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Q&A with Paula Beer

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

What was it like, collaborating with director Christian Petzold for a third time?
Paula Beer: Well, working with Christian is just fun. And his way of working is different from everything I’ve experienced so far. When they asked me to do Transit, the first movie we did together, I was like, well, we are going see how it’s going to be in real life. But the thing is, he really takes his time for rehearsals in the morning. There’s no one there except the actors and the director. Then the DOP will come at the time we’re ready. And we go down to makeup, costume is already on rehearsal, and then they prepare the set. We come back, we shoot one shot for this angle, then the next angle, next angle, okay. Then rehearse again for the next scene. So it’s really focused and calm and it’s just easy to lose yourself in the story because you’re not interrupted by technical things. It’s really about the story. And Christian has this vibe of, he just loves cinema and he has this energy of telling stories and being like, “great, you know, I saw that movie. I want to show you that scene because it reminds me of what we’re trying to do here.” And so it’s like a dictionary of atmospheres and working now for the third time with him, of course I got to know him very well during the last two films, and now coming together again, it’s just a huge gift working with him because it’s so unique and so, so relaxed and you can really dive into these characters and be like, “okay, but what is it really about?” And not just the first scene, but yeah, it’s just, it’s really, really fun.

you have to be really relaxed to laugh

I read that Christian was inspired by things like Éric Rohmer movies, Chekov plays, and so on. Is that helpful for you, as an actor, to engage with his the inspirations?
PB: It can help some, but I think sometimes for me, it doesn’t help to know the intellectual basis. Because being like, “okay, that scene, it comes from that scene, or it comes from that movie”… maybe that won’t do anything to me as an actor and I’ll just say, “well, yeah, even though now I know it, my heart hasn’t changed about it.” But what helps for me is to understand what Christian’s view is about the inspiration, or how he sees movies and what he sees in these scenes or in these books. And I think for me as an actor, it’s helpful to understand where his mind is because when he talks to me, I’m like, “okay, now I know what you mean.” And I can translate that into my actor language and be like, “okay, I need more this and that.”

How do you see Nadia’s journey? What was Nadia’s role for you in this story?
From the first time I read the script for Afire, I liked the story, but I didn’t know who was going to play Leon. And I said to myself, “okay, this is quite challenging. A main character that is all the time really, like with himself grumpy sometimes, really an asshole.” And then Thomas was reading Leon for the rehearsal. I thought he was amazing, because he brings this comedy to it. And otherwise, if there wasn’t a sense of humor, it would be horrible to follow this main character. And during the preparation, I was just wondering… maybe what Nadia does is, while Leon is grumpy, she brings the balance. And what I really love about her is that she’s so connected to herself, but at the same time in contact with people around her. So she’s in a very good way and… yeah, is just a really loving human being. And, and what I also like about how that she’s… because still in Germany at least, most of the female characters, it’s centered at male characters and a traditional character. When Leon says, “well, I’m in love with you,” a traditional female character would say, “oh, really? I didn’t know.” Or, “oh, thank you for, for talking about your emotions.” And she doesn’t do that. She’s like, “okay, but I don’t have time. I need to go.” And I love that, that she’s so… she’s just herself and not like, “oh my God, a man has feelings for me!” But instead Nadia just says, “yeah, but life is different… And life is like really shit right now. And you could have thought about that before you said that.”

In many ways, this is almost a ‘coming of age’ story. Did you discuss that aspect with your collaborators at all?
PB: The preparation conversations are a bit different than after you’ve seen the movie, because sometimes what we talked about during the preparation, even though it was probably important, I’m sure Christian has other things that he won’t talk about with us during the preparation. And then, for me, it’s like discovering the movie as you shoot: there are themes I didn’t anticipate being so strong in the finished film. And I… for me as an actress, I’m always like, concentrated about, okay, the connection, the emotions. And then seeing the movie itself, for me, the first time, I just think, “okay, I’m really watching a movie.” And seeing yourself onscreen is always weird. I think don’t know if humans are made for it. And to see yourself in a character, it’s like, “ah, okay, whatever.” But every movie with Christian is special because in a way he’s really intellectual and really emotional at the same time. And there’s so many topics in it. Umm… I think you could say this film is about a coming of age, but then again, maybe not at all. So I think it’s everything. and nothing. And that’s what I like about working with him and his about his movies that you can see all the things, and at end you can discuss so many things and so many topics, but in the end you can just watch and be like, “oh, that was surprisingly sad.” And then, then you’re, that’s it. And that’s fine as well.

Which scene were you most concerned about, when you were in preproduction? As far as how you were going to play it?
PB: Well, I think the the goulash scene at the sea when Nadja is falling down with her with her bike and then it’s written that she bursts out laughing. I was like, “oh, shit.” Because laughing for me is really difficult. Maybe that’s a personal thing. I don’t have problem like crying in character. That is not a big challenge for me. But with laughing, you have to be really relaxed to laugh. If you are shooting, there’s always pressure, even though it was Christian, when you’re like, yeah, “it’s easy, but you know, okay, we need to get this done, this better be good because we have maybe just one take,” because that’s Christian’s style. No pressure, but laugh. And I was kind of afraid of that scene.

Q&A with Thaddeus O’Sullivan

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

Period pieces are notoriously cumbersome and expensive to make. Did you find that to be the case?
Thaddeus O’Sullivan: The biggest challenge in this context was really the whole Lourdes issue. Trying to get permission to shoot at Lourdes was totally impossible. So we built the set– and that was tricky, both in terms of getting the scale and details right, and in terms of controlling the costs. And so I’d say that was the biggest challenge, and that was more of a logistical thing, really. In terms of shooting in very small spaces, working class homes, you know… we would normally go into a location which we couldn’t do in this case. I think with these three actors, you know, if we hadn’t been able to give them room to just be on the set and work… it would have been difficult. So we we had to build all of the smaller sets. They weren’t difficult to build or particularly expensive; it was just something we had to do. And the design of those was very carefully researched by the production designer. And even though he’s a little younger than me (quite a bit younger than me), he knows the period pretty well. And so we had a very creative time discussing all of the details, down to the wallpaper. All of the stuff. He was incredibly detailed, even with stuff he knew would not be on camera. He would still have it there for the actors to see as well, even for items the actors would pick up or look at that the camera would never see. And it was interesting to see their reactions, to know that somebody was thinking about the set with that level of detail. And that made the actors feel pretty good.

the story itself is really about this kind of self-discovery

Did you feel like a kid in a candy store, working with such an amazing cast?
TO: I was probably too nervous for that! Yes, I was at the outset: these are just the best actors around. And it was daunting. Maggie Smith said to me one day, “What’s wrong with you?” And I said, “Look, I’m standing here in fear,” and she said, “we’re all standing here in fear… just tell me what to do.” That was the second or third day. And I suppose I had one of my gloomy faces on and she was teasing me. But that kind of broke the ice. Kathy Bates is very easy to direct, very, very straightforward, and does a sort of forensic analysis of the script, which, given we’ve had a long protracted development period and we’ve had a number of writers involved, she was conscious of the history and wanted to know about earlier drafts and all of that. Laura [Linney] was easier (not on herself; she’s very tough on herself), in terms of applying everything she knew to every beat, and she had a very clear idea of the character from the outset and and how the character should be feeling in each scene. And she showed an unusual mixture of that kind of strategizing, but also very relaxed about, you know, changing things and so on. She came into the scene knowing how she’s going to do it. But at the same time, if we had changed the dialog, or if there was something that wasn’t working in rehearsal, you know, she’d change it. She’d adapt. But I found them all… You know, once we got started– before you get going with the whole star thing, it’s a big, big deal. But once we got started, it was very easy. Really.

One of the things that impressed me was that you have a film that’s kind of centered around Lourdes but it’s not filled with religion. Can you talk about that aspect of the film? It’s really about a relationship or relationships.
TO: Well, no, it’s it’s not a particularly religious film. The women who go there are all religious. And and Lourdes in Catholic culture is very important, and you grow up knowing about it and and so it doesn’t have to be religious… it can be, you know, a very spiritual pilgrimage, but it doesn’t have to be for a lot of Irish people anyway. Some people go there for a very particular reason: People will go to look for a miracle. Some people will go there just to engage with their spirituality, and then others will go there to pray for Our Lady to intervene and to help them. And then all of that is religious, I suppose. But the story itself is really about this kind of self-discovery. It’s about what the women discover about themselves in the process of making this visit. And and I suppose in a way you get what a lot of people expect, might expect, which is to go through some kind of transformation and to learn something about themselves. They expect to experience something about themselves, and they all do that. And I think people who go there… even if they’re fairly agnostic, you cannot avoid the spiritual atmosphere of being among people who have such a sort of collective spiritual feeling. It’s very emotional. And even people who are not terribly interested in Catholicism come back and say, “it really meant something to me, and it gave me a chance to reflect on things,” and and so on.

Q&A with Sean Mullin

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of It Ain’t Over.

When did you first start noticing a disconnect between Yogi Berra’s reputation and the player the stats showed him to be?
Sean Mullin: I think that’s what this was all about. When I started doing the research, I was like, wait, this guy was criminally overlooked. I mean, he was an incredible ballplayer and he’s not really talked about in a lot of the same circles as the greats. People always thought that he was good but not great. I think that there’s a difference between good and great. We really wanted to hit that home. The project came about because of Peter Sobiloff, our initial producer on this. He’s a big Yankee fan, and his wife dragged him to the theater to see the Mr. Rogers documentary [Won’t You Be My Neighbor?] in 2018. It was a Sunday, he was kicking and screaming, and as often happened in Peter’s life, his wife proved him wrong. He loved the movie. He absolutely loved it. And the next day, Monday, that’s when this project started. He went to the Yogi Berra charity golf event and he met the Berra sons. And he asked, why hasn’t there been a Mr. Rogers-like documentary about your dad? And they said, we don’t know. And then Peter told them, I have the perfect director for you. Peter had been a financier on Amira & Sam, my first film. He called me and said, would you want to direct a doc about Yogi? And initially I said, no, he’s too perfect. Where’s the drama? How am I going to get 90 minutes sustained on this story? And then I said, give me a beat. And then the deeper I dug, the more apparent this disconnect between perception and reality became. And finally, I was like, yes, yes, yes. This is the hook. Then I got the sons and we started shooting. The very first thing we shot was Dale’s book signing. He spoke about the drug abuse on the first day of shooting and that went really well and ended up in the film. I met Lindsay there too. I interviewed Lindsay a couple times like and every time she was like, you know, in 2015 I was watching that game with the “Greatest Players” with my grandfather and I said to him, maybe you should have been considered for that. She told me this story a couple of times so I said, how about we open the movie with this? We’ll use that as the hook. We’re not trying to say anything negative about Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Sandy Koufax of Johnny Bench—they’re all icons and incredible players. But Yogi probably should have been in that conversation too.

I wanted to make a movie about a life well-lived

I read that you didn’t want to do a hagiography. Was that challenging given that the family was so closely involved?
They were involved in that they gave interviews, but we had full creative control and final cuts. I finally showed it to Lindsay and Larry when we were in the final cut stage, when we were almost ready to lock picture. We wanted to talk to them before we locked in case there was something really glaring. And they had two small notes, one of them was factual, a photo we had labeled wrong. We thought it was Yogi’s mom, but it was his aunt. The other thing—the problem with making a movie like this is that you can’t get everybody in there, right? Phil Rizzuto was one of the best friends. He’s hardly even in the film. It’s hard, you know, that was a difficult decision to make. But there were two people that Lindsay was adamant that we include. Gil Hodges was one of them. There was a quick Gil Hodges bit where he passed away and there was a funeral shot.  And then there was one about Elston Howard too. We added a quick beat about him in the late editing stages. But yeah, other than that, if you don’t like the film, it’s my fault!

This is a guy where you can take any part of his life and make a full-length documentary about it. How did structure the film to fit everything in?
That’s a great question. I mean, I’m a writer at heart. I broke in as a screenwriter. I’m a proud member of the Writers Guild of America, which is obviously right now on strike. I make sure all of my documentaries are covered under WGA contracts. So this is a WGA documentary. But I’m not writing the interviews. The people are saying what they want. But I am writing the structure, I am saying, this is Yogi’s life. There are three acts, just as I would do in a fictional screenplay. And within those three acts, the way I write, I do eight sequences. This film is two sequences in the first act, three to four sequences in the second, and two in the third act. Each sequence is 10-15 minutes and each sequence is a short film, essentially. That’s how I write my fiction screenplays and that’s how I structure my documentaries. I look at this three-act structure and I label them. The first one is “Becoming Yogi” and the second one is “Doesn’t look like a Yankee.” I label each short film. For this film in particular, they’re even more pronounced because I demarcated them with those title cards, the ones with quotes from someone “super smart” along with the quotes from Yogi. And eight ended up being a nice number for the sequences, because that’s Yogi’s number.

What’s your relationship like with your researchers? I imagine that’s a very intimate relationship.
Absolutely. I have a production company called Five by Eight Productions, and it came about because as a comedian, I wrote all my jokes on five by eight cards. My house was cluttered with five by eight cards, and when my films started getting into festivals, I needed a name for my production company. And I was like, five by eight? I just looked around the apartment. My partner at the company is a guy named Michael Connors. He’s a co-producer on the film, and Mike is an Army vet like me. He went to Harvard and ROTC, an Army Ranger guy. We met at grad school at Columbia and we bonded instantly. And we’ve done all of our films together. When I work on his films, I do second unit stuff. We have an interesting production company where we’re both directors, so we both develop stuff internally. If his stuff gets greenlit, I co-produce, I’m like his creative, his right brain. And when I get something greenlit, he’s my kind of creative brain. So Mike Connors was a big part of this. He helped me with a lot of research and then there’s archival producers. I had four or five archival producers on this over the course of four years. It was just a lot it was a lot to go through. You know, I was very adamant that I wanted to tell the story as authentically as possible with as much footage as possible. I hope you all enjoyed the footage we dug up! It was a lot of work.

Do you have a favorite Yogi-ism?
Oh, goodness. I mean, I love them all. I like the ones that are more philosophical. I love that one where he said, “we’re lost, but we’re making great time.” That’s my life in a nutshell! And “nobody goes to that restaurant anymore; it’s too crowded.”  It’s great. Those are some of my favorites, but it was tough.. We didn’t know where to put the Yogi-isms at first. Initially I had them in the third sequence right after the break. Baseball is only about thirty minutes of the film, at least with Yogi playing. I was very adamant that I didn’t want to make a baseball movie. I didn’t want to make a sports movie. I mean, I love sports and I love baseball, but I wanted to make a movie about a life well-lived and about a whole picture of the American Dream encapsulated in 98 minutes. I felt strongly that we had to get out of baseball as soon as possible. The Yogi-isms were initially going to open up the third sequence, but they just didn’t fit there. I moved them much later and they’re in the sixth sequence now. Stuff like that you have to move around a bit. The Jackie Robinson thing became such a meal, it became such a nice thing, that whole safe/out thing which I loved. And his relationship with Jackie was really great. They played minor league ball against each other. Yogi was in Newark and Jackie was in Montreal and they were both veterans. They really bonded over that. I really wanted to highlight that relationship as well.

Is being a Veteran a connection with Yogi Berra that you took very seriously?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, that is another connection. I was a first responder down at Ground Zero after the attacks of September 11th. We spent twelve hours a day down there. The first two weeks down there were really intense. And I was tasked I with escorting some of the remains out in bags and over to the morgue, I was in charge of that. So, dealing with that and finding out that Yogi was pulling bodies out of the water and after D-Day and Normandy, I was like.. I’m sorry, I don’t want to bring everyone down. But I did really want to really dig into that because I think that set the tenor for a big chunk of the rest of his life. He grew up very fast. And something we didn’t get into the film was actually some of the braver stuff he did. After Normandy, he stayed on. They went and had more battles in North Africa and he kept on going and fighting. That didn’t make it into the movie but the D-Day thing was so appropriate and people know about it. He didn’t know how to swim! And he really did think like, oh, rocket boats, is that Buck Rogers? He had this childlike wonder that was so great and I hope it comes through in the film. He had really tapped into some sort of universal truth, I like to say. He just had no filter. That to me was so fantastic to kind of delve into. I had a blast making this film, even if I was killing myself while making it.  My mom says that I’m not happy unless I’m miserable. And I say, Mom, that’s a Yogi-ism.

Q&A with Austin and Meredith Bragg

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.

I want to start out by talking about how you got the idea to do this. How do you collaborate to come up with this incredible work that we just saw?
Meredith Bragg: We’re not entirely sure where we first learned that pinball was illegal in many cities, and that there was this man in 1976 with this insane mustache who helped legalize it in New York City. The idea sat on a Google doc that we have just full of embryonic ideas. And we… cold-emailed Roger. I’ll do this occasionally. I’ll just cold-email people who I think I may want to pull the thread of a story that may may be interesting. And I, I got on the phone with him for about three hours, and when I was done, I texted Austin and said I think this might be a feature because he had told us about all of the other things that were happening. We’re not pinball people. But I had read enough about the story before I talked to him that I sort of knew the basics of what was happening at the time. But he told us about GQ, about Ellen and about Seth, about writing the book. He was very candid, very early on about who he felt like he was when he first got to New York and who he became around the time of this sort of first scene. Pinball is a very selfish thing: he just wanted a machine for himself and he didn’t care about anything else. And then through the process of writing a book and opening up and meeting these people, he felt he felt like he wanted to be in the game. And so that was that was the genesis, I think. And then we pitched it with a number of other ideas to MPI films, and they initially pitched it with a number of other film concepts. They had told us no biopics, no period pieces, because this is going to be a tier zero film. So a low budget entity. But they gravitated towards it just as much as we did. And we proceeded to spend, cumulatively, days on Zoom with Roger, because this was during covid… early covid: I had emailed him in February 2020. So we we spent a lot of time with him, with Alan and Seth, with James, the photographer, with other people around who knew Roger or knew GQ or things around that time… and out of all that came this!

We end up creating something that’s much better than I think one of us could do alone.

Can you talk a bit about how you collaborate, as co-directors and co-writers?
Austin Bragg: Oh, it’s awful. We have, I think, what is probably one of the more inefficient writing processes you’ll find. I say this because both of us will walk away after we have come up with our basic outline and write an entire script independently. And then we will sit down with a physical copy and hand it to the other person with our stack of highlighters. So I will take Meredith’s script and he will take mine and we will go through and highlight all the things that they did better than me, write everything that Meredith did better than me. I will highlight and I’ll grumble a little bit because it’s still a competition. And then we’ll actually trade it back. And so I now have my original scripts with all the things that he highlighted, and I will go in with a different highlighter and highlight all of the things that Meredith didn’t realize were brilliant.And after we’ve done that process, then we fight. And depending on how close together the scripts are and when our deadline is, sometimes we do that again, and sometimes we’ll go immediately into creating a single hybrid version. Again, not an efficient process by any means, but so far it seems to be working for us and it gives us a little bit of an out, right? When something is not working; when I hit a scene and I’m stuck, or I just don’t like what I’ve done. There’s a good chance that Meredith has already figured out, and vice versa. If both of us have stumbled at the same point, then usually that means there’s something wrong with our outline, right? That there’s something wrong with the structure of it that we have to go back and address. So, not a great process, but that’s where we are.

Meredith Bragg: Yeah, we we outline heavily before we do this so that it’s not so we’re not diverging greatly. I mean, occasionally you’ll diverge in the writing process. You may, as you combine a scene or something just to get things smooth. But most of the time we know, okay, we’re going from this scene to this scene to this scene, so we can play around within that scene and not break the whole story. So it becomes… that highlighting becomes sort of, “oh, I want to steal that from what Austin did…” or, “I really like that line,” or, “I like that scene description,” or, “you know… that is a funny way to get into the scene, and it’s better than what I did.” So when we get the chance, it’s always great to steal the other person’s good ideas and then try another draft as often as we can. We do that, and we end up creating something that’s much better than I think one of us could do alone.

Did you actually have a pinball machine with you, as you were writing? Did you spend a lot of time playing, and did you find that helpful, if you did?
AB: So neither of us own a pinball machine, but we did – through Roger and some connections – we met up with Joe Said, so he runs an arcade in Maryland called Spinners Pinball Arcade, and we actually brought our families to Spinners in the middle of lockdown and, you know, bought the place out for a few hours so our kids could run around and play games… and we went into the back where the first thing I saw was a giant “Sharpshooter” machine, which is that machine with Roger as the cowboy. And we talked to Joe for a while about the machines, and everything about the maintenance of the machines, and all of the inner workings. He actually he let us walk home with a playfield, just the top playfield and some pinballs – a little tube of pinballs. And we took them to Meredith’s place and set up our camera and started playing around with, you know, how to film inside these machines in a way that, you know, we weren’t going to have time to mess around once you were on set. We knew that. So we had it in our head how exactly we wanted to get it through shooting, but we still don’t have pinball machines. We threatened to, but our wives, I don’t think like that very much. These are loud machines!

Is it hard to be a pinball wizard?

AB: It’s impossible. I mean, we’ve been on the circuit with Roger, and Roger’s in his seventies now, and, you know, he’ll tell you that he’s not the player he used to be. You know, it’s insane watching him play. In fact, some of the shots that you see in the film are Roger. Because we need somebody who can hit that shot on the pinball machine, you know, with a camera right in his face, and him down in a weird angle. He’ll do it in one, right? It would take me all day.

MB: We were told that real pinball players would know just by the spin of the ball, whether you’re throwing it or whether there’s a magnet underneath pushing it. And we knew we didn’t… we wanted to make a movie that the pinball community could embrace, but that anyone could watch. That wasn’t just… there’s been a lot of documentaries that the pinball community has embraced. But they’re very much geared for that community. We wanted something with wider appeal, but so one of the things we did is we said, “well, we’ve got to actually have someone making these shots.” And we didn’t have the time to set up a shot and insert and try twenty times and hit it once. So Roger happened to be on set that day and we thought, “Roger, come on over here.” So there are these great photos, behind the scenes photos, of this camera set up, this huge rig, and Roger’s just sort of somehow gotten his body in a position where he can hit it, and he just nails it. It was… he’s really, really good. We did a newscast hit – where was that? And Roger and I were on local news and they had set up a pinball machine there. And so they wanted to start playing as a teaser. So he starts playing. And then the commercials are done, and they’re back with us. He has to… he basically has to lose on purpose because he’s still playing that first ball! After you know, ninety seconds, or two minutes or whatever. So, I mean, he’s excellent. Whereas if we were doing it, the whole entire game would be done in about twenty seconds.

Q&A with Andrea Pallaoro, Trace Lysette, and Patricia Clarkson

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

Andrea, this is your third feature and a lot of your films have been led by women. I’d love to hear how you developed the script.
Andrea Pallaoro: Well, it’s a film that I had envisioned as part of a much larger exploration on the traumas and the dynamics of what it means to feel abandoned and the consequences of that. I really believe that the experience of abandonment, of not being seen, of not being recognized for who you are, is something that shapes so much of our relationship with the world around us, but also with our own sense of identity. And I think it’s something that we can all relate to in one way or another. Through the story of Monica, I think we can recognize ourselves through a much more extreme paradigm. But we can see so much of who we are and what we have experienced as well. That was really the main impulse for that in this story, and it’s really inspired by the story of a very dear friend of mine. It’s not her story, but it draws a lot of parallels with it.

Finding the truth is what we always want to do.

The role of Monica is a massive undertaking as she’s in almost every scene in the film, and she’s the conduit for the audience. What was the casting process like?
AP: It was clear that the most significant choice I could make was in finding the person that could bring this character to life. You know, the person I could actually embark on this journey with. And it was a very, very long process. I saw so many candidates for the role. And it was a search that wasn’t limited to the U.S., but expanded all over the world. When I met Trace, I immediately knew I had found who I was looking for. I found the person that had the all the characteristics to bring this person to life on the screen. That was the first time I felt like, oh, my God, yes. Now we’re talking.

And Patricia was always in the back of my mind because we had met a few years prior at a film festival in Marrakesh., I was such a big fan of her work. And her career and the characters that she brought to the big screen. It’s always been a dream of mine to work with her. But it’s one of those things that, you know, you think they’re just dreams. You don’t expect them to actually become reality. Even though when we were in Marrakesh, we did talk about how wonderful it would be to work together one day. Once we cast Trace, I sent the script to Patty and offered her the role, and the rest is history.

What was it that convinced you so quickly to accept the role of Eugenia?
Patricia Clarkson: So many different things. The lack of dialogue, the challenge of conveying a dying character with very little words. And also, it was not lost on me that it would give an extraordinary transgender actress an extraordinary opportunity. And that meant something to me.

Trace, what were your first impressions of the script and the character of Monica?
Trace Lysette: Well, I think the first thing was that, oh, it’s the title character and that’s rare for trans actor. And I had been working in TV for ten years, for a while. It seemed like a great opportunity. Then I read the script, and I loved it. Those things that Andrea described earlier, I felt similarly. I started auditioning and eventually they asked for some notes. I gave some notes. We had some dinners. I auditioned more. My favorite thing about Monica was her quiet strength and knowing that this was a well-lived trans character—not a transition story. It was not a story about youth, no shade! This is a woman who has lived on her own for a long time without the love from her biological family. And that’s a theme that is unfortunately common in the trans community. I think we all experience it to varying degrees. If you don’t, you’re lucky. And that was what struck me the most about her.

I imagine as an actor it’s a privilege if the director actually wants notes and wants your input. But also as a director, if you have somebody who’s lived a character that you haven’t lived, it’s probably also a privilege to have that input.
AP: Absolutely. It’s the most extraordinary opportunity for the creative process, to be informed by the real life. I always want my collaborators to bring that to the work.

TC: I think the collaboration was wonderful. I mean, I felt safe with Andrea, and he’s a very gentle artist, a gentle person. That made me feel safer to explore and to act and to bring the truth. Finding the truth is what we always want to do.

PC: I didn’t have any notes. I just said, oh God, I’m dying. And I’m going to have no makeup on and have no words. I can’t wait! No, it was one of the most glorious, most extraordinary experiences I’ve had in my career. And it’s so near and dear to my heart, this film. I was lucky.

Was there anything that changed in the script after you two met?
AP: Well, yes, absolutely. Even in the production process there were a lot of moments where it was immediately clear to me that Trace’s own experiences and how she saw the character were going to provide even more depth to the character that I had envisioned. And there are a number of moments in the film where her improvisation really surprised me and elevated the material so much. I am thinking especially about the conversations on the phone with Jimmy. With most of them, there was of course very specific information to convey. But most of those conversations actually were improvised.

TL: It’s like a hybrid. Yes.

Patricia, your character doesn’t have a lot of dialogue or a lot of movement in the film.  But you do an amazing job of conveying and communicating while lying in that bed, with your facial expressions. How challenging is that?
PC: I think it’s an organic process in that there wasn’t a lot of okay, you’re going to have this and that and you’re going to be this way. You’re it. It started to oddly come to me. I knew that brain cancer may take you in many ways, but what was most important was the emotional life of this woman. That was first and foremost. Yes, she’s debilitated. Yes, she’s immobile. All of those things are very important. She’s dying. She’s in the last months of her life. But what was most important was her emotional life. And it is the most important part of an actor’s journey with any character you play. Finding that with Trace, which came very easily, was a win-win. I didn’t have to reach. I loved that this character in the last months of her life had this profound experience of finding unconditional love for her child. She dies with that in her heart and her child lives the rest of her life with her mother’s love. We can all relate to that in some way.

AP: I have to add to that because to me, the best moments of cinema are where you can understand a character just by observing them. And without the aid of dialogue, those moments have so much power and let you understand things not so much intellectually, but emotionally. When you work with extraordinary artists like Trace and Patricia, the opportunities to do that and to find those moments happen daily.

Can you talk about choosing the aspect ratio?
AP: We wanted to find a cinematic language that could articulate the sense of claustrophobia and codependence that I wanted to explore through the character of Monica. We explored the various aspect ratios and compositions, and we realized that the one that would convey these emotions and that would enhance this exploration was a very square like aspect ratio. More like portrait photography and one that prioritizes the body and the face over the landscape.

How did you work with your DP, and for the actors, what was it like to be shot so intimately?
AP: Kate [Arizmendi] is an artist with a capital A. It was very exciting to dissect images during the two months of pre-production when we might spend like eight or nine hours a day on location exploring the space, thinking about what each scene and each shot needed to needed to convey. It was really a process of shooting the film in our minds and preparing ourselves for that cinematic language so that when we got to set we felt really sure of that exploration and we were open to new possibilities. But in order to feel that that openness, you need to do the homework and be ready for it.

TL: It was challenging at times. I love Kate. She’s probably the most vocal DP I’ve ever worked with in my career. We found our groove and I appreciated her artistry. We didn’t shoot in sequence and watching it back the first cut, I thought, oh, if I’d known they were going to be on the corner of my lip in this shot, I would have done this instead because I’m trying to layer the character and showcase different parts of her over the course of the film. And what I realized is I didn’t have control over that at all! And so that was something I had to experience and learn while doing this. My road map for the character was different from Kate’s, different from Andrea’s, but it’s incredible how it all comes together at the end, like a true collaboration.

PC: I didn’t know when I was on camera or not and I didn’t care. I mean, I did but I didn’t. I would go into that weird place when I get on the set, where I didn’t know where the camera was and it was maybe for the best. As long as my dog was in frame, that’s all I needed to know!  It was very freeing for me as an actor.