CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 10/24/08

Relating to Real:
Good Dick's Marianna Palka

By jason davis

First-time filmmaker Marianna Palka tackles an intimate tale of an emotionally desolate woman and a young man whose obsession with her might be her last chance for love in Good Dick.

Scottish-born Marianna Palka dreamed up Good Dick in the very video store where much of the film was shot. With producing partner Jason Ritter, she stars as one of the two unnamed characters who make an unlikely connection when he follows her home from his place of employment and slowly begins to infiltrate her closed-off life with his unceasing desire to love her in spite of her abrasive demeanor.

How did you become interested in screenwriting?
I always liked writing in school, but never screenwriting. When I moved to Los Angeles, I started to feel like I needed to expand my voice as an artist. I was driven into writing a script by necessity, I suppose. I gave the script to people I knew and asked them to read it. They gave me notes, and I'd make my own changes based on their notes, but usually not what their notes specifically were. The suggestions people had were ridiculous. If I liked the notes then I'd keep it, but it wasn't very often that I liked the note. And that's how I kind of discovered what I wanted to do, through the note process.

How did the idea of an erotica-obsessed shut-in and a video store clerk who loves her first occur to you?
I was standing in Cinefile and thought of the idea of the first scene, 'cause I thought it would be great for this chick to walk in and rock these guys' world. They do the same thing every day, and it would be nuts for them if a chick came in every day and rented from that section. I wanted to create that moment because I thought it would be funny, and then I based the rest of the film around that moment and built it in from there.

Can you describe the process of building the story?
I don't write an outline. It's not possible for me because I get bored really quickly, and then I lose interest and abandon the idea of the film completely. When I'm not writing an outline, I'm able to just do it. I'm able to write a draft in a few days and then go over that draft and perfect it. If I have to move a scene over to another place then I will, if it benefits the story or the arc or whatever. I can't do it the way that most people do it.

Neither of your characters have names. What was the idea behind that omission?
I read this book in high school called Rebecca. [The protagonist] doesn't have a name, and I thought that was so compelling. Her character is so specific, and she marries this guy who doesn't ever give her enough information. It made so much sense to me that these two characters who are in L.A. would, at the end of the movie, be anonymous to us, once we've discovered the definition of intimacy for them. It works for these characters, but I don't think it would work for other films unless it was for a specific reason.

It's a film very much about intimacy, and you make that point by withholding the most intimate details—the protagonists' names.
Right.

How did you balance the likeability of the Jason Ritter character with the fact that he was undoubtedly a stalker?
I never saw him as a stalker when I was writing it or directing it. I saw him as a guy who just really loves this girl. His intentions were so pure. Directing it with Jason, I made sure that, in the moment when he's looking through the window at her, that's a tender moment for him. For him, that's falling in love with her, and I think the time we spend on his face there is longer than the amount of time you'd spend on a creepy guy's face. The way that Jason's face changes in that moment, I think, illustrates he's a nice guy even though he maybe doesn't do nice guy things. He's a white liar as opposed to a liar, because if he didn't make up all those things and if he wasn't so creative, he'd never have blasted his way into her life. Those doors were closed. She had shut up shop for a number of years and he had to start anew with her.

As far as his character goes, the ends justify the means?
I think the intention justifies the means. He was never thinking, "I'm going to rape her," even in the beginning. We don't know that as the audience. That's why you're on the edge of your seat. Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy? What's he going to do? Why is he taking her address? So much of it is communicated in the beginning through the moving image, the music, and Jason's face. The first 20 minutes of the movie—him getting into her apartment—are kind of like Pepé Le Pew. When I was writing it, I was really thinking about the mythological character Eros—he's all loving—and I don't get to see Eros ever in films. I don't see that as often as I would like to, because in romantic comedies, especially the big-budget ones, they tend to use the standard archetype and we're watching a cardboard cut-out instead of something compelling and real. That was my intention, as the writer, with Jason's character.

How did you create the character you played?
It was the same kind of idea in the sense that I wanted to write a real character with real problems and I wanted to write a woman who was real. The stuff, as an actor, that I was going in for was not enough. John Cassavettes has this quote: The depiction of women in cinema is terrible. It's worse than ever. And he's talking in 1975 or something. It's all about when she's going to go to bed or if she's going to go to bed. It's women being high- or low-class concubines, and it's just a matter of time. How many people is she going to go to bed with and that's all it ever is. It's her as an object. That's interesting for one movie, but if it's all the movies that come out…

I'm in love with Ken Loach and Peter Mullan and British filmmakers like Mike Leigh who are writing characters—well, Mike Leigh doesn't write—but characters who are really truthful and based on human beings with real problems. Therefore, those peoples' films really help people. That was the other overall intention—they help a specific group of people, depending on what the story is about, and I knew that my character had been sexually abused in the film. I felt the cathartic part of this movie helps people. I've seen it with huge numbers of people, and there are all kinds of reactions. All sorts of people have come up to me in tears. People of all ages have come up to me regarding the sexual abuse issue. I feel like it's never been depicted in adult terms. Usually, you don't get to see what happens in the next 35 years of the person's life. That kind of evil is so banal and so suffocating. As with my character in the film, she can't even operate. She's not even really a person until she meets Jason's character and he speaks to her for the first time. When I was writing it, I was asking myself what it takes to overcome pain. What does it take to be sexually healed? How much does that have to do with touching, as opposed to meeting someone and not being intimate with them and having sex with them without being tender?

The scene between you and Tom Arnold is very ambiguous with regard to what occurred between the characters. Was this an intentional move to make the nature of the abuse open-ended so the viewer could establish their own take on what happened?
Yes. I love that the scene was ambiguous because people are ambiguous, and it also speaks to that kind of evil and how boring it is. As a grown-up, she's had to deal with it for so long that it's unbelievable. I was very psyched that we were going to get to do that scene together and that it turned out the way that it did. I think monsters can be boring, and it's horrible, and I wanted to show that.

In writing the script, was if difficult to pace the relationship so that Jason's character always got a little closer despite your character's rebuffs?
Yes, it was something I paid attention to throughout the whole process until I locked the picture. It was a matter of following that thread with them throughout the film. How much information does the audience have at every point? How much do they know about his background? What do they know about her? The plot's there. It's in the film, but characters aren't holding placards saying "This is the plot."

You withhold the most critical revelations about your characters until very late in the film. In so doing, you make the point that the information on why the characters are as they are isn't vital to enjoying the story. Was that something you thought about while writing?
Yeah. You can show who people are really easily without showing what their job is or if they have a car or what their favorite football team is. These are the things that are supposed to define people but really don't. People's character is their character—who they are, what they do—their actions as opposed to what they look like on paper. It's so much better to show how I feel as this character than to say, "Hi! I'm a cheerleader. What do you do?"

What's next for you?
I'm writing a film for the UK Film Council. They give you between 30 and 100 percent of your budget. They're really brilliant. I'm writing something that Bryce Dallas Howard is executive producing. I'm writing something that [Good Dick producers] Cora Olson and Jennifer Dubin are producing. I'm also acting in other people's films. Also, the film's being distributed by us—the four producers—so that's been really fun. We're in New York helping a lot of people who want to get their films made and want to distribute them themselves. It's the next level—there's no middle man. We're living a dream here.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly , a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.



Good Dick courtesy Present Pictures

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