In Temple Grandin, Claire Danes gives a Golden Globe-winning performance as the autistic woman who broke down barriers to become a celebrated academic.
The following is a transcript of a conversation that took place on 14 January 2010 at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, California.
The conversation was moderated by the President of HBO Films, Len Amato.
Other panelists were as follows:
* Claire Danes (Temple Grandin)
* Mick Jackson, Director
* Emily Gerson Saines, Executive Producer
* Dr. Temple Grandin, Author, Scientist and Professor, Livestock Handling and Behavior-Department of Animal Sciences-Colorado State University
LEN AMATO: Hello. It's great to be here. Temple Grandin. It's a name you may have never heard before, but one that you won't forget. On February 6th, we'll debut a very special film about the extraordinary life and accomplishments of author, animal scientist, and autism advocate, Temple Grandin. Temple's unique perspective allowed her to give a voice to people with autism and helped her to revolutionize the livestock industry with her inventive thinking. It is with the remarkable talent of Claire Danes that we're able to bring Temple's story to the screen. Director Mick Jackson has brought a very distinct vision to the film that allows the audience to see things from Temple's perspective and recognizes that inside her autism, which Temple refers to as the far side of darkness, there was an intensely vital, energetic and original mind that could see the world in ways that other people couldn't.
Today Temple is a full professor of animal science at Colorado State University. She currently speaks around the world on both autism and cattle handling, and over half the cattle in North America are handled in humane systems she has designed, but this introduction doesn't even come close to the movie. Hopefully a lot of you have seen it. It's a really, wonderful, wonderful film.
It's my great pleasure to introduce the director, Mick Jackson; our star, Claire Danes; Dr. Temple Grandin; and our executive producer, Emily Gerson Saines. So we're all set.
QUESTION: Dr. Grandin, in the center. I'll wait until you're mic'd.
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Can you hear me now?
QUESTION: Yes. How difficult -- this deals with some of the more traumatic aspects of your earlier life before you became enormously successful. How difficult is it to watch your earlier self, or does it, in any way, feel like your earlier self?
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: It's like going in sort of a weird time machine, and just watching the trailer, I'm getting kind of choked up. And I whispered to Claire, I said, "Can you believe that's really you?" She said it was kind of weird for her, too, and I asked Claire – she played me really, really accurate. This is '60s and '70s. This movie ends at the end of the '70s, and the thing about autism is as you learn more and more and more, you keep getting less and less autistic-like. In order for Claire to get some inkling of how to do this part, I found an old TV show tape from the '80s and an old VHS tape from the early '90s for her to watch.
QUESTION: So you would say that if you were talking to a parent, say, of an autistic child, you would say that, of course, people continue to grow and change.
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: That's right. And you keep getting better and better. People tell me my talks today at 60 are better than my talks at age 50. The thing about autistic thinking is as I learn more and more things and experience more and more things, it's like filling up the Internet inside my head. So I have more experiences to draw it. It's important to get autistic kids out doing different things. I want to emphasize, autism is a big spectrum ranging from somebody who is going to remain nonverbal all the way up to famous scientists. You would have no technical equipment here. You would have no hotel here if you didn't have people that were interested in things, because after all, who do you think made the first stone spear? It wasn't the yackity yacks around the campfire. That's for sure.
CLAIRE DANES: I'm the yackity yack around the campfire.
QUESTION: For Claire. It was at a session like this quite a long time ago that Steven Spielberg went out of his way to say that the two great actresses were Claire Danes and Julia Ormond. And I was wondering, is this the first time you've worked with Julia, and I remember that night you had heard what Steven had said. So how much did that mean to you when you heard that Spielberg had gone out of his way to phrase you like that?
CLAIRE DANES: That was incredibly flattering, and I was so little. I didn't know what to make of it then. I wouldn't know what to make of it now. It's very nice to receive that kind of encouragement and flattery, of course. But I had an incredible experience working with all of the actors on this movie, but especially Julia. We had so many vital scenes together and she did an exquisite job.
QUESTION: That was the first time you worked with her?
CLAIRE DANES: Yes. Yes.
QUESTION: Dr. Grandin, what do you think is the most important thing we can do to help change the attitude towards people who have autism?
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: One of the things I did is showing my work. Back in the early '70s when I acted like Claire Danes portrayed me, I went to the American Society of Agricultural Engineers meeting. They thought I was totally weird. They wouldn't talk to me until I whipped out those drawings. And those drawings in the movie, those are my actual real drawings. And I whipped out that drawing, and I showed it to them, and they go, "You did that?" I had to sell my work more than myself. And there's many people on the spectrum. The thing is, it's a range. And you might have people that are just kind of geeky and nerdy. They're on the mild end of the spectrum. I can assure you, there were a few of those out on the movie set.
When I was a little kid, I had all the symptoms – no speech and really severe autism. You gotta work with the kids really young and you've got to work with them, getting them doing things. My mother made sure I had my first job when I was 13 working for a seamstress. When I was in college, I had internships at a research lab and at a school for autistic kids. She arranged for me to go out to the ranch. When I was 15, I was scared to go out to the ranch. She said, "You have a choice: two weeks or all summer. And I'm really glad she made me go.
QUESTION: For Claire, I thought it interesting that I never saw you in this movie. You were immediately this character. And can you talk about what kind of preparation you did?
CLAIRE DANES: Well, it was pretty extensive. There was no way I could take this role on casually. I have such incredible respect for Temple. I didn't want to fail her or disappoint her in any way or all those other people who also hold her in such high esteem. And she's wired differently than myself. So I read her books. She's a great resource.
She was incredibly generous in sharing whatever information she thought might be helpful, and I grilled her, and she was incredibly open and responsive. I met with a few different autistic people. It is true. Autism is on a spectrum, and it manifests itself differently in every person. And so I had to kind of understand what autism was in a kind of abstract sense and then figure out how it expressed itself through Temple, kind of differentiate. It's not really possible to do that. Still, that was part of the process. And so first I broke it down into two magic chapters: her physicality and her voice. It just took time and practice, and I had great help. Mick and I also worked with a friend, Tamar, who -- I dance, and she was a choreographer on a few dance pieces I did, and she's really smart about the body and very observant, so I kind of recruited her eyes and her observations and figured out what that would mean physically, and then I worked with a great dialect coach who created, like, an exercise tape for me, spent a day with Temple, and we recorded that conversation, so she created a kind of Rosetta Stone of Temple, so to speak.
And it was in my iPod, and I was constantly reviewing it. It's so nice to see Temple and hear her voice. It was in my head for so long. And it's very familiar and very dear to me. It's nice. I spent a lot of time thinking about her.
QUESTION: Claire, when you're doing a role like this and you're doing the performance, you're in the middle of doing the performance, how do you keep it under control and not go off chewing the scenery like we've seen so many times, and how to keep it real and keep it to what Temple was like back then, despite all the study.
CLAIRE DANES: Yeah. Well, Mick would tell me to do it again if I got it wrong. Of course one is always at risk of getting it wrong being too extreme with it or underplaying it. The scenes were very well written, and I was working with great actors, so I felt very protected in that sense. But yeah, I had to be very specific, and it was really -- in between takes, I would put my headphones in and hear her voice. If I strayed too far from her actual voice, I would --
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: I have a question to ask you. How much of the headphones was our conversation in New York and how much was from the old tapes?
CLAIRE DANES: It was a combination. They were different tapes and, they had funny, funny titles. But they were recalled from our conversation and from documentaries and Errol Morris's documentary and different interviews. But my poor driver in the morning must have gone crazy because every day on the way to work, I would just be call and response.
QUESTION: For the filmmakers and Dr. Grandin straight in the back here, can you talk about the genesis of this project as far as what made you think this would be a good narrative piece and how much collaboration there was between the filmmaking division and Dr. Grandin?
MICK JACKSON: Should I take it? Emily can offer a lot of backstory to this. I was first sent this script by my agent who said, "We are sending over the Temple Grandin project from HBO." I said, "That's nice. What is that? Is it about religion?"
CLAIRE DANES: Yes.
MICK JACKSON: "Architecture?" They said, "You will see. You will see." And I started to, as I was eating my dinner, turn the pages, and I realized this was an amazing story, a page-turner. I put my fork down and just couldn't stop turning the pages because what Temple went through with her life is not the subject of everyday life. It's not. Certainly isn't what we kind of rather derogatively call a movie of the-disease-of-the-week movie in which a character suffers from some kind of disability or adversity, and through the force of their personality, the people around them, they achieve a kind of normality by the end of the movie. This was a completely original story of someone who is exceptional to begin with who was trapped inside a cage of autism. A terrific intellect, analytical mind, terrific force of personality, and when she was allowed to emerge through her own doings, the help of the people around her, she achieved not normality, but exceptionality. And that's a very unusual story, and that's what made this worth telling.
QUESTION: Temple, it's a two-part question. First of all, what was it like --
LEN AMATO: Excuse me. Let's talk about the genesis of the project, Emily. Then we can go to your question. I'm sorry.
EMILY GERSON SAINES: Well, my son is autistic, and I was given the book "Thinking in Pictures" by my mom when I was in a very dark place in my life. And I think what Mick was saying is true. However, I think Temple's story is both very typical and very atypical. The beginning of her life, she had many typical autistic traits. And I think what attracted me to this story is that it brought hope, and when you're trying to teach your autistic child how to speak and function within society, it's a really difficult job, and you're not always getting something back. So Temple's story, I think, brought hope to someone like me who at the time was feeling very hopeless, and I thought it would be fantastic to share this story with others who needed that hope.
And the other thing that I really loved about this story was that it took somebody who some people would call, as we say in the movie, a freak, and it celebrated them. And I think that we, as people, all have different shadings, and I think we should appreciate that in others that are not only similar to ourselves, but that are different. And ultimately, I think that allows us to appreciate the moments in life.
QUESTION: Temple, when you saw Claire mirroring you, were you able to see yourself in that? And also looking back on what you've accomplished, did you ever see your efforts as a game-changer?
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, I was seeing Claire, and I watched the first screening in the HBO corporate office in California, and I'm going, "This is, like, really kind of freaky. I mean, she's playing me perfectly back in the '60s and '70s." And I'm also happy to say they did a beautiful job on my projects. My actual real drawings had the cattle animated on them. The dip vat was actually built. They re-created all my projects. You know, when I first started out back in the '70s, I never thought I would make as much change in the industry as I did. I mean, now an auditing system I developed is used around the world. It has made a lot of improvements. I sort of have no idea how far I would go, and I remember the superintendent of what was the Abbott plant, which actually was really a Swift plant, said, "You always have to keep persevering."
QUESTION: Hi. Back here. You mentioned that 50 percent of the cattle yards are using your system, your humane system. What is the resistance, in your opinion, for the other cattle yards to adopting it?
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, basically, actually the correct figure -- and there's a lot of figures that are kind of wrong -- it's 50 percent of the cattle are handled with equipment that I used at the meat plant, and when I first started out, I thought I could fix everything with equipment. I could only fix half of it with equipment. The other half is good management, and this is where now I'm spending more of my time developing these auditing tools for measuring handling. You know, like, how many cattle are mooing and bellowing, that's actually used to score slaughtering plants. If you have more than three cattle mooing and bellowing going up the stunning chute, you fail the audit. More than one animal out of a hundred falls down, you fail the audit. And when I first started out, I thought I could fix it all with engineering. I could only fix half of it with engineering.
QUESTION: In the film, you had a hard time when you were getting your master's. Those men in the yard were very impolite to you.
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Yes, very definitely.
QUESTION: Did you ever get any -- did they ever apologize to you? Did they ever come back and mea culpa?
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, there were other feed yards where they treated me really well. There was Ted Gilbert down at the Red River Feedyard. There was Sam McElhaney and Gary Oden at McElhaney Cattle Company. There were Bill and Penny Porter out on Singing Valley Ranch. There were some people that treated cattle right, and they treated me right, and that all also help to keep me going. But those incidents with the bull testicles and being kicked out -- those incidences actually did happen.
QUESTION: For Emily and Mick, at what point did you start thinking of Claire in this role? And can you talk about, from your perspective, what made her right to play Temple?
MICK JACKSON: I think it was about three nanoseconds into the casting that I thought Claire Danes is the only person who can play this role, and I never shifted from that from that moment to this. Claire is an actress who, in many ways, has something of Temple's own characteristics – a directness, a determination which she sometimes calls stubbornness or you can call obsession, but certainly a determination to see something through in the right possible way and get it right and a tremendous range of things that she's played in her own career from "My So-Called Life" to the hormonal rages of "Romeo & Juliet," "Stage Beauty," "Shopgirl" -- all those things portraying a personality at different stages of her life, and I thought she can do that, and she can do that with determination. And I don't know whether this is generally known about you, and I hope I won't embarrass you by saying this. Claire did a performance back in 2006, a performance based on Broadway portraying Christina Olson, who is the Christina in "Christina's" --
CLAIRE DANES: Not Broadway, but way off.
MICK JACKSON: Off Broadway. But anyway, in which she portrayed this woman who is in the famous painting by Andrew Wyeth, who is lying in a field with a house in the distance in a kind of pink-white dress, and it's little known that this woman was a real person and could not move her lower extremities. And as part of this performance piece that Claire did, she dragged herself along the sidewalk outside the theater for God knows how many blocks, up the stairs, and into the theater, and then did the performance. And I thought someone who can do that and bring her
professional skills to that degree of dedication is the person who should play Temple Grandin.
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, I didn't know about that. Outside the theater you did it, too?
CLAIRE DANES: Well, it was like we filmed it, and then it was shown in the performance, but, yeah, I dragged myself across the street on First Avenue, and there was an intern from NYU with a broom shooing cars away. That was odd, yeah. But -- yeah. I don't know. We wanted to have people empathize with what it is to be limited physically in that way, and so they would have just made that (indicating) same walk, that same trajectory
themselves with their able legs. So that was the idea.
LEN AMATO: We have time for one last question.
QUESTION: Dr. Grandin, could you talk just a little bit about how you relate to cows because, again, judging by how it's depicted in the film, there was an immediate emotional connection, and yet, knowing the end result of raising cattle, didn't really seem to faze Claire's depiction of you. That seems to be a contradiction.
DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN: Well, I feel very strongly that we've got to give the cattle a good life, and compared to some of the other animals, cattle have a very good life versus some of the bulls and the cows living out on the range. And I knew a lot of good people in ranching. You know, that one bull testicle thing, that happened, but that wasn't
happening everywhere. You know, in nature everything dies. I mean, nature can be harsh. You know, those cattle would never have been born if we hadn't bred the cows and bulls together. You know, while they're alive, we've got to give them a good life. I feel very, very strongly about that.
QUESTION: Thank you very much.
LEN AMATO: I'm afraid we'll have to end it there. Unfortunately, the time went by fast, but thank you all very much.
