Frankly, after checking out her credentials and seeing a few online interviews, I was somewhat daunted by the prospect of talking to Julia Leigh, the Australian director of Sleeping Beauty. She seemed so utterly composed, thoughtful and deliberate in her interviews and about her thoughts on her debut feature film, which was selected to screen in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival last month. Her biography mentions her two novels – The Hunter and Disquiet – and their many accolades and prizes. She is described as “a sorceress” who “casts a spell of serene while the earth quakes underfoot”. She was also admitted to the Supreme Court of NSW as a legal practitioner, and has a PhD from the University of Adelaide. I felt I had better be prepared.
Of course, I needn’t have worried – she was an absolute delight to speak with from the first moment, and – in a conversation sprinkled with infectious laughter – Leigh presented a completely different side of herself to the formal artist who clearly likes to challenge her readers or viewers with deliberately complex and intriguing themes.
Sleeping Beauty, which caused many a tongue to wag in Cannes, tells the mysterious tale of a young university student Lucy (played by Emily Browning) who takes a paid job to sleep with older men. And sleep here means sleep. She is totally submissive, in a drug-induced state of absolute passivity, with no knowledge of what her clients do to her in the “Sleeping Beauty Chamber” (except penetration is not permitted). But Lucy’s unknown experiences slowly begin to haunt her and she realises she must find a way to discover what happens to her when she is asleep.
It was the idea of Lucy’s “radical passivity” that I wanted to explore with Leigh. She studied philosophy at university in Sydney and I assumed that she was influenced by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who championed the idea of passivity as a way of responding more ethically in the world to others. Leigh laughs playfully at the idea that anything quite so serious is behind her story, and explains why she chose to study philosophy when she left school. “I was very interested in literature at the time,” she says, “but I decided I didn’t want to formally study literature because I was worried I would analyse myself to death. It’s probably not a view I would hold any longer, but that was my instinctive choice as an 18-year-old. So I did philosophy. I think it’s a wonderful discipline for artists, and once upon a time it was seen as important. It’s quite sad that philosophy has become a marginal practice given the questions it sets out to explore and the light it sheds on human experience”.
But Leigh found no particular rallying point amongst the various philosophers she studied and certainly nothing that consciously inspired the behaviour of the central character in the film. “I don’t see Lucy as simply passive, but quite radical in her willingness to go as far as she does.” Explains Leigh. “Her perverse provocation to the world is ‘my cheek is turned, try me’. It’s a challenge. Lucy is young – in her early twenties – and I do remember it being not a particular easy time of life. I have a deep respect for people in their twenties. They’ve left their families, they’ve left the formal education system, and they are now trying to find their own way in the world. We tend to diminish that time of life, excusing their actions, but as a matter of fact it can be very trying – the world s not an easy place to be at that age.”
And it’s Lucy’s potentially dangerous decision to experience things she is incapable of remembering that is of particular interest to Leigh. “When you’re young, and perhaps if you are tough, you might put yourself in positions that are not necessarily in your best interests,” she explains. “Lucy has this deliberate recklessness, and she’s not necessarily committed to staying alive. The film explores that way of being in the world.”
When I ask her about Lucy’s dilemma of having an experience that she cannot possibly be aware of, Leigh laughs again, perhaps revealing a more playful rationale for the ideas behind the story. “It’s intriguing isnt it! It’s quite perverse, and if you were in her situation, you would probably know that the experiences were not great, almost certainly not in your own best interests. You know that you don’t really want to know, and that’s where the uneasiness starts creeping into your normal life”.
It seems to be this difficult and deliciously queasy space that most intrigues Leigh. “I wanted to saturate the film with that creeping, intensifying strangeness and uneasiness,” she explains, “and it’s all the more fascinating when we – the audience – know more than Lucy does about what is going on in that room.”
The old wealthy men (played by Peter Carroll and Chris Haywood) who pay to spend time with Lucy, have very different desires and the film’s elegant and formal style – long, wider shots of the action in a lush environment – add to the sense of mystery.
Despite being a celebrated writer, there was never a time for Leigh when Sleeping Beauty might have been a novel. “Behind a lot of my early thinking was the idea of the camera as a tender steady witness, watching what was happening in the chamber’” she says. “The whole idea came to me very visually, especially with the idea of Lucy being watched. It came to me as a film and I can’t even imagine it as a novel.”
Leigh wrote the first draft of the film in ten days and then began the process of bringing it to the screen. “I showed the first draft of the script to my younger sister Claudia – who I show all my work to – and she encouraged me to keep going,” says Leigh. “Then I showed it to some friends who had some experience with film. After that I had to find a producer. I talked to more than a dozen people, with some saying ‘no way’, others saying ‘it’s great but it’s missing a third act’ and that kind of jargon.” Leigh persisted where others would have given up. “I loved the script and I wanted to see it made into a film,” she says emphatically, “and I finally found a producer who recognised it for what it was”. And what it is will definitely intrigue and haunt you.
