In Wiig, Piven hits lottery
The “me” in Shira Piven’s sophomore feature “Welcome to Me” is Alice Klieg (Kristen Wiig), a woman afflicted with borderline personality disorder who wins big in the California lottery and uses the money to finance her own TV show. Klieg is a huge fan of Oprah Winfrey, and she takes inspiration from the aspects of Winfrey’s old show in which the talk-show queen doled out life lessons in an effort to help people help themselves.
But Alice is so self-involved that it becomes all about her, from her arrival onstage in a swan boat to the re-enactments she stages to settle scores with people in her life. The film is dark and funny and high-wire act for actor and director to negotiate in order that the audience laugh with and not at Alice.
Meeting of illnesses
“I sometimes like to say Kristen’s is a death-defying performance,” says Piven during a recent phone call. “What I love about the story is it’s a meeting of mental illness with our cultural illness. I feel like more than the mental illness piece of it, it illuminates something about our cultural mental illness with reality TV, with putting people in very intense emotional circumstances like this crazy show ‘Married at First Sight’ or even shows like ‘Real World’ or ‘Jersey Shore,’ there’s a level of exploitation in the system and there’s also a level of narcissism that feeds off of that.
“There’s that narcissistic need to be televised, as they say about Alice at one point, and we all know that’s going on culturally, there’s that element in all of us that wants to be televised, and there’s something in the system that’s ready to take advantage of that. To me, that’s a pretty exciting thing to get at. What I think is extraordinary about Elliot Laurence’s script, is that he really gets to the heart of that and illuminates it.”
Showbiz family
Piven, 53, older sister of actor Jeremy and wife of filmmaker Adam McKay (“Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” “Step Brothers”), was born with greasepaint in her veins as the daughter of legendary Chicago actors and acting teachers Byrne Piven and Joyce Hiller Piven. After getting her start as an actor, she turned to directing for the theater.
In 2003, she directed a Water Theatre Company production of “Death of a Judge” that combined theater with film. She made her feature directorial debut in 2011 with the comedy “Fully Loaded,” adapting a show she originally co-wrote and directed for the stage. Though relatively new to film, she is a seasoned theater director with over 20 productions under her belt. When she read “Welcome to Me,” she sensed that she’d struck gold.
“What we fell in love with in the script is that it’s dark and unflinching, and in the process, it’s funny,” Piven says. “I have a really strong connection with the script, and I could feel the tone right away. It was kind of the heart of what I fell in love with about it.
“The great thing is that Kristen, when she first read the script, had a similar reaction to the script and wanted to take a similar approach to what I already had in mind, which was a miracle to me,” she adds. “We both felt that this was a real woman in a real circumstance and the humor comes out of the truth of the situation. We both felt that the moment we try to ham it up in any way, it’s all going to fall apart.”
Wiig was always Piven’s first choice to play Alice. Her career’s high profile would certainly give the project a boost, and more than that, Piven was convinced that Wiig would connect with the role. But when considering Alice as a character, Piven turned to another actress for inspiration, Joan Cusack. The women are lifelong friends and Cusack even appears in “Welcome to Me” as Alice’s sardonic, much put-upon director. When Pi- ven considered what tone Alice should take, Cusack was her muse.
“I feel that Joan has this amazing quality to be really, really, really funny naturally, but then she has a really vulnerable side to her,” Piven says. “People don’t get to see it that often, but when you do, it’s really powerful. So Joan was in my mind a lot when I was rewriting the script with Elliot.”
Films of the ’70s
Also, in Piven’s head were films of the ’70s, which she describes as having depth, texture, and even, she jokes, a smell to them. “Welcome to Me” takes place in the here and now, but she wanted it to have a certain kind of timeless feel. She shot in the area around Palm Desert and describes small towns such as Banning as looking much the same way as they probably did 50 years ago. That sense of being frozen in time extends even to the studio where Alice shoots her show and the show itself.
“Music-wise, we ended up imitating a lot of old bad TV music. I think we were inspired by an old theme from Sally Jessy Raphael and those old ’70s TV shows to create the
show-within-the-show music,” says Piven. “We have to get into Alice’s head. What music would she choose? What would the sets look like? It’s a little bit like she’s putting on a school play. That’s her frame of reference. She doesn’t have a very sophisticated reference of how she’s going to stage things.”
After a screening of “Welcome to Me” at the Vancouver International Film Festival, a researcher in borderline personality disorder complimented Piven on how the film treats Alice and her condition. Piven’s own therapist has given his seal of approval to the film.
Endorsements
Most recently, a group of women from an association that promotes public awareness of borderline personality disorder gave “Welcome to Me” their thumbs up. Those professional endorsements mean the world to Piven for their reassurance that she, Wiig and Laurence have done right by Alice.
“It was extremely important to me and to Elliot Laurence to be respectful of this woman with borderline personality disorder,” she says. “He is definitely irreverent, and we would definitely laugh about this woman, Alice, and the crazy things that she does. But we were never laughing at her illness. To me, we are also laughing with her and laughing at the absurdity of life as opposed to ever laughing at her.