Rather than take a traditional biographical approach, Shainberg and Wilson developed a narrative that merged elements from the real Arbus’s life with a fantasy about her artistic metamorphosis. Blending fact and fiction made a certain sense for a tale about Arbus, notes Wilson. “One of the most important aspects of Arbus’s work was the melding of fantasy and stark reality. This was inherent in her vision of the world,” the writer says.

Shainberg and Wilson created a character, “Diane Arbus,” that incorporated the photographer’s basic history: a privileged and overly-protected upbringing in the family that owned Russek’s, the exclusive New York City furrier and department store; an adult life of marriage, motherhood and work as an assistant/stylist to her husband Allan, a fashion and advertising photographer. From the Bosworth biography they adapted carefully chosen details and events that went to the heart of the person Arbus would become: her childhood dare of standing on a ledge outside her bedroom window, testing her courage high above Central Park; her early and intense interest in things and people her parents and caretakers forbid her to look at, like the homeless men in a Depression-era Central Park shantytown.

The film, however, strays far from these literal events in the real Arbus’s life to invent a story and a relationship which never actually occurred. In imagining what Arbus might have gone through psychologically and emotionally in the days and weeks leading up to the creation of her first photographic portrait --the first expression of a singular vision that would change the world of photography --Shainberg and Wilson arrived at a new kind of biographical cinematic approach. As they shaped the narrative of “Diane’s” inner journey to becoming an artist, they incorporated judicious references to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” a motif that spoke equally to their character’s experience and the real woman that inspired it. “Alice” was one of Arbus’s favorite books and a seminal aesthetic influence; she included a riddle from the book in a photo spread she did for Harper’s Bazaar in 1963.

Comments Shainberg, “The experience the character of Diane has of transitioning from working as her husband’s photography assistant and being a housewife and mother to the Diane Arbus we know is an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ experience. It’s that moment in your life when, because you’re becoming aware of new things, you’re having a kind of trip or psychedelic experience. So ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was appropriate for the psychological experience that the character is having, but it also came directly from Arbus’s work and her own words.”