KFC.
Why is it important for you to adapt your plays into screenplays?
Tracy Letts
Well, I guess it’s important for me because I like the idea that the movies have a reach that the theater doesn’t have. My first love is the theater, but I recognize—especially being from a small town in Oklahoma—that a lot of people can’t to the theater and certainly can’t get to great theater. In many parts of this country, theater-going just isn’t part of the culture. However, you’re hard-pressed to find anywhere in the country that doesn’t have access to movies. So that accessibility is really important to me and I like the idea that there will be a kid in some small town somewhere who will get a chance to see August: Osage County who wouldn’t have gotten a chance to see the play. Then hopefully it will speak to them in some way, move them in some way, and provoke something in them. And in terms of why I want to be the one to do the adaptation, I love movies and I do think there’s a balancing act that goes on that goes on between trying to create a film and at the same time trying to preserve the thing that made the play want to be a film in the first place. So I just try to walk that line and I think I’m the one who will pay more attention to both of those things than some screenwriter brought in from the outside.
Was there any extra trepidation in adapting August: Osage County since it’s rooted in personal history and also because of the incredible acclaim you received for it?
Well, I don’t know. Sure, of course there must be some part of me that wants to honor those things in the film that I felt that the play already honored. I want to stay true to my original impulses. But at the same time there’s also a bit of carpentry going on and that carpentry needs to be dispassionate. So, it’s probably a mix. I don’t think that the pressures I felt on this one were any special pressures.
It’s a tricky thing to adapt from stage to screen properly, but you’ve managed to do it quite well three times now. Do you have any ground rules or benchmark film adaptations that you look at for how to do that form of adaptation?
No, I don’t think so. I can’t think of what the thing would be that I consider to be the template for doing it. I think it’s different for each piece. All three of the ones that I’ve done have been very different in their own way. The job is the same, but the piece itself will dictate what needs to be done. For instance, with August: Osage County because it’s so spread out in terms of the number of characters, I made a decision early on that the central conflicts had to stay central and as a result I would have to lose some depth in some of the secondary and tertiary conflicts in the characters along the side. So I was going to have to lose some depth to bear down on the central conflict between Barbra and her mother. That’s one way in which you take a three-hour piece and turn it into a two-hour piece. But, the central concerns were different concerns in Bug and Killer Joe. So, I don’t know that there is a template. I think that each piece is different.
What was the most difficult part of adapting August: Osage County for the screen? Length concerns?
I wouldn’t say it was ever a length issue. For me, it was just a matter of sacrificing some depth out in the margins of the piece. I needed to do that and in fact fought for some of those things as I was losing them. I never considered those things fat when I was writing the play. They were important things. But, there’s a reason for the phrase is “cut to chase.” That phrase originates from the movies. Because movies engage an audience differently, they rarely have the patience that we were allowed in the theater. Audiences watch theater differently. They’re leaning forward. Their ears are tuned differently. They have to listen to a lot of language. They pick and choose where their eyes focus on the stage. In the movies, you sit back and you eat popcorn and let it wash over you. It comes to you and you receive it. So, the expectation of action in the dramatic sense is quite different when you’re watching a movie.
Do you consider your three movies to be cinematic in translation or would you have written them differently if they were a movie from conception?
You know, now they look so different to me than the plays. You kind of turn a corner where you go, “Oh fuck, the film is just entirely different from the play.” Even though there’s a lot of the same language and the story is told the same way, the truth is the experience of watching the film is so much different than they experience of watching the play. I just consider them to be separate things now. That was true of Killer Joe and I just had the same experience with August. I just watched it a couple of days ago at the premiere in the New York and it was the first time that I felt that division. I sat and watched the movie and accepted it as a film and something separate from the play. You’re always going to have the experience of seeing the play if somebody does it, but seeing the film is just a separate experience entirely.
How involved do you get to be in your films beyond the script? Are you able to sit in on casting discussions or anything like that?
Well, how involved you get to be has a lot to do with who you are involved with. Killer Joe and Bug I did with William Friedkin and he is very collaborative with the writer. Probably more to the point, Billy’s not answering to a lot of other interests. Billy’s in a place in his career where everyone understands that they’re making a William Friedkin movie. It’s his way or the highway and that’s it. So, it’s not like I had a lot of hoops to jump through on Killer Joe and Bug. I was dealing with Billy always, from first moment to last and he’s very collaborative. August: Osage County was a different deal. I have to say that [director] John Wells was just as cooperative and collaborative, but there were a lot of other interests to be sure. There was Harvey Weinstein, there was George Clooney, there was Meryl Streep, there was Julia Roberts. There were a lot of people who have made a lot of great movies and have opinions about the work. It’s not that everything goes through a committee or that everything was a fight, there were just a lot of opinions that needed to be listened to. So it was a very different thing to serve on this film than it was on the first two.
I always enjoy the dark humor of your work, but often get into arguments with friends over how much of the writing is supposed to be taken as funny. Have you ever run into difficulties with directors or actors who just don’t see the humor in the scripts because of the emotional intensity?
Well, it hasn’t really been a problem. I do think it’s a really important ingredient to my work. I know with both Killer Joe and Bug people would read them and say, “Oh that’s so disturbing and violent and vile, I can’t possibly do that.” And then the first time they heard it out loud, they went, “Oooooh! I didn’t get how funny it was. I couldn’t see that on the page.” I know that Matthew McConaughey definitely had that experience the first time he read Killer Joe. He said he threw it away. He thought it was garbage and vile and wanted to take a shower afterwards. But he had a friend in the business who said, “I think you missed it. Go back and read it again, it’s actually funny.” And Matthew said, “Funny?!” He didn’t realize that any of it was funny at first and then changed his mind after rereading it. I’ve personally never really run into any particular troubles with that though. By and large the people who work on my scripts embrace the humor. Yeah, the humor’s dark, but I think it’s what makes it all work. If that weren’t there, it would be hitting someone over the head with a chair and I’m not interested in that.
Matthew McConaughey as Killer Joe
What is it about stories of perverse family values that interests you so much, because certainly those themes are central to both your most recent films Killer Joe and August: Osage County? I particularly got a laugh out of the fact that August was released in time for Christmas.
You know, I love a family drama. The family unit is always going to be ripe material for drama and comedy because we all have personal associations with it. None of us can escape our family. So it’s what accounts for people seeing August: Osage County and saying, “you’ve been spying on my mother” and that sort of thing. It’s because people want to relate to what they’re watching and family is always relatable. As far as my own personal interest…who knows what I’m working out there because I certainly have a very loving family. But you know, we’ve all got family histories and darkness in our family. Nobody gets out of this alive. (Laughs) So that’s part of my interest in it. And yeah, the Christmas release is great fun. I hope people gather up the family and go to see August: Osage County together. I think they’ll get a kick out of it.
Are you pleased that August: Osage County is finally getting released a film after Killer Joe and Bug? I ask simply because while I adore those two movies, they were based on writing you did many years ago as a younger man and the films stirred up old controversies that you wouldn’t necessarily be interested in provoking now. Whereas this film is more in tune with your current sensibilities.
Well, I think that’s true. Some people think that they’re with their plays their whole lives. I’m not one of those guys. Once a play is published and up on a shelf, I’m done with it. I would get sick of working on them year in and year out. So to go back to those and reopen them and see what I was going through back then was a strange experience. August was different of course because although there was a break, the play was still very present for me when we worked on the film. But you know, I think I’m done with taking my plays and turning them into movies. I don’t think that I’ve got any other plays that are particularly right for film adaptations. I think from now on, I’ll be doing an adaptation of someone else’s work or something original for film, which I’m very interested in doing. I like the idea that I might be able to explore something from the ground up as a piece of screenwriting. I’ve done some of that in the past and none of it’s been produced unfortunately, but I’m interested in trying my hand at that a little bit because I love movies and I’m interested in the art of screenwriting. It’s definitely an art form unto itself. The craft isn’t entirely different from playwriting, but it does require a slightly different mindset.
I was curious about that. What had your written before for film? Works for hire? Original projects?
Both of those things. I did an adaptation of a true crime story a few years back that they chose not to pursue. I’ve done a few jobs on assignment and a few jobs on my own and they just haven’t materialized yet. Hey, the movie business is tough. I think if I had just been a screenwriter, I’d still be waiting around for my first script to be produced. I think it’s only because of my success as a playwright that I’ve been able to get some movies made.
What were the other original films you wrote?
Oh you know…they were early efforts before I ever turned my attention to playwriting. They weren’t very good and aren’t worth talking about. (Laughs)
Was William Friedkin ever discussed as a possible director for August: Osage County? I enjoyed what John Wells did with the film, but you and Friedkin worked so well together before I was curious if he was ever in the discussion.
No he wasn’t. I don’t really know why that is. The Weinstein Company had the rights to the film and they hired John. I don’t really know why he wasn’t considered, you’d have to ask them. Certainly I enjoyed my collaborations with Bill and would love to have worked with Bill on this. But, I think Billy would say himself that August really wasn’t in his wheelhouse. It’s just not to Bill’s taste. I know he liked the film when he saw it, but it’s not really his thing as a filmmaker. So I don’t know why they didn’t go to him, but I’m not surprised that he didn’t direct it.
Have you two ever talked about doing an original project together?
Yeah, Billy and I have been kicking that around for a couple of years now because we’d like to work together again, but like I said I have no plays left that I would hand over for film adaptation. So we’ve talked about maybe doing a Western together. Bill Friedkin’s never made a Western and I think he should, so I’d like to help make that happen.
Have you ever written for yourself as an actor or have any interest in doing that?
No. I’ve never had any interest in that, which is weird because I like to do both so much. But I just don’t think I would be as good at either job if I was doing both at the same time. Orson Welles isn’t walking through the door any time soon and guys like that a very rare. I think something about doing both would make me very self-conscious. You know, they’re both hard. They’re both really hard in their own way, so to split your focus…my hat’s off to anyone who can do that. But for me, I’d prefer to keep them separate.
Finally, I have to ask: have you ever been contacted by KFC about Killer Joe?
When we were in London with Killer Joe they did in fact threaten a lawsuit. They were giving us free chicken from a store around the corner every night. But when they found out about the way the chicken was being used they threatened a lawsuit, which was such great publicity for us. It was in all of the London tabloids and the ticket sales went way up, so they immediately dropped it and I’ve never heard from them again.
