An interview with director Gorris

By Scott Foundas
Film Editor

The last time I spoke with Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris, it was Oscar night two years ago, and she had just received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Prior to that, we had met to talk at great length about her nominated film, "Antonia's Line," which is a masterpiece chronicling four generations in the family of an indomitable Dutch woman.
At the time, I was struck by Gorris' fierce intelligence and clear vision of her film's metaphorical reach. And after more than a decade of trying to scrape together enough international co-production money to make films in her native Holland, Gorris had a bonafide worldwide hit and finally stood poised to make her entry into English-language Western filmmaking.
Now, two years later, the fruit of her labor is about to hit theaters in the form of "Mrs. Dalloway."
As I met with Gorris again in a suite at Hollywood's Bel-€ge Hotel on the occasion of her latest film's American release, I first caught up with her by asking about that ceremonious night on which she took home Oscar gold.
"It was an absolutely wonderful experience, wasn't it," Gorris said. "American filmmakers have a dream and that is an Academy Award, and I don't think I ever had that (dream) at all in my life, because that was something so totally away from my world. I never thought I'd get that far. Getting that statue was really an absolutely delightful experience, and it has sort of put me on the map and broadened my horizons, so to speak. This is an English film I've made now, and I hope to be making more foreign films. I mean foreign to me -- American and English films."
So, with the Oscar in hand and the vast horizon of English-language filmmaking before her, I wondered how Gorris settled on this particular project for her next film.
"Well, I think it's very much about making choices and about being aware of what you have become," Gorris replied. "There's that fork in the road -- what if I had taken the other road instead of this one? It's about, as you said, reconciliation with what you have finally become, and in `Mrs. Dalloway,' this is pretty strong. At the end of the party, when she is up on the balcony and trying to understand why this young man that she has just heard about made that particular choice that he made, you can see that she's very close to doing the same thing. Then she doesn't, and again, that is making a choice. You have this catharsis about her reconciliation about the life she chose to live. These are pretty strong motives and human questions."
Virginia Woolf's original novel was written in the early 1920s, yet it is still widely available and has been ever since its initial release. Gorris' film makes the fictional memoir of a middle-aged woman in post-World War I England seem more relevant than ever to a contemporary audience.
"Probably because it is a work of genius, I imagine. Part of it is, of course, the style, which at the time was very revolutionary. Also, the content, in the sense that I just mentioned -- what are the choices you make in life, and what do you do with the result? I think part of Mrs. Dalloway's dissatisfaction with her life is that sometimes she wonders whether she's made the wrong choice, and at the end of the film or the end of the book, she doesn't wonder about that anymore.
"And there's the story of Virginia Woolf's life herself, which ended very tragically. I sometimes wonder, if she had lived now, if she might not have had to go through these intensely depressing periods. Maybe she would have been greatly helped by Prozac or something like that. Even though her contemporaries described her as a happy companion who had a great sense of fun, she has this sort of tragic aura around her because she was so desperately afraid of going mad again. She was so afraid of this that she committed suicide."
So now, with "Mrs. Dalloway" headed to theaters, I asked Gorris if she was already actively involved in developing yet another project to direct.
"Possibly, if we get the money together, I want to do another British film, which will be mainly shot in Italy and which is based on a Nabokov book. A pretty brilliant adaptation of it -- a fairly free adaptation -- has been made by a British screenwriter named Peter Berry, and it's going to be a co-production between England, France and Italy. Hopefully, we'll get the money together in time."