Beatriz at Dinner – An Interview with Mike White

Beatriz at Dinner project began when Mike White, an outspoken supporter of animal rights and a committed vegan, was outraged by the 2015 killing of Cecil the lion by an American trophy hunter in Zimbabwe. What, he wondered, would he do if he were ever to meet that man? He began to build a script around that idea. Before he had a single scene on paper, Mike White knew that his friend and colleague Miguel Arteta would be an ideal director for the project. “I’m very particular about the people who interpret my writing,” he says. “Miguel is so respectful of the contribution of the writer. He has a humanistic impulse and comes at things from a heartfelt and hopeful place. My work can be read as satirical and acidic. His empathy enriches stories that in the hands of someone else could fall into a darker hole. I am always confident he’ll get great performances and be protective of the script.” When White brought the idea to Miguel Arteta, he also suggested an actress they both had been wanting to work with to play Beatriz: Salma Hayek. “Envisioning her in this role was very clever on Mike’s part,” says Miguel Arteta, who counts the actress as a good friend. “She’s a real animal lover and a very political person. She is also extremely empathic, like the character. It’s a different kind of role for her and she loved the idea from the beginning.”

Beatriz (Salma Hayek), an immigrant from a poor town in Mexico, has drawn on her innate kindness to build a career as a spiritual health practitioner in Los Angeles. Doug Strutt (John Lithgow) is a cutthroat, self-satisfied billionaire real estate developer. When these two opposites meet at a dinner party, their worlds collide and neither will ever be the same.

Interview with Mike White, the writer of Beatrice at Dinner

Christopher Buck: It’s a pleasure to speak with you. Your movie, Beatriz at Dinner, was very powerful.

Mike White: Oh, awesome, I’m glad you felt that way. We went through it all; it was not what we expected, which was good and really left us sitting here thinking and pondering things.

Mike White: Well, thank you.

Christopher Buck: So, we’ve got a few questions for you. One of those, is Beatriz, her natural empathy streams from the purity of her soul, and it seemed to give meaning to everything she touches and expresses, as she’s very much a natural healer. What was the idea behind, her character and what she represents, and the clash with John Lithgow’s character and what he represents?

Mike White: Well, I feel like I wanted to create two real, different polarities and two separate ways of approaching the world. Naturally, John Lithgow’s character is the sort of, the captain of industry who is looking at what he’s doing, at what his leadership for the world is, jobs and, making the trains run on time. He’s using the resources of the earth and people to create capital. He’s a real capitalist.

And Salma’s character, Beatriz, I think she comes at things from a feeling point of view. Like, it’s about empathy, healing, compassion. I think there are people that feel like their sensitivities are so delicate, in a sense, that it is difficult for them to live in a world like a world that we live in right now. It’s just that there’s so much, everything is so fraught, our future of our planet is so kind of scary. There’s so much at stake that I think having a character who just really feels the pain of everything and everyone to such a degree makes her an interesting character but also feeling that she’s almost too sensitive to live in this world in a way.

Christopher Buck: It seemed that way. Would you say that that dinner was her own dark night of the soul? She, ran up against the real world that she’s been trying to heal; and it, but she smashed into it.

Mike White: Yeah, I believe it is. At the time that I wrote this, it was obviously before the election. But there are just times, where you feel like, as somebody who’s hope that the world is moving forward in some progressive manner. That, like, we are going to somehow rally and as a species–start to really attack the issues that are confronting our humanity and the planet.

And then, there are moments where you just feel hopeless. And you feel like, I want to swim away to somewhere to a life that was simpler. And, for her, it’s the mangroves of her childhood and Mexico, and where you just feel, I can’t fight this anymore.

Christopher Buck: We noticed that the mangroves and that were kind of her sanctuary, her retreat in there. Also, just as you seemed to use white like the white octopus or the white goat as a symbol of her purity. And it looks like she was almost too pure to live and interact in this world.

Mike White: No, I do think, the idea was, there’s a lot of different ways we could have ended this movie. And for me, I felt as she approached her frustrations, she starts to fantasize about a violent reaction. And I felt like that’s not the way; I don’t think she would follow through with that. But, the fact that she was starting to fantasize that where she just felt like she was on the verge of doing something crazy like that–at that point, she realized, she had hit the wall. Yeah, it was too much.

I think that it is the idea that, if somebody who’s too pure to live in this world, the purity of those feelings, the intensity of those feelings just makes it a struggle for her to live, you know?

Christopher Buck: I understand exactly what you mean. And, you’re right, our world is crazy like that. When I first started watching the movie, and you had Beatriz and her antagonist on the other side, I thought where you were gonna go was some kind of balancing between the two, but there was no ability to do that. Do you say there is a possibility of integration between the spiritual and the healing side of humanity and the ruthless capitalism that we’re often faced with?

Mike White: Well, I think we all do it to some degree in our lives. I think that selfishness, there’s no way to exist in this world without being selfish to some degree, I think we all try to develop our compassionate nature and are inevitably on one of the poles of the spectrum of that push and pulls.

The sense of the polarization of two different approaches to the world, and what we should be doing as a country and individually. It feels like it is becoming more polarized in the sense of what how we need to approach the issues that are facing us as a species. They are becoming more extreme in their positions, in a sense.

Christopher Buck: Do you think this movie was your way to shock and awaken people through the expression of this, through the diametrically opposed world vision that we need to do something to try to find common ground?

Mike White: I do feel, there’s a part of me that felt like there would be an audience that would see this movie and relate to Beatriz. Obviously, she’s kind of an ultimate distillation of certain characteristics. But I feel like there’s a lot of people who are like-minded with her in particular ways, and that would have a cathartic experience because it speaks to some of the frustrations – in a sense, the kind of despair of our times.

I do believe that if we don’t wake up to our responsibility to be stewards of this earth, we as a species, not to mention other species and the planet itself, are at risk. You know life itself is in danger, and I don’t think that’s an alarmist point of view. I believe that it’s just reality.

I felt like that was an interesting idea to write about. As a writer, you want to write, I’m not really a political writer. I don’t usually write political stuff, but there was just a moment where I just felt like I wanted to speak to all of these issues that were happening around me. And, I just had a need to get some of this off my chest, I guess.