Putting Palin at the center of your story is a thankless task in some ways, for you and especially Julianne Moore. Not only is Palin still extremely visible both politically and in pop-culture, but she’s already been famously caricatured as well.
It was daunting. She’s one of the most famous people on the planet. We [knew] people watching the film would have all sorts of expectations about what Sarah Palin should be like. We expected people to bring up Tina Fey. We expected people to be skeptical about anyone who played her. My approach was to not try to impersonate her. In fact, we tried to go right at those expectations by having a scene where Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin is watching Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, replicating the moment where she watched SNL the night that [skit] ran. We have actual Tina Fey in that footage on the monitor specifically to say, “Okay, that’s one thing. And this is a different thing, entirely different.” This is not a caricature, and it’s not an impersonation. Julianne wanted to get not just into the surface — her skin, her clothes, her hair, and her accent — but to kind of internalize what she could imagine Sarah was going through psychologically, what anxieties she was experiencing stepping out on to the national stage.
You know there’s no way you’re going to win over Palin partisans with this…
We tried to reach out. I wrote two long letters — one to her attorney and one to her directly because I very much wanted to speak to her to get the story right. She just declined; that’s how it goes. I had to settle for getting her voice through her audio books and through interviews and many of the personal accounts of people who were in the rooms with her at the time. But people have made films before based on true stories without having full access. It’s up to the audience now to judge whether we pulled it off, but we sure put a lot into it.
My take after seeing Game Change is that audiences might be highly critical of Sarah Palin the politician, but it’s nearly impossible not to have empathy for Sarah Palin the woman.
I like how you put that, because we tried to play her without being critical of her as a person and more just trying to question the decision — about how the process went. She’s a very interesting person who had a lot going on in her life at that point. She’s got five kids, a new baby with Down syndrome, an older boy going off to fight in Iraq, two teenage daughters, and now she is in the middle of a national campaign. You couldn’t really write a fictional situation with forces that could pull on someone harder than those forces pulled on her. Then with all that going on, to electrify her constituents as powerfully as she did. That was an amazing person that can do that.
You know part of me wants to call up Mr. Roach and point out that Palin did NOT actually give birth to her fifth son, and what the real reasons were that Track was suddenly so patriotic, but you know it would be a waste of time. And besides the movie is already made, and about to debut, so it would really not do much good anyhow.
I learned a long time ago that journalists, documentary filmmakers, and authors might be completely sold on the fact that Palin faked her pregnancy, and that almost ALL of the things that we think we know about her are invented specifically for consumption by the public, but that by NO means indicates that they are willing to put that information into their project.
After all they have a product to sell and if it seems too far out on the fringe nobody will buy it.
I also think that Palin counts on this fact. That is why she seems to feel so comfortable making fun of the "Trig Truthers."
Which is why I am still convinced that when Joe McGinniss wrote that there were still lingering doubts about her last pregnancy, even though he did not take a definitive stand one way or the other, that it scared the crap out of her. And I really do think that it had much to do with her decision to finally admit she was not jumping into the 2012 race.
And I also believe, that even if this movie avoids that particular topic, it is still going to have a fairly devastating effect on how the public perceives her moving forward.
Which is good enough for me.
