It was the Grand Jury Prize winner of the Sundance Film Festival in its year. It launched the storied career of Laura Dern in earnest. And it opened in theaters alongside largely favorable reviews. But Joyce Chopra’s elusive, heartbreaking, and even terrifying female-centric coming-of-age movie “Smooth Talk” (1985) didn’t exactly stay top of mind as one of the prime examples of movies about teenage angst, at least not when compared to something like “Dazed and Confused” or the films of John Hughes. But this alarming and ahead-of-its-time #MeToo film that came decades before the birth of the movement is thankfully being rediscovered with the kind of urgency it deserves—following its inclusion in the Revivals line-up in the 2020 New York Film Festival, director Chopra’s elegant narrative feature debut has just been released by the Criterion Collection in a new 4K restoration; a two-disc set that also includes various short documentaries of the filmmaker.
Adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’ 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by screenwriter Tom Cole (Chopra’s late husband), “Smooth Talk” is a dreamy and gradually unsettling look at the life of Connie (Dern), an innocent, carefree teenager on the cusp adulthood who clashes with her protective mom (Mary Kay Place) constantly, hangs out with her friends through aimless trips to the mall and becomes more and more aware of her own sexuality over the course of one eventful summer. After she grabs the attention of the predatory (and creepily named) Arnold Friend (Treat Williams), the film culminates into a long, frightening, and chillingly calibrated sequence towards the end, with Friend grooming and emotionally manipulating Connie to give in to him.
We recently spoke to Chopra, where the filmmaker reflected on the recent revival of “Smooth Talk,” recounted her memories of casting Dern, the serendipitous details surrounding the film, and her career at large as a filmmaker and documentarian.
It’s a perfect time for “Smooth Talk” to be rediscovered and reassessed, given the emergence of movements like #MeToo.
I think it’s wonderful. It’s really thanks to The Criterion Collection, and [also] the New York Film Festival that [screened it]. I haven’t seen it myself in a long time. People accept it now more completely than they did when it was [first released]. I mean, it got wonderful reviews when it was released, but it wasn’t an audience pleaser. I have to tell you that. It was limited to the art house [crowd]. But I’m looking at it now and asking, “Why did people have trouble with this, dealing with this situation?” I can’t tell you. What do you think?
One reason could be—and this is unfortunately still true today—female coming-of-age movies aren’t as numerous as male-centric ones. Perhaps when it was released, the general audiences weren’t ready for its groundbreaking themes.
They weren’t ready for it, yes. I have to tell you; we had a screening, the Village Voice critic [Andrew Sarris] hosted somewhere outside of New York City. It was a large auditorium, mostly older people. And during the question and answer period, somebody said, “Well, Connie fell asleep. It was all a dream.” And we asked the audience, “How many of you reacted that way?” And I would say half the audience, I’m not exaggerating, raised their hand and couldn’t accept that this had happened. And the reason Connie was out on the lawn was [she] fell asleep. And she was listening to the radio right before Arnold Friend arrives. That’s an extreme form of rejecting the reality of it.
I think that reaction, that denial of the reality, truly goes hand in hand with why a movement like #MeToo took so long to arrive.
Yes. When did you first see it?
I wish I could say I saw it as a teenager, but I didn’t. But I rediscovered it at the New York Film Festival recently. I also read Joyce Carol Oates’ story the film is based on. One of the things that her story captures so vividly is the out-of-body experience of it all. Connie feels alienated, can’t even recognize her kitchen or her lawn. Reading it, I thought you perfectly captured that out-of-body sensation that is so un-filmable.
Right, you can’t film that. I forget the language, “she walked out, and the sky was…” We didn’t even try for that. Laura, as she played it, as we directed, took charge of herself at the very end. Only when she overcomes the panic. By the way, did you see the movie, “The Father?”
The recent film with Anthony Hopkins? Yes, I did see it.
I saw it recently. And at the very end, where he’s calling, “Mommy, mommy….” That’s what Laura does. She’s holding the phone. And when I saw that, I said, “Oh my God.” I was so heartbroken. I love that movie. Anyway, Laura regresses at that moment; she wants mommy. Once she accepts that she’s going to take responsibility for her family, it enables her to cross. One of the titles we had going was, Connie Crossed Over. She literally was able to live with it or die with it. But that’s a different ending than Joyce Carol Oates intended.
Was Joyce Carol Oates involved in your adaptation in any way? Was she protective for the expansion you wanted to have in the ending?
I never talked to her about it. The New York Times asked her to respond to the film, and they printed a long essay she wrote about the origin of the short story. One of her titles was Death and the Maiden. But anyway, she said that, “I don’t believe in any talking…once I sign over the rights.” How do I paraphrase? “…that they are as professional in what they do as I am [in what I do].” And that was the first time my husband, who wrote the script with me, knew what she thought about the whole thing. I had hardly met her once years ago. She went into the movie having no idea what it was going to be like. I wish other authors were like that, but they’re not. She’s unusual.
It must have been reassuring to have that kind of creative freedom that you could take the story and make it your own.
Yes. I was able to option it for a very low fee. Her essay is very interesting, the one she wrote to the New York Times. She says something about, “At this point, I’m confused about who Connie is.” Is it the one that I [Joyce Chopra] created or the one she wrote about. Laura [really] embodied that part. [In the story], Connie doesn’t develop as a person. She’s a child. She’s the type who hangs around shopping malls. And our job was to [expand it]. How did it happen that Arnold came to this girl’s house? How do you create a world [where] everybody’s so disassociated [from] that girl that this could have happened, this isolation?
And part of that world-building towards making Connie a more full-fledged person is her relationship with her mother. That’s not really in the story to the extent that we see in the movie.
No, and there’s no sister. There’s no father. There are no friends. That was all created for the movie. I did a documentary a long time ago called “Girls at 12.” The idea [was filming] three girls hang out together. I’m fascinated by teenage girls, obviously, but I actually took things from that movie, literally, that I used in the movie.
Connie is on her way to womanhood in “Smooth Talk.” But she is also still a child. When you read the story, you definitely get that sense of transition, the in-between-ness. I feel like Laura Dern captures that gray area so perfectly.
Very much so. We had set a shooting plan around Treat’s schedule. He was cast early on, and we could not find a girl to play this part. We had casting directors in New York, and California and not one of them recommended Laura, which was so odd. She’d been in one show, but it wasn’t released. [It got] released while we were filming. So nobody knew her. We were two weeks away from filming, and I still hadn’t cast the part. Everybody who read sounded…well, I hate to use this word, but bitchy. My daughter wouldn’t like it if I used that word. [Laughs.] But let’s say unpleasant. The way I met Laura is, we filmed north of San Francisco. Our producer (because we’re all working for nothing) asked that we film near his home. Anyway, he was on the phone with a friend who lives on the beach in Malibu. She’s a very good still photographer. And he was trying to get her to come up to do still photos for free. And he was saying, “Really, the problem is, we’re going to start filming, and we’re going to cast somebody Joyce is unhappy with. We need somebody.”
And she said, “Oh no. I see her right now. She is walking on the beach right in front of my house.” She was a neighbor of Bruce Dern’s, and she was Laura. And so I flew to LA the next day. I called Laura to make a date to meet her. I wanted to read with her and record her reading. And remember, in the film, Connie dances to a James Taylor song, “Handy Man.” [And Laura] had an answering machine playing, “Handy Man.” This is the days of answering machines.
It was meant to be.
So I met Laura. I fell in love with her. She gave a wonderful reading. She picked me up at the airport, and it was a stick shift car. And on it was a postcard of James Dean, the very one in the script. I thought, “This is getting crazier by the second.” I didn’t have to read her to know she would be perfect because Laura has a way of tossing off lines that could sound so awful. But it doesn’t come out that way.
I understand what you are getting at. Connie could easily have been a very mean character. But Laura Dern doesn’t have that kind of meanness in her delivery.
Right. In the very first scene, her mother’s painting a wall on the staircase, and Laura goes right by her. She doesn’t see her. That’s the whole problem. And the mother is insulted, but she’s going to try. So she goes to the bedroom, and when she asks Connie, “Did you bring back anything?” Connie’s just oblivious. She’s just in her own world. And she says, “Oh, I forgot.” The line could have been [so different]. I’d have to go through the script with you to show you how easily you and I could make it a different character.
There’s also something about Laura Dern’s physicality that makes her a perfect Connie. Because she is very tall, one minute you look at her, she looks like a confident young woman with a powerful presence. But other times, like when she’s sitting cross-legged or something, her height translates into a child-like clumsiness.
Well, I asked her after she read. I said, “I noticed that you’re leaning upwardly.” And she said, once she was confident that I was going to cast her, “That’s my scoliosis stance. I heard that I’m taller than Treat. And I was afraid you wouldn’t cast me.” So she could go down by two inches by going on one hip. Yeah. She’s almost six feet. And now she wears high heels all the time. Not a lot of tall women do. It’s fantastic.
The sequence between Arnold Friend and Connie, in the end, is almost its own short film. You can just watch that whole segment on its own, and it would still be a chilling experience. What was your direction to the actors before you started shooting it? Their dynamic feels so real and extremely terrifying to watch.
That was a challenge to film. Shoot people talking basically for 20, at least 20 minutes. Treat likes to say this third character in the scene is not the guy sitting on the car, but the car itself. Okay, I have to back up. Sundance has a June lab every year where they invite first-time directors, whether you’re a documentarian or a writer. I was there for a completely different script. I won’t go into what that was. But at the last stage, Treat came, and we read with some of the actresses who were there. That’s when I got scared that the script was terrible because they were good actresses. But anyway. But we began to play around with the car, and Treat just began to realize how he could use it.
So, although we had very little rehearsal, he rehearsed with the car and worked out a lot of his movements. I wish I could tell you how I directed it. We just did it in pieces. It took five days to do it, which is actually pretty rapid because Treat only had five days. They both tell me I was a wonderful director, but I don’t know what the heck I did. Honestly, we just talked about what was going on in each beat, so to say. And they’re both so wonderful as actors. I’d like to think I didn’t have to do much.
What you say about Treat Williams’ movements makes a lot of sense. There is almost a choreography to the way he moves around the car. Or the way he moves towards Connie’s door and the way she guards herself. It doesn’t look complex, but it looks extremely complicated emotionally.
Yes, it was. To start with, I first saw Treat in a musical on Broadway. He was in “Hair,” the Milos Forman, movie. He also played the Pirate King in “The Pirates of Penzance.” So I think of Treat as a song and dance boy. And he was physically able to do all the things he was doing, hanging upside down on cars, leaning down against it. He was just completely at home in his own body to do all of that. And Laura was just reacting off of him. She’s just totally present. I think that those [are the] miracles.
The thing that’s so startling about the scene is, as well as Joyce Carol Oates’ story, people don’t often think or talk about the emotional power a predator has, and what all the emotional manipulation and grooming really looks and sounds like. He’s not breaking in or attacking her. He’s doing something perhaps far more insidious.
I was so focused on, “how do you film this scene? What’s really going on at each moment in the scene?” And Treat had one through line all the way through, which is, he’s going to have to exert power over her mentally and emotionally, not physically. In fact, Laura said something very curious. I’ll have to talk to her more about this. When she played the ending, she didn’t think that he had raped her at the time. That he just wants to control her to get her into that car. But that was a 16-year-old’s way of protecting herself while she was playing it. I think he raped her. In my mind, there’s no doubt about it.
I think so, too.
That’s how she thought at the time. She now thinks that he raped her. [She said], “At the time, I was doing this by instinct as an actress, but I’m not sure I completely understood what I was doing. I was so young.” Right. And Treat, of course, overwhelmed her. She just thought he was fantastic, this 33-year-old man. And she was 16. She was a kid who looks old, but she wasn’t. Anyway, that’s a whole other story.
During a New York Film Festival talk, which is included in this Criterion release, Laura Dern said the reactions were pretty mixed then. Some people were coming up to her and saying, “Oh, this was just so terrifying. I’ll be more protective of my daughter.” And others were saying, “Oh, this was really sensual and sexy.” Are you still getting mixed reading like that today, even in the #MeToo era?
I think it has changed. I think people are much more alert now. However, I don’t know privately what guys think. They’re not going to tell me. But maybe they’d say it to Laura. After this, Laura did films with David Lynch, like “Wild at Heart.” And Laura loved doing it because she could be sexy. She wasn’t much older when she did those films.
Often, we view female sexuality from a very male point of view. And it can get really ugly or ogle-y. While your choices in this movie acknowledge Connie’s sexuality, it’s all done in a respectful and even innocent manner. Can you talk about your approach to the use of camera in this manner?
I’ll give you an example. There was one day when our cameraman had to go away. I don’t know why. And our camera operator was left to film, and it was pretty simple stuff. It was Connie painting her toenails. And he lit it in a way I wasn’t happy with afterward. It’s gorgeous. But it’s too pretty and too sexy. It was like a Revlon [ad]. It’s the way a guy would film it. [While] my cameraman is a guy, he was quite alert to what I wanted… So if you look at the film again, you’ll see what I mean. Her hair…the light is coming through it, and light is glinting off her toes. It’s probably okay because I have one scene like that, but that’s an example of what you’re talking about. It’s the complete opposite when she wanders in an Apple orchard in a wide shot. We never made her an object.
You’re similarly observational in the short films you’ve made, that are included in this release. “Joyce at 34,” “Girls at 12,” and “Clorae and Albie.” There is connective tissue between these shorts and “Smooth Talk,” following women through a shift in their lives.
There’s a third film, that’s not on there…it was intended to be a series of women at different ages whose lives were changing. So the girls are going from an all-girls school to a school with boys. The two young women, “Clorae and Albie,” are shifting in their lives. So it was going to be women at different life stages, but we never got the funding to go beyond the third one.
I love your personal documentary short “Joyce at 34,” especially—even these days, women are made to feel uncomfortable talking about career choices versus motherhood and how that balance will work out. It’s groundbreaking when you face the camera and say something like, “I can juggle all of this with one kid, but I can’t have another one.” It’s so ahead of its time.
I’m much more aware [of that now]. [“Joyce at 34” has been] shown a great deal. And I’ve been to some festivals where [I sensed] nothing has changed. Until we have childcare, universal childcare, how could it possibly get resolved for women? I don’t imagine I could have continued [with a second child]. Because I had a daughter who loved to read books, she could come with me when she was a little older. I’d take her with me to meetings. I was lucky. But I can’t imagine having more than one. Yet people do it, so I should say I couldn’t imagine it.
It’s so personal, isn’t it? Not everybody is equipped to deal with the same things in the same way.
It also depends on what your career is. I was lucky. My husband’s a writer, so he was at home. But I would go away on location, which is different. I mean, I don’t know if you have children or not, but I would imagine it’s somewhat easier because you can write at home. But women who have nine-to-five jobs or whatever, it’s tough.
I don’t have children. I’m 43 now, but back when I didn’t work from home, when I had an office job, I had versions of the conversations with my family that I recognized in your documentary.
“Joyce at 34” was the first personal documentary. My first job was with [Richard] Leacock and [D. A.] Pennebaker and the films that they did were all about public figures. Either an actress like Jane Fonda or somebody on death row, but nobody had done a film about a person who wasn’t famous. In fact, when my friends suggested it to me, when I was about eight months pregnant, I said, that’s narcissistic. Nobody does films about [themselves]. People wrote about themselves. But nobody had made a film, a documentary. That, to me, was the outstanding thing that I’m most proud of. After that, there were endless films about my grandmother, my father, my two brothers. It was in the air. I mean, I happened to be there first. It was the first live birth on public television.
How was it received at the time?
It was on public television, which was great. But at the time that I made it, there weren’t any distributors for it. None of the documentary film distributors thought that [they would] make any money out of these [women-centric] films. And I [then] joined a new co-op called New Day Films. Julia [Reichert] and her then-husband Jim, and two other women just the year before had made documentaries, different subjects. But the centers were women, and they couldn’t find a distributor. And so they started the New Day Films, and I heard about it and joined up. We started distributing on our own. We had to do our own publicity. I had to mail them at the post office. Libraries, to start with, bought them. I don’t think some festivals took some until later in the ‘90s. I’d have to look this history up, but Sarah was born in ’71. That’s my daughter. So it took a long time for the general public to catch on to them.
Going back to something we were talking about earlier, I still feel like movies like “Smooth Talk,” about female coming-of-age experiences, are all that common. I am wondering if there are any recent examples of such movies that you’ve seen and loved?
I’m so bad on titles. There’s one [about] a girl fighting nonstop with her mother, and she wants to be called by a certain name. And that’s the name of the movie?
“Lady Bird?”
“Lady Bird.” I love that movie.
I do too.
Isn’t that perfect? In fact, it’s the same thing Connie’s fighting with her mother. The central subject of “Smooth Talk” is the mother-daughter relationship and in “Lady Bird” the mother-daughter are fighting all the time. And I just thought it was beautifully directed, beautifully written, beautifully everything—a prime example.
It’s funny you mentioned Lady Bird. That movie sort of has a dreamy quality with its cinematography too. A visual tone “Smooth Talk” also has.
I recognized it too, yeah.
And so let’s talk about that soft, pastel, dreamy quality of your film’s cinematography.
One of the things I love to do—and I think a lot of filmmakers do that—is [looking] at paintings, more than photography, to share with the DP for the look. The painter Balthus has this dreamy quality, and his subjects are often young, pubescent girls. So the palette came from Balthus paintings. Also photographer Joel Meyerowitz has this book called “Cape Light.” And he has a photograph of a screen door and a hallway. And we copied [that]. I was looking for a house that had that hallway. It was so important in the story to me, that Connie would be separated from Arnold with a hallway. I gave both Balthus paintings and the Joel Meyerowitz book to the Art Director. And speaking of photography and coincidences: I sent James Glennon, the DP that was recommended to me, the script. And I made up my mind that I was going to show him the Joel Meyerowitz book and if he didn’t respond, I wasn’t going to hire him. He lived in LA, and I flew to LA. And I called him to say, “I’m here, let’s meet.” And before I got in two seconds, he said, “I read your script. And there is a book of photos that you should see.” And it was “Cape Light,” Joel Meyerowitz. So this whole production was…[laughs]. And he knew the photographer and introduced me to him later on when we were in New York.
Are you working on anything currently?
I am working on kind of a memoir. But I have been doing documentary films in recent years. And as soon as we can travel again, I’ll go back to doing that. And once again, it’s about young people.
“Smooth Talk” is now available on The Criterion Collection’s website.