It was fascinating to learn that you had already been in the process of making a film about wildfires when the camp and woolsey fires occurred. Can you tell us about that?
Lucy Walker: That’s right. The reason I was able to really embed, and I knew what I was looking at and could just jump in, and start asking the right questions was because I’d actually been working on the film already for about a year at that point.
How did you two come to work on this project together?
We started working on what we thought would be a triptych, looking at sex, birth, and death on screen from a women’s perspective. We started the one about sex and it was an avalanche of ideas and people and different actors that we wanted to speak with, and that’s really where it began.
How did you get from First Cow to this story?
Kelly Reichardt: Well, both films were written with Jonathan Raymond and we started out with this idea of making a film of this little-known Canadian painter, Emily Carr. We wanted to focus on a ten-year period of her life when she was a landlord.
Ms. Varda, you say very early in your film that “chance” is your assistant. JR, would you say that you agree with that philosophy?
JR: Yes, definitely and that’s why we got along well.
What was it like developing the script with your cousin Jessica Barr after she had written the first draft?
Jessie Barr: We did a lot of talking and a lot of sharing; there were intimate conversations about what we’d gone through when we lost our parents.
Eliza, when did you first start to think about making this remarkable film?
Eliza Hittman: I first began thinking about this film in 2012. I read a newspaper article that was all about the death of Savita Halappanavar, this woman in Ireland who died after being denied a life-saving abortion.
How did you translate the stage direction into the performance?
Edgar Wright: When I gave the script to the actors, they had all of the music as well, so they could read the script with the right music playing.
Anora is such an intense and ferocious character, but there’s an understated vulnerability. How did you weave that into the performance?
Mikey Madison: I always saw her as someone who was deeply vulnerable on the inside but is constantly protecting herself by covering it up with anger and spunk.
On the eve of the first Olympic Games to be held in Russia in a generation, an account from an American cinephile in Moscow during the Cold War.