An eccentric woman in Central Park inspired Gaby Dellal’s Park Avenue—Fiona Shaw ran with it
GE: But you complicate the idea in Park Avenue. The film ends with a different sentiment: inheritance is not inevitable, a daughter doesn’t necessarily make the same mistakes as her mother. Charlotte chooses to go and tell Lily everything.
GD: Yeah, tell your daughter the truth. When I was growing up, there was endless gaslighting. My mother believed one story, my father told her another. Nothing was straightforward. As a child, you are confused, but essentially you know the truth. You just feel it, and if it doesn’t corroborate with what you are being told, you think you are going mad.
Throughout my own life, I’ve kept secrets. I’m scared of the truth, if I’m honest. But children need the truth and receive it without judgement.
GE: Park Avenue does feel like a spiritual successor to Three Generations, though.
GD: That’s what my children always say, “Mum, you just made the same film again?!” Obviously, it’s another mother-daughter movie, but I didn’t realise I was doing that. Park Avenue started because they wouldn’t give me a doorman for Three Generations. I set it downtown, and they said there are no doormen downtown. I said to the producer, “In my next film there is going to be a doorman.” So Anders, Park Avenue’s doorman, was the hook. It’s about New York City.
GE: The New York in Park Avenue seems like a New York gone by.
GD: I wanted to do an homage, but it had to be the New York I grew up with, like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. When I lived downtown, I would get on the subway and go to Central Park every day. I’d go, “Wow, this is like going along the Seine in Paris.” So I was very excited about creating this beautiful old uptown world where Kit lives.
GE: Kit is such an extraordinary character. Was she inspired by someone in particular?
GD: I think you write what you know. With Kit, it became very clear that I was channeling my own mum. My mother only wore Saint Laurent, and I found it excruciatingly embarrassing. She was very glamorous and very beautiful. If she were sitting here now, she would put on red lipstick and would never look in the mirror to do it. I was a tomboy, and we clashed.
My mother was the only person who could wear a gold suit in the daytime and get away with it. Fiona Shaw is the only person who can carry off a gold suit at the Doctor’s office, head held high, unflinching – dressed head-to-toe in Saint Laurent, receiving news that she “won’t make it until the holidays”. The yellow leather cape that Kit wears at the start of the film was inspired by an orange leather suit my mother often wore. It made me uncomfortable. It was only at the end of my mother’s life that I appreciated all her eccentricities. In part, this film is an honouring of my own mother, as well as Kit Gill, the lady I met in Central Park.
GE: What can you tell me about the woman you met in the park?
GD: It is an amazing story; I don’t believe in coincidences. But I’m walking in the park, and there was this woman, incredibly beautiful like Katharine Hepburn, and she had this long red coat that was a bit mucky. She was leaning against a tree screaming, “Don’t ever have chemotherapy. I feel like shit!” I looked at her and thought, “Wow, you’re amazing,” and I said, “Come and sit down. Can I help you?” I got her sitting down on the park bench, and then the sun came out and she calmed down. We sat and chatted, and I thought, “Oh, this woman’s fascinating. I love her.”
Over the course of our two year relationship I would meet Kit in the park, and I would sometimes record her—she had tons of amazing phrases, like “the models at Bonwit Teller are based on me,” as she says in the film. At the end she was clearly getting thinner and thinner; she said, “I hate my family, and I don’t want any of them to know.” That’s where the idea for the film came from.
