Poetic licence

Christine Jeffs tells PETER CALDER about the challenging, crazy times involved in making 'Sylvia'.


When Christine Jeffs' debut feature, the spare, haunting and quietly explosive Rain opened in America, the trade daily Variety named her as one of their "Ten Directors To Watch". The anointment was promising, to say the least.

Then barely 35, she had honed her talent as a director on a series of excellent commercials - the grainy monochrome campaign for the weight-loss drug Xenical was the most impressive of many. Meanwhile she had beavered away, adapting Kirsty Gunn's coming-of-age novella into a moody film which was - whatever the New Zealand Film Awards may have suggested - the best local film of its year.

Rain was not for all tastes: some found it too downbeat, others too slow, but what was undeniable was the clarity of the central organising vision. This was unquestionably Jeffs' film, the work of a woman in charge.

So it is hard to understand why she would take over as director of what started as someone else's film. And it is easy to see why she described the experience to a British newspaper as "a baptism of fire".

Sylvia, which opens here next week, purports to be a biopic of the doomed and darkly brilliant American-born poet Sylvia Plath, but it's a lot more pic than bio.

The literal-minded will find plenty to criticise - famously a scene which reunites Plath with her estranged husband Ted Hughes, shortly before her February 1963 suicide. But Sylvia is much more concerned to convey a sense of its subject's inner life than to plod through the chronology.

Impressing her vision on the material was a headlong challenge, the 40-year-old Jeffs recalls. After a slew of transatlantic flights and hurried meetings with star Gwyneth Paltrow, she signed on a bare 10 weeks before the cameras were due to start rolling, after the original director walked.

"I think my pre-production time was six or seven weeks," she says. "It was crazy. And it was a huge struggle right till the last minute.

"But then I met Gwyneth and really liked her and felt I could work with her and she could go where she needed to go [in the role]. And it was a really huge opportunity for me to learn about myself and about filming."

If the finished film has something of a paint-by-numbers feel about it, the fault certainly doesn't lie with Jeffs' direction, Paltrow's performance or the beautiful lensing of cinematographer John Toon who, not incidentally, is Jeffs' husband.

As much as anything it's down to a script which bears the prints of too many hands. In a wistful piece for the Guardian, screenwriter John Brownlow compared the redrafting that took place after Jeffs came on board to a train wreck. He said the final script lacked "the tingle factor" of earlier drafts.

It hints at the difficulty Jeffs faced. "I came into a project that was already budgeted and already scheduled and that was difficult. But I had to learn to follow my instincts so I could have a relationship with the story and make it my own."

Making it her own meant demanding the rewrites, and the New Zealander says she found it "a huge relief to start shooting" even though she was still making changes on the set.

Disinterring Plath and Ted Hughes, two of modern literature's most controversial figures, is challenge enough (the film, as Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein famously observed, is "a story that ends with a woman's head in an oven").

But Sylvia had other hidden obstacles. For a start, the real-life couple's daughter, Frieda Hughes, who is her mother's literary executor, refused to have anything to do with the project and denounced it in a literary magazine - in verse, aptly - charging that "they want to make a film / For anyone lacking the ability / To imagine the body, head in oven" and, later, scorning the film-makers' request for rights to "my mother's words / To fill the mouth of their monster / Their Sylvia Suicide Doll."

More problematically, Elizabeth Sigmund, a close friend of Hughes and Plath, has attacked the film as a "misleading, over-miserable myth". Sigmund's enthusiastic endorsement of the project, based on her reading of an early draft of the script, is included in the press notes but she subsequently condemned the film as "unrealistic, mythical, cliched and simplistic".

"The film enhances the idea that Sylvia was a permanent depressive and a possessive person, which just isn't true."

Jeffs is at pains to underline her respect for Frieda Hughes' and Sigmund's misgivings. But she is adamant that the film conforms to the idea embodied in the opening lines of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest: "It's the truth," he wrote, "even if it didn't happen."

She says she was aware that the Plath-Hughes story has always been deeply contested but says she did not feel weighed down by a duty to conflicting histories.

"I felt the weight of telling her story in an emotionally truthful and responsible manner, but I was also given a script which had a certain arc to it - from when she meets Ted to when she dies - so a lot of the narrative choices were in place already."

And though she read Plath when she was a teenager, she felt no strong allegiance to either party. "It's very complex, so it's very hard to have a judgment," she says. "I felt it was like a lot of relationships; you had to be there to know what it was like. They were products of their time, like everyone. Ted was an artist; he liked women and he needed to explore all the facets of his life and Sylvia was very needy, as you can tell from her journals."

She pays tribute to Toon's work which lends the film a saturated, autumnal feel, especially in scenes shot near Dunedin.

"I couldn't have imagined doing it with a cinematographer I hadn't worked with before," she says. "That was proposed to me and I fought it vehemently. I knew he would make it look extraordinary - and he has - but we had so many scenes to do and there's a real trust involved between the cinematographer and the director in terms of speed.

"He wants to light all day; I want to work with the actors. So you have to work out that balance and it can be a tricky negotiation if you don't know each other. It created a huge momentum so we could do a huge amount of set-ups a day."

Whatever Sylvia's fortunes at the box office, Jeffs has plenty of irons in the fire. She has been working on a script for Eric Roth (who wrote The Insider and Forrest Gump) and has just finished a screenplay adapting Wildlife, a novel by Richard Ford, who wrote The Sportswriter.

The latter is a film she hopes to direct, and you can't help think she would be more comfortable working on a script she'd had a hand in from the start.

So is there any prospect of that? Jeffs' smile is faraway, slightly secretive. She knows more than she's telling. "We'll see," she says.

* Sylvia opens on Thursday.