Frida: Interview

Review by Clint Morris

Interview with Frida scribe, Diane Lake

In Frida - opening in Australian Cinemas on Boxing Day 2002 - Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina bring to life acclaimed painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, two of the most prolific names in Mexican history.

For a period just under 20 years, Kahlo and Rivera were at the center of an international maelstrom of artists, intellectuals and radicals seeking to revolutionise government and culture. Their tempestuous love affair, landmark journeys to Australia and larger than life personalities made them not only controversial, but also iconic.

Diane Lake was one half the team who bought the story to life on screen and, as the accomplished screenwriter tells Clint Morris, it took a lot more than reading a brief bio...

Salma Hayek is brilliant in Frida

"I read everything I could get my hands on. There were sessions Frida had with a psychiatrist, tapes of her conversations with a journalist, and so much published material as well.

"Of course, Hayden Herrera's book was the touchstone. It's an amazingly comprehensive biography", explains Lake.

"But the best research was visiting Mexico City. Luckily, the studio agreed to send me. And one of the producers, Roberto Sneider, made sure I saw all the important locations that would help me get the flavor of Frida's life.

"I'm a big believer in going to locations. You stand in a square that Frida and Diego might have walked in, for example, and you see what they might have seen, and you try to feel what they would have felt. You see them walking and you become them walking... they come alive to you, and I think that shows on the screen."

Not surprisingly, Lake says it was difficult trying to condense two important lives into one film. "It was torture. Absolute torture - especially someone's life as rich and varied as Frida's."

Lake says stars; Hayek (From Dusk Till Dawn) and Molina (Boogie Nights) were the perfect choices for the titular roles. "Salma, of course, is wonderful. Just perfect. But the tough role to me was Diego's. I felt it as I was writing. I mean, women found him devastating, but he weighted 300 pounds and wasn't by any interpretation of the term, handsome.

"The movies are full of beautiful people in love, not people like Diego. (Don't get me wrong, I would love it if casting was more 'alternative'... but we're talking Hollywood here.) So I thought the casting of that role was absolutely crucial for the success of the film.

You had to believe Frida could love this 'toad' of a man, as she called him. And Alfred Molina's performance is a revelation. As anyone who's really been in love knows, it all comes from the inside... From someplace behind the eyes, someplace deep in your soul. And Molina communicates that. He is everything I could have hoped for in that part."

Lake might never have had the chance to write the screenplay, because, as she explains, film scribing was a secondary career choice. "Well, there I am, teaching at Marist College, on the banks of the Hudson Valley in New York, and out my classroom window I see boats and barges head up and down the river.

"And in the classroom students who are also ready to sail away into the world surrounding me. I just kept getting internal--and external--signals that perhaps I had another journey to take, in addition to teaching. I loved teaching and very much hope to teach again if the right situation presents itself.

"But I just decided to risk going for the dream. And the dream, a dream by the way that I had hardly let myself admit to, was that I had something to say..."

"So I left academia. And for five years I did communication consulting for companies like IBM, giving seminars, that sort of thing -- freelance work that would let me work just 2 or 3 days a month -- while I tried to write. At first I wrote plays.

"One was a finalist in a competition and I got an encouraging letter. But I'd always loved movies - I mean, I was voracious - so I decided to come to Hollywood. It took a year to find an agent, and a couple of more to find a better agent, and then my work got seen by the right people at the right time (never underestimate the part luck plays in success in this business) and work started to come my way."

Having seen what a great job she was doing on Frida, Hollywood is now vying to snap up Lake. Her spec script, Distance is the more prominent idea to be snapped up. "One of my agents told me once that it's too good not to get made; it's just a question of when. Seven years later, I'm still waiting.

"It was at Columbia, director, star, ready to go... then the star dropped out to take another project for more money. It's a triangle love story set against the backdrop of the Impressionist era. Berthe Morisot was one of the 6 founding Impressionists -- right Alongside Monet, Renoir, Degas... the people we all know.

"She and her sister, like many young girls of the time, took art classes -- not at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, because women weren't allowed there, but with private tutors.

"But Berthe's work was astonishing. Her mother, a dynamic force in her life, very much encouraged her as an artist. Berthe was also painted numerous times by Edouard Manet, and it's believed she had a clandestine affair with him, but she eventually married his brother, Eugene -- a nice, but unaccomplished guy.

After she married his brother, Edouard never painted her again. The struggle of the Impressionists is a fascinating one - all that passion they had for their art! And Morisot's struggle to figure out what love really was... Was it the grand passion she felt with Edouard or the quiet comfort she felt with Eugene?"

"At the little cocktail thing before Frida's opening, Gwyneth Paltrow was there. And it hit me - she's just about the right age, she has that cool look to her that fits Morisot, she could communicate the dissonance of this character so well and, well, her mother, Blythe Danner, would be perfect to play her mother in the film!

"The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I looked at her and had this thought... but I was way too chicken to go up and introduce myself."

Among her other forthcoming scripts turned films are A Thousand Cranes possibly going out to Johnny Depp and Picasso with Dustin Hoffman mentioned for the lead role. But no matter how many scripts one can sell, says Lake, there's always plenty that got to waste.

"One that I remember talking to one of my agents about, for example, was something set against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin wall. What a life changing, world-altering event that was! Think of all the stories there are to tell there... all the lives that changed because of it...

"I can think of so many ways to approach that event, humanise it, and tell a dramatic, poignant, important story... My agent's response? It's old news. Nobody really cares.

"And the sad thing? When you're talking about Hollywood, they're probably right. Sigh..."

And is Lake confident audiences will appreciate her latest film? "I have absolutely no doubt. This is a film that tells a universal story. It wasn't an easy story to write or direct or portray -- but I think everyone did a stellar job."

Frida Commences December 26, 2002.

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