“You don’t want a screenplay to be too complete.” Rebecca Miller on Maggie’s Plan

Rebecca Miller discusses her latest film’s unconventional approach to comedy, adapting original material, and the differences between writing novels and screenplays.

The eponymous hero of Maggie’s Plan (Greta Gerwig, Mistress America) is a single girl living in New York City. And unlike similarly fictional counterparts such as Holly Golightly and Carrie Bradshaw, she’s not terribly concerned with finding Mr. Right. She’d much rather snag a donation from her awkward mathematics-obsessed friend and pickle entrepreneur Guy (Travis Fimmel, Warcraft) and raise a baby on her own with the occasional help from friends Tony and Felicia (Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph).

Rebecca Miller

But then she meets John (Ethan Hawke) and falls for the brilliant (but married) writer. Maggie isn’t exactly morally conflicted about him divorcing his wife Georgette (Julianne Moore) to marry her as Georgette is cold and heartless, and completely unappreciative of her husband’s genius.

But after a few years together, reality of life with a toddler and a somewhat scattered husband hits home. Georgette is still in the picture and after meeting her, Maggie begins to wonder if the two aren’t perfect for each other after all and she begins to formulate a plan to bring them back together.

Based on an unpublished story by Karen Rinaldi, Maggie’s Plan was written for the screen and directed by Rebecca Miller (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Proof). She has written numerous plays, novels, short stories and screenplays over the course of her career and has been a longtime advocate for women in film. Creative Screenwriting spoke with her about this most recent project and its unconventional approach to romantic comedy.

Ethan Hawke as John and Greta Gerwig as Maggie in Maggie’s Plan. Photo by Jon Pack – © 2016 – Sony Pictures Classics

What shape was Karen Rinaldi’s original story when you first read it and what work did it require to make it suitable for the screen?

It was a series of chapters that she sent me – the “Maggie” chapters of the larger book, which actually is going to be published in a year’s time. In those chapters there was Maggie, John and Georgette. They were different in some ways from how they’re portrayed in the film, but similar in others.

Maggie’s character was the most different – I altered her character pretty dramatically, and also what she did for a living. I think originally she was in publicity for a maternity lingerie company!

While she was a different kind of character, her dilemma was the same. And what I would call the “emotional geometry” was there – the idea of what happens when you realize your husband is perfect for his ex-wife.

She falls in love with an (apparently) unhappily married man and she’s convinced this woman is something of a monster…but three years later she meets the woman when her own marriage is somewhat troubled and realizes “Oh my god, she’s kind of great. Maybe they’re perfect for each other”.

So that dynamic was there, but there was no Guy, the “Pickle Man” and there were no friends. In a way, I had to build out a lot of the plot and think of things that could happen in their situations. So it was very different (from Karen’s story) and yet very much the essence of the same.

Greta Gerwig as Maggie and Julianne Moore as Georgette in Maggie’s Plan. Photo by Jon Pack – © 2016 – Sony Pictures Classics

Much of Guy’s communication is nonverbal. How did you approach the writing of his character and did it involve any backstory?

Guy is actually based on somebody I went to school with…who ended up becoming a pickle entrepreneur! So I don’t get any points for imagination there.

There are aspects of his character that are like my friend’s, but the idea of his love for mathematics was more based on my son’s best friend – who is, coincidentally, the son of Karen Rinaldi. My son himself is also pretty good at math in a way that I never was. So I began to appreciate the beauty of it in a different way as these kids grew up and I watched them.

The sort of mystical elements of higher mathematics were really interesting to me, and how sometimes the highest level of physicists are almost metaphysicians in a way because you go to the very edge of what we know in terms of the universe.

You see these grand structures and grand truths and his frustration made so much sense to me – and I was also able to connect to it in a way that was personal to me, in the sense of always wanting to know what really holds the whole universe together and knowing that you don’t know.

So I just wrote this person who I felt had a great appeal but who also had a kind of oddness about him. And an oddness that matched Maggie’s oddness. She’s odd and doesn’t quite fit into the world – mainly because her ethics are so particular.

She’s driven by ethics, but they’re very idiosyncratic ones. So what she thinks is right isn’t necessarily what your average person would think is right. That’s why you needed Tony, her friend, to be yelling at her and saying “What are you doing?” He’s playing the audience, saying “Are you out of your mind?”

If there was nobody telling her that she was doing the wrong thing, I think it would be harder to accept what she does. But because she gets her comeuppance and she gets pulled up short, it’s almost like you give her a little bit more leeway. She’s being punished a little bit for her transgressions.

It’s very interesting. With a movie like this, she’s essentially playing an archetypal bad person. For every married woman, the “other woman” is not somebody you want to encounter. The woman who’s going to come in and make your husband’s life extremely easy.

She’s the “other woman” and so it’s a challenge to say “here’s this adorable character – fall in love with her”. The first thing she does in the movie is help a blind man across the street. The first thing she’s saying is “I’m harmless…I’m good”. Then immediately she starts to make a big mess of things…and steals someone’s husband.

How do you get an audience to be with her and not judge her but stay with her? I feel like that’s a challenge – but I also thinks it’s a humanistic point of view in a way. If the audience can forgive her, then maybe they can forgive themselves for all their various sins.

Maya Rudolph as Felicia and Greta Gerwig as Maggie in Maggie’s Plan. Photo by Jon Pack – © 2016 – Sony Pictures Classics

Maggie’s Plan is not your average romantic comedy. Were there any elements of the traditional rom-com that you wanted to stay away from?

I tried to make everything come out of character in a genuine way, even though a lot of the plot points are somewhat absurd. But I felt like if you really believe they’re coming out of character – and that’s why her character was so tricky – then you’ll accept this sort of slightly screwball, surreal plot.

Sometimes romantic comedies can come off as almost a little bit cynical – like, willed from the outside. For me, the rule is that there always has to be a law of causality where, internally, the triggers all make sense. Even if you end up with a most surreal situation ever, there’s got to be a kind of internal logic that’s obeyed or honored. Then you won’t feel tricked and used the way you sometimes do in a movie.

And even though you might have an inkling of where the whole thing is going because of the genre that it is, that somehow it’s going to end up “ok” in some way, moment to moment I wanted to feel a sense of surprise. I wanted to give the audience a sense of “ultimately I may know where we’re going to go, but I have no idea how we’re going to get there” and to change up the direction. Which I think is fun, you know?

Rebecca Miller on set of Maggie’s Plan. Photo by Jon Pack – © 2016 – Sony Pictures Classics

What would you say is the theme of the film? Are there any elements of the cautionary tale?

I suppose there are…and yet at the same time, no. Because in a weird way, she was kind of right! Everything she did turned out for the best.

It’s possible you could look at it like everything that happened was necessary. There’s a philosopher who said “we live in the best of all possible worlds” (Gottfried Leibniz); that idea that there were symmetries at work that were beyond her control. She thought she was controlling everything, but she really wasn’t. There was a larger framework and larger symmetries at work.

That’s a little bit like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was actually a play that I had a well-thumbed copy of right next to my desk. I referred to it a lot when I was making the film.

I also looked at things like The Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby and some Preston Sturges movies for that kind of witty, very frothy pace and unapologetically witty dialogue – just not trying to dumb it down in any way.

But at the same time I was also looking at A Midsummer Night’s Dream for that sense of waking up and suddenly being in love with another person, you know? You’re being bewitched, in a way. She thinks she’s the one throwing fairy dust in everyone’s eyes, but maybe she’s got fairy dust being thrown in her eyes.

Stanley Tucci as Puck and Rupert Everett as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999)

Over the course of your career you’ve written screenplays, short stories, plays…is there one type that you prefer working with?

To me, screenplays are the most mechanical. Of course I’m trying to make them really deeply about character, and even though I’m always going back and forth from character to structure, character to structure, character to structure…in a way it’s more a craft, I think. Which doesn’t mean it’s not an art, but it’s an art that has to have a lot of craft to it. You have to really be able to take apart the engine and rebuild it.

Writing a novel of course has huge structural challenges, depending on the work that you’re doing. But with a novel you’re feeding a reader line by line. Does this sentence work? How does the image unfold itself? Each paragraph is a unit of energy. It’s a very sensual way of writing because the words on the page are all you have.

Whereas a screenplay is really a blueprint. The words on the page are standing in for a moment that will be recorded later. So it’s very hard, but it’s hard in a different way.

And in a different way, you don’t want a screenplay to be too complete. Because if a screenplay is utterly complete, there’s no room for the performers. You are creating something with enough air in it that a performer can come in and fill it up. That’s the trick.

You don’t want to overwrite a screenplay. There have to be those gaps – and I think that that’s something one really gets through experience more than anything else.

Featured image: Greta Gerwig as Maggie and Ethan Hawke as John in Maggie’s Plan. Photo by Jon Pack – © 2016 – Sony Pictures Classics

by Ramona Zacharias

Movie aficionado, television devotee, music disciple, world traveller. Based in Toronto, Canada.

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