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Q&A with Joel Alfonso Vargas

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Mad Bills to Pay.

What was the genesis of this film and how did it become a feature?
Joel Alfonso Vargas: It kind of happened during lockdown. I had some projects that I was trying to set up just before that but because of the pandemic, they didn’t materialize. I was spending time thinking. I’m from the Bronx and a lot of what you see in the film was my stomping ground. I was doing a lot of meditating, a lot of sitting in silence, and trying to figure out where my life was going. It was a strange time. I was reflecting on my childhood and the types of guys I grew up around. And I started to think, what happened to those people? I was turning 30 around that time and I was thinking about fatherhood, thinking about having grown up without a father, and trying to reconcile all these things in my brain. This character, this type, kept popping up in my head and that was the first kernel. From there I expanded. I started with an outline first, a real vomit thing—just getting it all down on paper. Then I parked it for a moment. Then I went to film school. I had the opportunity to develop it further at film school, and that’s how it happened.

Every take felt like a fresh interpretation

Did you just have the first act as the short and then it expanded? Or did you always have a clear sense of where it was going?
JAV: It was always going to be a feature. The film school I went to was in London and they didn’t know that I wanted to shoot it in New York City, which was tricky. I really had to fight for it in the end. They backed it as a short. So, we shot the feature and cut it into a short, which is the first act and a half or so. But it was great to have that short because we took it to Locarno and won an award there, and that helped build awareness for the future.

The visual language of this film is so deliberate. It almost feels like a documentary. And the dialogue doesn’t feel like dialogue. It feels like we’re witnessing authentic conversations. There’s no conventional coverage. I know you work with a lot of story beats and improvisation.  What was the rehearsal process like with your cast?
JAV: Yeah, thank you, it was kind of inspired by jazz music. My intention was not to overwrite it and to leave a lot of space to give creative license to my collaborators. I did thoroughly develop the story structure, and I was thinking very deeply of the effect of every scene and backstory. What I didn’t try to touch so much was the dialogue. I wanted to figure out those nuances with the cast. We rehearsed, and we shot the film very quickly. We shot it within 16 days. There wasn’t a whole lot of pre-production. Our resources were very limited so we couldn’t rehearse too much. But we did rehearse for about a day and a half where we went through as much as we could and tore apart the scenes and rewrote them together. We would rehearse little bits before actually shooting a scene. It was always super rushed. I placed a lot of rigor on finding the right cast— that was an extensive process.  

I know you did some street casting. What was that process like?
JAV: Yes. And TikTok. The intention was to street cast the whole film. We got pretty far with someone who we thought would be our protagonist, and he was a recent father. We were curious to work with that, to incorporate that and really lean into the documentary aspects of the film. But three or four days before we were meant to go out, he called us and was like, I can’t do it, I think it’s going to take me away from my family. The week before we had met Juan [Collado], who plays Rico, through Backstage and he ended up working out great. He really rose to the challenge. We found Destiny through TikTok. She was the only true non-actor in the cast. Yohanna Florentino plays Rico’s mom and she had been in my orbit for some time. We had worked on a project before, but not at this scale, so we were excited to work together. She was the first person we cast. Then it became the job of finding actors who were at her level. She’s great, and classically trained. There was a lot of criteria we had to meet in the whole casting process.

When you’re locked off and not focusing on massive shot listings, did you find that the scenes sort of took on new life come the second take or the third take? You might not have been able to achieve that if you had to worry about continuity or traditional coverage.
JAV: A hundred percent. Because we didn’t need to worry about continuity, that meant that from take to take, we could keep the things we liked, abandon the things that we thought didn’t work, and we were almost rewriting the film as we were shooting those takes. Usually by like the fifth take, we’d get something we really liked, and then we could move on. It was very freeing for everybody, especially the cast, because they could try new things and stand in different places. Every take felt like a fresh interpretation, which was awesome.

The visuals of the film almost feel like an anti-New York film. We’re so used to handheld, frenetic pacing. I’d love to hear about how you found the visual language of the film, and the choice to do 4:3.
JAV: I think for me that all began from thinking about these experiences and memories. Just my own experiences of life in the Bronx. Life for us was pretty slow and languid. We’d hang out in front of the building on folding chairs and watch life pass by. In a way, that was what I was trying to capture. But that also intersected with my background, which is semi-documentary. I’ve always been drawn to observational films. I also do photography as a hobby. All of those things came together to give way to that visual language.

And you can see it; there are shots that almost feel like a photograph. I wanted to ask about the scene in the pizzeria place, where Rico is discussing his absentee father, and you have this fantastic quote about how sometimes you have to man down. It’s sort of a light bulb moment.
JAV: Yeah, it really is. Rico is a character that means well, his heart is in the right place, but he’s ill-equipped with the tools to be effective. Whether it’s because he doesn’t have a role model at home or if there’s something more underlying that instigates his self-sabotaging behavior is what we’re trying to explore, in a sense. Juan is acting in this scene, he’s playing a role, but that’s also his story. He didn’t grow up with his father. Neither did I. A lot of the people on the crew, by coincidence, come from single parent households. It was kind of interesting. Juan is really speaking from the heart, and that’s something we see from him throughout the film as well as from the other actors. There’s a conviction that they’re telling a true story.

This is an incredibly accomplished, incredibly clear micro-budget film. Now that you’re on the other side of having made it, is there anything you wish you knew before you started, any misconception of truly independent filmmaking?
JAV: I mean, it’s not romantic. I think we’re all like, it’ll be so free and liberating!  But you have to be more industrious and industrial in order to stretch that money out as far as it’ll go. Our planning and scheduling had to be bulletproof, because there was no slack to make mistakes. Also, don’t rely on the MTA!

Q&A with Sergey Loznitsa

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Two Prosecutors.

I understand this film is based on a story that really resonated with you?
Sergey Loznitsa: The film is based on a story by Georgy Demidov, who was arrested in 1938 and spent nearly fourteen years in prison camps. After his exile, around the 1960s, he wrote his memoirs and short stories. In the 1980s, the KGB confiscated all of his manuscripts. His daughter spent years fighting to get them back, but Demidov died in 1987, never having seen his work published. This particular story was published in 2008 by a press that specialized in repressions, executions, and exiles. I was collecting any material I could find on this topic, and after completing my first film about Stalin’s regime using archival footage, I was looking for a story that could continue what I had already begun to explore. This short story came my way, and I decided to adapt it.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here

How did you work with your cinematographer on the film’s framing?
SL: For all of my fiction films, I work with the same cinematographer, Oleg Mutu. He comes from the Romanian New Wave and shot some of its most important films, including The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. When I saw those, I was looking for a cinematographer for my first feature, and we’ve been collaborating ever since. Every film is a collaborative process. For this one, the first decision was the format, the classic academy ratio. The second, obvious choice was static images. Then Oleg suggested the color palette. We removed all the lively colors: green, yellow, orange, purple, light blue. They’re completely absent from the film, from the sets and costumes. We also added a filter. All of these tools serve to immerse the audience in a specific place and time. What surprised me is how many directors nowadays are returning to the classic academy format. It wasn’t a conspiracy between us, but there’s something in the air that brings us back to it.

The lighting through the high windows creates a sense of both hope and hopelessness. Can you talk about that?
SL: I hadn’t thought about it that way. There were general decisions we made about the lighting. It was supposed to be soft and tender. If you compare it with Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age, it’s a glimpse of light that comes from darkness. But I’m not linking it to the idea of hope, because the space we are in is completely hopeless. None of the characters are meant to be heroes. They’re all anti-heroes. There is no positive character in the film. They all work for the system; they represent the system. Even if their wishes or desires are somehow wholesome, they are still part of it. Someone can understand what kind of system they exist in, like the older prosecutor… and someone cannot, like the young man. As Dante said, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

The pacing is remarkable. You let scenes fully play out without any rush. Can you talk about that approach?
SL: We are in a place where there is no rush. You could spend ten years within the same four walls, with the same characters and one single thought. I wanted to give the audience an opportunity to pause and reflect, so there’s always a little room, a space in time. The approach nowadays, constantly having to stimulate, to impress, has a lot to do with the era we live in. My film is about a different time, so I have to play by those rules and break through that wall. Maybe it’s also the influence of my documentary work. The perception of an image changes with time. By spending time with an image, we start to notice things we haven’t seen before. That wouldn’t happen if it were fast-paced.

Each performance is magnificent, especially those who communicate more through silence and gesture than words. How did you find the casting process?
SL: Let’s talk about the prisoners as an example. When it came to casting, I requested that we invite people who had actually been incarcerated, and also real prison guards. If I put those two people in front of you and asked you to tell me who was the prisoner and who was the guard, you probably could not distinguish them. I think it’s a quite interesting phenomenon. As for the lead actors, they’re marvelous. The three leads all left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. It was a fateful decision for all three of them — what they left behind, at least for their careers. But at the time, that wasn’t the first thing they were thinking about. You have to have a certain sense of character, and I think the choices they made as real people, they translated to the characters they play in the film. One challenge I faced was that the young prosecutor and the older prisoner belong to two different schools of acting. The latter comes from the Soviet theater tradition of the 1960s, and the younger actor represents contemporary technique. They’re both in the same scene, and it was an important task to bring those two schools together. Not everything could be resolved on set. The actor who portrayed the prisoner, for instance… all of his vocal work had to be adjusted in post-production to bridge the gap between old-fashioned theatrical speech and the contemporary style.

Where did you find the locations? They look authentically 1930s.
SL: It’s a real prison, built in 1905 and deactivated in 2007. The first time we visited, it was an almost visceral feeling. You could sense the suffering that had accumulated there over the years. Our art directors began to clean the walls, and it took on the look of a film set. The prison cell was actually built inside the gymnasium, because physically it’s impossible to fit camera equipment into real cells. We could move the walls around as needed. The train scene was shot in the same space. For the office, we used an old radio building in Riga, also in the style of the 1930s. Everything was filmed in Riga.

Q&A with Maggie Gyllenhall

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Bride!

That dance number was incredible! What was it like to direct a big dance number?
Maggie Gyllenhaal: That dance number required a very specific tightrope walk. The way we shot it and the way we choreographed it took a lot of care, forethought, and then a lot of work. But you know, it was also an immense pleasure. Three cameras, two-hundred extras, a massive, beautiful room. We had all these New York dancers letting their monster out. It was a terrifying pleasure.

the thing that makes their love possible is the monstrousness

How did you prepare everyone for it during pre-production?
With all the people that I work with, with my crew, with my actors, what we’re trying to do in prep is to get on the same page, and also to create real love and trust and respect. I think actors work so much better when they feel loved and seen, and I think it’s the same for production designers, for costume designers, for DPS, for editors. My ultimate goal is to make a space where we start off on the same page, and then once we start shooting, we have created enough respect and trust that people feel free to go to the edges of what they know about themselves and actually learn something on screen, as opposed to acting like they’re learning something on screen.

Can you talk about how you approached using lenses in this movie, and how that compares to your relationship with lenses on The Lost Daughter?
When I started to prep The Lost Daughter, which was during pre-vaccine COVID, I was for the very first time in my life prepping with a cinematographer. I didn’t know what that meant. Hélène Louvart shot that film. She’s very experienced, totally brilliant. We began the process on Zoom and during that prep, I thought, I don’t care about lenses, I don’t care about aspect ratio, I don’t care about light. What I really care about is emotional reality and storytelling, communicating this complicated story. Then we start prepping. And she said to me, how do you imagine the light in this first scene, page one? And at first, I thought, oh, I don’t know about light. She said, no, just tell me what you imagine. And in fact, as soon as I opened my mind to thinking that way, I was incredibly specific about how I imagined the light. It became a very exciting collaboration. I think we had five lenses. We had no dolly track. We had so little money and so little to work with. I started to learn about my aesthetic and my vibe.

With this film, we had Technocranes, we certainly had dolly tracks, we had all sorts of lenses. We have so many tools to play with and so much expertise in the hands of the people who I’m working with. The VFX was a whole new world. It was a major learning trip. I felt like I was becoming fluent in a language that I had just learned how to speak while working on this movie. And I needed that language in order to get what I wanted on the screen. For instance, I found that I love long lenses. My editor used to joke that I should be a bird watcher, and my cinematographer made a dirtier joke about my love of long lenses! I find that it’s good for trying to get into someone’s mind. In the very beginning when they first burst into that ballroom, you see the whole room, and you see all the people. And then a change happens. Something magic happens when they’re looking at each other across the room. That’s the long lenses.

Could you talk a bit more about the learning curve in creating the production design for this particular period, along with the VFX?
I had originally set it in a different time, but about halfway through I decided to set it in the thirties because I wanted Frank’s primary relationship to be with a movie star because he’s so lonely and so alienated. He imagines that he’s got this real relationship with this guy who of course doesn’t know who Frank is. It had to be set in a time where there were movies, and the movies of the thirties are so based in fantasy. They’re delightful. They’re joyful. The clothes are sick, but they’re not real. And this movie, this love story, these people, the thing that makes their love possible is the monstrousness. It’s the reality that is like, you fucking lied to me from the second I was born. And still, I love you. That is a love that I recognize more than the Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers one, which we’ve all tried to fit ourselves into—but I don’t fit. The love at the core of this story makes more sense to me. Bouncing my characters off the movies of the 1930s felt good, felt like it worked. But then, it’s not really the thirties. Part of the prep was that I had to explain that it’s not just the thirties, it’s the thirties by way of 1981 downtown New York, and also right now, and also Berlin. Along with Karen [Murphy], my production designer, we had our own language. We had our own way of realizing, now we’ve tipped too far into 1981, or this is too clean straight-up 1930s, and we don’t want that. We walked that line together because we have a very similar aesthetic and were mutually inspired.  

And regarding the effects, here’s the thing about VFX. Most visual effects language is not my taste. I worked with a very strong visual effects house, and they’d send me beautiful things that were exceptionally good. But it didn’t feel right to me. I wasn’t making that kind of a monster movie. And it took a while with the VFX for me to believe it. The same thing happened even with The Lost Daughter, where we had zero dollars and I had to do little things like make a cricket move and make a worm come out of a doll’s mouth. And it took a while on this film. I’m so into the idea of world building, and it took time to build this world.

Q&A with Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.

What keeps you interested in these characters? Because ultimately it’s the same premise every time: just trying to book a show at the Rivoli, right?
Jay McCarrol: Well, Matt and I have been channeling these pseudo-real versions of ourselves since we met each other, and it’s sort of been giving us the same thing our whole lives. Like we just enjoy egging each other on. We figured out a way to put every single influence in our lives onto these characters. And we have so many similar influences and things that we love… So there’s an endless amount of runway for us to put these characters through different parodies, and put them through different adventures, because we figured out they’re always going to fail and start right back at the beginning.

Matt Johnson: You know, the truth is the, our interest wanes… and I think that’s what refreshes it. It’s very Gilgameshian in that way. When we made the web series, we just stopped and we were like, “we’ll never do this again.” Then we made the TV series and Vice went of business and so we stopped. That was a little different because we had hoped that we’d be able to release the third season, but instead it was just like, “okay, well, this is completely over.” And so it is the distance away from it that then makes it seem brand new, and what’s so great is the movie deals with this idea in a way. I think the characters inside the project don’t ever change. But our own individual circumstances chang so much between each version that it’s almost like returning to this statue of ourselves, or this frozen version seems fresh, because we ourselves have changed so much. So I think that’s what, uh, keeps it interesting— and it’s a kind of an anti-answer because what keeps it interesting is that it loses our interest and we leave it and then we come back to it. And so I can see very much in another decade coming back to this and it seeming brand new all over again. And yet to the audience it seems like nothing has changed.

taking an idea and presenting it poetically makes it more true

What changed for you in how you approached this project, now that you’re both much more accomplished filmmakers?
MJ: I think the illusion that Nirvanna The Band creates with audiences is entirely due to the super-imposition of a three act Hollywood structure onto home video footage. And I think that if people realize that that’s all that’s happening, you do see behind the curtain quite a bit. Because the more movies I make (where I need to figure out how to hold an audience’s attention for the entire runtime), the more I realize that it’s all just about story structure. Of course acting and having performances that are credible might even be above that. But since Jay and I are playing ourselves, we sort of have that figured out. It’s not like we’re going to give false performances. Like it really is just us. The way we’re shooting is exactly the same as when we were in school. It’s exactly the same. We go to the street and just film on the same types of cameras. Really our trick is to give a character exactly what he wanted as the break into act two. So in act one, the character wants something so desperately that they’re willing to do anything to get it. And at this point (and most screenwriters don’t do this – they do the opposite: they put the goal further away from the character), I give it to them. And the character realizes, “oh my God, this is hell!” In this movie, Jay wants to be famous. Matt wants to spend all this time fucking around. We give them both exactly what they want. Jay, you’re the most famous person in the world; Matt, now there’s four of you and all they want to do is fuck around. They’ll do any plan you want. In fact, they’ll pitch you the plan. And they both realize this is just immiserating.

JM: We’re big fans of the “monkey paw” trope. It also helps that we’ve worked with the same filmmaking team through all these movies. We just keep getting better and better. And so we’re just constantly on a journey of taking the lessons learned to the next project. And I’ve been doing that too with the music and this was an amazing opportunity… because a film composer in my position, with my status in the film composing world, doesn’t normally get an opportunity to do a big orchestral thing.

What does the film actually look like on the page? Is there page?
JM: So there’s a group of us, and we come up with a story.

MJ: But this term is so vague. We don’t write!

JM: Well okay… We talk about a story.

MJ: Yeah.

JM: We start talking about what’s going to happen.

MJ: And it all comes from somebody saying something like, “we should do something big, like some big cinematic idea and we should use the footage of when we were kids,” and that’s all we had at the beginning.

JM: Yeah. And normally what happens is that Matt will take notes of what we’re talking about…

MJ: I don’t actually write in those first meetings— I write the things down when I go home.

JM: And he’ll just sort of synthesize everyone’s writing ideas and the story. And it really helps that Matt has a voice for writing. Even just taking a good idea and making it great. Just by the way he writes it, it doesn’t even change the idea. Every story idea has a kind of intentional voice that is consistent. And so when we get to read it back, it’s just on one page: this is what the movie is about, and then this happens, and then this happens. We want to simplify it like that. But it does help that he’s the one who puts it down and has the ability to write that sentence with a little more style.

MJ: Do you guys know the concept of the “poetic fallacy” of good ideas? I’ll teach it to you. It’s so brilliant. Okay, so there was this study of aphorisms, and test subjects were asked to rank the power of various statements for truthfulness. For example, “common problems create common foes.” And they present this to a group as a maxim. And then they present the very similar maxim “common woes create common foes” to a different group. And they asked both groups to rank the truthfulness of these sayings. It turned out that the one that rhymed outperformed the one that didn’t rhyme by a huge amount.

JM: So what’s the lesson?

MJ: It’s that taking an idea and presenting it poetically makes it more true. And that’s crazy because it’s the same factual statement as a non-poetic statement. And so if you and your friends are getting together and writing something, whether it’s a script or an idea or a song, and you can find a way to synthesize that into a sentence that feels good to say – as stupid and superficial as that is – it gives it a kind of numinous power that you can’t describe. And so when we all get together and write, really it’s just us in a room trying to make each other laugh. And what I liken it to… I heard this idea in a documentary about the Bee Gees and it blew my mind. Have you guys seen this Bee Gees documentary? It’s a must-watch about the creative process. Here’s how they describe songwriting: All of those big hit songs… They say they wrote those songs in a matter of minutes, and it felt – as they were coming up with the things and pitching them to one another – that they were all remembering the same dream they had the night before.

And that’s how it felt when we were getting together to come up with this movie. We’re all remembering something that happened…We’re not creating something, we’re all remembering it together. And so when I go home and I write this, it’s so simple because it sort of exists outside of us.

I know this is pretentious in a way, but it’s easier to write when it’s true. It happened. We all remembered it. Do you know what I mean? And it helps you to know when you’re on the right track because you can feel it in the room. Because everybody… they don’t say “that’s funny.” They say, “that’s true.” And how can a fake story be true? And yet we say it all the time. Yeah, that’s true. My favorite feeling when I’m watching a movie, even though they’re all fake, is I’m sitting in the theater and I’m watching what’s happening and I say to myself, “yeah, that’s true.”

It’s crazy. All my best friends are in books. They don’t exist. And so somehow we get tuned into that, and that’s the process. There’s no script. There’s this little two-page written outline that I share with everybody, and we all read it and laugh. We all laugh, and as we shoot, we go back and change little things. But the truth is I don’t remember rewriting it. We just kept it all in our heads.

Q&A with Emerald Fennell

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Wuthering Heights.

I understand you’ve been obsessed with this novel since you were fourteen. I love what you said about how the book never judges its characters, despite their actions. How did that inform you as you began to adapt the book?
Emerald Fennell: I think everyone in this book is kind of deeply troubling. That’s what makes it such a masterpiece, you know? The sum of its parts and the sum of their parts are so much more. Before I looked to adapt it, I wrote down everything I remembered. Some things were real and some weren’t real. And there were some aspects that were complete wish fulfillment, pervy, a sort hopefulness. When it came to adapting it, it was always going to be difficult to translate these characters that are… hard going a lot of the time. But then I love hard going characters because I’m hard going. And the people that I love are hard going. I like characters that makes your sympathies change, depending on the scene, depending on the moment. That’s how life feels sometimes. So, for example, I’m obviously going to be attracted to Nelly as a character.

they can feel safe to have terrible ideas

Nelly’s fascinating and her machinations are foreshadowed quite well. She’s complicated, and she has that really touching scene with Cathy towards the end. It feels like these characters are just trying to do their best in the moment.
And I think that’s the thing with Nelly. There’s this great piece of criticism from the fifties, which is called something like “The True Villain of Wuthering Heights is Nelly Dean.” She’s this untrustworthy narrator, an innocent bystander who’s not quite so innocent and you can never quite trust. But I’ve always felt like Nelly is kind of us shouting at the movie screen in a theater. You know, when you watch somebody go down to a basement in a horror movie and you yell, don’t go down to the basement! That’s what Nelly is doing. She’s the older sister. She’s trying to keep things on the rails. Would you let your two most incompetent lunatic friends plan the course of your life? Of course not. None of us would. It’s important that we always understand that perspective, and that’s why working with actors like Hong [Chau], who is so deeply and profoundly gifted, is essential to giving the audience an understanding of the character. That’s what’s so heartbreaking about her scene with Cathy at the end—Nelly’s admission that maybe she did know what she was doing. Behavior and cruelty can be natural and deliberate.

The production design is extraordinary in this film. Can you talk about working with your team?
The production designer Suzie Davies is so remarkable and such a gifted artist. I’m lucky to get to work with her because she’s also fun and funny. A lot of the conversations that we have together are kind of conceptual—so many of the references that we had for this film were like, the arterial system and its relationship to trees. And how this kind of brutalism makes you feel. There are these giant sculptures in the middle of nowhere that give you an unnerving feeling, like swimming near a huge ship. We talked a lot about that uncanny feeling. But the most important thing for me was to use this base idea of how nature invades Wuthering Heights. Nature is part of it and insinuating itself into Wuthering Heights, whether it’s the rocks or these kinds of tumorous growths. And then at Thrushcross Grange, it’s an attempt to contain nature. There’s skin behind walls or taxidermy or flower pressing, all these Victorian attempts to make things clean and pleasant. And that will inevitably influence the people living in these places.

And that then extends itself into a conversation with Jacqueline Durran, who is the most brilliant costume designer, about how the walls relate to Cathy’s corsets. And then there’s Siân [Miller], the most incredible hair and makeup designer. We’ll say, the walls are sweating with crystals, and if nature can’t really be contained, then we’ll do the same thing with Cathy’s makeup. There will be similar jewels that look like kind of sweat freckles on her face. The thing about working with such an incredible team, and I’ll say particularly with a team of women, is that we all spend a great deal of time communicating with each other about how we can all be generous towards each other and make sure that everyone’s work is in tune.

I also get to work with Linus Sandgren, who’s the greatest cinematographer in the world. I’m using so many superlatives because I’m a girl [laughs]! But I can’t overstate how meaningful it is to work with and to have the trust of people that are so gifted and so experienced. Linus comes in and he’s the same way, he’s working from an emotional place, so he’s also in tune. When I think of the directors I respond to—Powell and Pressburger and Peter Greenaway—I think about how they extend their hands in a way that isn’t purely literal. They’re creating a world which might be kind of stylistic, but it should feel true in some subconscious way. Working with all these amazing people, it’s a shared endeavor.

In tune is the perfect way to describe all the production elements in this film; everything feels meticulously laid out. How do you get everyone on the same page?
Well, it’s a testament to this crew that the entire prep time was only three months. Everything was built in three months, from scratch—they fired the tiles for Wuthering Heights. There was so much joy. I think you only do this job if you’re an adrenaline junkie and you need that constraint. It’s kind of a sadomasochistic endeavor, making a film out of a book that not only you love, but that hundreds of thousands of people love deeply. There’s something joyous about just going for it. What I love about this job, and what I feel is essential to it, is saying and reassuring people that they can feel safe to have terrible ideas. To make things that are bad, to do acting that’s bad, to make a costume that’s silly. I don’t want anyone to have any shame. Because the thing about shame or fear of being silly is that all that stuff is inhibiting to art. I would so much rather make something demented that tuned into somebody or pulled them in. A lot of my job is making sure that everyone I work with—and many of them have massive reputations that far exceed mine—trusts that I won’t let them down. That they can come to me with insane ideas, and those ideas will be met with an enormous amount of grace and thought. And that’s the way that you can work fast and you can build things that are incredible as you trust each other.

First and foremost, the film does feel gothic, but you also seamlessly fold in moments of comedy and melodrama and sweeping romance. How do you communicate with your actors about what you’re going for?
It’s the same process with the actors as it is with the crew; it’s primarily an emotional conversation. We have a lot of rehearsals. We have a lot of conversations. I try to not rewrite too much until I’ve got the actors in the room and can see how everything’s working, and what things to pull out and where to apply pressure. It’s always kind of interesting, the rehearsals.

Another way I like to work with actors is to do the boring takes first.  Let’s do the rehearsal scene that we know will end up in the movie, and you know it’s going to be great because you have Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi or Martin Clunes. You do all that first, and then it’s about playing with it and seeing what happens if you, say, subvert the power in the room or if somebody plays it laughing hysterically. It’s the sort of stuff that you would do in a theater, but it’s making sure you get it on film. Some of the time it’s not usable or it’s too arch or it’s a means to an end. But sometimes you need it. And those times, it’s electric. But again, that’s what happens if you have an immense amount of trust in your actors and they have trust in you. They know that I’m not going to make them do something crazy and then put it in the film. They know there will be a process. I like a lot of choices as well. And I like them to surprise me and to surprise each other. That’s what I find really thrilling. Take the dinner table scene, when Heathcliff comes back after years away. Dinner table scenes are quite deadening because you have to get so much coverage no matter how precise you are. You just do. But they can also be the most fun because you get to whisper in people’s ears and try to destabilize them a bit. Not in a mean or aggressive kind of way, but in a playful kind of way. It’s fun and when everyone is up for playing, that can make it so wonderful.