The English screenwriter, the Danish Girl & the mature but very junior student.

At a special showing of Academy Award-winning The Danish Girl I had the pleasure of meeting and talking to screenwriter Lucinda Coxon about the 11-year journey of her script from first draft to 72nd Venice Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and the Academy Award in 2015.
The Danish Girl is a touching and sharply observed study of the Danish artist Einar Wegener, and his artist wife Gerda. Einar, after a long struggle with his own nature, comes to believe that he is Lili, a woman trapped within a man’s body. In his increasingly desperate quest for resolution he becomes the subject of the first male to female gender reassignment surgery, from which he ultimately dies. The subject matter is intense, personal and emotional, and script and cinematography are tightly focussed.
Lucinda Coxon is first and foremost a theatre playwright. Dressed for comfort in rehearsal gear – sweatshirt, jeans, baseball boots- armed with a ready, self-mocking sense of humour and juggling a microphone and a bottle of water she was completely at ease in our small local theatre talking to an audience about her work.
Does she prefer writing for stage or screen? ‘When I want food on the table or shoes for my daughter I prefer screenwriting,’ she answers drily. ‘But my first love is theatre. I cut my writing teeth creating scripts for stage actors.’ What about television? (She wrote the miniseries The Crimson Petal and the White for BBC). A look of panic crosses her face. ‘TV writers are a different species’ she says. ‘They write large numbers of episodes in ridiculously short periods of time. I enjoyed writing Crimson Petal, but I’m just not built to write under those sorts of pressures.’
The Danish Girl was not quick off the blocks. Its 11-year journey from proposal to public distribution involved some 15 redrafts. As an OCA Creative Writing student working on Scriptwriting I was interested to know why so many rewrites. The answer was obvious – once she’d said it.
‘Over time the script attracted considerable interest, from high-profile directors and actors. Different directors featured and then faded away. In each case it was necessary to adjust the script to suit the reader. The script changes were to do with practical artistic and commercial considerations rather than altering the narrative at the heart of the screenplay.’ End to end adjustments? Each time? Really? A long look into space then: ‘Pretty much’. So the final script was draft number 15 or whatever, then? A wry laugh is followed by ‘Oh no. The shooting script was very close to the earliest drafts.’
The Danish Girl’s central characters – Einar Wegener/ Lili and Gerda Wegener were real people. The novel of the same name by US writer David Ebershof, is a fictionalised biography. Had Lucinda’s own researches led her to create characters that were not as those in the novel?
Ebershof, she explained, had not had access to the same research when he was writing as were available to her several years later. The internet had become a far more powerful research tool in that time.
Lucinda had managed to track down a number of Gerda Wegener’s drawings and paintings of her husband as Lili, and those, together with what hard evidence she had been able to assemble, formed the basis of her characterisation. ‘In the end my job was to create rounded characters that met the dramatic needs of the story’ she said. ‘Stick to the facts as closely as possible, of course, but there is a point at which creativity has to be allowed to lead.’

Did gender politics play a part, given the transsexual heart of the story?
Lucinda is emphatic. ‘Yes. The debate about who should play Einar was protracted. Should a straight man be given the role? Surely a transsexual would have a better understanding of the emotions involved? It’s the same argument that occurs when casting gay or disabled characters. In the end the answer has to reflect two separate needs – the commercial need for an audience-pulling star, and the artistic reality of finding the actor who best inhabits the role. Eddie Redmayne is cissexual and a wonderful actor.’
My favourite anecdote of the evening came when she said she had been asked at one ‘meet the audience’ evening, ‘Who writes the bits you don’t?’ Puzzled she asked for an explanation. ‘Oh, you know, those bits where nobody’s talking but there’s stuff going on.’
As I thanked Lucinda, I asked her if she would sign the downloaded script that I just happened to be carrying (!). My (now laminated) flysheet bears the message: Peter – write good! Best – Lucinda Coxon.
I enjoyed my few minutes talking to this friendly, creative lady. I can indeed ‘write good’, inspired by a screenwriter who evokes pathos even in her script actions. At a point about two thirds of the way through the script Einar has boarded a train bound for Dresden and the first of his operations, leaving a devastated Gerda in Paris. The scenes change briskly from station platform, to Einar in his railway carriage watching the scenery, to Gerda, alone in their Paris apartment. The action reads: Gerda, charcoal in hand, the canvas before her, waits to begin. Then a swift line on the canvas – the curve of a flank – conjures a nude Einar or Lili… whatever name is attached to it now. She sketches the form of a body she loves. Strong magic, to keep it safe from harm.
Strong magic indeed.
Image Credit: Gerda Wegener, Lili avec un éventail à grandes plumes, 1920
Gerda Wegener, ‘Sur la route d’Anacapri (On the Way to Anacapri)’ 1922