Erin Cressida Wilson (born February 12) is an American playwright,
Wilson is known for the 2002 film Secretary, which she adapted from a Mary Gaitskill short story. It won her the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.
She also wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, and has authored dozens of plays and short works.
She has taught at Duke University, Brown University, and UC Santa Barbara.
She also wrote the screenplay for the erotic thriller Chloe, theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 26, 2010. The film became director Atom Egoyan’s biggest moneymaker ever, although it was a financial flop.
Agent: Rowena Arguelles (CAA)
Secretary Writer 2002
In the Media:
SIGNATURE: You have a whole creative history of exploring the kinds of issues at play in this movie. How and why did you get involved with this adaptation?
ERIN CRESSIDA WILSON: I was at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013, and Jason and I ran into each other. I knew him and he’s like, “You should read this book.” By the time we left two days later we were writing it together. I have a son, and at the time I read the book he was nine. He gets really into his iPad; he can get very lost in games. If I get very frustrated with it I will grab it and hide it, and it’s as if I’ve taken his entire world away from him. That relationship, and the sort of horrible way that parents tend to rip this world away from their children, interested me a lot. I was fascinated by the idea of how romantic and sexual relationships have changed for kids and for adults because of the Internet, for good and bad. My mother used to say about technology: “Improved means to unimproved ends.”
SIG: The author of the book has been criticized in some quarters for writing misogynistic material. Did you experience the book in that way at all? And was that any kind of concern for you?
ECW: Not at all. I have a very nonjudgmental view of characters that do things that aren’t necessarily all good. And I have a very open mind about sexuality, about being not just non-political about it but actually politically incorrect. I’m just reading to see: How can this be a film? In addition to that, I feel very much that everybody has his own view of the world. And Chad’s view did not offend me in the least. I had no problem with it because I thought it was his honest view. I enjoyed it because he was unapologetic. I’ve taught for years, and I’m not ever prescriptive about what people’s political motivations are. In fact, I don’t see why the personal has to be political anyway. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.
SIG: This feels like the first time a movie has really tried to address what’s happening with millennial teenagers on the Web, particularly as it pertains to their ability to form connected relationships that aren’t based on fantasy.
ECW: Yeah, I’m very interested in this epidemic of boys whose first touch with sex is on the Internet viewing really out-there pornography, so that they’re not equating sex with love, with human touch, with even kissing or intercourse. It’s no longer even part of what it’s about. It’s about being provided with high stimulation that’s totally under their control and is not messy the way real human relationships are. Boys not being able to get it up for girls is really turning into a major problem. I’ve talked to shrinks who say that they have a lot of boys that have this issue. It’s fascinating and scary and worrisome to me. In terms of the false sense of self that one can get from the Internet, I think it can be dangerous, but it can also be a way to open up doors that you didn’t know were there in your imagination with another person. It’s probably a little safer if you’re an adult and your mind hasn’t been calibrated to be in this world from the very beginning.
SIG: Yeah, it’s not a tattered Playboy magazine that a young kid will be exposed to these days. It’s sexual imagery that is beyond inappropriate. It’s just not the same as it was twenty years ago.
ECW: That’s very true. We know that there’s a timebomb sitting in our house — on every iPad, every iPhone, every computer — for our child to see something that in our wildest imaginations we would have never seen at age ten. It’s horrible! Even when I see these images, either by mistake or on purpose, I’m a little taken aback that I can just go click-click and see videos of the most pornographic nature. The kids in Chad’s book are younger than they are in the film. We raised the ages to make it slightly more palatable, but really the book is about twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. We wouldn’t leave pot or heroin or even alcohol out for a ten-year-old to take. And yet the computer is on and available. And the thing is, once they start doing whatever they’re going to do so early on, yeah, I do think it can lead to an addiction. It’s an incredibly torturous situation for parents. I know it’s the number-one issue that we’re all talking about. So I think the time is now.
SIG: You’ve explored the less conventional aspects of sexual connection throughout your career. Was there anything you came across on this project that genuinely surprised you? Any new discoveries or insights?
ECW: Well, I didn’t really think it through and know about boys, their situation with not being able to get it up for girls. That was eye opening. Certainly I didn’t know anything about the sites that encourage anorexia. When I first read about it I didn’t believe it was true. It’s just psychotic! But it is really true. And then there’s a lot of stuff in the book that’s not in the movie, some seriously pornographic stuff that is … something I had never thought of [laughs]. Things that had never occurred to me!
SIG: If you could have viewers take one thing away from this film, what would it be?
ECW: Truth, which is probably not quite the right word, but I would hope that they’d feel a truthful experience and portrait of our times. The film to me is a comedy of manners and a portrait of what we go through. It’s not meant to be more than just recognizing where we’re at and acknowledging that we’re all here experiencing this. My hope is that there’s something really embarrassing about this film — that it makes you squirm with recognition.
‘Girl On The Train’ Scribe Erin Cressida Wilson To Adapt ‘Maestra’ For TriStar | Deadline | September 25, 2015
EXCLUSIVE: TriStar president Hannah Minghella and producer Amy Pascal have set Erin Cressida Wilson to adapt Maestra, the L.S. Hilton novel that Sony acquired just before it established itself as the runaway hit of the London Book Fair last spring. Wilson, best known for scripting the 2002 film Secretary, takes the job after adapting another female-driven novel sensation, the Tate Taylor-directed Girl On The Train.
Bonnier Publishing has sold publishing rights for Maestra to 25 territories round the world, and the book was published in the UK last March. Maestra follows the story of Judith Rashleigh, who works in a prestigious London auction house by day and an insalubrious bar at night. When she stumbles across a conspiracy, she ends up in a battle for her life. The book, set against the backdrop of the European art world and Europe’s seriously wealthy, Maestra marks the beginning of a razor-sharp and meteoric sequence of novels by Hilton.
This is one of several plum projects that Pascal is producing. She’s nearly wrapped on the Paul Feig-directed
TriStar prexy Minghella was key in bringing this in quickly for a preemptive buy, and she is overseeing the project for TriStar. Wilson is repped by CAA and Art/Work.
Erin Cressida Wilson Boards ‘Girl On The Train’ For Marc Platt & Dreamworks | Deadline | January 13, 2015
Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) is adapting Paula Hawkins’ hot-button novel Girl On The Train for DreamWorks and Marc
The novel, pre-emptively acquired by Dreamworks and Platt in March, is getting a lot of buzz as one of 2015’s most eagerly anticipated titles. The Hitchcockian thriller, the latest in a recent line of complex female protagonists, is about a young woman who becomes entangled in a murder investigation because of what she witnesses on her daily commute.
Marc Platt is producing through his company Marc Platt Productions. He is in post on Steven Spielberg’s untitled Cold War thriller starring Tom Hanks.
Girl On The Train is Paula Jenkins’ debut novel. She previously worked as a journalist, including the deputy personal finance editor of The Times in London. She is repped by RWSG Agency, Lizzy Kremer and Georgina Ruffhead at David Higham Associates. Wilson is represented by CAA and Julie Bloom of Art/Work Entertainment. Her attorneys are Joe Dapello and Nancy Rose of Schreck Rose.
Sex, cinema and secrets: early exposure at the arthouse
Growing up in 1970s San Francisco I was often dragged by my parents to explicit foreign films at small cinemas like the Clay or the Vogue, the Balboa or the Castro.
There I’d sit, underage and somehow smuggled in, on a scratchy red chair that smelled of popcorn and sticky floors, surrounded by bohemians and intellectuals watching the same thing that I was watching: sex.
Back then, the entire city felt drenched in sensuality, and so did my home. It was here on sweaty afternoons that I watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman on TV, curled up with my mother, drawing constellations and stars and universes from freckle to freckle across her skin.
I was trying to find the secret – the reason that fueled her to grab my hand on Sunday afternoons, take a left turn as far away from the playground as possible, and rush me to the opening weekend of I Am Curious (Yellow) (1969 – age five), Carnal Knowledge (1971 – age seven), Last Tango in Paris (1972 – age eight), A Clockwork Orange (1972 – age eight), The Mother and the Whore (1973 – age nine), and Swept Away … by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974 – age 10).
I would sit next to my mother on these afternoons and inevitably a tendril of tension would start emanating from the screen, and from her. Suddenly, in a fierce whisper, she would instruct me to look at the floor. And so I would stare at a discarded popcorn box, a spilled drink or simply the darkness that disappeared into the seat ahead of me – listening carefully to quickening breaths – allowing the film’s soundscape to caress me. I learned to peek with my eyes to see bodies in motion, pushing like animals, doing something mysterious that I didn’t understand, but somehow enjoyed.
It was during this era that even the more explicit films like Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) managed to cross over into the mainstream. My mother blessedly spared me these films. A confluence of factors – among them the rise of television and a growing counterculture – led film-makers to mine previously taboo topics. The abandonment of the Production Code in 1968 opened the floodgates for sex to migrate from dirty theatres to more legit venues. But it was short-lived thanks to a 1973 Supreme Court decision that once again shunted these features to adult picturehouses. Nevertheless, it was a transformative time to be coming-of-age.
But despite this early education in sexually-explicit cinema, I never quite understood how I came to construct the power dynamics in my script for Secretary (2002 – age 38). It wasn’t until I came across my mother’s diary, a few months before her death, that I started to fully comprehend what was at work in my subconscious. This journal kept a weekly record of what turned out to be my mother’s 20+ year affair with her shrink. One afternoon in 1951, after only a few sessions, he pronounced my mother to be a sadomasochist. Not great shrinkage, but there was a lot of truth there. And reading my mother’s diaries brought me to understand that secrets that fly around a house actually do get absorbed by children in ways that are mysterious.
Ours was a house full of books. Food to eat was scarce but it was packed to the rafters with words to read. It took hours of searching the pages of highbrow literature to find anything naughty. I quickly figured out that in a cinephile’s house, some of the easiest sources of sexy images were film magazines. Curious and dressed in my school uniform, knee socks, and saddle shoes, I would sneak down to the basement and flick through my father’s stashes of magazines. Alongside the mildewed copies of Oui, Hustler and Playboy, were stacks of Film Quarterly whose pages were charged with erotica, drama, and – best of all – a lot of European men.
If the city and our house felt like extensions of all things carnal, then our derelict basement seemed to be the epicentre. Oddly, my parents’ bedroom, with its door always open, seemed to be the one place sex did not inhabit. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard has written much on basements and their psychological connotations. In The Poetics of Space, he posits the attic as the site of rationality and the basement as the site of irrationality – manifestations of the conscious and the unconscious respectively. While the attic provides reassurance, the basement provides mystery.
And mysteries it held. It’s where my father hid not only his porn, but his alcohol. It’s where my mother, a lover of many men, hid her love letters – locked in a metal box buried in the dirt under the house. She would often say to me, “Don’t go under the house.” And just as her order to not look at the sexy films had spurred me on to do so, I would indeed look under the house. When I finally uncovered “the box,” I found on the very top, a note to my father: “Dear heart, if you find these letters, I loved only you.” And then underneath were handwritten and typed letters from the men, often writers. On thin onion skin paper were words of love and sex and longing. But my mother had, like a true self-censor, carefully cut out all the explicit words with scissors. If I held the paper up to the light, it was like lace.
It was also in this basement that my mother would invite the dustbin men in. They were Italian-Americans who collected our trash in large burlap sacks that they’d throw over their shoulders before going back down the 30 or so stairs to their truck. In the same way I imagined my father would linger on the sexy images of his magazines, my mother admired these men, their muscles dancing and backs straining under the weight of our detritus. She would say to me, “Look at his hands. Look at his lips. Look at his back. Listen to his voice.” She was giving me erotic instruction.
It felt natural that in my early adulthood I would start writing plays about sex. Though in the 1980s New York theatre scene, a woman liking men was practically against the natural order. There appeared to be a rulebook thrown at every emerging playwright. If you were gay, an obligatory coming-out play was what was called for. If you were a person of colour, you were told to cash that card in and write with that in mind. If you were a woman? It was advisable to write about how abusive men were. It was not so good to be a thinking woman who was phallus-embracing. At Smith, the all-women’s college I attended in Massachusetts, girls walked around in T-shirts that said, “A Century of Women on Top”. And I remember asking, “What if you don’t like being on top? Does that mean you aren’t a feminist?”
My Women’s Studies professors would say: “You don’t know how hard we fought for you.” And yet, when they told me my sexuality was not correct, I felt embarrassed. I knew I had longings that didn’t line up with the politics, but I refused to repress them, particularly in my writing. I fought to unravel a political correctness that was censoring desire.
By the time I wrote the screenplay for Secretary, I had given up all hope of ever reaching a wider audience. No movie star would accept playing the lead in that film. After all, to portray a submissive and to be spanked onscreen would be a disastrous move for their careers. In addition, there was talk early on that the script was sexist because it ended with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character making a bed and dropping a cockroach on it – so that her husband would find it and punish her. It was repeatedly suggested to me that – instead – she should “find herself,” and become a lawyer herself. She should be powerful in a way that appeared strong through a traditional feminist lens. There was also a vibe around the film that Gyllenhaal’s character should overcome her problem. Again, I didn’t consider her to have a problem. And so I decided that this was a coming-out film for a masochist.
When the film screened at the Sundance film festival, middle-aged feminists stomped out during the spanking scene. I’d sit on the bus that shuttled us through the snow between screenings and eavesdrop on conversations. When the subject of Secretary came up, film-goers would look sideways. No comment. After all, in 2002, educated film-makers were not supposed to like this sort of thing. They were not supposed to like BDSM. And so we came away from Sundance with an honourable mention and exhaustion. We had not sold the film to a distributor. I had observed other films like Tadpole getting sold to Miramax for $5m. It was not a sexy situation. Perhaps we were the ultimate masochists, attempting to make this film in such a climate.
But Secretary was allowed to sit on the vine for a long time thanks to an eventual distribution deal from Lion’s Gate Entertainment, the advent of home video, DVDs, streaming and the glory of late night airings on the Sundance Channel. Today, it seems that what was pornographic 12 years ago is passé and maybe even clichéd. One generation’s risqué becomes the baseline for the next.
These days I watch films with both eyes open. There are no discarded popcorn boxes on the floor to stare at because I’m at home, alone. And I’m usually not watching a film, but a serialised cable television show. Sometimes I miss being uncomfortable around other movie-goers. I miss the furtive glances as we exit the dark into the bright light to fall into a café and get drunk on caffeine or alcohol, cigarette smoke streaming out of our mouths as we anxiously talk in and around the film we have just seen.
My mother used to tell me – among the many things she told me – that there was nothing sexier than a man whose breath smelled of scotch and cigarettes. I miss cinema and sticky floors and popcorn on an empty stomach. We move forward, but some of us stop sometimes to remember what it was like to fill in the blanks of a dirty letter, to hunt for the naughty film magazine, and to look up between one’s fingers to catch a glimpse.