24 January 2024
In “Miller’s Girl,” out Jan. 26, John Miller (Martin Freeman) may be a failure as a fiction writer, but he has remade himself as a creative writing teacher. Sure, it’s in a small high school in Tennessee, not in a prestigious university, but with the arrival in his class of Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega), an 18-year-old whose talent and ambition are equally vast, he suddenly feels he has found his mission.
But as Sweet watches her best friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon) flirt with another teacher (Bashir Salahuddin), she becomes enamored not just with Miller but with the idea of an illicit seduction.
Miller, whose marriage sometimes resembles George and Martha’s in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” loses sight of his boundaries, his responsibilities and himself and the movie heads down a darkened path.
Teenage girls, as “Miller’s Girl” says, “are full of emotional violence and vituperation,” while grown-ups still feel “the exquisite longings of adolescence” but must also face “the constant burden of accountability.”
Jade Halley Bartlett has been paying her bills writing in Hollywood for almost eight years but this emotional thriller about power dynamics between men and women is her first script to get made… and it’s her debut as a director, too.
Jenna Ortega as Cairo Sweet in “Miller’s Girl.” (Zac Popik/Lionsgate/TNS)
In another first, this is the first time that Bartlett – who left Los Angeles during COVID to return to her parents’ home in Tennessee and moved to Georgia – has ever been interviewed. (The interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Q. There’s not much about you online. Where are you from and when did you start writing?
I grew up in East Tennessee for my formative years, and then I moved to Memphis for high school. My parents started reading Stephen King to me when I was six years old, so I have a morbid sensibility. I did professional children’s theater when I was young and then did theater all through middle school and community theater in high school. Right after high school, I moved to New York City in 2004 to go to an acting conservatory. I had big designs on being a Broadway star. Then the recession hit and you couldn’t get a job if you weren’t a dancer or a celebrity. I was neither of those things and I have a degree in nothing.
So one of my best friends from school Elyssa Samsel — who wrote the music for “Miller’s Girl”— and I decided we were going to write a full-length musical. Just why not? We did. We wrote this musical based on a short story by Edgar Alan Poe called “Ligeia,” and we did staged readings of it. Writing was never anything I’d ever considered but having been an actor, I understood dialogue and it felt very natural and I felt like I had agency all of a sudden because I wasn’t getting acting jobs.
I was working as a bar manager for Broadway shows, so I was underground all the time which wasn’t great for me. I was working “Seminar” starring Alan Rickman [2011-2012] when I started writing “Miller’s Girl” as a play in the basement of that theater. All the bartenders were acting and were very generous and did workshops of the scenes as I was writing them and then staged readings.
Then I got invited to audition for a TV show. Randomly, the ceiling in my apartment collapsed from water damage and water came in from my ceiling for eight days. And then I got the job so I moved to Los Angeles.
Q. How did it change into a movie?
That TV job was for a show called “Cinnamon Girl.” Renée Zellweger co-created it, Anthony Tambakis wrote for it and Gavin O’Connor was directing. It never went to air but they were so generous and read my play and all said, “You have to adapt this to screen.”
The first reading of my screenplay was at Renée’s house and included Renée, Ron Livingston and Hamish Linklater. Everybody’s just been generous and kind. My whole experience has been kind of an anomaly, lovely and magical.
Q. How did the movie evolve in the years since?
I wasn’t trying to make any kind of statement originally – I just wanted to write a young female character who was so smart and was nine steps ahead of everybody, but who had moments of real vulnerability.
Then #MeToo happened and just blew my world open. I learned about my internalized misogyny and suddenly I saw John in a new light. Cairo is so isolated, her parents are never home and she has fattened herself on 18th- and 19th-century literature and 20th-century movies, which now we know are inherently problematic so her concepts of love, sex and relationships are the fairy-tale lie. So she gets into this scenario with this man who is so literate and who really sees her and of course she’s conflates all that. Then he walks her down the garden path but then he shames her. It’s heartbreaking. She gives him so many chances to do things differently but his hubris won’t let him.
I know people get really hung up on the age discrepancy and that the formal setting of a school is obviously problematic but I think I wrote really human characters and it’s about the way they behave regardless of that – I’ve been in these situations with adults where people go too far down a path so they make the other person feel like it didn’t happen or that it’s wholly their fault and they don’t take any responsibility.
John can’t accept his behavior because then he’s the villain and his concept of himself as a good man, as a failed writer who had tried very hard, is shattered.
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Q. Was it important that you get to direct and was it difficult to persuade people to let you do it since you had no experience?
Par for the course, it was not that difficult. It had never crossed my mind to direct and I didn’t know how that process would go. We were considering another director who was very talented and we were auditioning an actress for Cairo and this director was trying to get her to this place and it just wasn’t happening. And it probably was not kosher, but I stepped in and just talked to her about what was happening emotionally in the scene and it was suddenly like sparks and sizzles in the sky.
It felt really good. That evening when Mary-Margaret Kunze – she was the casting associate who cast me in “Cinnamon Girl” and became a producer on my movie – said, “So, you’re going to direct the movie?” She spoke life over me in that moment.
I had lunch with [the studio executives] and I thought they were going to tell me to take a hike, but they just said, “OK, great.” It was very easy. And because they were so down with it that gave me a ton of confidence. Once that ball started rolling, everything I wanted to see on the page was just there and the movie looks exactly as I imagined it, like it was plucked from my brain.