I’ll Be Your Mirror: Megan Abbott Talks with William Horberg About Ripley on Film

Abbott: I’d read Strangers on a Train as a teenager, but I didn’t read my first Ripley until my early twenties, when the Minghella adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley came out. They were a revelation to me. In some ways, I think Tom Ripley will be forever misunderstood. The popular notion of him as a cold-hearted serial killer or a psychopath always feels so wrong to me. When you read the books, the trick of them is that you actually identify with Ripley, especially if you grew up with any kind of class anxiety, any feeling of being an outsider. I loved the Minghella version, which seemed to understand that anxiety deeply, and Ripley’s essential and eternal loneliness. And, most of all, it embraces the homoeroticism of the books, which radiates off every page. Can you tell me a little bit about how the movie came together?

Abbott: Exactly. How could you not side with Ripley over Freddie Miles? (Or do I reveal too much about myself?)

The Minghella and Clément movies both tackle the first book in the series, when Ripley is still fairly wide-eyed and inexperienced. Both capture the intoxicating appeal of a rich person’s Europe as seen through a striver’s eyes: the golden hues of Minghella’s; the lush blues and whites of Clément’s, with the impossible beauty of Delon’s face. It’s quite a contrast to The American Friend and Ripley’s Game, both featuring a more world-weary Ripley, deep into the world of art forgery and fraud. Liliana Cavani’s Ripley is a smooth criminal (and one of the most actively heterosexual Ripleys), and Malkovich seems to be having so much fun with him. But one of the reasons I love Wim Wenders’ American Friend (unforgettably photographed by Robby Müller) is that it gets at something so fundamental to the books, especially the later ones: Ripley’s essential loneliness, his hunger for friendship, companionship, intimacy. Hopper conveys that so beautifully, and his relationship with the great Bruno Ganz is one of my favorites in all of movies. But Hopper’s take, all the way down to his Stetson hat, is certainly an idiosyncratic one (i.e., “What’s wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?”). What do you think of Hopper as Ripley? According to Wenders on the [Criterion] commentary track, Highsmith herself took a while to come around to him!

Horberg: The American Friend was the first Ripley film I saw, at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, in 1977. I’ll reciprocate your self-revelation by confessing that I was so enamored with the movie that, when the theater closed, I climbed back into the box office and stole the movie poster for the film that was hanging there. But at that time I was going to see it as the new Wim Wenders film, featuring cameo appearances by two of my cinematic heroes, Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller, not as a Ripley film. I wasn’t aware of the series yet, and if I knew Highsmith at all, it was only via Hitchcock, as the author of Strangers on a Train. I loved Hopper but probably saw him more as playing himself than comparing him to Delon-as-Ripley. My recollection is Highsmith didn’t like the Delon version either. She wasn’t alive to judge Matt Damon, but I suspect she might also have found fault with him. I think she identified so closely with her most famous creation, the one character that inspired her to write a whole series of books, that no one could have perfectly inhabited the role to her satisfaction.

For me, the very first book, The Talented Mr. Ripley, was the most compelling, with the strongest premise for a movie: How far would you go to become someone else? Paramount made it the tagline on the movie poster. It was quite tricky to cast the film and stay true to our premise. It wouldn’t work for an Alain Delon to play our Ripley—he was too perfect. Instead, Minghella’s concept was that Ripley longed to be Alain Delon. We saw Good Will Hunting long before it came out, and were convinced that Matt could play Ripley, so we needed someone with movie-star charisma willing to play the supporting role of Dickie Greenleaf and Jude Law fit the bill. Matt would jokingly curse me out every day as he had to attempt to physically become an Adonis like Jude. The hours that poor guy put in on the treadmill every night after wrap in order to pull off the beach scene in those lime green speedos! What a champ!

Abbott: Alissa Wilkinson wrote in the New York Times recently that Ripley serves as a mirror for the culture, for us, and that the changing Ripley adaptations reflect their unique cultural moment. I think that might be true. I certainly think he serves as a mirror for me, and the Ripleys I love probably speak more to my own fascinations. In my youth, the Ripley of the first book spoke to me so deeply, a striver, peering through the keyhole. Now I respond more to the more complex, more haunted Ripley of the later books (and as we see in American Friend and Ripley’s Game). What do you think? In the age of social media and endless doppelgängers, do Ripley’s elusiveness and his performativity seem more apt than ever?

Horberg: Interesting. In Highsmith’s time, Ripley’s sexuality is closeted, and his outré acts of impersonation and forgery allow her to construct thrilling and suspenseful narratives around his increasingly elaborate deceptions and outsider status. Today it feels like we live in a golden age of crooks and con men and imposters,—doppelgängers, as you say. They are out of the shadows and everywhere we turn. Social media allows everyone to have a false identity; it also accelerated the end of privacy and the nearly completed construction of the surveillance state. It makes sense that Minghella’s Ripley was something of a love letter to the period of the Clément film (we even shot in many of the same locations around Ischia and Naples), and even the latest Ripley (on Netflix) is so emphatically period that it’s in black and white. Maybe he needs to remain in the twentieth century, due to the Ripley-ization of the twenty-first century? What do you think? 

Abbott: I confess, I’d love imagining what Highsmith would do with Ripley in the current landscape. She always seemed interested in placing him in new eras (in her last in the series, the 1980 novel The Boy Who Followed Ripley, Ripley enthusiastically dons drag). It’s hard to believe—as much as I think Ripley himself is more than a little in love with past times of imagined refinement—that he wouldn’t find a way to take keen advantage of the mutability of identity in our digital age. Still, without having Highsmith around to provide the story, I do worry about increasingly more empty variations. That said, I’d love to be surprised. And Ripley always surprises.