Director James Mangold Found Inspiration for "Girl, Interrupted" at the Movies

Director James Mangold likes to look for inspiration from classic movies when writing screenplays. “Writing and making a movie is an act of searching for answers – at least for me. Very often you can draw upon great fables for answers about how to solve problems, and they can offer you guidance.”

“When I sat down and started writing Girl, Interrupted, certain things started to click into place,” Mangold continued. “I started looking for models, films that could help me, plays, stories – but not necessarily of this genre.”

“I always think of template films,” Mangold said. “When I made Heavy, I was thinking of silent films and making a kind of wordless romance. In Cop Land, I was thinking about Westerns – I watched 3:10 To Yuma two dozen times. With Girl, Interrupted it was several films, including George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five – I’m a huge George Roy Hill fan. His films are very underrated.”

Mangold explained, “In Slaughterhouse-Five, ‘Billy Pilgrim,’ who’s the hero, is living both on a planet far away in a bubble… and in the middle of a very intense battle in Dresden in World War II, and also on Long Island with his family, and he keeps snapping back and forth between these different pieces of his life. One thing I noticed about that film is that clearly ‘Billy Pilgrim,’ by any normal standards, would be insane… but we don’t think he’s crazy. We think he’s our hero and he’s got a problem. Time has come unglued for him.”

Director James Mangold on the set of Girl, Interrupted

“And I thought that could really work for Susanna’s character, because the last thing I wanted was the audience to push her away,” said Mangold. “What clued me into this whole idea is something Susanna Kaysen describes in her book about how when she was in the throes of whatever kind of fog it was that landed on her in adolescence, time had become fluid. It seemed to move backward and forward and what goes up did not necessarily come down… And since movies are all about time and the chronology of things, it seemed that a really cinematic way to try and relay some of that disorientation was by kind of putting time in a Cuisinart and letting it get a little mixed up for Susanna.”

James Mangold avoided some of the more obvious role models for Girl, Interrupted. “It’s too easy to call this a Cuckoo’s Nest with women,” Mangold believed. “In many ways, this story is so different. The atmosphere is so different. It just happens to be a period piece and it happens to involve mental health in a mental institution, but every Western isn’t High Noon and every cop movie isn’t Prince of the City. I think you can make a movie about a mental hospital and make it about completely different things.”

Jack Nicholson as 'Randle McMurphy' and Will Sampson as 'Chief Bromden' in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Instead, James Mangold saw similarities between Kaysen’s story and what ‘Dorothy’ encounters in her “parallel universe” in The Wizard of Oz. “Susanna and ‘Dorothy’ are both depressed and disaffected adolescent girls yearning for someplace better, not understanding what is going on, hurtled into this circumscribed universe where they meet the best friends of their lives, each of whom is also missing pieces of themselves, is unsatisfied with what they are. They go on many adventures together – the adventures add up to nothing on a plot level, but the greater sum of these parts is, they all grow up. In the course of these adventures, they become more whole as people. In the end, ‘Dorothy’ finds out there is no secret – she could have clicked her heels and gone home anytime. And in our film, the journey is the secret, as well.”

Girl, Interrupted producer Cathy Konrad applauded this script direction. “Jim’s brilliant conceptual notion about The Wizard of Oz really threw us into a good mode of how to navigate the screenplay. It was how we could identify Susanna as a girl trying to find her way back home, her way back into life. It was the idea that along the road to discovering who you are, you often find yourself surrounded by others who are missing pieces of themselves as well… So they all go down the yellow brick road together. Some make a wrong turn down a dead-end street like Lisa, some run out of gas like Daisy, and some just end up lost without a map like Susanna.” 

Sources:

Mitchell Sacharoff, “James Mangold’s Girl, Crazy,” Venice, Jan./Feb. 2000

Girl Interrupted DVD: Director Commentary

Girl Interrupted Production Information, Columbia Pictures Press Release