Bringing twists of ‘Eileen’ to life
Anne Hathaway, Thomasin Mckenzie and Southern California author Ottessa Moshfegh discuss making the Hitchcockian thriller
When Thomasin Mckenzie signed on for the title role of the new film “Eileen,” she hadn’t read the Ottessa Moshfegh novel on which it is based.
But when she did, Mckenzie says, it unlocked an even greater depth to her character that added to what screenwriters Moshfegh and Luke Goebel had built into the script of the psychological thriller, which is in theaters.
“I felt it was like it was almost as if I was playing a real-life person,” she says on a recent video call. “The book was a real person who I was able to ask any question I needed the answer to.
“It was all told from Eileen’s perspective, so it’s a window into her mind and in her existence,” Mckenzie says. “So I was so lucky to have the book, and to have Ottessa, who was a big part of making this film, as a resource.”
Anne Hathaway, who plays Rebecca, a glamorous older woman who ignites a dormant spark inside Eileen’s heart, says she felt the same way after reading the novel.
“I think what you said was so true about it just being a treasure trove,” she says in response to Mckenzie. “There was one line I really do wish I’d taken a look at before coming today, because I keep paraphrasing it.
“Eileen says of Rebecca, ‘If she sounds affected, it’s because she was; if she seems over the top, it’s because she was,’ ” Hathaway says. “And I felt so liberated by that. I was playing someone who was interested in starring in every room she walked into.”
In the film, which closely follows the plot of the novel, Eileen is so introverted she seems in danger of collapsing into herself, whether at home, where she looks after her alcoholic ex-cop father, or at work as a clerk in her Massachusetts town’s juvenile prison.
When Rebecca arrives at the prison as its new psychologist, Eileen is instantly drawn to her confidence and beauty. When Rebecca invites her for a drink after work, Eileen’s life starts to change, and the twists and turns of this early 1960s tale take off.
Neither Eileen nor Rebecca is a typical female character. Eileen is a particularly strange bird. The platinum-blond Rebecca is a sharper operator, but behind her flawless facade, cracks are hidden.
“A phrase I really dislike is ‘Love will make you do crazy things,’ ” Hathaway says of the pivotal point in the film. “I think that it’s disrespectful to love. I will say rage will make you do really crazy things.
“I think that we make the mistake when we assume that just because someone looks put together on the outside, that they don’t have a roiling underbelly.”
From book to film
For Moshfegh, “Eileen” was a success almost from the moment it arrived in bookstores in 2015. It won the Hemingway Foundation/pen Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award.
Film rights to the book sold quickly, with the strangeness of its main character offset by the twisty mysteries of the plot. Moshfegh has said it was inspired by her love of Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca.”
“I was pleased someone besides me could see the cinematic potential in the story, and I really wanted to see Eileen’s character onscreen,” Moshfegh says on a video call with Goebel, her co-writer and husband, and director William Oldroyd. “I was even happier when, I don’t know, seven years later, I got the option back and I was controlling (it) again.
“It was right around that time that William Oldroyd Zoomed me and said he’d read it, and asked if we wanted to work together,” she says. “It was a big yes, having some idea of what Will had in mind and knowing that we were on the same page.”
Oldroyd says he read Moshfegh’s second novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,’ in London at the start of the first pandemic lockdown.
“I loved Ottessa’s writing and thought I would read everything else she’d written, and so I did,” he says. “And when I read ‘Eileen,’ a picture started playing across my mind, these pictures that she had written, these vivid images.
“I’ve always loved noir, Hitchcock, (Patricia) Highsmith, those sorts of mystery stories,” he says. “I’ve also always been drawn to these prickly, thorny characters. People who may be a little on the outside, slightly odder than normal. And this character of Eileen, I just couldn’t stop thinking about her.”
Moshfegh says she knew right away that Oldroyd was the one to direct the film.
“What I can say is Luke and I got engaged after six weeks,” she says. “It was six long weeks. I already knew that we were going to end up together.
“You just kind of have a hunch, and it was the same kind of hunch with Will,” Moshfegh says. “He just immediately fit into the vision of Eileen that I’d always had, that Luke had. And when we started talking, it was just clear there was chemistry, and there was respect and understanding and excitement.”
Moshfegh and Goebel, who married in 2018, live and work together in their Pasadena home. Their first produced screenplay was the 2022 film “Causeway,” a revision of Elizabeth Sanders’ adaptation of her own short story, and it starred Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry, an Oscar nominee for best supporting actor.
“Eileen” is their second screenplay, and the couple is working on an adaptation of Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” as well as an original script that Oldroyd will direct.
“Without sounding too hokey or obvious, working with Ottessa is a dream,” Goebel says of their process. “She’s a formidable genius to work with, and I love being in her creative presence.
“And there’s really not a lot of boundaries,” he says. “Our work lives and our private life really isn’t separate. We really are in it, in a way sort of like method acting, but method writing.
“Everything we’re doing from what we dream, talk about the next morning to, you know, pretty much every waking hour together, we’re either directly talking about the script or working on other scripts, or we’re doing things that enter the feedback loop.”
Strangely reasonable characters
Like Oldroyd, Mckenzie and Hathaway say they were instantly attracted to the screenplay and the unusual characters it contained.
“That’s what drew me in,” Mckenzie says of Eileen’s oddness. “How unusual she is and how much of a rare opportunity it was to go so deep into somebody’s psyche and play someone who is so isolated and so obsessed, I suppose.”
Hathaway connected with similar depths within the character of Rebecca.
“I thought Rebecca was going to be such a fun character to play,” she says. “She was mysterious and alluring and vi- vacious. And had something in common with Eileen, which was the biggest yes for me. Which is that this is a story about what it takes to get out. What it takes to break out.”
Both Eileen and Rebecca are at a crossroads where the decisions they make will determine the lives they might lead, she says.
“Eileen is not, and actually even Rebecca, they’re not people who it’s a guarantee from the minute that they’re born that they’re going to wind up having some great destiny,” Hathaway says. “Rebecca certainly was born with privileges but she had to make a lot of things happen for herself.
“And Eileen is right at that point in her life where her life is either going to collapse on itself without ever having really bloomed, or she’s going to reach inside and find what it takes,” she says.
Oldroyd said the film was shot in two blocks of time. The first 10 days revolved around Mckenzie as Eileen and Shea Whigham as her father. The next 16 focused on Mckenzie and Hathaway.
“I think that actually helped,” he says. “Because we completely built Eileen’s world with her dad, and then into that world we dropped this alien creature of Rebecca. This person who’s going to completely change her life.”
Moshfegh says she was thrilled with the entire cast, which in addition to Mckenzie, Hathaway and Whigham included Marin Ireland as a mother whose teen son killed his father, and who features in a key scene in the film.
“It’s all a bit uncanny because they are exactly who I saw them as,” Moshfegh says. “Eileen, I mean, I swear to God, I think I must have dreamed Thomasin Mckenzie. She is so perfect in that role. And the chemistry with Anne Hathaway’s character was just exactly what the film needed.
“This larger-than-life sort of movie-star presence comes in and relights the room, and Eileen is sort of transfixed just like the rest of us,” she says.
Goebel says the characters of Eileen and Rebecca work so well because the film treats them as real people, not overthe-top caricatures.
“There’s a way in which the larger machine might not take characters like these seriously as reasonable characters,” he says. “We think these are reasonable characters. I think we treated them as reasonable and courageous people doing the work to try to improve the world that they see as operating against them and innocence.”
Hathaway says she was happy to make a morally challenging film about a difficult female character.
“How refreshing this book was to me,” Hathaway says. “I know it sounds really strange because so much of the writing is really grotesque. I don’t know. I felt really seen in Ottessa’s writing in ways that I don’t necessarily want to be seen. In ways that I wouldn’t have talked about or didn’t even know how to talk about.
“This is the story about what it takes for someone to get out,” she says. “Whether or not we like that story, and the particulars *of it, is kind of beside the point.”