Established playwright Lucinda Coxon first dipped her toes into writing screenplays in 1997 with the Italian film Messaggi quasi segreti. In 2002, she adapted Rosamond Lehmann‘s The Heart of Me for the big screen, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Olivia Williams as sisters in love with the same man. (Both actresses took home awards from the London Films Critics Circle and the British Film Institute, respectively.) In 2010, she followed it up with the Emily Blunt crime comedy Wild Target, and a year later received all kinds of accolades for her adaptation of Michael Faber‘s Victorian Era series The Crimson Petal and the White for the BBC.
But it’s Lucinda’s adaptation of David Ebershoff‘s novel The Danish Girl that has critics raving as of late, a screenplay that is 11 years in the making. The true story of Lili Elbe, the first trans woman to ever undergo gender reassignment surgery, and her wife, Gerda, The Danish Girl is a love story of a different kind; about the complications of identity and the steadfastness of true love through even the biggest of challenges and change. Lucinda’s ability to detail the roughest moments of honesty alongside those of bittersweet new beginnings is what has helped to make the film successful in its stranger-than-fiction storytelling. That is to say that people in 1920s Copenhagen were not nearly as brave nor as truthful as Lili and Gerda, which is why they are becoming a contemporary focus for not only Lucinda and director Tom Hooper, but researchers around the world.
We spoke with Lucinda about her process in adapting The Danish Girl and her next project adapting Sarah Waters‘ The Little Stranger.
AfterEllen: I read in the press notes that you originally didn’t think you were the right one to adapt the book for film. What was intimidating?
Lucinda Coxon: Not intimidating, but a novel arrives in the post and I think the cover says something about “It’s the story of the first sex change.” I think that was literally the bold kind of outline. I went “OK, maybe.” And then I started to read the book and it was so much more than-you know. It was just kind of so fascinating as a story. And it was fascinating on its own terms as a novel, but the idea it was also based on a true story that had been lost was more fascinating. And the more I was researching around, the more fascinated and more hooked I was. Just the opportunity to write about these two remarkable women and this journey that they went together and the story of this marriage and their incredible commitment to enabling and growing one another, I found really moving.
And I found it sort of personally challenging, the idea they had such vision and such courage. The idea that once you see something, although it might be easier to pretend that you’ve not and kind of find a work around, but to instead be the people that go, “No, that’s really what is in the room”-that’s to push through and follow your kind of destiny to its absolute conclusion. I found that really challenging.
AE: Like you said, the movie is based on a true story that has already been fictionalized for the novel, and there are differences in the film version from the book. What were the challenges in adapting something that already had two different versions?
LC: Well, some of the changes were pretty straight-forward to make. In the novel, Gerda is American and her backstory’s been very heavily fictionalized. Actually, a lot of her story with Lili is not heavily fictionalized in the novel. So I kind of stripped out everything that seemed to have been willful fiction on David’s part and restored it and took it back as close as I could to the truth as we knew it.
The truth, obviously, is a slippery thing as well. We use that term very loosely, I think, when we talk about the story because certainly, when we began, there was even less research material available than there is now. There’s been a lot of research done in the last 10 years into digging up her story and trying to get to the bottom of what the medical procedures they went through were, and lot’s of Gerda’s art’s now kind of being found all over the place that had really been kind of missing for years. Lot’s of interest in the story, and that’s been something that’s been kind of ongoing that I’ve kind of been writing alongside.
The challenges are the same as anything-do you believe it? Are you with them in it? And I think I wanted to-I always felt that it was, in a sense-for me-from Gerda’s point of view. Simply in the sense that she sees Lili; she sees Lili in the act of painting and loving her and painting her. Lili manifests in the world and it becomes possible for Lili to become fully realized as a person.
And so I felt that was the way in for me; that it was about looking through Gerda’s eyes, and about looking at the person that’s really in front of you; not that person that society has delivered to you. And I thought that was kind of remarkable gift that she had, even when you reach the point where it’s going to cost her, in a sense, her relationship. The thing that has the highest value-it’s going to cost her the person she loves in order to have the person she loves. But that moment where that marriage has to be dramatically reconfigured, I found very, very moving.
AE: Once Lili transitions fully, they could no longer be married because they were living as two women. Was that something you ever considered including?
LC: We did have it in the script, actually. We had that scene, and we had Gerda’s sort of distress. And not only that they couldn’t be married, but if Einar was deemed not to have existed-so his birth certificate was kind of corrected, but she was not a widow, so she wanted someone to mourn as well. So not only they couldn’t be married, but she had no kind of status and her past had been completely erased. So we did have it, but actually what we-we also had scenes where Lili gets her new passport with her name on it and actually, when it came to it, we just thought it was in the story and those scenes didn’t make the cut. It was already there.
AE: Did you find anything in your research that indicated that they continued to have a kind of romantic/sexual relationship after Lili transitioned?
LC: It’s really interesting because, I should say in relation to the previous question also, I think the thing that might have made it feel differently than they were two women who weren’t able to be married- we had a scene that was flagged up, but I don’t think there’s necessarily any evidence to suggest that they wanted to be married. And Gerda Wegener produced-apart from all her wonderful portraits and fashion drawings, she produced some of the most exquisite lesbian erotica. It’s fantastic! And the day I found that out, I went, “Oh! I have this whole new thing for the film,” and everyone kind of went, “You know, this may be just one thing too many, because this is already quite a bit.”
And I think that the evidence that we have is that, in the end, Lili was not lesbian. Lili very much wanted to have relationships with men. I think Gerda was more open to that and I think we try to track that in the film without being incredibly specific about it, just because, you know, there isn’t-what goes on between two people in a room, we can never know. But I think it’s clear that’s part of the emotional journey for them and I think that’s in the film without, in that sense, Lili distancing herself and wanting to be with men. I think that’s the truth of it.
AE: It seemed like Gerda was still interested in having that romantic/sexual relationship with Lili, but for Lili it became more of a familial love.
LC: I think that’s partly-who knows why that is, but I would say there’s-to a degree in Lili, that’s also about needing to distance yourself from the past, in some way. So she’s making her way forward in such difficult terrain, actually a need to distance yourself from the past, and Gerda is, in a way, a casualty of that. But it’s necessary to her. It certainly seemed to be what she felt.
AE: Did you consult any trans women through the writing of the script?
LC: Not at the beginning. More as we kind of moved forward in time. At the beginning, I think I knew relatively little about the trans community, when I began, so Lili was kind of my road in, in a way. I found out much more. If you would have told me when I started it that we’d be releasing it into this landscape, I would not have been able to believe it. Two years ago, I might have thought, “Oh, come on!” But 10 years ago, 11 years ago, it seemed impossible. I talked to some young trans people. I did try quite hard. One of the things I was very anxious about not projecting a 21st century sensibility onto Gerda and Lili because they are people who have never heard the word transgender; they are forging a path on their own and I thought it was really important to let them do that without the sense of community. And at the point where Lili gets access to a surgeon who can give her what she feels she needs, she’s suicidal. She’s considering a lobotomy. That’s where she is. These are not people who have any sense of a community and so I wanted that to be really kind of clear and so I think I was slightly nervous about taking on board too much of the trans conversation, in a sense. I mustn’t have that language and that jargon in my head because that’s not who they are. It’s like a lot of research: You have to know it and forget it. That was the kind of way forward for me.
AE: The ending is different from the book and real life. In reality, they weren’t together when Lili died.
LC: Lives are messy. We showed two rounds of operations that were actually six rounds of operations, and they do separate. And Gerda remarries, but the marriage is very short-lived. It’s plainly a kind of rebound-it is! It’s so obviously Lili kind of needing her space and Gerda trying to figure out who she’s going to be without her and it’s a rebound marriage that doesn’t last. At the point where Lili dies in surgery, Gerda is getting her room ready because Gerda’s gonna look after her the operation. So they are, for all intents and purposes, together still, but it’s a different set-up. There’s accuracy and there’s truth, and the truth of the story is that Gerda was waiting for her to take care of her. She was preparing her room.
I think she-I mean, who knows how accurate this is in terms of everyone trying to spare everyone else’s feelings-but there’s definitely a sense that Gerda has become a kind of mother to Lili; that Lili’s almost like the child of the marriage. While she’s in this slightly debilitated state, that she needs looking after and Gerda is kind of taking on that role, and Gerda is waiting to do that. So, they are together, for me, to the end. And the fact that they aren’t in the same room at the same time is kind of a detail.
And we talked about how the other stuff would have played, obviously, and I thought about it-I think it would have been a much less truthful version if we had a big kind of bust-up separation, because I don’t think that’s what happened. I think the big bust-ups are earlier, in a sense, when they realize they’re to going to be able to go forward in the same way, and once that’s done, everything else falls as a consequence. So for me, they were together at the end, and I think there’s great evidence that was the case. She continued to be-Gerda set out to get Lili’s memoir published. They’re inextricably connected.
AE: I saw you are also working with Sarah Waters on adapting her book The Little Stranger.
LC: We’re making it next year. We have a fantastic director called Lenny Abrahamson. He’s great; Sarah’s fantastic. The book is amazing.
AE: Was that a different challenge? What was adapting that book like?
LC: Oh, it was completely different. When you’re writing about a life, the burden of responsibility is enormous and you’re always trying to do your best by people. Sarah’s book is very different. It’s a kind of haunted house story, The Little Stranger. Kind of Turn of the Screw territory, set in 1948.
AE: Is it pretty close to the book? Is Sarah involved at all?
LC: It is pretty close to the book, yeah! We kind of chat. She reads the drafts and she’s involved, yeah.
AE: What’s it like to have the person who wrote the original reading over your drafts?
LC: It varies. She’s very gracious and, luckily, she really liked the script. If she hadn’t liked the script, who knows? But she’s been very gracious but it’s been a kind of dream experience and I loved it and started working on it, and then Lenny Abrahamson started chasing it and it turned out that he had also wanted to adapt it when the rights were up, so we all worked together and Lenny and I are involved now. It’s all be great.
AE: I was curious because Emma Donoghue wrote the novel Room, and then wrote the screenplay so that she could be the only one to do it. [Note: Lenny Abrahamson directed the feature adaptation of Room this year.]
LC: For a while I only adapted works by people who were dead to err on the side of caution. But I think most people-it varies, of course. People are people. But David Ebershoff-I said to him and Sarah-I always say to people, “Do you have any interest in adapting it yourself? Because if so, you should do that. I don’t want to be the person standing in your way; just say so!” They made it clear they have better things to do; they have other books to write.
The Danish Girl is open in select theaters now.
