Josie Rourke is the Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse. Her productions have transferred to Broadway, the West-End and won Olivier Awards. Many of her shows have been translated into live cinema broadcasts, including Coriolanus (2014) with Tom Hiddleston (The Avengers), Les Liaisons Dangereuses (2016) with Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs, Me Before You) and Dominic West (The Wire, Burton and Taylor) and Saint Joan (2016) with Gemma Arterton (Clash of the Titans, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time).
Her UK election night broadcast of The Vote (2015), which she co-created with writer James Graham and directed, in real time, starred Dame Judi Dench (Philomena, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel). It was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Live Event. She was previously Artistic Director of The Bush Theatre. Her other work as a director includes Shakespeare productions for The Royal Shakespeare Company and in the West-End, and work in Chicago and New York on Broadway, at The Public Theatre and at the Park Avenue Armory. She is the first woman director to run a major London theatre. Mary Queen of Scots is her first feature film.
How important to you was the play Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller?
The Schiller play I knew very well and that was a real inspiration for me. In that play you have a rare thing for the history of drama on stage, which is two women playing flip sides of the same coin. That is usually ascribed to male roles. You can see that with Batman and the Joker or Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty. I wanted to follow in Schiller’s footsteps and psychologically expand the definition of rivalry between women. Often when we say men are rivals that is the beginning of a conversation about their ambition, their power and their obsession. When we say that women are rivals then often that is a full stop and the end of a paragraph. I wanted to show that they were rivals, they were politicians but they also had a deep fascination with and need for each another, which is very much there in Schiller’s play.
How did you find the transition from the stage to film?
As a theatre director you spend more time in rehearsal rooms than you do in theatres. In the rehearsal room you are very close and often I will see an actor do something extraordinary, a fugitive moment of expression that I know I cannot capture on stage, so I have to work out how to amplify that to a large group of people. In cinema I can catch that fugitive, beautiful moment of expression. The opportunity for nuance is gigantic. Tension tends to exist in the edit as much as it is made in the room because of the fragmented way in which we create cinema. The frame is very familiar to me but to be offered multiple frames to curate, fill and consider was incredibly exciting and, of course, in theatre we think naturally and continually about the body in space and how it moves, so adding a camera to that conversation was incredibly exciting.
Had you come close to doing a movie before?
Yes. Luckily, people have been generous enough to talk to me about a couple of projects and to see if I wanted to get attached but this seemed like the right one.
Did you try and make this film feel modern?
It is quite a subtle question for me in this film. Any version of the past is a representation, and we have to try and speak to the present. However, if people feel it’s modern because it is talking about women’s stories then that’s because while women’s stories have always existed, our opportunity to tell them as women is relatively fresh. People have said that this is a ‘Me Too’ movie but that movement was not at its height when we were shooting and in a way I feel that with ‘Me Too’ we shouldn’t pretend that there has been a sudden outbreak of sexual misconduct that has been happening and we’ve just chosen to look. The modernity in this film comes from us looking at aspects of women’s lives, where perhaps we’ve not had the opportunity to do so before.
How did you persuade Margot Robbie to take her role because she was reluctant first?
As in the film, I wrote her a long and loving letter. Margot [Robbie] is an actress of deep skill and broad range and though we made this movie before I, Tonya (2017) was released, I was fascinated by her performance in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) because it was a performance of great rawness and intensity and gigantic vulnerability against raw power. It is my job as a director to be able to look into a performance and be able to intuit what else an actor might be able to do. Casting is part of my craft. I thought of Margot immediately.
When did you first start thinking about the themes of the film?
I am the theme of the film; I’m a woman. In a way, it is both exciting and slightly sad that people think the film is incredibly modern. What that really tells us is that not enough women have been given the opportunity to make films, particularly set in this era of history. It shouldn’t be remarkable.
As a woman what are some of the subtleties that you might spot in the story?
There is a lot in this film, visually, about the woman’s body. There are some basic and essential truths about our rights to our bodies, what they do, taboos around our bodies and some things that people might find shocking but which to us are entirely normal and part of our experience. It was important for me to portray that. There is the menstruation scene, where Mary gets her period, which is in the movie because Elizabeth is thinking politically in great depth about whether Mary is going to bear a child and raise an heir. The scene is cut against the scene in the Privy Council where they are discussing whether Mary will marry and what kind of husband she might take. And this person in America asked me whether that was a very difficult scene to shoot. I said, ‘No, it was the most straightforward scene to shoot,’ because we had a scene with six women and we all tend to get our periods.
Do we tell enough stories about women in power?
I don’t think that we do. Mary and Elizabeth’s story has been told many times but there is a reason why I wanted the screenwriter behind House of Cards (2013-2018) to write this story [Beau Willimon]. It is because I wanted them taken seriously as politicians and to understand what leadership meant to them and what the cost of that power was. We can never see change take a hold of society until we have enough cultural points on our map by which to navigate and I wanted to create another of those points.
When did these women first become important to you?
It was through Shakespeare, really and because I’m a gigantic dork I was reading Shakespeare at an early age and that is what led me into the period, I think.
People seem to love stories about British royalty. Why do you think that is?
I think a lot goes back to Shakespeare. As a country we have a gift and burden as a British culture, which is that the greatest writer to have ever lived (and Tom Stoppard thinks will ever live) was William Shakespeare. And therefore, as a dramatist, you cannot put pen to paper without being in conversation with him, and so many of his plays regarded the lives of English, and occasionally Scottish, monarchs. That’s a deep part of our dramatic history. I was talking to the actress Nina Hoss (Phoenix, A Most Wanted Man) and when I told her I was making Mary Queen of Scots she thought it was fantastic and it just shows that you can have a very ready conversation with someone from a different country about what this thing means. These old plays sit very strongly in how we tell our new stories.
Do you think women in positions of power have to act like men?
In our film there are two questions, one of which asks whether you can lead effectively without embracing the patriarchy and those modes of power with which we are so familiar. And they can form a trap for both men and women. There is a line in the movie when Dudley, one of the more sympathetic characters, explains to Elizabeth that she cannot, in realpolitik, help her cousin and she says how cruel men are. She also then embraces that wisdom herself and becomes a man in that moment. That is something we all have to endure and bear. Sometimes male politicians are forced to present strength when perhaps it would behove them and us to show vulnerability and empathy.
Is that the most important line in the film?
Beau Willimon has a favourite line in the film, and I adore writers so much that I think his favourite line is my favourite. It is when Mary is waiting to go to England and he looks at the coast and goes, ‘England does not look that different from Scotland.’ And the fisherman giving her passage says, ‘Aye, they are sisters.’
Is it true that part of your inspiration for the scene where the queens meet comes from Heat (1995)?
Yes, because that is one of the moments in cinema where you see two acting giants have the chance to play a long scene opposite one another and let’s get two young women doing that.
Mary Queen of Scots is available on DIGITAL DOWNLOAD NOW, and comes to BLU-RAY™ AND DVD ON MAY 20, 2019.