Seventeen years before Carol whisked Therese away on a cinematic trip across country, High Art featured its own photography-centered lesbian age gap on the road. I’ve always seen these films as companion pieces — not just due to plot details, but because of their shared perspective on being young and gay.
With High Art finally restored and beginning its re-release, I got to ask writer/director Lisa Cholodenko if Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt was a direct inspiration for her film as well. The answer? Nope! It’s just a deeply entrenched lesbian desire to be or be with a photographer/go on a road trip with an older woman.
I got to ask Lisa a lot of other questions too. We covered her career from film school to her recent television work, discussed the casting process for High Art, dove into why it took so long to make The Kids Are All Right, and so much more! While you wait for the High Art restoration to come to your city, I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Drew: I like to start my interviews from the beginning. Where did you grow up and how did you come to filmmaking?
Lisa: I grew up in LA, specifically the San Fernando Valley, but I didn’t become interested in film until my mid-20’s. I landed a job at the American Film Institute through a friend. I worked in the conservatory and I was exposed to lectures and students and I got to see what that was like. I decided to try to make my own films so I went up to Stanford and did a summer program where I made a little documentary. From there I got very excited to find my own voice.
While I was applying to graduate film schools, I had a mini career in editing rooms and was an assistant editor for a couple of years on films like Boyz n the Hood and Used People. Then I moved to New York and I started an MFA program at Columbia. It was a very exciting time for queer cinema. I was inspired by Todd Haynes and a producer named James Schamus and so many others. Everyone was making independent and independent films — independent vision films. It was a lovely, golden age and it was short-lived.
Drew: (laughs)
Lisa: I saw people coming out of Columbia or NYU who were actually getting distribution and having a viable start. People like Karyn Kusama, who is still a friend, who made Girlfight. I had taken out quite a bit of a loan to go to Columbia so I wrote High Art while I was a student to get going. I had an interesting mentor in Miloš Forman who gave me a lot of good tips on how to make that film. And I met Jeff Levy-Hinte, now Jeff Kusama-Hinte, and he decided to partner with me to produce it. We got it made when I hadn’t yet graduated. And then I had this great magic moment. It got into Sundance, I won a screenplay award there, it went to Cannes at Director’s Fortnight, it was bought for distribution, and I began a career.
Drew: I want to go back a little bit because I love your short Dinner Party which you made during school. It’s so truly gay. And it’s interesting you bring up Todd Haynes and that moment of queer cinema, because it really does feel like a queer artist making work with none of the baggage people even have now of explaining oneself and one’s community. At the time, were you thinking explicitly about creating queer cinema or was that just reflective of your life?
Lisa: I didn’t have an agenda. But my interior heart process was A) I don’t care, and B) All the more powerful if I’m saying something in a non-overtly politicized way, that’s just a good story, and it’s representing the people I hang with and the lives we’re living. My place in this was to be the truest I could be to myself and hope that would connect to other people.
Drew: So then what was the inspiration for High Art?
Lisa: It was during that golden age of independent cinema when there was the aesthetic of heroin chic. There were photographers like David Armstrong and Nan Goldin and people who came out of what is called the Boston School who were photographing their friends. Then there was the Bowery and this world of sex and drugs. It was overtly shown and aestheticized. In a great way! I loved it. I was awed that this was the vogue happening in fashion and being used to sell clothes. I was interested in how off color that was to me, how bizarre that was, and loving those photographers and feeling like this is what I’m submerged in.
I happened to know either personally or adjacently people who were snorting heroin and making art. It was just kind of what was happening. And I thought they were cool! So there was a romance to it, but I knew there was also a nihilism to it. All these things converged and I was like that’s my point of view and then I folded in my own ambition through the lens of that young woman character.
Drew: Can you talk about the casting process? Especially for Ally Sheedy, Radha Mitchell, and Patricia Clarkson?
Lisa: I had a producer named Dolly Hall who made The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love and All Over Me. She was making these lesbian films and she had a relationship with a casting director named Kerry Barden who donated his time and talent to us. The first person we cast was Radha Mitchell. She was still in Australia and had done very little but she had been in an independent film that had come out around that time. He showed me a tape and she was so expressive. Her eyes looked great. There was something credible there — I believed her.
Then I got a letter from Ally Sheedy saying that she’d been given the script and loved it and wanted to know if I’d see her if she flew herself out to audition for me. It wasn’t the obvious choice. It seemed kind of bizarre to me but it also seemed bizarre not to say yes.
Drew: Yeah!
Lisa: So she flew out and she was extremely thin at the time and just fully identified with all of it. Her mom is queer and she had had her own run in with drugs. I could tell she fully got it. She was able to fully embody that character.
I read Radha with Ally and they seemed to have a nice chemistry that was right for the movie. And then Patricia Clarkson came in because we were having a hard time casting that character. A lot of amazing people auditioned, but something wasn’t right and I couldn’t quite pull the trigger. So we had an emergency casting session when the movie was already up and running and about to start shooting. Patti Clarkson came in and auditioned with Ally. She brought this humor and irony to it that she plucked out of the writing. I remember laughing and thinking oh my god this was what the film needed. It’s heavy. It needed something rye in it or it might have been sort of a dirge. She brought a weird levity to it. She’s a great actor.
Drew: Yeah she’s amazing. I worked on a movie she was in and we were shooting in this random lesbian couple’s house outside of Cincinnati. They had a High Art poster in their living room and Patti signed it.
Lisa: Oh my God! That’s funny.
Drew: It was a fun little moment for those lesbians. And also for me to witness.
Lisa: She is a gem. It was a complete treat for me to find somebody like that. That was a blessed moment.
Drew: You mentioned that the movie went to Sundance and to Cannes and the response was very good. Was there a difference between how film culture at large received it and how queer audiences received it?
Lisa: The vibe was really good overall. And a few things filtered into that. First of all, the amazing Ally Sheedy performance. People seeing her anew, seeing her in a film as edgy and radical as ours. She won the National Society of Film Critics Award which is kind of a big deal. Or, at least, it was to me.
Drew: It’s a big deal.
Lisa: I didn’t know she won it. I was on a train to Philadelphia and I opened up The New York Times to the entertainment section and her photograph was on the front page. It wasn’t a blockbuster film and was never intended to be, so I was amazed by the attention that it got. I think it broke the paradigm of what people expected from a lesbian film by having a narrative that wasn’t primarily about queerness. I mean, it was and it wasn’t.
Drew: You mentioned this was in a moment of excitement, but that it was short-lived. What was your experience between the success of High Art and making Laurel Canyon and Cavedweller? There were a lot of women and queer directors at the time who didn’t really get a chance to make more than one film or maybe two. Was it challenging to get to those next projects?
Lisa: Well, I was just finishing graduate school. So it felt like a new day for me, because I had to learn to be a professional filmmaker. I was in a cocoon when I made High Art.
I did some episodic TV. I did an episode of Homicide and I did an episode of Six Feet Under. But yeah it was a little bit confusing. I wanted to parlay this early success into something that was a viable career. So I did those episodes, I did that Showtime movie Cavedweller which to me wasn’t my favorite but at least I got to make another film. And then I felt like Laurel Canyon was an interesting endeavor because it had a bisexual character but wasn’t entirely queer. I was interested in seeing how that would feel and if it could still have a queer sensibility. It’s interesting. A lot of straight women really like that film. I’m sure other people do too, but it definitely appealed to a certain kind of straight woman.
Then I got pregnant. I wrote The Kids Are All Right, partially because I got pregnant and had a kid. The guy who I wrote it with, Stuart Blumberg, had written Hollywood films and had a more commercial sensibility, so his contribution to the marriage between us was making it more commercial. I’d done stuff that was art house, but this was an attempt to see if we could do something that might be seen by a wider audience. I’m proud of that.
Drew: Did you feel like during those years you were able to make the projects that you wanted to make and keep working? Were you able to parlay the success of High Art or did you feel pushback as a woman or a queer person?
Lisa: It did take a long time to make The Kids Are All Right. I came out to LA. I started a life. I got involved with somebody who I was with for many years. I’m not anymore. We bought a house. I was doing things for money. And then bless her, she said you have to write your own thing. It’s time. Get downstairs and do it. Then I met Stuart and we wrote it. But it took a good four years of writing to get it right. There was another cast attached, but then I did get pregnant and had a kid and when I came back it felt like it needed a different cast. Not because they original cast wasn’t great. My sensibility was just a little different.
Then we took it around. And I thought well I’ve made all this work and people have seen my movies and they know I’m competent to pull this off. Also I thought the script was super tight. But they weren’t sure they wanted to invest in it. That was a hard moment for me. They would point to things in the script — many of which were true. It did take us a long time to work through a couple things, mostly dealing with the Mark Ruffalo character, so in retrospect I understand that. But it was difficult. Like Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are attached… you still don’t want to make it? They wanted to know who it was for.
But how the film turned out was a great antidote for how rigorous it was to get it made.
Drew: You’ve worked a lot in TV since then. Olive Kitteridge is one of my favorite limited series ever. I think it’s so, so good. And it’s not hard to understand why so many filmmakers turned to TV in the 2010s because it’s where a lot of the most interesting stories were happening. Do you feel like that bubble has burst? Are you feeling called back to features?
Lisa: I’m kind of an opportunist, so I go where the material feels good and calls to me. I think of Olive Kitteridge as a high point of my career. I’m really proud of it. It was hard to make and I feel like I gave everything to it.
When I decided to do that, Todd Haynes had just done Mildred Pierce. We have the same casting director so we’re sort of in the same soup. And I felt like wow that’s so avant-garde. He went from these independent queer films to that. I thought that was really cool and that I could do it too. Todd gave me a hall pass to dabble.
I just thought of HBO as prestige TV. I didn’t think it was the dawning of this crazy streaming world. So to me it stood apart and then it got folded into all of this work that five years later was everywhere. I’m glad I got in at that point, because I was allowed to make that as a four hour film. I know they’re still doing that sometimes, but the quality isn’t as great across the board now as it was in the early days.
Drew: Absolutely. I don’t think that’s controversial to say. (laughs)
Lisa: I mean, I’m not saying there aren’t still great things. It’s just harder to find them in this world of so many things.
Drew: How are you feeling right now? Obviously, the industry is in a weird place in general, and for queer media specifically. There’s this naive part of me that wants to think well someone with your resume can still get the work you want made. But maybe that’s not the case?
Lisa: I think it really depends on what it is. More so than ever, it matters who is attached, how tight is the script, how easy is it to understand and sell. A lot of people in the mix need to be able to visualize it. Maybe if I was someone like Scorsese, I could walk in and just say I want to make this. But I’m not. I’m me. I don’t have that card. So I feel like I have to be very clear and intentional about what I want to do and what I want to say and what I want to make. And that forces me to open up my palate. Maybe something isn’t queer, but I still find it interesting and I feel like I can infuse whatever sensibility I have into it. Is that always a little disappointing to me? Do I wish I could always lean into my queerness? Yeah. Because that’s what I understand and that’s what I’m often most interested in seeing.
There are projects I have that are definitely queer — including one I’ve been working on for a long time — and then there are others that are just queer-adjacent. I feel like it always has to be a story that can stand on its own. We’ve seen enough of the tropes. And God bless them. I was grateful to see them when I was younger. But I don’t personally want to make them.
Drew: What was it like revisiting High Art during the process of this restoration and re-release?
Lisa: At first, it felt a little like opening a journal from 27 years ago. Like woah I was that person. It was so in my face. It was so stark. I felt very exposed. And obviously it was a first film and we didn’t really have money, so I see the craft and the crudeness. But then I also see magic.
There were two days. First there was the color and then second was the sound. And I think once we hit the second day and I could get over the shock and awe of seeing, I was able to just settle into it. I was like wow this is really moving and these performances are really good. Ally Sheedy really pulled it out!
I could stand back and see what was impactful about it and I appreciated that that’s what I wanted to show then. That’s what made sense to me at the time.
The restoration of High Art will be showing in more cities soon before its online release.
