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MillimeterFade to Black: Bill Condon, Director
Nov 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
Bill Condon's unwavering eye is again cast on the foibles of humanity, telling the story of another driven man at odds with society. In Gods and Monsters his protagonist was James Whale, the gay director best known for his horror films at Universal. In his new movie, Kinsey, the hero is the iconoclastic scientist, known as Dr. Sex, who awakened America's collective libido with the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953.
Photo: Suzanne Tenner
As Alfred Kinsey, Liam Neeson delivers a shattering performance. Condon needed a visual construct to hold this story together, and finding it proved to be a challenge.
“Some movies strike you right away,” says Condon. “I remember with Gods and Monsters, I was reading the novel it was based on, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is the play between the expressionism of the '30s and the Sirkian, kind-of-'50s widescreen expressionism. [It] could be so fun here — create a widescreen '50s world where this black-and-white man doesn't belong anymore.’ It was just there, full-born. [With Kinsey] it took longer, and it really came out of discussions with the designer. I'd shown him a still that I loved from the Kinsey Institute of a series of pictures of a man, naked, with his penis getting progressively larger, set against a backdrop of graph paper. … Richard Sherman, the designer, said, ‘Why don't we make that the motif for the movie — these squares, this grid that he's always trying to get people on.’”
Kinsey's work involved taking the sexual histories of as many Americans as he and his staff could record and tabulate. The framing device for the film became Kinsey instilling his interview technique in a staff member by giving his own history. To capture this, Condon had the invaluable help of DP Fred Elmes, who has shot films for John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, and Ang Lee.
“He had this idea to really separate the interview process, which kind of punctuates the movie. We keep coming back to these scenes of Kinsey giving his sex history — and to put that in black and white, which is a direct reversal of expectation.”
The story spans several decades, and Condon wanted to be able to invoke America's social naiveté without getting bogged down in a period piece. “We've really made an effort to be subtle with period in the movie, to really do it with a light touch. I didn't want that veil of period that sometimes movies of the past can be dripping with to separate you from what was going on.”
According to Condon, Elmes was again key in making this happen. “I can't say I know exactly how he does it, but if you look at the film, there's a kind of late-Victorian, turn-of-the-century section at the beginning, moving into the teens. The light, everything about it, has a very different feel from what it feels like in the '30s, and then obviously into the '40s and '50s. I think you feel the period without being distracted by it.”
One of the most fun, and difficult, sequences in Kinsey is a montage following Kinsey and his staff crossing the country and interviewing as many people as possible. The original idea had been a complex grid design with interviews shot all across the country. It was quickly apparent the production couldn't afford this.
“Lower budget, you can't shoot hundreds of people talking, so whenever we had extras, we shot them against a white background and had them speak, but didn't use sound, because that meant that we didn't have to pay them as day-players. Then, we only scripted about twenty of them.”
Actors' faces, giving their sexual histories, are transposed over a gridiron encompassing the United States. Vintage film vies with graphs and charts as the sexual histories mesh into a chorus, and faces representing the panoply of America almost seem to morph from one to the other.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.