In 1965, Edie Sedgwick left school in Cambridge and went to New York City. While there, she met Andy Warhol, became a cultural icon, and quickly succumbed to the temptations of fame and the indulgent excess that goes with it. The story of the film's production is almost as fascinating as the period of Edie's life it portrays.
"Even before we started shooting, the tabloid buzz had already killed us."
-director George Hickenlooper
I spoke with director George Hickenlooper last week about the film and the DVD coming out this Tuesday, which features a thoroughly reworked and enhanced cut of the movie. We talked about portions of the movie's history covered in various places, from the rumors and speculation to the final perspective he can now offer on the film in retrospect. There are mild to major spoilers throughout, so the short version is: go buy the DVD. A review of that will follow shortly. I would have included it here, but it's long as it stands.
The journey of Factory Girl was plagued by setback after setback, starting with the casting of the lead. When George first met Sienna Miller, he had no idea who she was.
GH: "All of a sudden, everyone's saying 'oh, you cast Jude Law's girlfriend because she's Jude Law's girlfriend?', which wasn't the case at all. I didn't know she was Jude Law's girlfriend when I auditioned her. I just knew was that she was this fun, talented actress from Keen Eddie.
"I didn't even read the tabloids until we got into making this movie, when I ended up in them. So, that's where it started and then Sienna had to drop out because of this play and then I cast Katie Holmes, and then a week after I cast her, she started dating Tom Cruise... I thought, 'wow, this is a great added bonus!' and then a week later (laughs) she drops out of the movie 'well, I guess not!' (laughs). Then I went back to Sienna, basically begging her 'hey, when your play's up, can you do this again?' and she was like 'sure!'
MC: "One of the things I think the film does and does well, I think, is put actors in roles, regardless of the size, that we don't often see them in, like Jimmy Fallon. I don't know if many people even caught Don Novello (Father Guido Sarducci) playing Hayden's character's manager. I mean Hayden himself, people know as the guy from the new Star Wars movies and that's it.
GH: "It's far more interesting to me to see people when they are... you know, a little bit broken and that goes for actors too, and I think that can really work into how you play a character. And I think there's no film it's more appropriate to do so in than Factory Girl, which is partly about how Andy Warhol worshipped the iconography of famous people. So, that's why I wanted to sort of pepper it with these faces that you knew but you hadn't seen them in this context, and I think you just have to go in there without that prejudice. Take Saturday Night Live out of your mind, take Star Wars out of your mind and look at these performances in a vacuum.
MC: "Hayden is a really fine actor, and I wish people would judge him on a more objective basis.
GH: "You know Star Wars is that huge monkey on his back. He didn't really have a director on that movie. I mean, George Lucas is a genius, but he's not really an auteur. He's not really an actor's director, that's not his strength. Hayden's a great actor, but he needs that direction like any other actor...I mean, Natalie Portman isn't even good in Star Wars.
MC: "A lot of people don't come off as good as they really are in those movies. Going back to Jimmy for a second, I particularly liked what you did with him in this picture because I thought when I saw him in Almost Famous, that was going to be the only time I'd get to see him do something other than what he was "typed" for.
GH: "He's a very good dramatic actor, he's a very good comedic actor, he's very versatile. I'm about to do this other picture, it's a thriller, and I'm hoping to cast him in that. It'd really be against type, he'd be the bad guy.
MC: "Please do. When he turns on Edie, it's vicious and cold. Completely unexpected based on what you've seen him do elsewhere.
GH: He's in this picture for Holly Wiersma (producer on Factory Girl) called Rocket and apparently he's quite good in it.
MC: "So before you started shooting you were set back just in casting Sienna, but then did you get pushed further back to work around her theatre schedule?
GH: "Well, we delayed the shooting initially because we still didn't have all of the money together. That was a long, long, ongoing process that is unfortunately what led us to Louisiana, because no one else was going to finance the movie.
The Grind
GH: "There was a gentleman's agreement that I would have a few days in New York to shoot, and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. My producer, Holly Wiersma, never really trusted them from the beginning, and one of the reasons she brought Harvey into the picture was they weren't keeping their word on a lot of things, and they basically just kind of hid from everyone. They hid from me, they hid from Holly, they hid from Harvey for three months during the summer.
"I was getting furious, because we were trying to get this film out before the end of the year, since we all thought Sienna deserved Oscar consideration. So I kind of took the bull by the horns and showed the picture to Jeff last August, under the condition that if he didn't like it he wouldn't write about it, and he really liked it and wrote that piece called "Derby Girl". That got everybody's attention. That's what suddenly got Harvey, but Harvey didn't have the negative, they hadn't finished turning the negative over to him yet...all kinds of details that I'm really not privy to...finally after a few weeks, LIFT started talking to Harvey again.
"By then I was saying "look, we've gotta get this thing done. We've gotta start shooting again in the next two weeks, because I'm not gonna have enough time in the cutting room to get this thing ready for a December qualifying run. [LIFT] were like "yeah, yeah, you don't know what you're talking about"--
MC: "They obviously didn't have any concept of the timeline movies are made on....
GH: "They had no idea what the process was like, and sure enough, I didn't wrap until December 11th. I had about four days to cut all this material. I literally should have taken all the dailies and put them in a blender and say, "okay, this is Factory Girl".
MC: "Which would've made it look like an actual Warhol film at that point. (laughs) It'd be six hours long...
GH: (laughs) "I mean, I had 30 new pages of material I shot and 35 pages transcribed of documentary footage I shot...over an hour, hour and a half of new material I had to cut in to a movie that was already 90 minutes long. Then balance it, and massage it, let it evolve...
The Big Push
The pressure was to get the movie out the door so they could meet the awards deadlines, but each day brought further and further diminishing returns.
MC: "So at the point it was screening....
GH: "BAFTA saw a different cut than the Hollywood Foreign Press saw, than what the National Board of Review saw, than the Academy saw...then even after we made the Academy cut ...this is something no one really knows, even after we were making the Academy screeners, we were still making changes. We knew if we had gotten nominated, we would be disqualifying ourselves. I've never actually told anyone that because we knew knew the film wasn't finished and you know...at some point it was just "pencils up", you know, this film has to be in theatres in two weeks, and...there's really nothing more you can do. The Academy screenings that happened, the run was projected on video with a temp mix. I mean, it was just crazy."
"Everybody saw radically different cuts....the rumors started compounding, because it was like "well this person's seen it, and I haven't seen it". When we had the L.A. Critics' screening, it was one version, and when it was time to show the N.Y. Critics, we pulled it. We didn't want to show them the same thing we showed the L.A. Critics, because we had another 48 hours to make it that much better. We were saying it was incrementally 'just so' much better based on the number of hours we had to work on it.
MC: "So you could fly back and forth to each coasts to see the editing process on the movie...
GH: "It's the closest I've ever been to live television."
Death and Rebirth
With screenings being pulled left and right, and the film's continued editing after most contenders had long since locked final cuts, Factory Girl looked more and more like a trainwreck to be avoided or ignored. Many critics would not see past the controversy swirling around it and used the words "troubled" and "rough" in their reviews, relying on the instinct to pounce at any sign of weakness.
The movie opened and made few waves, and come nomination time, Sienna had been out of the running for weeks thanks to the negative buzz. She recently appeared on Letterman in conjunction with promoting Interview with Steve Buscemi. Referring to playing Edie while showing a tattoo, I could swear I detected a hint of disappointment: most people in the audience didn't know what she was talking about. She gave one of the great performances of her or anyone's lifetime, and she looked resigned that no one would ever see it (we'l see about that).
I loved so many parts of the movie, I assumed I would have to wait years to see a director's cut where George had the time to breathe in composing the final film.
I first got in touch with George thanks to Jeff Wells, who I'd asked about finding a way to see the "Derby Girl Cut", wondering what else was out there. After an introduction, George agreed to let me see what came before the mad rush of 2006. There were new chunks of scenes and longer takes that were nowhere in the then-final cut.
Shortly thereafter, he let me know he would soon have big news.
GH: "Then what happened was in March, Harvey called me up...I had no idea why. I thought he was going to grumble about the movie not performing well, and he basically said 'hey look we just didn't have the time to get this right, why don't you go back in the cutting room' and he hooked me up with Kevin Tent who had been one of the editors, up in New York. Kevin, you may know, cut Sideways, About Schmidt...basically everything Alexander Payne's done. We spent about a week in a cutting room here in L.A. just massaging the film, and basically...it's not exactly a director's cut, but it's basically what I would have done if I'd had another month in the cutting room.
MC: "Given the footage you had--
GH: "Yeah, and I liked a lot of the footage we had, I really did, and it's pretty close to what the movie would have been, because the cut you saw didn't even take into consideration a lot of New York footage, because we hadn't shot it yet by the time I put that one together [in August].
MC: "There were little bits...for example, Mary-Kate Olsen's brief appearance wasn't in the theatrical cut.
GH: "It is restored in the new cut. In fact, you're going to see a lot of what we did in that cut on the DVD, and then you're gonna see a lot of stuff you've never seen at all.
MC: "Among the many things Page Six and others took to the bank, the sex scene bears mentioning. Between the Derby Cut and the Theatrical Cut, one of the major differences I saw was there in particular.
GH: "What happened there was in the original version I was shooting, Hayden didn't want to take his clothes off. I mean, it was January, it was freezing outside. He was like "look, it's obvious it's cold outside, you can see our breath...we're not gonna fuck with all our clothes off outside, it doesn't make sense". He and Sienna felt they did it in a way that was convincing and real in the context of the weather conditions, and I totally signed off on it. There was a sweetness to it and an innocence to it.
"Then Harvey's view was that the scene needed to be much more intimate and much more sexual, and I can see that. I like the sex scene as it stands now. I like the old one too, but they happen at different points in the film now. The first one happened right after the conversation on the pier. the much more intimate one happens later after they've gone into the cabin. I think what's nice about the new sex scene is that it happens after her monologue about Minty and Bobby dying while they're sitting near the fireplace, and it serves as a kind of healing process after the loss of her brothers, whereas before it was more of a throwaway.
MC: "Something I really liked was her delivery in the new cut... it didn't feel actor-ly, it was just spilling out of her head and she was letting herself become really vulnerable with this guy.
GH: "I agree completely."
The Love Story
MC: "Another thing I wanted to get into was how Edie and Andy interact, and whether there's more in there."
GH: "There is."
MC: "I felt like the theatrical cut...well, he could have come off to some as cold and unsympathetic."
GH: "Yeah, I could go off for an hour on that. I can say that...I never thought of Andy Warhol in iconic terms. There are two ways to go in making a biopic: if you approach your subjects iconically, you come at it from the outside in, or, you try to dig down underneath the iconography to the human being below. I was most interested in making a very visceral film that looked at a concentrated period in Andy's life, this point where he was very vulnerable to a woman.
"A gay man who would put himself on the line for his love of this straight woman. The gay man who is completely beaten up by his mother emotionally about getting married to a woman and having children, and finally the man who became so bitterly angry and viciously jealous when this woman turned to another man and being abandoned. I mean, he was in love with her, it was the one heterosexual relationship that he had, but he couldn't consummate because that wasn't his sexuality.
"I wanted the film to feel like you were present...that you were there at that moment in Warhol's life where he wasn't looked up to and was still seen as a very minor artist. He was extremely petty and small-minded, and Edie elevated his career and lent a public persona to him.
"A lot of critics beat me up over that, but a lot of critics don't do their homework and just know Andy Warhol as the second most important artist of the 20th Century, and when they see this petulant child, it doesn't measure up. They're not looking at him contextually at that point in his life. It's almost like critics were expecting this cookie cutter presentation of "look at me, I'm Andy Warhol, the second-most important artist of the 20th Century".
"I mean, if you look at I Shot Andy Warhol or Basquiat ...those performances are good, but the characters are written like caricatures. I didn't want Warhol to be a caricature. I knew it'd be controversial and I knew I'd get beaten up over it, and I did. You know, fuck 'em. They're wrong. you can quote me on that
MC: "I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier in regards to the casting: either you go the way everyone says you should do it, or you do it the best way for the material. What I couldn't agree with in the reviews I was reading was how all these people were seeing Andy as so cold. I can certainly wrap my head around how they wold perceive him as this detached character the way the theatrical cut portrayed him, but maybe there was some more stuff you didn't get in on the first pass, I dunno---
GH: "No, no, you're right on the money, totally, and Guy Pearce would love you for saying that, because you know, Warhol wasn't cold and mean, he was hurt. He was very vunerable, and what he did was detach himself because he didn't know how to reconcile his feelings. The New York Times said I put it in Freudian terms, and I do."
MC: "That was the relationship."
GH: "Freud was right. Andy was abandoned by his mother, she didn't accept him on his sexual terms, he had problems with intimacy because of that, and when he got hurt, he just removed itself. It's very clear at the end Andy did feel remorse for Edie. Bridget Berlin played a phone call for me that she recorded between her and Andy around 1969 when Edie was wandering around New York strung out on heroin, and Bridget said "you should do something" and Andy said "she was so beautiful, why would someone so beautiful want to do that to themself?" We took that phone call, and it became the second confessional.
"And it's funny, now I'm remembering, that earlier cut I showed Jeff, the one you saw, Guy and I were worried Andy was coming off cold, and he wasn't being represented the way we intended and that's why we shot that second confessional scene there at the end, which does humanize him, and it's based on a real phone call."
MC: "The scene where Andy brings Edie home to mom, that's what sympathizes him for me, where this woman has mentally blocked herself from seeing anything other than this girl being who Andy's going to marry."
GH: "Edie lived in such fear of abandonment, that it was important to her for everyone to get along. That was part of her naivete, that she thought everybody could just be together and get along. I've been in that situation myself, as the child of divorced parents. That's how Edie and Andy could connect, they were this sort of yin and yang.
"They both had different relationships with their parents, but they fit perfectly as opposites because they were both searching for the same thing. then again, they were destined to abandon each other because that's how the cycle works, it's what they're used to on a primal level."
The Final Product
GH: "You know that additional stuff with the psychiatrist? Sienna read all of that off cue cards. It was the last day of shooting...we were so under the gun. I had been up for 24 hours writing new material. She literally sat down in makeup watching the assistant director write her lines on cue cards because she didn't have time to memorize any of it."
Watching the movie, you have no trouble believing she could do something like that. Sienna Miller is no mere starlet, she's here to stay. For that matter, Guy Pearce is the real definition of a leading man: the guy who does his job better than everyone else but doesn't rub it in their faces.
We did the interview contained in this piece before I'd seen the new cut, and after seeing it, I feel like I've seen the whole thing for the first time. Whether you're a moviegoer who saw the film in its theatrical run or a critic who saw one of myriad awards season cuts, this is another animal entirely. Many portions of the film exist in whichever version you've seen, but this is how they fit together properly.
The only version on DVD is the new Unrated Cut. The Theatrical Cut is nowhere to be found, and if it were my first time watching the film I'd prefer to not know it existed in the first place. There are a couple small things I still miss from old versions of the film, but the other changes more than make up for them. It isn't often that the best "extra feature" on a DVD is the film itself, but that's certainly the case here. Don't get me wrong, the extras are excellent, rounding out a disc that is worth buying day-and-date at full price.
The reason I've been following this movie & story in particular over the last four months (while uprooting my life in the process) is that even though I recommend countless movies each year to friends and acquiantances, there aren't many that capture this much of my attention. I think this is an Important Film as a learning tool for aspiring directors and actors, and as a sterling example of How to Do a Biopic Right, among other things.
I didn't pursue this because Jeff Wells wrote about liking it and he runs the site, or because I'm friends with anyone involved in making the film (I'm no one). I went after what I knew deep down was a good movie waiting for the right time to be seen. Four months ago I thought I'd get a sort of anthropological look at how the film fell apart and what it might have been, and I'm glad to have been wrong.
What has emerged at the end of nearly two years of on-again, off-again shooting, rewriting, and re-editing is one of the best films of 2007, regardless of how many versions there have been or how it was painted, cornered, and killed by TV, online, and printed press. If you believe in real cinematic art, this will be one of the few movies that does it right this year.