The director of Fur talks about working with Kidman and Downey.

Perhaps there’s never been a more polarizing figure in the world of photography than Diane Arbus. Hailed by some as a genius and a pioneer, dismissed by others as exploitive and voyeuristic, Arbus used her lens as a window into the world of people living on the fringes of society. Her photographs focused mainly on society’s so-called “freaks” – transvestites, midgets, people with rare and exotic afflictions – at a time when they were largely viewed with disdain.

Fur, a new film starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr., attempts to trace the roots of Diane’s fascination with the strange and unusual. Dubbed “an imaginary portrait,” Fur straddles a nebulous line between fiction and non-fiction, alternating between events both real and imagined.

ReelzChannel.com recently sat down for an exclusive interview with Fur’s director, Steven Shainberg, who talked about the challenges of making a movie about such an enigmatic person.

“Arbus is probably the only real person that I’ve ever thought about making a movie about,” says Shainberg. “From my childhood, she was always a very important person to me – both her life story and her work. I was completely in love with her photography. I was in love with the daring and the adventurousness and the passion of what she pursued.”

Shainberg’s story centers on a key period in Diane’s life, in which she first contemplates abandoning her life as the privileged housewife of a photographer husband in Manhattan.

“It’s historically accurate,” says Shainberg. “In 1958, at the age of 35, she went to a dinner party and someone asked her, ‘What is it that you do with your husband in your studio,’ and she broke down crying…and that was the beginning of heading off into the world to honor the need that she felt.”

“I don’t think she could, at that time, have been articulate about it,” Shainberg adds, “and she’s not articulate about it in the film. I don’t think she knows what’s happening to her. There’s a sea change that’s occurring because an inner explosion that’s about to happen.”

In Fur, Diane’s “inner explosion” begins when she encounters Lionel (Downey), a mysterious neighbor afflicted with a rare condition that covers every inch of his body with hair. Entranced, Diane becomes obsessed with meeting Lionel and taking his photograph.

The character of Lionel is quite a departure for Downey. For most of the film, only his eyes are visible. “His eyes are so expressive and there’s so much feeling in them,” explains Shainberg. “Getting him not to do all of that high-powered, frenetic verbal stuff that he’s so capable of doing and to just trust the stillness of his body…to some extent, it’s like asking a guy to not do all of the stuff he’s great at.”

Charming and self-assured, Lionel is by no means a hermit. “It would be easy enough to play him as the pained, withdrawn freak,” says Shainberg. “This is a guy who, when he walks into a room, every woman wants to sleep with him. He’s sexy. He’s charismatic. He’s a performer.”

The real-life Arbus went on to become one of the world’s most celebrated photographers before committing suicide in 1971. Since then, society’s treatment of “freaks” has changed considerably. Nonetheless, Shainberg believes that Arbus would still be relevant if she were still alive and working today.

“Her work at the time was dauntingly outrageous because of its subject matter,” says Shainberg, “but really, her work has the effect that it has because of her presence in the room, what she put at risk, what her relationship was to those people. In that sense, I think her work would be equally effective today.”

Fur is currently playing in select theaters nationwide.