About halfway through Late Fame, a woman climbs atop a modest stage in a small red room and sings the famous Weimar cabaret song “Surabaya Johnny,” composed by Kurt Weill and written by Bertolt Brecht. Gloria, the singer, played by Greta Lee, delightfully out of time in a glossy black bowl cut with opaque purple eye shadow, is accompanied by little more than a tinny boom box, self-consciously chosen in the era of aux chords. She playfully prowls the room, giving little licks of attention to the smattering of greying men who have come to see her, but despite her radiance, there is a sense that the 40-something woman needs them even more than they might want her.
Late Fame, directed by former film critic and programmer Kent Jones, is not about a disappearing New York; it is about a New York that is already long gone. The film follows Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), an aging poet who once rubbed elbows with Richard Hell in SoHo lofts and now sorts envelopes at the post office, as he is reluctantly inducted into a group of aspiring young writers that view him as a genius. Gloria is their Dorothy Parker, scintillating and self-destructive, a born performer who is not of the penthouse-dwelling, wannabe Beats contingent, but hasn’t yet surrendered to a life beyond artistic ambition, as Saxberger has. The two orbit each other, remembering the charge of creative community and pondering their own choices.
Lee embodies Downtown strivers with acuity (see: her performances in Past Lives, Russian Doll, and Girls). And while she can skew (delectably) satirical, Late Fame sees Lee tap into endless pathos, in part inspired by her own brushes with Eds and Glorias when she first moved to New York to make it as an actor. Even the film’s scrappy indie process reflects just how difficult it can be to find those pockets of bohemian creativity in this city: The cabaret scene was filmed, not in New York, but in New Jersey.
Ahead of Late Fame’s release on Aug. 7, we spoke to Lee about crafting Gloria’s unforgettable look with the makeup artist Kabuki, Broadway divas, and why New York is a city haunted by artistic possibility.
How are you feeling revisiting the film ahead of release?
I just love it. It feels like this secret precious gem that I’ve just been carrying around with me. It’s so great to be able to let it go and share it with everyone.
So much of this movie is rooted in this longing for a former era of artistry. If you were in a different era or an art scene from the past, what would it be?
Oh my God, I think about that all the time. It’s a huge part of why I signed up for this and why I love the story of it so much. I would want to be transported to the heyday of musical theater. This is very specific, but my career trajectory was heavily impacted by this performance of Aida on Broadway by Heather Headley [in 2000]. This was maybe an under-appreciated show at the time, but I loved the idea of a powerhouse diva, a stage diva, which we arguably don’t have anymore in the same way. As a young person, I was like, Oh, this is the coolest shit ever: that athleticism, that depth, and that strength. Now I feel like we see a lot of two-inch performances. You know what I mean? Everything just feels like a telecast of a smaller thing.
When was this performance?
I think I was 18 or so. I am having one of these moments where I’m like, “Wow, I really am so old.” But I remember as a young person feeling totally transformed. It felt like a religious experience.
It’s similar in some ways to Late Fame: You have these young people obsessing over this one particular person’s work and projecting things from their own life onto it.
I think a lot about the youths and who’s a rock star in their mind. I remember when chefs in New York were the rock stars of their time. But who now takes up that space? I’m very nostalgic for a version or a time in the world where the idea of that felt more rooted in something real.
Who were your New York rock stars?
I was really heavily influenced by female stage divas. Liza Minnelli in Cabaret as Sally Bowles was life-changing for me, and something I think about a lot. But I’m talking about everyone from Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald to Sutton Foster, too. Fierce women who could tear down the scenery and really sing.
When you moved to New York, did you ever meet any Glorias or any Eds?
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there was a part of me that thinks I was a Gloria. I was aspiring with no clear path of where it’s gonna end up. A big part of it for me is understanding I was this close to ending up like a Gloria if certain things didn’t go a certain way.
I recognize there’s so many women and men, performers who were walking a certain walk down an unknowable path. There’s no promise. A lot of people that I’ve even lost touch with—I don’t know where they ended up—are like Gloria in the movie. Dreams take on different shapes and forms and for some, myself included, certain dreams have to die in order for new ones to emerge. There’s a certain death that has to happen sometimes.
I think Ed and Gloria are two responses to the same question: How long do you hold out for your art? Ed is someone that has found a new path, while Gloria might just keep barreling down the same one.
How does anyone define the currency and worth of your life? How can you measure your value, whether you’re an artist or not? At the very end, what is it? Is it just feeling lucky to be alive? Or do certain desires and ambitions play into your sense of worth?
I think so much about how lucky I am that I have something that gives me this tremendous sense of purpose in my life. My pursuit of being an actor and getting to make movies and to tell stories and collaborate with people drives my life’s sense of purpose and what I want. If that was taken away, I don’t know how I’d feel or what that means. Yet Ed portrays a really interesting argument for finding other ways to live, and living for different things, other than what you originally intended. I’m thinking a lot about young people.
Careful now, I still consider myself one of those.
I’m curious. I wanna know. I can only make assumptions about what it used to feel like for me. Living in New York when I had first graduated college, I had that sense—I used to call it a tickle in my butt. New York gave me this sense that anything is possible, and it’s right out those doors. I just need to get out there, and I’m gonna find it. I hope that is still true for people who are starting out in whatever their endeavors are, but I feel like the way the blueprint is all different now. How can you not be affected and informed by almost too much input on what it is that you should be looking for and in what way.
It’s interesting to think about how much nostalgia plays into that, too. The film really captures New York in a way that still feels magical and like there’s possibility. But I couldn’t help but notice that the camera in SoHo is trained upwards. It’s trained to the wrought iron facings and not the stores that are at street level. It’s maybe omitting certain realities of what it’s like to walk around that neighborhood now.
I would argue that is intentional because Ed, and also I would say Willem himself, is from a different era. In between takes he was actually pointing at different buildings and saying, “Oh, I used to live there, and I had the most heinous argument with my girlfriend on that block,” talking about all the different players. Walking down on the ground but looking up was trying to capture this feeling of wanting to look past what is directly in front of you on the ground floor and instead looking for ghosts, looking for something else, cutting through the noise of what feels so blaringly in our faces and finding answers elsewhere.
I’m also thinking about the guys in the movie and how much they take on a newer, younger generation in the quest that we’re talking about: looking for purpose or looking for value or merit in art. They’re working through what is actually considered exceptional or great and their own confusion around it. It’s not as easy as “old stuff” they find. You can’t just project a romantic idea of what was great in the past. It might not work anymore.
Finding that sense of purpose, whether it’s an artistic pursuit or not, used to be centered geographically. New York City had this currency and agency in terms of being central to art or whatever your endeavor was. Now I don’t know if that is the case anymore because of the Internet and our access to so much at all given points. It’s not necessarily even New York anymore. Maybe it’s Seoul. Maybe it’s Mexico City. Maybe it can be so many other different places.
Were you having these kinds of conversations with Kent Jones? He’s seen the New York film scene change so much.
He’s seen everything that’s happened in cinema all over the States, but especially New York. We talked ad nauseam about all the different experiences he’s had working with Marty Scorsese and observing all of the different things over the years. I think he would argue in some ways it’s exactly the same.
Do you still live in New York, or are you mostly LA-based now?
I spent almost 20 years [in New York]. I became an adult there and started my family there. I had my kids there. I moved with them [to LA] during the pandemic.
I can’t imagine raising kids in New York. Were you going up and down the subway with the stroller?
Oh my God. Every day I felt like, Where is the mariachi band in celebration of my efforts to get around the city? How is this not being publicly acknowledged? It was so hard, but it’s also all you know at that time. In New York, I used to haul six bags of groceries on foot, no big deal. That’s what you just did. Now I’m in my car, and I think, That is crazy. I miss it though. New York is forever the source of the original butt tingle for me.
When you and Kent were coming up with the character, how involved were you involved in creating Gloria’s style?
I was heavily involved. We didn’t have a lot of time and it’s an indie, so this was a case of using every tool in your toolkit, every connection you have. I was so pleased to bring in some people who are maybe outside the box in terms of the movie-making process. It was really important for me to capture the way she would do her makeup, to make sure it’s authentically someone who’s not on Instagram. Someone who is really well-versed in a world that had passed. That she would know Sally Bowles inside and out. Her clothing, her hair, all of it are references that are very real and specific.
I worked with Kabuki, who is an iconic, legendary makeup artist. I went to his apartment in Manhattan, and… it’s insane. Everything he was doing, all the different looks are things that just aren’t done anymore. It’s not a TikTok beauty tutorial. It’s the opposite of that, emphasizing features in a way that would be completely unacceptable now. And using color! We talked a lot about Isabella Rossellini and her love of color and makeup for makeup’s sake in a world where right now it’s all about natural, no-makeup makeup. It was great to swing totally in the opposite direction.
The purple eyeshadow jumps out.
And even the blush placement: a really concentrated pink on your temples, which is something that isn’t done anymore. It was great, especially after doing something like Past Lives, which was so grounded in realism and naturalism. This was a totally different thing. The hair, all the different wigs we did. It’s true with the song, too. We wanted to treat it like it was a real person performing at Marie’s Crisis or one of those places in the Village.
Where was it filmed?
We were on location out in New Jersey. I grew up going to those places in my early days in New York. They got these incredible background actors who felt believably of that time and place. And then I had to sing out and perform this thing in the way that Gloria would, in this kind of pedestrian way. She has this boom box and is able to just whip it out wherever and do her thing and sing a torch song.
It’s something that I can relate to. It’s a way of life that was something I was experiencing early on in my career in New York, having to hit the pavement and grind it out, go to auditions and just perform at the drop of a hat. So we had to honor that spirit, as terrifying as it was for me.
What’s so great about that scene and that performance is not necessarily that it’s a virtuosic performance but instead that you’re making eye contact with each individual person and having specific moments with them. That is why they’re there. What they’re looking for is actual unmitigated attention.
That really was what was so scary for me because it would’ve been so much easier if I was attempting to do this polished thing, like I was training to do in school when I was a musical theater major—to make it perfect and to make it impressive in a different way. But because it had to be something that was rough and something that was not perfect, that felt very scary and very vulnerable for me. I couldn’t do it like I’m a recording artist or like I’m a true veteran because she’s not that.
Were you singing live?
Oh, I was singing live. It was important to both Kent and I to not have a microphone, because in a setting like that, you don’t always have a sound engineer, and to feel the immediacy and unpolished-ness of a performance like that, to have it be naked. So there was no mic.
What were the other locations?
We were in Washington Square Park. We were in New Jersey for a bit of it. This movie is a testament to New York and how much it’s changing and how hard it is to film in New York. To have a real New York movie is so rare.
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