The Handmaid’s Tale

Filming Margaret Atwood’s bestseller showcases science fiction as a class act.

By Sheldon Teitelbaum

THE HANDMAID'S TALE, directed by Volker Schlondorff, scripted by Harold Pinter and starring Robert Duvall, Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Aidan Quinn, and Elizabeth McGovern, was adapted from Canadian Margaret Atwood’s awardwinning 1985 novel, a netherworldly scenario of Calvinism run rampant in day-after-tomorrow America. The production was filmed last year, between late February and early May in Durham, North Carolina, fora neat $13 million—significantly less money than one might imagine is necessary to bring its cautionary vision of the future to life,

Compared to this picture, however, with its sombre, nightmare glimpse of womankind under the black heels of Atwood’s Swaggartians, even so outlandish a dystopia as Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL would seem to have made genuine commercial sense. And given the material and the talents brought to bear on it, THE HANDMAID'S TALE ought to make as much, if not more, aesthetic sense.

But it’s going to be a hard sell for its distributor, Cinecom, which plans to open the film in select, major markets in January or February. For although Atwood'’s book occasionally displays its pulpish qualities and playful lapses into dark comedy, her future dystopia is literarily high brow, outwardly political and unremittingly depressing.

Al the helm, German director Volker Schiondortt.

Indeed, that producer Daniel Wilson nevertheless managed to bring this acclaimed near-future fantasy to the screen ought to get THE HAND- MAID'S TALE intothe book of Hollywood's least-likely-ever-to-be-made motion pictures. And, according to some recent media speculation, onto the list of nominations for next year’s best film.

Wilson, who optioned Atwood's book for a hefty sum, and Cinecom plan to downplay the film’s science fiction roots in their release strategy. For Schlondorff and Wilson, any reference, however tangential, to the pulp sensibilities sometimes expressed in Atwood’s novel remain anathema. Wilson, for instance, insisted, rather narrowly, perhaps, that his movie must not be termed science fiction because it would not attempt the kind of flashy, techno-fetishistic future associated with most science fiction films.

“Everything we did is set in a totally realistic world,” said Wilson. “It is not fantastic, but is as straight and normal as the world we are living in, and just as recognizable. The costumes may have changed, and the rules of life, but the buildings are the same, and sois human nature.”

To be sure, added Schlondorff, “the movie is about what our society could become in the future. But this has nothing to do with streamlined cars and gadgets and has everything to do with human behavior and what people doto each other.”

“It's not science fiction,” said Wilson. “It’s a cautionary tale about our lives.”

Despite the disclaimers, Atwood’s book and the film it inspired are science fiction just as surely as is George Orwell's /984. But when you look at what passes for science fiction film these days, it’s easy to see why the filmmakers want to playa labels game.

A new class of “handmaids,” dressed in red, take part in the “salvaging ritual that is part of their indoctrination into a new procreative role, proctored by “aunts,” a “Bene Gesserit” clan clad in brown smocks and armed with electric cattle prods, as jack-booted Swaggartians and a makeshift guard tower stand ready to crush dissent in Atwood's rica under the sway of religious fascism. Logo, Top Left: The symbol! of Gilead, Atwood's dystopia.

THE BOOK

Novelist Margaret Atwood on filming her science fiction vision of American fascism.

By Sheldon Teitelbaum

Unlike the makers of the film, who disdain the term science fiction, Canadian author Margaret Atwood regards her novel as fairly solidly ensconced in the SF tradition. By SF, however, Atwood means speculative fiction, according to the usage proposed by the late Robert Heinlein, a subcategory of futuristic fiction distinguished from so-called hard SF, said Atwood, by its realism, its lack of futuristic hardware, bug-eyed monsters, time travel, and other standard genre tropes.

Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale won the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke award, a genre honor, not to mention Canada’s 1986

Governor General's award, and nominations for the British Booker Prize and the French Ritz-Paris Hemingway Prize.

“We've already got tomorrow’s technology,” said Atwood by phone. “One of the things that frightens people the most, I've found, is that everything is on credit cards, and yourcredit cards can be frozen at any moment. In my book, that's how they trap the females they push a button, and bingo, no credit. So if you want to resist this tyranny, resist any change from liquid money.”

In Atwood’s ultragrim fantasy, America has been ruined by the excesses of consumerism. Pollution, nuclear mishaps and genetic disasters have wreaked ecohavoc, with the result that most women have become infertile. Those still able to have children are castin the biblical role of “handmaids,” as defined in the book of Genesis’ story of Rachel, and are required to bear the children of the ruling elite.

Kate, Atwood’s protagonist, refuses to submit to such tyranny, and attempts an escape to Canada. She is caught (and would have been turned back over to the Americans had she succeeded, Atwood postulated, choosing not to recall the time Canada generously offered young Americans sanctuary against the draft and the war in Vietnam). Kate's husband is murdered and her youngdaughter is taken from her.

Atwood with director Volker Schiondorff, during her visit to the North Carolina set.

After being tested for fertility, she is sent to a training center, the Rachel and Leah Institute, where the “Aunts” a “Bene Gesserit” clan clad in brown smocks and armed with electric cattle prods, indoctrinate Kate and her fellow handmaids in the duties and glories of their new procreative roles.

Kate is subsequently assigned toa high-ranking“Commander” named Fred (played by Robert Duvall), formerly a Madison Avenue exec, and his barren wife Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway), an erstwhile singing television evangelist, Renamed Otfred—of Fred —Kate is given a small room in their home. She is forbidden to socialize with the other residents of the household, is confined to her room until summoned, and may not speak unless spoken to.

During her monthly peak of fertility, however, the three of them engage in an unusual and singularly unpleasant household ceremony. Offred lies motionless between the Commander and his wife. They are all fully dressed, as is she, and the act of copulation is cold and humiliating, stripped of any tenderness or passion. If Kate becomes pregnant she will be revered. If she fails repeatedly, she will suffer the horrific fate of becoming an “Unwoman.”

“People often ask me why Kate doesn't burn down the Commander's house,” said Atwood, reflecting on the quaint American notion that one can survive political oppression asa Rambo action figure. “I tell them you obviously don't know what these regimes are like. All most people seem to be able to imagine isa Soviet takeover like in those movies AMERIKAand RED DAWN Of course, no one really believes them—if the Russians can't get their dishwashers to work, what chance do they have?

“What shocked peopleabout The Handmaid's Tale was that every society has within itself an incipient form of totalitarianism which would take over if conditions favored it. And this is the form it takes.”

The Handmaid's Tale is Atwood’s only science fiction novel. But Atwood, like Doris Lessing, has long been a science fiction reader, and knows her way around the genre. She has never felt it necessary, as have writers like Harlan Ellison, to distance herself from the genre for fear of being tainted by its inherent commercial limita

Wilson became interested in The Handmaid's Tale in January, 1986, when his actress wife Zoey Wilson, sug- gested he give the book a read. Wilson had toiled in the financially fecund wastelands of television as an award-winning producer, and was at work on the mini-series HEMINGWAY, starring Stacy Keach. He saw in Atwood’s book the longcherished opportunity to make anentry into feature films. The Handmaid’s Tale, said Wilson, was “an incredible piece of literature. It dealt with how any society, no matter how seemingly stable, can be pushed over the edge. And it did so by telling a damn good story.” Wilson recalled how the laconic and cryptic British playwright Harold Pinter came immediately to mind as the proper choice for screenwriter. Although Atwood had experience as a scriptwriter, mostly for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Wilson did not think to offer Canada’s Queen WASP raconteur a crack at adapting her own novel, nor, apparently, did she ask for one. “Atwood already had a number of offers from people out here who wanted to option the book, and there was also interest from at least one studio, though they never got far enough along to name a figure. It was not an unsubstantial amount of money she wanted. I met with her in New York while she was guest-lecturing at New York University. What I think convinced her to deal with me was my suggestion that Pinter do the screenplay.” Wilson optioned the book in February 1986 and traveled to London in March, where he got Pinter to read it, informing the playwright that he would be hiring 63 year-old British- Czech director Karel Reisz, who had already expressed interest in the project. This was crucial, said Wilson, because Pinter would only work ona screenplay if a director he approved of had been lined up. In 1980, Reisz and Pinter had worked together on THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, and had become close friends in the process. Pinter, attracted by the prospect of working once again with Reisz, gave the book a quick reading in April, and consequently abandoned a project he had been working on to take on the adaptation,

Producer Daniel Wilson, filming on location with handmaid Natasha Richardson. Below. The star names who considered but turned down the flim’s grim title role. Jodie Foster; Sigourney Weaver; Debra Winger

“I simply felt,” said Wilson, “that Reisz was a craftsman who possessed sufficient intellectual weight to grapple with the material.”

Nor did it hurt that both he and Reisz happened to share the same attorney.

Between optioning the material and the attendant costs of developing the script, Wilson spent $800,000 of his own money on the nascent project. Pinter, with considerable input from Reisz, completed and delivered a first draft on September 20, 1987. The playwright had succeeded admirably, most concurred, in the unenviable task of cking outa neat, razor-sharp narrative from Atwood’s decidedly pensive, non-linear novel.

In Atwood’s book, Kate spends so much of her time thinking that one is almost moved to fault the author fora lack of dramatic acumen. When one realizes, however, that her protagonist is permitted to do little with hertime but think —that, to survive (always a favorite theme with Atwood), she must remain quiet and passive, living in her thoughts~ the fleeting, atemporal structure of the novel begins to make sense.

“The book,” noted one production observer, “was like scrambled eggs. Pinter gave the story a sequential line. We pick Kate up at the beginning, trying to escape over the border, to her sequestering in the commander’s house, her liasons and her plans for escape. The novel covers all those things, but not in that order.”

To make the book work asa film, Kate’s inner life had to be externalized, the drama of her existence rendered in a welldelineated story. Noted Wilson, “What Pinter did—and he did this brilliantly, was to take these thoughts and transform them into dramatic scenes, He winnowed the book into its essence, and he didn’t waste a comma doing so. The fact is that Pinter simply had the right intellect and style for the material. We solicited Atwood’s comments about the script, and she loved it.”

Wilson discovered, however, that it would take more than an intelligent script to get THE HANDMAID'S TALE on line. “I naively thought that with a best-selling author like Atwood, a screenwriter like Pinter, and a director like Reisz, any studio would want to finance the production,” he recalled.

“Boy, was I wrong.”

uring the next two and a half years, Wilson would take the Pinter script to every studio in Hollywood, encountering a wall of ignorance, hostility, and indifference. Most of those he pitched it to told Wilson that Atwood simply wasn ta known quantity in the U.S., and that movies like 1984 and BRAZIL, to name two recent cinematic efforts at dystopia, had never sprouted commercial legs, and that a film for and about women as evidenced by producer Charles Fries’ appallingly misbegotten FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC, would be lucky if it made it to video. Two smaller New York companies, however—Cinecom and Mirimax—expressed some interest in the project. But neither, said Wilson, could come up with the kind of funding he felt was necessary—at least $10 million. The project languished until the Spring of 1988, when superstar Sigourney Weaver got hold of a copy of the script. By this time,

Reisz, dismayed at the lack of studio interest in the project, had long since announced that he could no longer continue with the project, that other commitments were pressing. His departure was amicable. Wilson maintained that Reisz behaved honestly and honorably throughout his year-long association with the project, and was invaluable in helping to give it shape.

Weaver announced through agent Sam Cohn that she would be interested in playing the part of Kate. Casting Weaver as Kate had, in fact, never occurred to Wilson, and was somewhat hard for him to swallow. Wilson had always thought someone more vulnerable—and someone younger—would have to play the part. Wilson wondered if Weaver could tone down her trademark “Rambette” routine. But with Weaver aboard, thought Wilson, who could turn the project down?

While attending Cannes in May of 1988, Wilson learned that Cinecom, one of the two New York companies initially interested in the property, was reorganizing under a new CEO, and had recently received a healthy influx of cash. Cinecom began producing more expensive films, and Wilson learned that they were again

Unable to become pregnant by the Commander, Richardson fails for chautteur Aidan Quinn at Joy's urging.

Faye Dunaway as Serena Joy, wile of the Commander and a former TV evangelist, acclimating Richardson to a handmaid’s role as the couple's procreative surrogate.

considering the project. Wilson ultimately found a replacement for Reisz—and identified a number of his other principals as well—through Cohn, who suggested Schlondorff in May 1988. Forachange, things were looking up.

hen in October, a month after preproduction had begun with Cinecom’s backing and less than three months before the scheduled start of shooting. Weaver announced that she had no choice but to back out of the production. The actress, who was trying to become pregnant, was ordered by her doctor to cease working. This setback almost put an impromptu end to THE HAND- MAID'S TALE.

“We had all thought Sigourney was doing the film, "recalled Wilson, “and had based our schedule on her availability. Suddenly we found ourselves committed to a schedule, with personnel on the payroll, and we didn't have a lead actress.”

The irony of this turn of events— Weaver's character was being coerced by the state into becoming pregnant— was not lost on Wilson, who again despaired, as did his newfound director, of ever getting the project into the ozone.

As they would soon find, the task of coming up with a replacement for Weaver and consequently with those slated to play opposite her, would prove a tad more trying than they had expected. No one wanted to play Kate. This reticence owed, explained Schlondorff, to the fact that “there wasn't one positive character in the story you could root for. They were all ambiguous sometiines you hated themand sometimes you loved them.”

“All these stars Volker approached,” recalled production designer Tom Walsh, “were backing away from the material for one reason or another. He went through so many names, you have to look through an actors directory and ask who didn’ they ask.

“Jodie Foster, for instance, rejected the part, arguing that THE HANDMAID'S TALE was a feminist art-house film, and that she just didn’t feel she was right for the part. Schlondorff recoiled in shock and fear when he heard that—making that kind of movie was the last thing he wanted to do.”

Another actress offered the role was Debra Winger, who, said Wilson, expressed an interest but could not accommodate the production in her schedule. Ironically, Wilson later discovered that Winger had been cast in a film by the long-departed Reisz, who shot itin North Carolinaat the same time THE HANDMAID'S TALE was shooting.

Walsh believes that most of the casting difficulties experienced by the production could be traced to a reluctance among many American actors and actresses to appear in less than positive roles so as not to offend their fans. “They've made so much money from whatever character they've created for themselves,” he explained, “and they don't want to be depicted as ambiguous or negative.”

It is this reluctance to take chances that may account for the fact that two of the players Schlondorff was able to secure— Natasha Richardson(as Kate) and Victoria Tennant (suitably cast as Aunt Lydia, replete with electric cattle prod)—were British, and perhaps less interested, as Tennant has demonstrated on past occasions, in winning public adulation.

“That's what I admire about the Brits,” said Walsh. “They dive in with equal energy whether they are playing a positive or negative character. They are there to act, whereas American actors and actresses want to be loved—especially if that’s what they are successful at.”

Schlondorff compared the casting of THE HANDMAIDS TALE to a fishing expedition. Most of the actors with whom he spoke seemed to want todo strictly mainstream movics, but on the other hand, “they all wanted to do something different as well, and therefore they were often torn. First they would turn the partdown, then they would come back, get intrigued, but when it came down to signing the deal, they withdrew again.” This was certainly the case with Richardson, said Schlondorff, though he was able toland her the third time she came around, “Actually,” recalled Wilson, who had a different take on what transpired, “Natasha was someone we had always had in mind for the part. And she was quite enthusiastic about doing the picture.” The 26 year-old daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and British director Tony Richardson (TOM JONES), the actress was far more in keeping with Wilson’s idea of Kate than Weaver had ever been. Wilson had always felt the role demanded a vulnerability and youth Weaver, despite her obvious commercial appeal, so glaringly lacked And, as he reminded Richardson when she showed up onthe set last February, Wilson had worked with her grandfather, Sir Michael Redgrave, on a program about the life of Charles Dickens—his first effort in television. “Sigourney’s a fine actress,” said Wilson, “and she would have donc a wonderful job. But the film would have taken ona different perspective with her aboard—one | wasnt sure was right for it. I really think we were blessed with Natasha. She conveyed great emotional qualities and range, playing the kinetic and dramatic moments with equal aplomb.” Schlondorff shared Wilson's spin on Richardson's recruitment. “Looking back at it, it seems almost impossible to have made the movie with Sigourney because the rest of the cast would have had to be different. She could have killed the Commander just using her jaw.”

DIRECTING DYSTOPIA

Volker Schlondorff downplayed the book’s premise as political prophecy, rendering it as a surreal, feminist nightmare.

By Sheldon Teitelbaum

When asked where Gilead existed, according to production designer Tom Walsh, director Volker Schlondorff replied that novelist Margaret Atwood's fascist Republic of Gilead existed on the map of human paranoia.

Schlondorff, the Pariseducated German intellectual best known for his film adaptation of the Gunter Grass novel The Tin Drum, was approached by producer Daniel Wilson to replace Karel Reisz. Schlondorff, who had been living in New York for five years, read the Harold Pinter screenplay, and then the Margaret Atwood novel. He didn't, he later announced to Wilson, much like either of them. He simply could not buy the premise—not as a piece of political prophecy, anyway. America was too fragmented a society to permit a totalitarian theocracy—people would never stand for it.

“Coming where you come from,” responded Wilson, “I can't believe you can say that.

“The thing about religious zealots,” argued Wilson, “is that they can tear things down far quicker than any other political movement or ideology. That’s because if you don't agree, you are a heretic, and then they burn you.”

Schlondorff conceded the point, but he maintained that the scenario posited by Atwood, in which our value-relative consumer society has been replaced with a numbingly repressive regime governed by old-style American puritanism—remained hard forhimto take seriously. But a month after lunching with Wilson, Schlondorff called to ask if the position was still open.

Schiondorft (1), German film auteur, directs Robert Duvall as Atwood's fascist Commander.

“I had misread the book asa political parable, sort of a 60s movie,” recalled Schlondorff, who was determined not to be typecast as a European arthouse director, and who wanted, very badly, to carvea niche for himself as a maker of “American” films.

“What stayed with me, though, was the relationship between the main characters,” said Schlondorff. “The whole thing was more of a surreal nightmare about female sexuality and submission. Atwood was simply dreaming up the next horrible situation she, as a woman, could be in, and what horrible things men could do to her. The fear that such things could happen toa woman are real, and you can always build a movie on fear.”

Atwood, however, takes the political implications of THE HANDMAID’S TALE seriously. “Since I wrote the book,” she noted, “we've had the Baby M. case, the Jimmy and Tammy scandal, the Supreme Court abortion decision, and the testimony of Oliver North, which pretty much indicated that he wouldn't have minded staging a coup. Certainly Volker came to believe it more and more as events unfolded.”

For Schlondorff’s part, however, he maintained that he was stil unmoved. “I don’t buy any of this as political prophecy,” he said last September, after filming had been completed.

There was, according to wm = Walsh, who had worked as a production designer with Schlondorff three years earlier on AGATHERING OF OLD MEN, and who was hired in the same capacity on THE HAND- MAID’S TALE, another facet to the director's reassessment of the material.

“Volker,” said Walsh, “was completely frustrated by his inability to get a number of other projects he had been working on off the ground. With Sigourney Weaver's connection to the project at the time, itseemed that here was finally a picture that actually could get donc.” An intellectual who is as adept at politics and economics as he is at film, Schlondorff was associated with the Junger Deutscher Film (Young German Film) movement that emerged during the mid-'60s. Schlondorff began his career as an assistant director to Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Melville, and was later ranked with such luminaries as directors Ranier Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Alexander Kluge, and Jean-Marie Straub.

Schlondorff achieved special renown for such seminal German films as THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM (based on the Heinrich Boll noveland co-directed with Schlondorff’s wife, actress/ filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta), CIRCLE OF DECEIT (filmed

ichardson, who followed her father to New York years earlier, had received the London Drama Critic's Award for the Most Promising Newcomer of 1986asa result of her portrayal of Nina in Chekov’s THE SEAGULL. She was best known to American audiences, however, for her starring role in Paul Schrader'’s PATTY HEARST. She was also able to turn her accent on and off with great facility, a matter of no small consequence for the production.

Robert Duvall as the Commander, getting to know his handmaid a little better by breaking the no contact rule to play a forbidden board game in his inner sanctum.

Richardson was not without qualms about the project, though Schlondorff was eventually able to set them to rest. Her boyfriend, said Schlondorff, never stopped warning her that the role would ultimately harm her career.

“Had Volker told me this was this great feminist political statement, | would have been concerned,” recalled Richardson, who was interviewed in New York in August. “Butthat wasn't how he saw itatall. He was much more interested in human relationships, and envisioned the movie as a thriller.”

“As a piece of philosophy,” Schlondorff told her, “the story isnt very deep. As a thriller, however, it has potential.” Schlondorff suggested that she regard the exercise as somewhat akin to Alfred Hitchcock's film, NOTOR- IOUS, in which Ingrid Bergman is trapped in a house run by fascists, and becomesa welltreated slave.

Casting Richardson, however, forced Wilson to rethink the casting of his other principals. “Once we had decided we weren't going to be going the Weaver route—which would have given us major boxoffice appeal—we determined we would have to build up a firstrate ensemble that would pack the same dramatic and dealmaking punch collectively.”

Securing the services of Robert Duvall, as the Commander, and Faye Dunaway, as his wife Serena Joy, proved somewhat difficult, if only for scheduling reasons, but these snags were eventually unraveled by veteran production manager Wolfgang Glattes. According to Walsh, both players were also offered large sums of money, which must have helped overcome any misgivings they may have had about so unconventional a movie. Indeed, although the production was budgeted at $13 million, only $5 million of that, noted Schlondorff, was below the line.

Wilson, however, denied that this was entirely the case. Duvall and Dunaway were both paid well, “but our cast costs were not at all excessive. The fact is that people wanted to do this film, and some of them made sacrifices to do so.” As for below-the-line costs, Wilson said these were significantly over $5 million, especially after postproduction expenses and scoring had been factored in.

“Duvall was the only one,” recalled Schlondorff, “who immediately said yes to the role. As long as his character is true to his nature, hell do it, and he doesn't care if you root for him or not. That kind of integrity goes through his entire performance, which | think dominates the movie. Although he is the villain, he is the one you like the most.”

Schlondorff faced a host of inherently difficult obstacles in his quest to create what he thought of as an American film—one which American audiences would find immediately accessible, Notably, German-born-and-raised Schlondorff was not an American, though, as he correctly pointed out, this did not prevent him from adapting that most American play, Death of a Salesman, in an immediately accessible fashion. The global village, he argued, has grown far too constricted for such categories to mean a great deal anymore.

There were other difficulties. Atwood also was not an American, and her outlook on many issues is discernibly Canadian, and very much her own. Moreover, Pinter had always been contemptuous of American vernacular, and his script was, according to Walsh, stripped of distinctly American dialect. By the time Schlondorff, his German director of photography, his Czech cameraman, and his two British players got hold of it, the story was already twice removed froman American sensibility, and was in imminent danger of drifting farther away from one with every impromptu decision.

Mindful of these pitfalls, Schlondorff sought out the assistance of a friend and former collaborator, Jennifer Bartlett, with whom he had worked on a number of Lon- don stage projects. An American painter based in Paris, Bartlett was hired carly in preproduction as a visual consultant, becoming, in effect, Schlondorff’s Syd Mead. Schlondorff, recalled Walsh, used to refer to heras his“bulldozer.” She was there, he said, both asa crutch and acatalyst.

It was Bartlett's vision, more than any other except Atwood’s, insisted Schlondorff, which most informed the film. And it was also Bartlett who, he believes, enabled him to invest his movie withan inherently American sensibility. “Jennifer is a Californian, and she was my direct link to that American sensibility. Moreover, we had just completed two stage productions, and were extremely in syne aesthetically. For six months she worked on every detail of the production with me, and was involved in each facet, from the casting to rewriting the script to how the film should look and what kind of cinematography we should get. | was pregnant with her ideas, There's nota sceneinthe film that wasn't designed by her.”

xecutive producer Wolfgang Glattes was brought on to do THE HAND- MAID’S TALE by Cinecom’s Bob Walker, largely at the behest of agent Sam Cohn. “They thought, “he said, “that | would work well together with a German director.” Glattes, who has worked in film for 25 years, first in Germany and then as a Hollywood-based production manager and assistant director during the last Il, enjoyed a lengthy association with Sidney Lumet and Bob Fosse (working in such films as THE MORNING AFTER, ALL THAT JAZZ, and STAR 80), and is considered one of the premier line producers in the business.

One of Glattes' earliest tasks was to scout out suitable locations which would not require the building of elaborate and expensive sets. Ultimately, the Raleigh/ Durham area of North Carolina was selected. North Carolina, Glattes noted, had much to recommend it, not least the fact that the state offered good value, and was eager to attract productions. Most of THE HAND- MAID'S TALE is set in New England, the result, perhaps, of Atwood’s own lengthy sojourn, in 1962, at Harvard's Radcliffe College, where she completed her graduate studies. North Carolina, said Glattes, was really the only state in the south capable of passing for New England. Duke University, where key scenes were shot, possessed some of the ambience of a northern Ivy League college. “It had a beautiful flagstone rock look,” noted Glattes. “Any further south, and the architecture starts getting too southern.”

Richardson, with her husband and young son, is caught at the Canadian border in an attempt to fiee Gilead to avoid conscription by the state as a procreative handmaid.

During filming, Schlondorff's relationships with his cast were reputed to have been warm and effective, though the production was filmed on sets that were closed to the press. Richardson denied, for instance, contentions that Schlondorff was uncomfortable with women as his protagonists—a mark against him, given the subject matter of the film.

“That is really news to me,” said Schlondorff, who noted that women have been at the core of most of his films. This was also news to Richardson, who said she had no sense of discomfort at any time during the production. Indeed, the only discomfort she could recall experiencing had to do, understandably, with the copulation ceremony between herself, Duvall, and Dunaway.

“We were all trying to be supercool about it,” she recalled, “very professional and together. But there was a great sense of embarrassment. | felt sorry for Duvall, because it had to be tougher for him, He had to make the motions, while I just had to lie there. | was worried that people would laugh when they watched it, but Volker said when we were looping it that he couldn't understand how we did that scene—it was so painful to watch, like ritualized rape.”

Schlondorff noted that Kate's relationship with Duvall and Dunaway was actually akin to that of a daughter who is subjected to ritualized child abuse by her parents. “This was the real archetypal relationship underlying the film,” he said, “and was probably what kept me involved in the story.”

There is, said Richardson, something modern, spare, and elegant about the movie she helped create. THE HAND- MAID'S TALE is a fairy tale, and as a movie, it is considerably hipper than the book upon which it is based, There is humor here, and there is a warmth that author Margaret Atwood is not always noted for, and all this bodes well for the film.

Although THE HAND- MAID'S TALE may not provoke the kind of controversy sparked by THE LAST TEMP- TATION OF CHRIST—this is sad, because the publicity would no doubt help the movie find it’s audience —the film is, without doubt, an original.

“I think the audience reaction will be strong,” said Richardson. That's really the best we can hope for. oO

DESIGN

Creating a retrofitted future look for the Republic of Gilead on a shoestring.

By Sheldon Teitelbaum

From the start, director Volker Schlondorff determined that THE HANDMAID'S TALE would look like no other dystopian film ever made. Partly, this was a function of a lack of money—the funding just wasn't there to fashion the Republic of Gilead as a Calvinist equivalent of Tim Burton's Gotham City. Mostly, though, Schlondorff wanted to keep things simple, recognizable, and slightly off-kilter.

Indeed, if the film resembles any near-future filmic nightmare at all, noted executive producer Wolfgang Glattes, it shares something of the feel of Truffaut's FAHRENHEIT 451. But for a few select elements, such as the firemen's uniforms and the monorail, that movie made do with few of the conventional props of a science fiction film.

You're in good hands in Gilead— the state seal.

Flour on sale at a grocery store. A generic future of religion and Madison Avenue consumerism.

Even with so distinguished a cast, actualizing the look and feel of the film proved no easy task for Schlondorff. Despite his ambition to create an entertaining, discernibly American film, he never did get around to buying its premise entirely or becoming comfortable with the fact that the book it was based upon used more or less conventional—albeit mostly non-technological—science fiction tropes and trappings to render its nightmare vision more believable.

Production designer Tom Walsh noted that Schlondorff was nevertheless ill at ease with any kind of futuristic markers scattered within the film. “I think Volker was much more comfortable with the world of naturalism,” Walsh reflected some months after ending his stint on the film. “I don't really think he [Volker] isa man of the theatre or opera, though you'd have assumed he'd have a littl more imagination than he did, and be more capable of accepting the context of fiction and developing within it.

“The fact is that the futuristic, or even fictional context made him uncomfortable, and this made the process of fabricating this world all the more difficult. He isa brilliant man who actualizes ideas quite well, but actualizing the visual sometimes makes him timid.”

Although Schlondorff maintained that visual consultant Jennifer Bartlett had essentially written the book on the movie's look, the Paris-based painter only showed up on the set fora brief, if extremely trying 24-hour period. “She had a lot of spunk,” recalled Walsh, who found himself doing battle with her during the initial hours of her visit. “She has strong opinions on everything, most of which ended up validating ideas | had already presented to Volker. This is a collaborative medium, and I like the give and take, but none of us liked being dictated to, We got tothe point where we simply had to start making all these ideas floating around real.”

The drab, martial look of America’s barren future, where those few women still found to be fertile are bussed-olf to become the procreative handmaids of the state.

Black garbed fascist troops patrol Gilead, the familiar extrapolated but rendered slightly off-kilter in design.

Walsh, who most recently worked on HBO's VIETNAM WAR STORIES, noted that the key to pulling the housestyle together, given the dearth of funds, was to keep it anchored in the familiar. “Atwood’s society is 10 years off in the future,” he said. “But it isa regressive society, so the things in it had to be recognizable.”

Atwood, Walsh noted, drew considerably from medieval culture, upon which she superimposed the trappings of our own technological, consumer culture. Schlondorff, for his part, insisted upon avoiding, at all costs, any references to Nazi fascism

COSTUMES

Supplying fwe hundred outfits on a budget of just $60 each required off-the-rack solutions.

By Sheldon Teitelbaum

Early oninthe production of THE HANDMAID'S TALE costuming became a bone of contention. Director Volker Schlondorff and his visual consultant Jennifer Bartlett insisted that clothing would, inessence, be retrofitted. Schlondorff refused to charge costume designer Colleen Atwood with the task of creating customtailored outfits. This did not sit well with everybody, and particularly not with production designer Tom Walsh.

“I regarded the decision that there would be no ‘built’ costumes as a naive pretense,” said Walsh. “It’s all well and good to get everything out of a catalogue, but you can't get 500 of the same item of clothinginside of four weeks and not look like SOYLENT GREEN, where everybody was wearing hospital smocks.”

Costume designer Colleen Atwood (no relation to the book's author, Margaret Atwood) took most of her clothing cues from the novel. In the movie, handmaids wear red smocks, Aunts and guards wear brown, the wives of the ruling elite wear blue, and Marthas—the servants—wear gray. The general populace, much like Orwell's ‘proles,” wear whatever rags they can find.

“TI relied a great deal,” recalled Atwood, “on Madison Avenue’s idea of what a lady or a soldier or a servant should look like. Clothing had to be utilitarian, sort of like the Red Chinese.” Other sources of inspiration, especially for the men’s clothing, were found in the art of the Belgian painter Delaveaux, which possessed, she said, “a strange, repressive, 19th century look.” The paintings of Robert Linder were referred to for colors, which were intended to be as bold as the film's cinematography. Science fiction magazine illustrations, however, were not consulted.

Homosexuality, termed “gender treachery,” is a capital offense requiring Gilead's hanging machine, manned by Economen, outfitted in chemical workers’ sults.

The Marthas, the servant class of Gilead, stand in their gray uniforms on the steps of the Handmaid Indoctrination Center, actually North Carolina's Duke University.

Atwood’s budget amounted to some $60 per costume. Everything was bought in allotments, she said, such as a huge consignment of Chinese slippers found in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. The hangman of Gilead was outfitted in a French Surgeon’s uniform, the “Economen,” or slaves, in chemical workers’ outfits.

Costumes for extras—most of those students at Duke University, and sometimes numbering as much as 500 per scene—were prefitted bya staff which included an assistant, two seamstresses, and parttime dressers.

According to Walsh, Atwood had a number of run-ins with Bartlett during her stay on the set. “Colleen was an extremely professional designer,” said Walsh, In fact, Atwood had worked on such films as TORCH SONG TRILOGY, MARRIED TO THE MOB, SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME, and Sting’s BRING ON THE NIGHT. “She certainly didn't need to be spoonfed, but that is precisely what Bartlett tried to doto her. Itgot real nasty at times.”

Atwood, for her part, downplayed Walsh's assertions. “It's always tricky to have someone come on who has their own ideas about the way things should be,” said Atwood of Schlondorff’s design consultant, “The truth is that some of Jennifer's ideas were quite good and some were not so great, and it was hard for me to deal with her, especially at the beginning. But I grew quite fond of her actually.

“It wasn't so hard for measit