Interview with Lauren Greenfield: The Queen of Versailles

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 18 April 2012 01:58

Written by Laura Blum

Lauren Greenfield is pleased. Her latest work, The Queen of Versailles, has just played at the 15th Full Frame Documentary Film Festival to more cheer than it drew at the Sundance premiere. How fitting that Full Frame's Quinceañera would mark a girl’s coming into responsibility, via this portrait of Jacqueline Siegel, trophy wife of David “the timeshare king” Siegel.

The billionaire couple was building a 90,000 square-foot mansion -- Orlando and the country’s largest -- when the recession put the kibosh on their dream house. That the screening took place on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking supplied an apt metaphor for this Franco-Vegas-styled hulk frozen in time.

Poor Siegels. Now instead of 10 kitchens, a private skating rink and closets the size of an Olympic pool, they must content themselves with their 26,000-square-foot mansion, which Jackie laments is "bursting at the seams" given their eight children, 25 servants and untold exotic animals.

Greenfield reveals the addictions and compulsions that fuel the American Dream gone amok. Yet the photographer-turned-filmmaker also shows Jackie's more endearing qualities and invites us to sympathize with the former waitress, model, Mrs. Florida and holder of a computer engineering degree even as we bask in the schadenfreude of her fall.

Staff are laid off; the kids switch to public schools and animal excrement piles up as David tumbles from his golden throne into financial ruin and a nasty misanthropic sulk. When the going gets tough, Jackie gets going (albeit in a rented car she expects to come with a chauffer). She's the Real Housewife we ridicule yet begrudgingly admire.

In the Full Frame lounge, Greenfield sat down for a tête-à-tête about The Queen of Versailles and how she quarried its bedrock souls.

Q: The film opens on a lemony note as if inviting us in on a joke, but then refrains from satirizing. What were you going for at first?

A: This audience laughed a lot more than I heard before, so thank you. But the film was not intended as any form of ridicule at all. The arc that I intended was to start with that fascination and combination of both envy and disdain that we have for rich people -- like the shows we watch with the Kardashians and Paris Hilton -- and then to take us to a different place. So it´s fine with me if you laugh in the beginning. Humor does bring you in, but I also want you to care about the people in the end.

Q: Part of what gives that light-hearted feel is the opening music.

A: All the music was by a composer named Jeff Beal. It´s all original. What we talked about was glorifying the good life and then seeing what happens. In the beginning there's a montage that's like The Fabulous Life Of. When I was at Sundance Lab, the temp score we had was Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. I loved it and thought about keeping it in, but there was something objectifying about it. Jeff uses a waltz that later gets deconstructed, which gives a real baroque over-the-top quality which is also sort of regal. He brought a humanism to the music and an empathy.

Q: Are some viewers surprised to find themselves empathizing with the 1 percent?

A: Yes, I've gotten that. But for me the Siegels are both the 1 percent and they're everyman. As the quote goes, in America we don´t hate the rich because we always imagine someday we'll be them. In a way David and Jackie represent that because they did come from humble origins and their fantasy life in the beginning is what a lot of people would imagine would be the dream life.

Q: Some viewers find the Siegels almost too enraging to watch. But for those who succomb to their charms, the family's fortunes and misfortunes seem to hold equal fascination. Why is that?

A: Something about their story during the boom spoke to the American Dream, and then when the crisis happened ultimately it became a much more compelling commentary about the American Dream. We have an obsession with wealth and having things. When I started, it was more of doing a real portrayal of what is often in this "reality" fictional kind of context. What happens with the crisis is that we learn the implications of those values. We all took that hard lesson during the recession. This is a supersize foreclosure story.

Q: La famille Siegel, c'est moi...

A: This is not a movie about a rich family; it's a movie that speaks to the culture of consumerism and what we went through in the crash and our values as a culture. The Wal-mart scene shows an addiction of sorts. I too have been to Costco and found myself with a cartful of stuff I don´t need. In particular, David hits the nail on the head at the end when he says it's a vicious cycle; we're all a part of it and greed was driving it. You see him on both sides of the situation: he's selling mortgages to poor and middle class and he's also victim to the banks he's borrowing from to build bigger.

Q: The myth of Icarus comes to mind. Which other stories resonate here?

A: King Lear a little bit with the ambivalent relationship with the sons, and I was also thinking about Citizen Kane and the antique warehouses, which seem a direct reference. It's not so much specific to any Shakespearean story, but more that it had a kind of epic quality, that it felt alegorical -- like the tale of a king and a queen and a prince and a fall. I felt they were larger-than-life characters that could hold that kind of symbolism. And Jackie would often say, "What we´re going through is the same as everyone else but on a larger scale."

Q: What narrative arc did you think you'd find before the recession hit?

A: I don´t know that there really was a story when I started. I just kind of fell in love with the setting. I thought Jackie and David were amazing characters and there was something very dramatic about their family life, with elements of comedy.

Q: What did you learn about Jackie going to her hometown of Binghamton?

A: I saw the role that her beauty played. She was never going to stay there -- she always wanted to do something big. She realized that she had this power with her beauty, that it gave her a ticket to something. It's also reflective of the culture that she realized at a certain point that her beauty was going to take her more where she wanted to go than her engineering degree. That was her choice.

A: Not only is she savvy enough to be an engineer, she's savvy enough not to.

Q: I love that story. In an earlier cut I had it later, but I ended up putting it in the beginning because you need to know that Jackie's smart. She went to an engineering school at RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology] when there very few women.

A: As a photographer who's studied body image, deconstruct for us: what's with her Versailles-sized breasts?

A: Jackie likes everything big. David wants to build tallest timeshare in the world and together Versailles was their love child. It's only in the combination of both of them that Versailles happens. She always got a lot of attention. She has this sort of Amazonian quality. Jackie likes to overwhelm people. Even when she was young and flat-chested, she worked in a diner and the owner said customers didn´t care if the food was hot or cold, they were just stopped in their tracks for Jackie. My guess is that as she got older the breasts were kind of a way to keep that power.

Q: As a 40-something, is she really unphased by David's jab about trading her in for two 20 year olds? Did you ever see her lose her cool?

A: I don't think Jackie was that surprised hearing those comments but they're also hard to hear. And no, she never lost her cool. They have a solid relationship in a strange kind of way. What I tried to show was what any family that has had financial stress will be able to relate to, albeit on this over-the-top level. Jackie is very genuine and that's part of why she´s good on camera. She doesn't give a shit about what anyone thinks and she's not a social climber. She likes having beautiful stuff but she's not trying to put on airs and be part of high society. There was a real energy in the house, partially because of Jackie's child-like playfulness and also her generosity of heart. The atmosphere she creates is very atypical of rich people.

Q: What do you make of David's law suit against Sundance for their "rags-to-riches-to-rags" blurb, even though he uttered those precise words on camera?

A: David is a complex character. In the beginning I was scared of him; he was this intimidating figure. And then I really did develop a lot of empathy and affection for him, particularly because of his honesty in the interviews and the way he was able to be so vulnerable about what was going on. In the middle of it I realized that his love story with Jackie and the tension in their relationship were going to be at the center of the film. David isolates but he's also carrying the full burden of the family and created all its wealth, so in a way he is the true rags-to-riches story.

Q: How were you using color and composition to tell the story?

A: I was trying to have the look of my photographs, which use a lot of rich saturated colors and play off of popular culture and textures. I also tried to make the interviews environmental portraits. In photography this means that the surroundings tell as much about the person as the interview. I find that often in documentary indies people frame very tightly because the sound guy is always trying to get it right. So I drive the sound guy crazy because I always want to have a tableau that speaks to what´s going on. I also try to use the interviews like verité so that if someone comes in or says something, I can be more inclusive of that.

Because I did five interviews with David and Jackie throughout, and two with [adopted niece] Jonquil and [daughter] Victoria, there was a progression in the interviews. They´re not just talking heads that are mixed up throughout the film; they´re really chronological. Jonquil came from poverty, and I always saw her as this interesting mirror of Jackie. She says at the end something like, "When I used to see rich people on TV, I thought they'd be happy every day and now I know that's not the case and you just start to want more and more." Victoria had the opposite development. She started out as this spoiled child who wasn't that empowered to speak for herself and was very shy. By the end she's this self-realized person who's the only one who stands up to her dad.

The color palette changes. Both David and Victoria had a real physical transformation in the film. Victoria loses the baby fat and becomes a woman from a little girl and David in three years ages what looks like 10 years.

Q: Jackie too appears transformed by the end.

A: In the beginning she put on makeup and there was a presentation in front of the camera, and by the end -- after the botox -- she´s wearing no makeup and she's barefoot and very honest before the camera. That was why I started with that first scene so you can see both the posing and the real life and can start to make that differentiation.

Q: What's the latest with the Seigels?

David borrowed a million dollars to get an extra six months so Bank of America won´t foreclose. That date came up and he borrowed more money. So he's taken out a mortgage. Now it´s not going to foreclose, but he has a big mortgage.

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