ERIN CRESSIDA WILSON Creating Chloe

Erin Cressida Wilson is pretty enough to star in one of her own screenplays. In fact, the writer bears a striking resemblance to the actress Julianne Moore who plays a successful doctor who begins to question her husband’s fidelity in Wilson’s screenplay for the film Chloe. Wilson began her career as a playwright and her plays have been produced Off-Broadway, regionally, and internationally. Previously a professor and Director of Graduate Dramatic Writing at Brown University and Duke University, she now runs the Dramatic Writing Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is gracious and soft spoken, yet speaks with passion and confidence about her own work. Unlike many screenwriters, Wilson has high praise for her producer, Ivan Reitman, and also Atom Egoyan who directed Chloe. She also speaks warmly of producer/director Steven Shainberg, for whom she wrote her first produced screenplay, Secretary, which starred James Spader and a then virtually unknown Maggie Gyllenhaal. That film won the 2003 Independent Spirit Award and launched her career as a writer. Wilson then took on the story of Diane Arbus, and in a second collaboration with Shainberg, wrote the film, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, which starred Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr.

Chloe is the story of a woman, Catherine (Julianne Moore), who hires a young escort ((Amanda Seyfried) to seduce her husband, David (Liam Neeson) to see if he takes the bait. Catherine finds herself ‘directing’ Chloe’s encounters with David,and Chloe’s end of the bargain is to report back. The plan goes awry when Chloe decides she prefers Catherine, and then comes on to her.

Since many writing teachers often advise their students to “write what you know.” I’m curious how this particular story resonates in Wilson’s own life. Her tone is one of amusement as she tells me, “When I watched a scene between Julianne and Amanda’s characters, and they are talking about having sex with ‘David,’ I suddenly realized what was so incredibly obvious about this story in my life, yet it’s something I had no idea of during the process of writing it.” After some prompting, Wilson continues, “I had been with a man when I was 35 who slept with a 21 year-old and it devastated me. I didn’t even think of it when I began to write the script, but my subconscious was dealing with the whole situation.” One might wonder how she could have forgotten this experience and not drawn on her pain for this script. Wilson says she remembered a lot of it as time went on during the writing process. “I did have this situation and I did remember that it was very painful to me. It was the first time I ever felt old, and I hated this girl so much I wanted to kill her, except I also found it shockingly and horrifyingly arousing to think of them together. This is a very complex situation of feeling betrayed, horrified, sad, and aroused, and it’s a hard thing to admit, and that was at the heart of what I was writing for Julianne’s character — her monologue where she tells her husband, ‘I feel invisible,’ is the most important line in the film. In a weird way, I believe you have to be attracted to yourself in order to be attracted to someone else. I believe that the film has a lot to do with her falling back in love with herself. Chloe is her younger self that she is rediscovering, and since I began the process of writing this from Chloe’s point of view, it wasn’t till later that I realized the impact of my own life on the Julianne character. It’s my joke about this film that I started out as Chloe and ended up as Julie. This is a real story of jealousy, the arousal of jealousy, and the gifts of jealousy, the downfall of envy.” Wilson pauses and laughs, “This is why I’m not the typical Hollywood writer.” ▼