Tom Hooper Narrates a Scene From ‘The Danish Girl’

 “The Danish Girl” follows the lives of the artist couple Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) and Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne), focusing on Lili’s transition from a man (as Einar Wegener) to a woman. This scene shows Lili, living as Einar, at a pivotal moment leading up to that transition. In an interview, the director Tom Hooper discussed the scene and some of his ideas for the movie. Following are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q. What was important to you in telling this story on film?

A. What became key to me was honoring Lili’s experience of transition, which was specifically defined by going through it in the 1920s, when the word transgender did not exist and the medical establishment did not accept the concept. We had the great fortune that Lili left behind a memoir called “Man Into Woman” where we got to hear her in the first person talk about her transition. This gave us a great sense of the perspective of what it was like to go through this process.

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What was the approach to using the artists’ paintings in the film?

At first, I was very purist and said we have to use the real Lili paintings and I won’t accept creating our own. And my production designer Eve Stewart said, fairly close to the shooting, “Tom, you do know that the Lili in the paintings is not Eddie Redmayne and doesn’t look exactly like him.” So there was a moment of going, yes, however pure I am, we are going to need to adapt these paintings so it does reflect Eddie Redmayne’s Lili. So we started to create very faithful versions of the paintings. The only way of really getting it right was by asking Eddie to sit for the painter as Lili Elbe. We recreated all the famous poses of the Lili paintings and Eddie would sit and the painter would work for many hours.

What was your visual approach?

The artists’ perspectives were very important to me and I tried to internalize the way they saw the world and think about the way I framed the film to reflect that. Even things as simple as when you paint a painting, there is no handheld camera. There is no tracking shot or point of view. That led me to adapt mainly static camera positions to reflect that. We also wanted to see the world from a human eye height because that’s generally the way they painted.

What was it you saw in Eddie Redmayne when considering him for this role?

Eddie has been drawn to the feminine. He played girl’s parts in school plays. He played Viola in Mark Rylance’s celebrated production of “Twelfth Night.” So he had a body of work of playing women before I approached him to play Lili. He has a quality of emotional transparency, which led me to think about him for Lili. I wanted the audience to go on a journey where step-for-step, beat-for-beat, you’re with Lili and you understand what she’s feeling. One of the things I think he achieves in the film is, with Eddie, Lili’s emergence becomes inevitable, becomes necessary. And that’s because of his extraordinary empathic ability to connect with audiences.