Bombshell

BOMBSHELL DIRECTOR JAY Roach on the key moments of his Fox News sexualharassment drama.

It’s not a surprise that Bombshell starts with a disclaimer. After all, it’s based on a true story — the downfall of Fox News head Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), after many women accused him of sexual harassment and worse. But usually, “based on a true story” suffices. Bombshell’s disclaimer is much more elaborate, essentially because of the use of composite characters such as Margot Robbie’s Kayla Pospisil. “The disclaimer on any film should point to the fact that you should be sceptical, you should wonder how much of this is quote-unquote real, and we should talk about real and invented afterwards,” Roach says. It was also a legal requirement, given how many high-profile figures, from Megyn Kelly to Bill O’reilly, are portrayed in the film. “If that’s what it takes, as long as I can put it up front, I guess that’s okay,” adds Roach.

The film’s lead character is Fox News anchor Kelly, played with uncanny, prostheticsenhanced accuracy by Charlize Theron. And from the very beginning, we see Kelly in full presenter mode, breaking the fourth wall as she takes the audience on a tour of the Fox News headquarters. “We treat her as a kind of narrator for the early part of the film, but she’s fairly clearly an unreliable narrator,” says Roach, no stranger to the technique, as Austin Powers fans will attest. “She’s about selling the power of Fox, the mythical stature of Roger Ailes, the notion of this tower. It seemed right. It’s a news place, and it was an interesting way to set up a lot of what you needed to know in a very short time.”

In the film’s pivotal scene, Pospisil wrangles a meeting with Ailes in his office, only for it to turn into an insidious abuse of power on his part, as he bullies her into twirling for him, and then revealing her underwear. Robbie’s growing unease and Lithgow’s note-perfect lasciviousness combine for a truly unsettling experience. “To this day it devastates me,” admits Roach. The central dilemma: how do you stage a scene, in a drama about sexual harassment, while taking care of your actors? “It was so tough, because Margot was so connected to what that character was going through. We didn’t have to shoot many takes of it. And actually, I didn’t want to put John through it any more than I had to because he had to be such a soulless motherfucker. We shot it with three different cameras, and I operated the third camera, so we wouldn’t have to do separate takes for the wide shot.”

“It’s one of my favourite moments in the whole film,” says Roach of the scene where Pospisil,

anxious about a forthcoming ‘meeting’ with Ailes, gets into an elevator and finds herself sharing space with Kelly, on her way somewhere else, and Nicole Kidman’s Gretchen Carlson, an anchor about to be fired for rocking the boat (and the first to make accusations against Ailes). It’s also the only time that the film’s trio of major movie stars share screen time. “I always understood it was going to be an important moment,” Roach says.” They can’t talk in front of other people, because they’re always being surveilled. Ailes has created this weird cult of fear, right when women need each other.” Originally, it had been scripted that the three women would be alone, but Roach added background extras. “Now there’s double tension,” he says.

“It’s only a few seconds, but it’s gonna be a long ride.”

At one point in the movie, we see pictures of six women we haven’t met before, recounting stories of their ordeals at Ailes’ hands many years before. These women represent victims who came forward in real life, after Gretchen Carlson filed her claim. “Originally, we were going to try to interview the women,” says Roach of how this sequence evolved. “In the end, we decided to have people reading out their stories, like The Laramie Project or The Vagina Monologues. I thought, ‘We can use this segment to remind people what these women had been through decades earlier.’” Two of the women we can hear were actually victims of Ailes; the rest are actors of a kind, including John Lithgow’s wife, and a production assistant. The women in the pictures are also actors.

As the disgraced Ailes is ousted at Fox, and as the film comes to a close, Roach (and writer Charles Randolph, who also co-wrote the stylistically similar The Big Short) hands the narration torch to Pospisil, as she leaves Fox News for good. “It’s an unusual thing to ask the audience to shift points of view,” admits

Roach. “But it felt like handing off the narration and ending with Kayla, because she’s still got a chance to actually change something, was more effective. She became the soul at stake by the end.”

The film ends with Carlson signing a huge ($20 million) settlement with Fox, only to be told that as part of this resolution she’ll have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and will effectively be muzzled. “Maybe,” she replies, enigmatically, at the end of a film which has been telling her story. Though as Roach reveals, this wasn’t actually the original ending. “It ended with a montage of little moments in all the women’s stories, all the women who had experienced harassment,” he explains. “It was strong but it felt to me like I was trying to button the film into some kind of closure, when I wanted to leave it on open-ended outrage.”