The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Janet Planet.
Annie, I know your work primarily as a playwright, and I was surprised to learn that you’ve been thinking about making movies for a very long time. Why did you decide to set this story on screen and not on stage?
Annie Baker: It’s never like an intellectual decision. For me it’s very instinct-driven. What is a play and what is a movie? I think I could come up with a lot of reasons. For one thing, getting this performance from somebody [Zoe Ziegler] that was ten when we shot this movie… I don’t know if any ten-year-old on the planet— even this genius ten-year-old—could do that every night for eight weeks. But that’s not why it’s not a play. It’s just a movie.
Julianne Nicholson: I think part of it is just visually this particular place that Annie chose, and an understanding of this place. You cannot create that. You have to be in the place.
AB: Absolutely. There’s nothing I like less than nature on stage being made to look realistic. That’s not to say there aren’t ways of representing nature on stage. It can be interesting and kind of abstract, but that’s not the same as pretending something’s real and alive. Anything on stage is wonderfully dead. Julianne’s right. One of the first things I knew was that this movie was about this place. I knew we had to shoot it in the place. Julianne and I are both from that place. That was baked in from the beginning.
every relationship has its own really particular set of rules
Was it challenging to try to get into the mind of an 11-year-old while you were writing?
AB: I don’t think I was trying to get into her mind. Part of the originating impulse was a movie about the intellectual and spiritual development of someone that age over the course of the summer. In some ways, the movie is her brain changing over a summer. Writing for this character was actually one of the things that made me want to do it. I was trying to capture a feeling that I’ve had. I’ve spent a lot of time with kids, taking care of kids, I’ve had a lot of kids in my life, and there’s a feeling I got from them that I felt like I hadn’t seen captured on screen before, especially for girls. I felt like movies about girls were often about trauma or puberty or burgeoning sexuality. Those are all are great topics, but I wanted this to be about a young girl and her mind and her mind in relationship to her mother.
Zoe, it’s such a wonderful performance. I read that you had never acted professionally before. You’re in almost every scene in the film!
Zoe Ziegler: That’s right.
That’s incredible. What made you want to try acting?
ZZ: One of the parents at our school—her daughter’s an actor—they sent it to my mom and said I would be perfect for it.
What would you say was your first impression of acting? Was it fun or scary or interesting?
ZZ: It was really fun. I liked memorizing the lines.
You also had the pleasure of acting beside Julianne Nicholson. Julianne, can you talk about Janet and what intrigued you about her as a character?
JN: The first thing to know is that I’m a really big fan of Annie’s work, so I was interested in anything that she was putting on the page. And I grew up in that area. When we met, I didn’t know that this was the story, or where it was going to take place. It just felt like such a gift to be able to read this thing that was so reminiscent of my childhood and so familiar. I had such a deep connection from the first page, and to dig into that with Annie was such a lucky thing for me.
The connection between Janet and her daughter Lacy is intense. I experienced such conflicting feelings about it while watching the film. I’m curious what you might have thought about their relationship?
JN: I feel like parenting in 2024 is very different than parenting was in 1991 and that’s something that Annie and I talked about a lot. Sometimes, I, Julianne, would have this sort of inclination to be nicer or more physical or warmer. But it was very important to establish this particular relationship. Not my relationship with Zoe, but this world that we were spinning. My mother and father split up when I was seven, and there was about a year where my mom and my younger sister and I were all very close. We got kicked out of the apartment that we were living in because the landlords didn’t want a single mom living in their apartment in 1977. We were a tight little threesome and we lived in this communal house in Newton and we had really interesting experiences. I’m intrigued by the relationship between a single mom and a daughter. I think it’s so interesting and beautiful and of course each one is different, but those lines are blurry. I think it’s really fascinating. And I believe there is some value in not helicopter parenting and not clearing the path for your kid, but letting them sort of try to figure stuff out on their own and fail on their own.
AB: Listening to you talk, I feel like we’re really accepting of the nuances and ambiguities of romantic relationships on screen. Like if you watch a romance, you’re willing to witness a lot of darkness, and redemption, and also sometimes nastiness. I feel like that’s its own genre. But with parent/child movies, there is this need to sort of come down on the idea that they’re either a good parent or they’re a bad parent. And the movie must have an ethical standpoint on the parenting because, like Julianne was saying, parenting is a culture unto itself now. To me, parenting is just a relationship. And there are things about it that are incredibly beautiful, and things that are kind of weird, but every relationship has its own particular set of rules. And that was part of what I wanted to do—to show that this is a relationship like no other and it has its own set of rules. That’s part of what we’re understanding over the course of the movie. There’s no parenting lesson to take away from it.
I know it was a short shoot and you all didn’t have a lot of rehearsal time, but did you have any time to get know each other prior to the shoot?
JN: We met briefly in New York when we first did the scenes together. We also had a little time in Massachusetts, where I got in touch with Zoe’s lovely mom. When I’m working with younger actors, I like to start a relationship before we show up on set. So we texted a bit and Zoe really likes horses so I sent her a sweatshirt with a horse on it and I brought Uno—which I don’t think you had ever played, Zoe, and we obsessively played Uno together. We fast-tracked our relationship, which felt fun and easy. I also feel like something happens when the camera’s rolling between Janet and Lacy that you can’t predict or prepare for, and you’re really lucky when it happens.
I have a question about the writing process. The three-part structure is clear in the film, but I’m curious about how you flesh out your characters with a lot of little details. That scene of Zoe smearing her hair on the shower wall is so distinctive.
AB: The hair thing was really hard to pull off, by the way! Zoe was a champ. My first AD is like in the shower with her, passing her a clump of hair. First, we tried to have it in her hair, but it kept falling out. Do you remember this, Zoe?
ZZ: Yeah [laughs].
AB: Also, you had an allergic reaction to the St. Ives shampoo. But it had to be St. Ives! Laura Klein, our AD, was throwing clumps of Zoe’s own hair at Zoe. Zoe, you were amazing. It was one of those things, where you’re like, oh, we’ll get this done in five minutes. And we’ll get to spend two hours on this other thing. But then the clump happened. It felt like, we’re not gonna get it, we’re not gonna get it. And then we got it! Sorry, your question…
Do these character flourishes develop over time—are they fleshed out with numerous drafts or are they there from the beginning?
AB: I take a lot of notes before I start writing on every project. And a lot of the notes that I take are imagistic. You could call them character details, or you could just call them images—like when someone tucks their hand on the wall or something. Usually like 90 percent of them don’t even end up in the play or the movie. But in that process, I have gathered thousands of details. They don’t necessarily have a purpose in the story. I usually have a document with a million images and details and ideas, and then as I draft, I can pull from it. I think that’s usually how I work.