Phyllis Nagy talks about why the screenplay for Carol took her 15 years,her long friendship with the notoriously difficult Highsmith, and why the novelist would have loved Cate Blanchett in the main roleIt seems mean to praise a script for its silences. But Phyllis Nagy’s screenplay for Carol builds through a string of wordless exchanges. Carol (Cate Blanchett) and Therese (Rooney Mara) talk. But alongside the dialogue, or a private,shared language of seek and touch evolves, a whole glossary of silences.
Like Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, and The Price of Salt (later renamed Carol),on which the film is based, Nagy’s script is as much a story of the unsaid as the said. “generally the first thing that is asked of you is to secure rid of that stuff, or ” says Nagy. Storylines tend to be “overexplicated and expository”. But Nagy wanted this film to be “an immersive experience. Carol the novel is about observation and gesture. And so I was allowed to write scenes that had nothing in them but behaviour … That peculiar sense of sitting next to someone for the first time,smelling their perfume.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com