'The Danish Girl' Filmmakers on Bringing a Transgender Trailblazer to the Screen

Long before transgender issues entered the mainstream consciousness, Lili Elbe received one of the first gender reassignment surgeries in Europe. Her story is the basis for "The Danish Girl," which hits theaters on November 26.

"The Danish Girl" stars Eddie Redmayne as Elbe and takes viewers back into Copenhagen, where Elbe was living as an artist named Einar Wagener with artist wife Gerda, played by Alicia Vikander. When Einar begins to model for Gerda as a woman, Lili gradually begins to reveal herself and the couple's relationship evolves.

KCET Cinema Series members had the chance to see "The Danish Girl" on Tuesday, November 17. Joining host Pete Hammond for the post-screening Q/A session were director Tom Hooper ("The King's Speech," "Les Miserables"), screenwriter Lucinda Coxon ("Crimson Peak") and producers Gail Mutrux and Anne Harrison. Below is an edited version of their conversation.

The KCET Cinema Series is sponsored by the E. Hofert Dailey Trust and the James and Paula Coburn Foundation. The winter series features nine films screened weekly at the ArcLight Cinemas in Sherman Oaks. In previous weeks, members enjoyed special guests Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel after a screening of "Youth," director John Crowley and actress Saoirse Ronan for "Brooklyn" and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy for the most anticipated film of the season, "Carol."
 

On making "The Danish Girl."

Tom Hooper: The only reason I'm here under this incredibly large screen, which feels like the largest screen that I've ever played "The Danish Girl" on, is because of the script written by the woman on my left, Lucinda Coxon. I was lucky enough to read it, late 2008. I was in early pre-production on "The King's Speech," and, without doubt, it's the best script I've ever read. I found it incredibly moving. It moved me to tears on a couple of occasions. I hoped that one day, I would get the chance to make it as a movie, but a seven year involvement with this film makes me a bit of a newbie, because my wonderful producer, Gail Mutrux, fell in love with it 15 years ago. Fellow producer Anne Harrison fell in love with it 12, 10 years ago, so it's a real passion project for all of us.

Lucinda Coxon: I'm really, I'm either a kind of a psychic, but lazy, or the world's worst opportunist. Eleven years ago, I thought, "hey, here's this really neat thing, I'll write a script now and I'll be able to jump on the transgender bandwagon in a decade." I think when I first read David Ebershoff fabulous novel, I didn't know anything about this story...When I researched it, there was relatively little research material about it and there weren't very many people very interested in it. As we discovered, as we tried to get the film financed, there weren't very many people very interested in the transgender debate at all and people were very nervous about it.

Of course, I had made the classic mistake of falling in love with it and therefore assuming that everyone would fall in love with it and thinking, well, this is just going to finance itself because it's just so great and who could resist this extraordinary story.

I think it's been really serendipitous that the film wasn't made sooner, as it turns out. That's not just being philosophical in retrospect, I think that this is the perfect moment and it's fantastic to be part of this rising tide.

Gail Mutrux: I think we were very lucky because it wasn't sort of nobody. There were pieces that would come together and then fall apart. It got pretty close a few times, but it wasn't until Tom seriously wanted to do it that we felt that it was going to get made. It was exciting.

Tom Hooper: I fell in love with the love story at the spine and the way that Lucinda wrote the script. It's very much a portrait of a marriage going through a profound change. I think at one level, anyone who has been in a long relationship or a long marriage, partners can change over time. You can start married to someone who's a very different person by the end of it. It certainly is true of my parents' marriage.

It's interesting because I fell in love with this around the same time as "The King's Speech." Both projects come from the same moment in time, even though one's taken longer to make. I think for me, there's a very powerful universal theme linking both, which is that all of us have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, or the true version of ourselves, whether that's shyness insecurity. Whether it's anxiety or addiction or depression. Whether it's stammering, like in "The King's Speech," Bertie in "The King's Speech." But, to not identify with the gender you're assigned at birth, I can't imagine a more profound block a human being can experience, between them and their true identity. It's surely a cause of such distress to the individual involved, but in this story, in the 1920s when there was no road map for transition, when the word transgender didn't exist, when the medical establishment pathologized such a sense of self as a disease. How could this change happen?

I think what led me to this story is that what allowed transformation to happen was the space opened up by love. The love at the center of the film, I think, allows this transformation to happen. The story, Lucinda's wonderful script, the real lives these artists led teaches us that if you are blocked in any way, if you are truly loved, if you are truly seen, you have the best chance of transforming yourself.

On why Lili Elbe's story matters today.

Lucinda Coxon: I think, as we were saying, one of the things that's really important to me is the universality of the story. Certainly, the true histories of these two people were swept away by the turbulence of 20th Century history. For example, Lili Elbe's medical records were few and far between because they were kept in a hospital in Dresden, which was destroyed by Allied bombing at the end of the second World War. So, in historical terms, that's partly why that story was swept away. It's also women's history and queer history, which is often swept away anyway. In terms of now, I suppose that one of the things that I found really powerful about the story is that it is, in a sense, really modern. This is someone who is self-actualizing to a kind of remarkable degree. These are people who are kind of curating their own live in a very modern way. But it's a self-actualization story that makes it very clear that doesn't happen in a vacuum because of all the people around you. The people around you are the catalysts. I think that's exactly what Tom's saying. It happens in a space that's created by love. I think Einar and Lili and Gerda, they were way ahead of it then and there's a lot to be learned from them in that respect.

On working with Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander.

Tom Hooper: I first worked with Eddie when he was 22, a young kid actor. I was directing "Elizabeth I" for HBO with Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons. Eddie played a young rebel who tries to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Helen Mirren, never a good idea. Helen Mirren, the queen, sentenced him to his immediate death.

I remember to this day shooting that, the scene where Eddie receives the death sentence, and it was extraordinary because, as I was shooting it, I felt like I was watching someone being sentenced to death rather than watching an actor having a death sentence. There was something about his emotional rawness that was extraordinary. It was almost like an emotional translucency, he was shaking like a leaf. You could see into his heart so directly.

It's funny because English actors are often in dialog with their own emotional reserve. You could say that some of them are emotionally repressed. Not like English directors who have a very fluent contact with their emotional life, as you can tell tonight. This young English actor really stood out to me and, then and there, I thought, if I could ever cast him in a lead role, I will. The next opportunity was "Les Miserables." When I look back on it, his "Empty Chairs, Empty Tables" remains for me one of the highlights of that film, marked again by tremendous emotional rawness. It was on the barricades of "Les Miserable" where I slipped him Lucinda's wonderful script in an unmarked brown paper envelope, on the barricades of French Pinewood Studios. He came back the next morning and just said, look, if you ever get the chance to make it, I'd love to be involved.

And then Alicia Vikander. When you cast Eddie Redmayne, it was intimidating finding the actress to act opposite Eddie because Eddie is so formidable and I'd heard, Nina Gold, my wonderful casting director, suggested that I look at Alicia. I had seen her in "Anna Karenina." I had seen her in "A Royal Affair," where she's a Swedish actress playing a Danish princess. I sort of thought, I'm not going to take five years out to learn Danish before directing the movie in Danish, so casting a Scandinavian Swede who can play Danish and speaks English sounds like a good root for the purists.

She came in to audition. We did the scene, which has a great title in the script. It's called "Scene 56," memorable scene number and that's the scene where Lili and Gerda, Einar and Gerda, have an argument the morning after Einar kisses Henrik. Alicia was so moving in this scene that at end I had tears in my eyes. Eddie Redmayne turned around and said, "There's no great surprise about who you're going to cast now, Hooper." I was like, "No, no, I'm completely objective. I've got lots of notes. I can't think of what they are at the moment."

On gender issues in "The Danish Girl."

Tom Hooper: One could talk about gender fluidity in relation to Lili's character, but Gerda is a strong woman in the '20s saying, I have a right to be a professional artist. I have a right to be openly ambitious, driven, searching for my subject, all of which things are incredibly radical, let's not forget, for a woman in the 1920s. One is reminded, when watching this film, that for centuries, it was men who said to women, this is your gender role. The 20th century was part of this great moment when women started to repossess the definition of their own gender. So, the film to me is an exploration of gender fluidity through both characters.

On keeping smaller films alive.

Gail Mutrux: Two things, one audiences need to keep coming to the movies. In the last few months, you read about all these wonderful movies that have been released and people are staying at home. Part of it is that people put up the money. If they make "The Hunger Games," they know a lot of people are going to come. If they make, for instance, "Room," this small movie, they're not sure. It goes hand-in-hand. It's not about producer's persevering. It's about the people putting up the money for the movies. They're the ones that have to stay in the game.

Anne Harrison: We'll also find other outlets. I love to see a movie, and I hope everyone else here loves to see a movie in a theater, but there are other ways to distribute movies, for example through Netflix or other ways. There will be other ways to get our stories out, but I think it's really about story in the end.

Tom Hooper: I feel cause for optimism in the sense that, I think the studio system gets a lot of bad press all the time for not supporting a range of filmmaking. This is a studio film. This is Focus Features, Universal backed it. On the back of "Les Miserables," I had some box office success with that, I was able to turn to Universal and say, "Actually, this is is the passion project that I've always wanted to make. Will you support me?" They did. Although it's a European subject, effectively, it is a Hollywood movie. I take heart that is, in this case, would in turn embrace both the huge films-- I mean, Universal had an okay year-- but also this, which was made for less than $15 million in a very economic way and they supported it.

On the copies of Gerda Wegener's paintings seen in "The Danish Girl."

Lucinda Coxon: So the portraits that you see in the movie that Gerda did of Lili, we had an artist produce those paintings, you can see that Lili has been tweaked a little more like Eddie, but they are very, very fine copies of Gerda's paintings. Actually, there is a big new show of Gerda's art that just opened in Copenhagen, the biggest ever exhibition of her art, so I'm hoping that lots more people will be seeing those paintings in the future.

Tom Hooper: Lucinda makes it sound a little bit more straight forward than it was. It's actually quite a funny story because I had this kind of, I was very purist. I was like, we must use the original Gerda Wegener paintings. I will not accept anything else. Gail, get me the real paintings, please. About a month before the shoot, these two sat me down and said to me very gently, "You do know that the real Lili paintings, it's not Eddie Redmayne." It was one of those incredibly embarrassing moments where, yes, I'm a purist, but this is a bit of a problem. Rather at the last minitue, we set about recreating the Lili paintings, really trying to copy her paintings, but putting Eddie's Lili in them. They're similar, but not the same. We tried all kinds of short cuts at the time. We tried projecting photos of Eddie, effectively blowing up the Lili paintings over the top in black and white on the canvas and then projecting Eddie over them. In all of these shortcuts, none of the art was very good and it was only, ironically, when we got Suzie, our wonderful painter, to get Eddie to sit as Lili in the conventional way and we did the conventional thing of a portrait artist sitting with a live subject that the paintings actually took off. That's what you see.

On handling Lili's transition in "The Danish Girl."

Lucinda Coxon: I think one of the challenges, certainly in the writing writing is to write a role where you create enough space around Einar for Lili to emerge, to be revealed gradually through the course of the film. In the end, we understand that Lili was always there, really, from the beginning, that she was masked.I think all those kind of touches were laid in. I think when we see him watching Gerda applying her lipstick, it's partially because he loves his wife and admires her and admires her aesthetically, but there is also some deeper kind of identification that we later come to understand, so I think we're always trying to lay it in gently, but, on the other hand, be clear that it was always there.

Tom Hooper: First of all, this was in the script and Lucinda had marked it all out beautifully. I think Eddie and I had worked on this idea that it wasn't a role about transformation, it was a role about revealing or revelation and Eddie sort of prepping and working a year out. We did our first screen test seven months out and Eddie put a lot of preparation into it, but a lot of it was about unlocking his latent femininity, exploring it and then recovering it so that in the film it could be gradually revealed. One of the interesting things that Eddie and I learned from meeting trans women in the community was that sometimes people in transition go through a phase of kind of hyper-feminization, where, in order to reconnect with their female identity, they almost overreach. Their feminine body language become affected. Their clothes become very feminine. They use too much make-up, maybe too strong a wig. We embrace that as a way of Lili getting in touch with this part of her that had been suppressed. At the end of the movie, you'll notice that she goes back to her own hair. Her body language simplifies. Her clothes simplify and she really starts to have the confidence to be herself without trying too hard and without too much adornment.

On involving transgender actors and advisers in "The Danish Girl."

Tom Hooper: We had some great trans women who advised the film, going right back to an early, very inspiring meeting I had with Lana Wachowski, the Hollywood director. In terms of the casting, we had trans extras in London, in Copenhagen, in Brussels and there were two trans actors who played in the movie in small rolls, including a trans woman called Rebecca Root who was playing a cis gender role. We did reach out and try to involve the acting trans community as much as possible.