INTERVIEWS

Zipper: Writing About Adultery

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By Ramona Zacharias.

Mora Stephens and Joel Viertel

Mora Stephens and Joel Viertel

Mora Stephens and her husband Joel Viertel have worn many hats in the entertainment industry. Both have multiple writing, directing and producing credits to their names and are seasoned in different aspects of film and television production.

And they love to write together. Their latest film, Zipper, was an official selection of this year’s Sundance Film Festival and stars Patrick Wilson as federal prosecutor Sam Ellis who falls victim to the dreaded “zipper problem” and finds himself first tempted by, and soon after addicted to, a string of high class escorts and the services they provide.

Written by Mora and Joel, directed by Mora and produced by Joel, Zipper was a real passion project for the couple and took some six years to realize. But meeting each obstacle head on with renewed dedication to a story they believed in, Mora and Joel’s persistence paid off when they acquired a dream cast (which, in addition to Wilson, includes Lena Headey, Ray Winstone and Richard Dreyfuss) and ultimately, a theatrical release.

I recently chatted with Mora and Joel about what it’s like to write about adultery as a married couple, what challenges they encountered in getting Zipper filmed, how they stuck it out, and what they’ve learned about screenwriting along the way.

Patrick Wilson as Sam Ellis, Kelton DuMont as James Ellis, and Lena Headey as Jeannie Ellis in Zipper

Patrick Wilson as Sam Ellis, Kelton DuMont as James Ellis, and Lena Headey as Jeannie Ellis in Zipper

Tell me about writing as a husband and wife team, but particularly on the topic of infidelity. Was it something you had fun with? Did you learn anything new about each other through this process?

Mora: Actually it was a fun process – I love writing with Joel. We’ve long been collaborators, having been married for 13 years and talked about stories since we were teenagers growing up in New York. So it’s fun to collaborate with him, and particularly on this project, where I wanted to take the story of a politician and sex scandal, but approach it from a place of empathy and curiosity – to really get inside the character’s head. I needed Joel’s help to get inside a man’s head and unravel the mystery for myself! We had a lot of fun working on the subject along the way.

Joel:   Mora and I have collaborated on a number of projects, and the material almost always involves a couple at the center of it. But on every project, whoever is the director of it has the final word. So there is a structure to it and somebody has veto power. But I view it as my job in writing a script like this to be totally honest about how the male mind works – for better or worse and whether it’s ugly or not. And nobody gets offended by that. I can say “well, here’s how we think” and that’s just part of the process. Mora’s not one to get all up in arms about it, and that’s one of the reasons why we’re able to write a script like this together. I can be totally up front about how the thought process works and we just put it in the script and keep going.

Lena Headey and Mora Stephens on set of Zipper

Mora Stephens on set of Zipper

Films about infidelity are quite common – films in which the protagonist is unfaithful through his use of an escort service are perhaps less so. It obviously fits with Sam’s character and career path, but did that specific part of the story allow you to go to some new territory in terms of both plot and character development?

Mora: It was important to me that it be escorts and not a mistress because I wanted to focus specifically on the “politician zipper problem”. And I thought of it as a story of a man versus himself – he is both the hero and the antagonist. He’s his own villain. I didn’t want it to be a triangle love story by having it be a story of adultery with a mistress – then it does become about “who is that third character”. I wanted it to be all these different women because it really is about him at the end of the day. Likewise, it was important to me that the wife be a really strong character and a real partner to Sam and that we not lay any of the blame at her feet. In looking at other films about adultery, it’s too easily justified why the husband or wife walks out the door. “She didn’t have time for him” or “she never had time for sex” or those types of reasons. Lena Headey plays her as very strong and sexy and they have a great sex life; they’re best friends and partners and she’s a really dynamic person. So it’s really about what’s going on within him.

One of the inspirations for the film was how fascinated I was by the ways in which men and women were viewing political scandals differently. There’s a woman that we know whose own life had been affected by an affair with her marriage ultimately ending. Yet when she heard about the Eliot Spitzer scandal, her first reaction was to say “why not just have an affair?” Everyone has an opinion about it, but they’re all different.

Joel:   The desire was for it to be about a politician who has a family that appears perfect, but he’s drawn away and finds this part of himself that he didn’t know he had. The minute it’s an affair, it stops being about that and becomes about the affair that he’s having. As opposed to the notion of him having to deal with what made him want to step away from his family. It keeps the focus on the family and on him – the escorts just come and go. I think that that’s adhering to the truth; certainly looking at Spitzer, it wasn’t about anyone specific, to our knowledge; it was about doing something that was naughty. So the story was really more focused that way – his psychology and the biology of his sex drive rather than the emotional entanglements of a person you fall in love with. Which is a completely different part of your brain.

Mora: Those were our initial jumping off points. I wanted the character of Sam to feel as real as possible but to be his own character that was both from what Joel and I created on the page and what Patrick Wilson brought to the character. He’s not some fictionalized version of Spitzer; from the time we started writing the story to now, there’s basically been a new scandal every month! So there’s been a lot of research material available, from all points of view – from political wives, from mistresses who’ve written books, assistants… there was lots of juicy research available that informed the script and were things that I talked to Patrick about.

In terms of trying to make the script feel real and relatable, it’s fun to take a character who feels as completely different from myself as possible and put myself in his shoes at the very beginning of where it could have all started. So another thing I was working with was wanting to look at the early stages of addiction and where that comes from. I’m the daughter of a recovering alcoholic and both my parents were artists – my dad was a writer who has written quite eloquently about alcoholism and he’s been sober for many years. I remember as a child being fascinated by how it changes the way your brain works and the way your children are as well. That was an origin for Sam – that he has this potential within him. In the story, his mother is an alcoholic and he’s always been repressing this part of himself and is afraid of it. But there are little clues about it: the porn addiction, the little white lies… he’s been following this very straight path but there’s always been this part of him that could lead there. That was a way to take a character that feels very different from myself and bring him to a place where I could understand where he was coming from.

Patrick Wilson as Sam Ellis in Zipper

Patrick Wilson as Sam Ellis in Zipper

Did you “like” his character? Was he created such that the audience could at least identify with him?

Mora: I did approach it from a place of empathy, as did Patrick. But I’m also testing those limits by showing all the very bad things that he does! He does some really awful things and I don’t condone any of them. In talking to audiences after test screenings and after Sundance, I think you can enjoy the film without walking away from it liking him. I’m hoping it plants the seeds for people to have very different emotional reactions to the ending and for them to go out into the night and talk about them. Some women completely love him and understand him and want to unlock the mystery!

Joel:   I think the goal was to make him feel as close to a real person as we could, and dynamic that way rather than “likable”. The idea was to capture elements of real people so that you could say “Well, he may or may not be my kind of person, but he feels real… so to see him go through this is interesting”. Because paired with that, the “what if” of the movie is hopefully interesting in and of itself. You can watch the rendering of a real person going down this rabbit hole and you can go with him, reserving your right to have your own opinions about him along the way… which may change over time.

I understand that this project was a few years in the making. What were some of the challenges you encountered and how did you keep pushing forward to see the film realized?

Mora: Well, you never set out thinking it’s going to take six years! Movies are really hard, but sadly there are even more challenges involved in getting a movie with a woman director financed. I’m hopeful that things are changing. But along the way it meant, first and foremost, to have Joel’s support through all of it. That was tremendous. And you just have to keep picking yourself up again… like pushing a rock up a hill!

But we also had great allies from very early on. With the first draft of the script, Darren Aronofsky, Mark Heyman and Scott Franklin of Protozoa Pictures came aboard and Joel and I did about a year of development with them. Just rewriting the script over and over and over again – with Darren’s notes, with Mark’s notes. That was really tremendously helpful.

Finding the right cast took time and then finding the money for the movie was the longest stretch. But once it all came together, then it was very fast. The waiting was the most painful part.

Joel:   All independent films are very hard to make, and it’s harder if you’re not making a straight genre film. The only film that we made very quickly was one that was a thriller. People can wrap their minds around straight thriller as a commodity in the marketplace. But anything that’s not that, or a horror movie, is much harder for people to embrace. And so you know when you set out to make a film like this one that it’s going to be a difficult process.

The ones that do get made, I think get made because people never give up on them. They just keep pushing and pushing and pushing and eventually they find that one version of the movie that can happen, and that’s the version that they make. I think the trick is to not compromise on anything along the way that’s actually going to damage the product. That’s the hard part. There are shortcuts; if you do this or that, or cut this bit of the story or whatever… or cast a huge actor who’s totally wrong for the movie. It would be a quicker path to production. But, as we’ve learned, if you do that because you’re so desperate to get into production, well once you’re in production you’re now making a movie and you can’t make it good.

So the trick is really to stick to the things that you believe will make it good – not sacrificing those while still pushing forward and trying to get the movie made. There was pretty much nothing on this movie that we felt like we sacrificed on. We knew that if we wanted to make the version of this movie that we thought would be worth making, it would take a long time and require a lot of willpower. And that’s exactly how it went.

Patrick Wilson as Sam Ellis and Dianna Agron as Dalia in Zipper

Patrick Wilson as Sam Ellis and Dianna Agron as Dalia in Zipper

Having both worked in the industry for a number of years, and in many different roles, is there any advice that you could give to our readers?

Mora: I taught screenwriting at NYU Graduate Film during one of the many years we were making Zipper! One of the things I always encouraged my students to do was to just read as many screenplays as possible. That was one thing I wound up doing outside of NYU – it was back in the day when you could buy scripts in bookstores and on the street. Now you can find pretty much anything just by searching for it on the web.

The Mini Movie Method, by Chris Soth

Million-Dollar Screenwriting: The Mini Movie Method, by Chris Soth

Joel: In terms of our process, we use a method called sequencing, which we learned from a guy named Chris Soth. It’s now called the Mini Movie Method, but when he taught it to us, it was called sequencing. We’ve used that ever since – it’s great and I can highly recommend that. I think the first seminar was me, Mora and Chris sitting outside Coffee Bean on Santa Monica Boulevard!

Mora: But I think the key – particularly for people collaborating with other writers – is that the structure of a screenplay is very much like the dinosaur bones. It’s important to get the structure right first. We do a lot of work before we actually sit down to a blank page, just figuring out all the beats of the story. So the entire structure is there. We also do a lot of character work, which not only informs the screenplay but is also something I come back to later on with the director’s hat. Going back to my early notes on a character’s backstory and biography – that can be helpful in terms of just finding a couple of facts or something that might be useful. Or putting something into the screenplay that may inform a performance.

Joel:   Thinking on the somewhat writerly side of it, but equally on the “producerly” side, the real first thing you have to do as a screenwriter is you have to choose what you’re going to write. That’s a very tricky art. I would say there are two schools of thought: one is that you write something because you love it and you think it’s a great story. The other is that you have to pay a lot of attention to the industry and figure out what story is worth your time writing. Because there are some stories that might be great, but they would be so expensive compared to what they would be worth that they could never get made. Maybe write that for yourself for fun, or as a sample.

But I think the really good screenwriters, the ones who go on and on, have a sixth sense about what’s going to fit into the landscape of what movies are being made now. What’s not going to feel like pandering, and is going to be something original, but also that is worth what it costs to make. And I think that’s the hardest thing for a writer to assess… to look at the story you want to tell and say: “Is this an expensive story? Is it an inexpensive story? Can this get movie stars or not movie stars? Is this a studio project or an independent project? What would it cost and what, at the end of the day, is the film worth in the marketplace? Is it going to be a big deal or a tiny deal, and does the budget match that?” Because if the calculation on that is completely wrong, you may write a wonderful script but it will be very hard to get made. It’s a very difficult calculation to make, but I think it’s one that’s worth trying to do before you take the time and give all the blood, sweat and tears it takes to write a script. Make sure that you have a sense of how and why that script could make its way through the system. Because if you can’t see that pathway for how it’s going to get through on basically its cost and value, it likely won’t, no matter how good it is. That’s the first thing I think a writer has to do, is make an assessment of the feasibility of writing a script.

Mora: But what will also make it worth making is if it’s an original idea. Find the thing that you’re so passionate about that you can be working on it for six years and go through a million rewrites. That you can pick yourself up again each day and rededicate yourself to telling that story. So you need to have the practical sense of how you’re going to make that movie but also involve the part of you that’s completely dedicated to it.

Joel: I think Zipper is a really good example of all of those things. It wasn’t particularly expensive – there were no gunfights or car chases. But it felt like a topic that kept coming up over and over, and one of those issues that would be relevant at any time. It also felt like it had all the various aspects that would appeal to both actors and financiers. It had enough elements in it to make it a film that could get made. And it was about an issue that Mora and I were interested in and had a lot to say about, so we were passionate about it from the get-go.

It still took six years to make but we could endlessly push on it because we believed in it and because it wasn’t so expensive. If you write a $50 million movie and no one sees the benefit of it, you could spend six years and you’ll never get anywhere. This was very close and we finally pushed it over, but I think it was because that calculation was pretty accurate from the beginning, and because it was something that we cared about.

As for development, I would only say, “Only address a note if you agree with it or you hear it twice”. That’s always been my rule and I stand by it!

Zipper is released on DVD and Blu-ray on September 29th.

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Movie aficionado, television devotee, music disciple, world traveller. Based in Toronto, Canada.

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