Early ‘60s time travails

If this year’s crop of potential Oscar contenders takes you back in time -- that’s the intention. “A Serious Man,” “A Single Man,” “An Education” and “Nine” all take place in the early 1960s, and they’re making this oft-unexplored early period of the decade fashionable again. Maybe it’s a “Mad Men” effect, or just a zeitgeist coincidence, but there’s no getting around the continued popularity of post- WWII repression, before the Vietnam War and the loss of national “innocence.” Before smoking cigarettes was bad and smoking pot was good. During this key decade, says John McWilliams, author of “The 1960s Cultural Revolution,” “we understood our national purpose, even if we couldn’t articulate it. We believed in our leaders and had faith in our political institutions. People like to look back and be reminded of what we once were.” Here, those films’ producers and directors muse on what keeps the 1960s swinging back into our collective memories -- and onto the big screen.

FOR THE RECORD:
‘60s settings: An article in the Dec. 16 issue of The Envelope about a number of movies set in the early 1960s, before the social upheavals of the latter part of the decade, included “A Serious Man.” Though those cultural changes had yet to affect that film’s characters, it was set in 1967. —

-- Randee Dawn “A Serious Man”

Early 1960s, Minnesota

“Nobody has ever made an existential Jewish film set in the Midwest in the 1960s,” says producer Eric Fellner. “But a lot of us actually lived in that period, and there are a lot of people out there now making films in their 40s and 50s -- and those were some of their early recollections. For Joel and Ethan [Coen, director-writers], it was a specific series of recollections that inspired them to come up with this story. The other day, I was looking at documentary footage for another project, and it is incredible what happened in [the U.S.] in the 1960s -- it really was an amazing period. [In England] we had King’s Road, hippies -- but I don’t think it was as much of a social and political shift as in the States. There is a lot of attention on the 1960s suddenly, but while these are all good films -- and we need good films -- all of these films put together, they’ll do maybe $100 million worldwide. That’s not exactly a clarion call to commercial filmmaking.”

“An Education”

Twickenham, London; 1961-62

“One of the reasons [screenwriter] Nick Hornby was attracted to the material was that it was set at this moment and time,” says producer Amanda Posey (who is also Hornby’s wife). “It was a time in London and British social history he felt hadn’t been portrayed much in films. The swinging 1960s had, but getting out of this postwar period we were in, just a few years out of rationing, was rare. Yet only a couple of years away -- depending on where you were in England at the time -- was a very exciting decade to come. In the screenplay, Nick describes David [Peter Sarsgaard] stepping into Jenny’s [Carey Mulligan] living room as ‘the future stepping into their home.’

“It was our intention to wear the period lightly on our sleeve, as it were, but we’ve had very personal reactions from people who were living at the time, or who may recognize the crockery or other items in the film that have personal resonance for them. . . . We know that the world and experiences [Jenny] is reaching for are going to become much more readily available to her soon, and that’s a dynamic that does inform one’s pleasure in watching the film. But the central pleasure of the film is it’s all about things that carry through into today.”

“A Single Man”

Santa Monica; 1962

“Until Kennedy was shot, we were still living in the ‘50s,” says director Tom Ford about his first film. “Yet everything was about to explode under the surface. So you have this energy and frustration and anger -- and all these things were about to explode. So, it’s an interesting period from that standpoint. The early ‘60s were the last moment that was radically different from our current moment, and that is interesting. Up until this period, everyone aspired up -- if you didn’t have any money, you wore copies of the clothes women wore in high society. You aspired up. But in the late 1960s, everyone aspired down, everyone wanted to look like the guy on the street. My character George [ Colin Firth] talks a lot about fear, and how fear is being used to sell everything. So the character of George -- and part of the statement of the film -- is about this fear permeating everything and being used as a selling tool. It’s really the beginnings of our contemporary culture. . . . This film could have taken place in the 1930s or today -- the story is not about the setting. It’s really a story about isolation that we all feel as human beings, and a story about making sure that you’re conscious about all the small things in your life.”

“Nine”

Rome and Anzio, Italy; 1964

“In making ‘Nine,’ we were actually embracing and celebrating the style of that time period, particularly what was so unique to Italy: Vespas, skinny ties, dark suits, little sunglasses, coffee clubs,” explains producer Marc Platt. “That very specific scene, there’s a glamour associated with it that’s fun for an audience. The ‘60s was a time period where there was a tremendous amount of evolution in our society -- an explosion in the music world, the fashion world, and Italian cinema was a major exporter of all that around the world. It may be that we’re [now] in a period like the ‘60s ourselves, where there’s a tremendous amount of possibility -- but also strife and challenge. The current period we live in has a lot of us questioning what will tomorrow bring. The turbulence of the ‘60s . . . showed us that the world can emerge OK in the end.” Adds director Rob Marshall, “The ‘60s was an era at the edge of change. . . . There was something about the sensuality of that time: everything wasn’t out in the open, it was more discreet, and that was appealing . . . I do think it’s going to be explored again and again.”

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