Anne Hathaway, left, and Thomas McKenzie, cast members in ‘Eileen,’ pose together at the film’s premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival | Photo Credit: Chris Pizzello
Eileen, the title character of Otessa Moshfegh’s debut novel, is an awkward young woman with a vivid, sensual and sometimes dangerous imagination.
Her real life, however, is anything but: she takes a mind-numbing desk job as a secretary at a boy’s prison in Massachusetts in 1964 and is home to a sadistic, cruel father who has starved himself to death. Seems satisfied to get off the pier. She’s hopelessly lonely and a little bitter—that is, until the arrival of a glamorous new employee, Rebecca St. John, a Hitchcock blonde with a doctorate from Harvard, a taste for martinis, and a feisty Mae West confidence.
The moody, noirish film adaptation of “Eileen” debuted Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival, with New Zealand actor Thomasin McKenzie playing Eileen and Anne Hathaway as the enigmatic Rebecca.
As Moshfegh said in an interview on Saturday in Park City, “Rebecca kind of sweeps in and takes away Eileen and the audience which is really sticky.”
Moshfegh helped adapt his novel for the screen. Before work began on the script, she, her husband Luke Goebel, and director William Oldroyd, along with Florence Pugh, settled on an “eerily perfect shared vision” steeped in the genre behind the terrifying “Lady Macbeth” but with a contemporary character lens. reversed with
Although she knew the story and characters by heart, when she and Goebel began writing the screenplay, new dimensions suddenly opened up in characters such as Eileen’s father Jimmy, played by Shea Whigham. The actors then added their dimensions.
Oldroyd said, “I knew that if it was made into a movie, it would attract great actors because they would love to play these roles.” “And I haven’t met an actor who is as emotionally available and honest as Thomasin.”
As Eileen, Mackenzie had to do much of the heavy lifting in translating the largely first-person novel into a performance that was not aided by an internal monologue or exposition.
“It’s such an excellent first person in the novel. That’s why adaptations of novels become so difficult. But that’s just in the face of it,” Goebel said. “There were so many great actors who auditioned for the part . But there was just the seriousness of this character in his bones. It would be hard for me to say whether something is lost between the novel and his expressions, which are incredible.
MacKenzie came across as a fan of Moshfegh, having already read “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” and then “Eileen” and empathizing deeply with the character’s longing and loneliness. She dreams of a bigger life, the possibilities of which open up to her as Rebecca.
McKenzie said, “I was very, very fortunate that I had the book available to work from.” “His writing goes very deep into that and into the character’s inner monologue. And that was just gold for me because it gave me so much material to work with to really understand what was on Eileen’s mind. I think I’ve always been a bit of a static actor and these days I’m trying to feel a bit more fluid and a bit more comfortable being a bit bigger. But playing Eileen in this situation really worked out because she’s such an observer and I think she’s afraid to make any big moves.
Hathaway, on the other hand, needed to go big to play Rebecca, whose name is a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of the book by Daphne du Maurier. Moshfegh wanted her to be larger than life in the film as well.
“Eileen” cast member Anne Hathaway faces the press line at the premiere of the film at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Photo Credit: Chris Pizzello
Hathaway said, “To me, Rebecca represents someone who is unquestionably brilliant, living at a moment in history where it is very dangerous to be openly a brilliant woman.” “How were we going to kind of figure out how a fabulous woman would make herself feel safe and empowered in that time? That’s where a lot of the glamor comes in because she’s able to allow people to think what they want while keeping her very, very deep self, private.
“For me, it’s a movie about triggers,” Hathaway said. “Throughout the film, that inner life balloons, it gets triggered and it comes out with some extreme consequences.”
Due to COVID-19 protocols, Moshfegh and Goebel were unable to visit the set during filming, but they did visit Eileen’s home the day before. It was a transportive experience.
“It was like walking into my imagination,” Moshfegh said.
“Eileen,” which is currently looking for a distributor, proved to be a freeing experience for all — for the actors to stretch and play, for Moshfegh to let go of the novel and let it be something else, for Oldroyd Freedom to create exactly what he wanted without interference. This was true freedom, he said.
During a climactic scene, Hathaway also had an out-of-body experience.
Hathaway said, “I had a moment where from within the scene, I left my body and saw it as an audience member and walked away, I’ve never seen this movie before.” “Like, this is something brand new.”