DIVA sat down with the author and screenwriter of Eileen to find out about how this sapphic thriller was brought to the big screen
BY ELLA GAUCI, IMAGE BY NEON
*This interview contains spoilers for the upcoming thriller Eileen*
My interview with critically acclaimed author Ottessa Moshfegh and screenwriter Luke Goebel began in the waiting room of Soho Hotel. As I nervously bit into a croissant, I noticed that I was in fact sitting alone with Luke Goebel who introduced himself with a smile. I asked him if there was anything I should question him and Ottessa about in our official interview. “I want to talk about queerness,” he replied.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016, follows the life of an introverted outcast who works at a juvenile detention centre for teenage boys. Eileen’s world is fairly small: she buys gin for her alcoholic father, works with detestable older women, and dreams of getting out of her town X-ville. All of this changes, however, when the new director of education, Rebecca Saint John, arrives.
The American novelist has gained somewhat of a cult following for her subsequent works My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, Death In Her Hands, and Lapvona. Her husband, Luke Goebel, is best known for writing the 2022 film Causeway which stars Jennifer Lawrence.
With my well-thumbed copy of Eileen in my bag, I sat across from the creative duo Ottessa Moshfegh and Luke Goebel ready to ask about Eileen, queerness, and working together.
In the book, the reader is so trapped in Eileen’s head – what was it like getting that onto the screen?
Ottessa: We had to think really carefully about what scenes we were going to show because every scene needed to tell us more about what Eileen was really feeling. We didn’t write a lot of directions but what Thomasin did in those quiet moments was to tell us exactly what Eileen was feeling and thinking without saying a word. Without that, it could have been a very flat movie.
Luke: We wrote into a shared vision that we had established with William Oldroyd about making this classic, twisty, dark noir suspense that had nods to classic cinema like Hitchcock. The opening scene that Will chose helped to set that genre, that style and that feel for the movie. We wrote it wanting to condense the characters and the world into something that was seductive and charming.
That opening scene certainly sets the tone for the rest of the film – why did you and William Oldroyd choose that moment to begin with?
Ottessa: You’re so smart to ask us about the opening scene because it has a bit of everything. The opening is a nod to this classic noir suspense. It’s this sweeping ocean. But then there’s this very transgressive act where we’re seeing a woman trying to repress her sexual feelings. We’ve never seen that.
Luke: With dirty snow!
Ottessa: The book was so much about taking a genre and adapting it to what felt like a very contemporary mind and reader. And I think that the film is doing the exact same.
The way that the film handles queerness felt so fresh. How do you read the relationship between Rebecca and Eileen?
Ottessa: We’re millennials. I was born in 1981. We watched the culture shift. When we grew up being gay was seen as so weird. The ways that I felt queer were mostly not about sex. I felt queer outside of that. I questioned how I fit in with this normative society as an artist. Things were never black and white for me.
In Eileen, Rebecca is totally seducing Eileen but it’s not because she wants to have sex with her. That’s not the only kind of seduction that exists. That’s not the only kind of queerness that exists.
Luke: I get the sense that Rebecca is seducing Eileen to experience some kind of sexuality within herself even though she doesn’t intend for it to become intimate. I think she sees Eileen as somewhat of a patient. I think there’s a demonstration of sexuality and desire.
I feel like Rebecca has more agency in the film. What changes did you make to the characters when putting them on screen?
Ottessa: I think there’s a very big difference between hearing about something and seeing it. We’re seeing these characters go there. The kiss was not in the script. On that day, Anne Hathaway did it in the moment. The kinds of blurry things kept happening. It’s not a black-and-white romance. Rebecca is very mysterious.
Luke: I love that the film makes you think about sexuality but it doesn’t have the answers. If they had sex, that would have been an answer. But they don’t. You have this whole question about how we find out who we are by sounding it out against each other as “non-normative” people.
What was it like to work together?
Luke: We’re both pretty deeply feeling and thinking people. We live together and we don’t do much else!
Ottessa: It’s really easy to work with him because we could shift into role-playing without any self-consciousness and there wasn’t any insecurity.
Eileen will be in cinemas from 1 December 2023.
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