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Q&A with Melissa Barrera, Nicholas Britell, and Benjamin Millepied

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

Did you find it helpful to engage with the previous iterations of the story when you were preparing for this film?
Nicholas Britell: Well, what was interesting, actually, was that when Benjamin first told me that he had this inspiration to to do Carmen, my first instinct was that I actually didn’t want to adapt or rearrange Bizet at all. And I was obviously familiar with the opera. Benjamin and I talked extensively about things like the Pushkin epic poem and and the inspirations for libretto. But I also thought it was really important to follow Benjamin’s instinct for this; you know, there have been so many incredible adaptations of Carmen over the years in so many different guises, and that I felt strongly that if Benjamin is going to do this musically, I wanted it to be something completely different.

Melissa Barrera: I would say the same for myself. I didn’t want to… There’s just been so many iterations of this story that I didn’t want to subconsciously copy it, if I watched other things. So I stayed away from everything. I was familiar with the opera, but not enough. Like, I didn’t know anything other than I think Habanera, and I don’t… like, I don’t think I knew the music of the opera very well; I’d never seen it. But… it has such a big presence in Latin America. In Mexico, where I grew up, there was a commercial for soap, like cleaning soap, that used the Habanera song and changed the lyrics for that, for the soap. So it’s just been present for me, for a long time. I know that it’s huge and I know the the Carmen character, the essence of it. So I just wanted her to be mine.

talking about the film and the process makes me want to get back on set as soon as possible.

Can you describe the process you went through to prepare these dances?
MB: Yeah, it was getting comfortable with the dances enough that I didn’t have to think about the steps when I was in there, so that I could focus on the storytelling and what she’s feeling as she’s dancing, more than like, “Oh, did I do the right step? Did I turn the right way?” So it was just like drilling it well.

Benjamin Millepied: Yeah, I think it’s so impressive, particularly in the in the dance with all the other women, because you see Melissa dancing with all these professional dancers. And yet I find that your dancing is freer, you know, than all of them, which was really incredible, you know? Yeah. Really amazing sequence, considering she doesn’t take dance classes at all!

MB: Well, I have a funny story about that! I was mortified at one point, because Benjamin went out to Australia and started sending me videos that he was choreographing with these professional dancers, with the Sydney Dance Company dancers, the best dancers in all of Sydney. And he would send me videos and I’d be freaking out because I was like, “I’m not going to be able to do that. How do you expect me to do that?” If you’re choreographing with professional dancers and I get there and there’s this dance in the desert where I’m dancing with five of those girls and I’m in the middle… and I was like, “How am I going to look better than these girls?” So that was the dance that I think had me the most worried. We were shooting that and it was raining that day and we kept having to stop because our lights, you know, there was thunder, and for safety. And so I was just losing my mind in the trailer because I just wanted to get it over with, and finally it stopped raining. And I was like, “I’m going to slip because the floor is wet… I’m going to slip and fall.” And it was a oner as you can see. I don’t know if you noticed, but the the camera in that sequence doesn’t cut. It’s like one continuous take where you you can’t hide in a oner. It’s kind of… and when you cut, you can cut if someone made a mistake, you cut out of that scene and you use one where you didn’t. But for this it was… I knew it was going to be a oner and I was so nervous about that. We did a take, and then we did another one, and and Benjamin cuts, and he comes to me and he’s like, “How did you do that?” And I said, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “How did you… how did you do that? That was so good. You were flying.” I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I kind of just had an out-of-body experience. I’m glad you liked it because I don’t know what happened! And so it was kind of like one of those magical moments where everything kind of just… it was the pressure of like, we don’t have much time. It’s about to be sunrise. We have to get this done. It doesn’t stop raining. And I think it all kind of worked out for the best.

The movie looks great, but it also sounds incredible. One of the most remarkable thing about the dance sequences is how much in the foreground the shuffling of feet and the breathing of the actors is. How early on was that part of your idea? Did you compose with that in mind?
NB: I mean, and I can say a lot about the sound. We had an incredible sound team, led by Niv Adiri, who’s a genius, and and actually one of the first people that I remember recommending to Benjamin was Niv, because I felt… for something that was really intended to be a, you know, a visual and aural experience, I wanted to make sure that the sound and the sound mix was really, really special. But, you know, as far as the the dances and the music, the on-camera music, that was something that Benjamin and I started talking about literally, you know, I mean, it might have been like ten years ago! Actually, I found an email from Benjamin from ten years ago that said, “I want I want to make Carmen.” Yeah, but it was, you know, it was a long process actually, to figure out all the on camera music. It started with just us talking about things and feeling… trying different experiments, I would say. And then we brought on these incredible collaborators: Julieta Venegas and Taura Stinson and The D.O.C., and that’s really when the songs kind of took their their shape, I think. And I was really curious myself, like, how they were going to look. Because I remember… Benjamin is so trusting and supportive as a director, of his crew. And I remember in particular with The D.O.C., that final huge, you know, rapping fight match that that happens. I remember saying to myself, “you know, I wonder if Benjamin’s going to want a lot of changes in it?” Because this is such a complex choreography. Like I can’t imagine. And and when he listen to it, he just said, “This is great. We’re there.” And I was like, okay, great. And I remember doing it and he shot it. And it’s what we wrote beforehand, you know, and I think that’s such a fascinating testament to Benjamin that he was able to, you know, he worked with this piece and crafted this whole sequence in a film right around that. And it’s true to the film and it’s true to the song. And I remember thinking to myself, that was really kind of remarkable that he were able to take this song and turn it into a whole scene.

This is an incredible challenge to take on, for your directorial debut.
BM: You know, I have to say in hindsight, like I just loved the process of the day-to-day. Like every day on set something goes wrong, and every day you show up, you’ve got to be pragmatic and actually embrace these issues. They’re there. They’re just issues that push you to be more creative. And frankly, I don’t mind it at all. I enjoyed it. I really… talking about the film and the process makes me want to get back on set as soon as possible. No, it’s… it’s really… you have to solve things every day, every day stuff for different reasons. And you have to find solutions. And if you surround yourself really well, you’ll have other people who will find good solutions for you. And what it forces you to do is try to go to the essential and actually strip away what you don’t need. But what is the essential stuff? And how can you figure that out, and do it with less and less time and less, you know? So it’s a fantastic process. I mean, I think maybe I particularly thrive on, like, restraint and how to be creative with restraint. So I just really loved it.

MB: We were… I just want to tell this story because we were you know, always running against the clock — as you usually are in movies, unless you’re like, you know, a big director that has all the time and money in the world to make a movie. But but for the most part, you’re rushing and trying to get things in with the light that you have, or so that you don’t have to do a forced call or whatever. So you’re always kind of tense. And Ben always would release that tension, because every time that we would be in between setups, he’d play awesome music over the speakers. So there was always music playing, and everyone was so relaxed because of it. But then also, when we were shooting the dance in the desert — the final sequence in the sunset — we had like a thirty or forty minute window to shoot that sequence, because the light was just right for that amount of time. And and we were in a red sand desert where the camera needed to see in 360. There was a limited crew because we had like a tiny little tent because the camera had to see all the way around. Base camp was thirty minutes away so that the camera could see the entire, you know, desert. And we had to dance, and then clean the dirt so that you didn’t see the footsteps of the previous take. And so it would be like a whole reset of that. You know, the crew would be sweeping, and Ben would grab a broom and sort of sweep and dance in between setups. And that is just like the definition of who Ben is as a director, just like… Joy and teamwork. And generosity and all the best things. It was such an amazing experience.

Q&A with Kelly Reichardt

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

How did you go from making First Cow to telling a story like Showing Up?
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. She had sort of bought this building and become a landlord because she thought it would give her more time away from day jobs and leave to more time to paint. And then we took the ferry to Vancouver and we learned that she was a hugely famous painter in Canada. Do you guys know Emily Carr? She’s huge in Canada.

It’s true! I’m Canadian. She’s huge! There’s a school named after her, right?

KR: Yeah, there’s an art school. And we stayed at the Emily Carr hotel. But you don’t hear as much about her here in the states. It’s like saying you’ve never heard of Norman Rockwell. There are statues of her up. She’s amazing. But we didn’t want to make a film about a famous painter! We came back closer to our own world and started focusing on artists we knew that were working in areas we knew. There was this school, Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, which is an art school. You don’t get a BA or anything. It’s purely art on the docket. Those types of schools have been closing down around America and this school which is like 105 years old had also shuttered its doors. It’s a really important institution for people doing pottery and crafts in the Pacific Northwest. We wanted to film in this place before it ceased to exist, and because of Covid we were able to do that.

Pottery has a lot of inside politics!

Can you talk about recreating that environment?
KR: It was pretty cool because it was completely empty and so I went there with the art director and we measured out the rooms and made a big floor plan. I had that in my apartment and we got to make up what the school would be. There were some clues in some of the rooms like, okay, there are sinks, so that’s the dye room. And then one of the first times that I visited the school, there was a giant loom. I mean, a giant loom that would take up this whole wall. But then that disappeared. Things were just kind of being moved out of the school. And another art facility gave us the rooms to use. We were just making up what this school would be. I’d been teaching at Bard College—which is a liberal arts school like NYU—for the last 17 years. I’d been interested in the Black Mountain College of Arts for a long time and I’d visited what is now a boys camp. I had a lot of ideas about what would be in the rooms. And we knew lots of people who went to school there. Then Tony Gasparro (the production designer) started inviting young artists and recent graduates of art school to come and make the art that would be the students’ art in the film. And so little by little, all the rooms started filling up and art started getting made. It was pretty cool. One of our production assistants knew how to use the looms and taught everybody how to use the looms because the loom woman had Covid! All the young actors had a long time to just hang out with nothing to do, so they all started learning—getting into the clay and getting into the dying, and they were learning everything. Then I’d like walk around and everybody would be teaching me how to do stuff. It became a totally active place before we started shooting. There were people making stuff in every room. It was so cool to see it go from nothing to being. It made you think like, oh, someone should put an art school here, a lot of people want to study art! One of my colleagues from Bard, Ben Coonley, made the sort of Buckminster Fuller-like dome. He came and did the projections and worked with the art department. It was great. That was like the hive. The whole thing was making an art school come to life.

What caused you to think of Michelle Williams for this project?
KR: One thing that helped me see Michelle in the part was in this collection of artists and sculptors. I had this image of Lee Bontecou when she was about Michelle’s age. She looks so much like Michelle, and that helped me see Michelle in the part. So aside from, you know, that I wanted to work with Michelle and I wanted to work with John Magaro, and I had to consider, how are these people related? Then came Maryann Plunkett and Judd Hirsch to make that family make sense. Michelle kind of waded in with Cynthia Lahti, whose art she’s making at first, virtually. Cynthia’s important and Michelle was in New York for a few months. And then I sent her like ten pounds of clay and some tools. And she waded into it and then she came to Portland and just started spending days in Cynthia’s studio. We then moved everything in Cynthia’s studio to that garage space. There are some houses and apartments that friends of mine built and sold to their artist friends there, and they’ve been passed down to various artists. I’ve stayed there too. I knew those spaces really well and that was for sort of planning how that would all go.

How has your relationship with Michelle changed over the course of making four films together?
KR: She goes off and works on a lot of things and I’ve made things in between the films I’ve done with her. But then you get together and I sort of reap the benefit from everything she’s been working on and learning in between. I mean, when I was watching Fosse/Verdon, I was just like, oh my God, Michelle can do so much more than I’m eking out! We were being a bit braver in a way than we were when we were younger because I think I had more trust in myself to start bigger and then pull stuff back as opposed to starting where you want to end up. Honestly, Michelle’s always been so trusting, which is an amazing thing. She’s just always been really trusting, which is the best thing you could ask for from your actors—that they trust you. Michelle always did, which was a big gift.

How did André Benjamin (André 3000) become involved?
KR: I was working with the casting director Gayle Keller and she sent me tons of images and somehow André ‘s picture got mixed in with the regular people pictures! And I had him on my wall with some of the sculptors, and over time, you know because you see pictures of him in his overalls, he just became Eric the kiln guy. I guess he took my number and he called and was like, hey, what’s going on? What you got going on? And I said, I want you to be this kiln guy. He was just up for it. He went out to Long Beach, to Cal State, and I had made a short film there, a 16mm film of the artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, who was out there working. They have huge kilns. I mean, they have enormous kilns and different kinds. Right after I was there filming, they got to know some of the people there and Jessica worked there. They said André could come—which wasn’t hard to talk them into. They would teach him how to work the kilns. I thought he’d go in and spend a day. After the first day he was like, oh my God, clay, I knew I needed to be doing this! He kept going back and making stuff. He would walk around whenever he wasn’t shooting, playing this wooden flute that he carries around with him and it was kind of always wafting in. On the last day at this school, I asked him if I could record him playing, and he went out in a field and he played for like 45 minutes. The crew sat around and listened to him and we recorded him and it was beautiful. I had that to work with in the editing room.

There’s this inherent power dynamic in the landlord/tenant situation between Lizzy and Jo, but there’s so much nuance and complexity to that relationship. Can you talk about that?
KR: I’m hesitant to in case in resonates differently for different people. When I was starting out in New York, we had an office on Lafayette Street. Killer Films was there, but it was called Apparatus at that time. And there were a lot of people in that building who could never afford to be in that building now. But I was in this building with all these filmmakers, and they all had trust funds and I didn’t. I could only be in that office because my friends let me have a desk there and work there. They all helped me get my first film made; they were so generous to me. Anything that happened that was good for any of us was good for all of us. I’m always saying this to my students: what you want to graduate with is people you want to make films with. We still go to each other for notes for our films. You need that. And a lot of those people blew through their trust funds helping people like me! But it’s never an even playing field regardless… race, sex, gender, money, connections. It’s like in the art world. Even in small ways, someone’s family is more draining than someone else’s family, you know, just in all the ways that one person’s life is more complicated. You know, when I think back, if someone had given me money to make a second film after my first film, I would not have known how to negotiate any of those things. All the things that come with making a film that are outside making a film, I had no idea how to negotiate that world. Some people totally know how to do it. I didn’t want to make a film about filmmaking, that’s for sure. But I do like the idea of how small politics are in everything. The original thinking when we came back from the Emily Carr trip came about when I was in L.A. with some friends and I went to these two different dinners where everyone was gossiping about the politics at the ceramic space. Like, who’s sleeping with the kiln guy? They’re getting the better space in the kiln and someone else’s stuff got burnt because they’re getting the short end of the stick. It was all about the kiln and space. I called John Raymond and was like, pottery has a lot of inside politics! This is so exciting, you know? Anyway, I think Lizzy and Jo really like each other’s work and that doesn’t mean you don’t have your moments of being like, we’re in a small town and there’s only so many people’s attention to get.  When you write a grant, there’s only so much money in the world, and who’s going to get it?

Q&A with A.V. Rockwell and Teyana Taylor

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

Can you describe the origins of this film, and why this story was one decided to tell?
A.V. Rockwell: I really wanted to tell a story, especially for my first film, that recognized my coming of age experience in New York City… and in that process, I could say farewell to the era that I grew up in. But I think what made it an urgent story was just really seeing how the city was starting to change dramatically in ways that it hadn’t before, in the sense that it felt like communities of color, black communities of New York, specifically, we were being targeted and being pushed out and erased from the city altogether. And experiencing that and witnessing that change firsthand was really hard to reconcile because, like, how do I feel about the fact that the city that I love so deeply doesn’t seem to love me and my people? And so I think this movie was an opportunity to do a deep dive into that. And I think in the ways that you see Terry and Inez, two people that are extremely vulnerable, you know, coming out of the foster care system, but yet here they are fighting for a home and gaining a sense of stability and building a family bond. And we see the power of having all of that, what it means to these two people. And so I think for them, they represent the generations of people that I’ve seen coming out of a community like Harlem that have fought for generations for that, and to have gentrification be yet one more obstacle that knocks us down again was just really, you know, really hard to see and to think about. And I thought about all the communities that aren’t served by the benefits of gentrification. So I think outside of that, I also just wanted to acknowledge my own story as a woman and a black woman coming up in this city, the inner city. I wanted this to be like my love letter to the inner city black women that nurtured me and uplifted me. And yet they’re made to feel so misunderstood and invisible within society, and not only within society, within our own communities, as you see showcased in the film. So I really wanted to show Inez as going on a journey, as a way to present the question of who is really fighting for us. Because you see, over the course of the movie, how she’s fighting for everyone else. She never fully feels loved and fully feels embraced. And I think that’s the story of so many black women, regardless of what their station is in life, just feeling like no matter what we give to the world, we’re made to feel that we are never quite enough. And, you know, is there anybody out there that will fully love us and not just see us as their superheroes? Or, you know, only see us when they need us.

I really wanted to know exactly what was happening in New York over this time period

Teyana, what drew you to the character of Inez?
Teyana Taylor: Everything A.V. said! Yeah. And it’s something that…that you feel the moment you read the script. Even with the synopsis, you know, it was… that was all I needed to see. Actually, the synopsis was all I really had— I hadn’t even had the script yet. And I immediately put myself on tape and knew that this was something that I wanted to be a part of because it was something I could relate to on so many different levels. You know, with getting into an industry where you kind of already feel unappreciated, or a little invisible, or unheard or, you know, different things like that… I can relate to Inez in a lot of those ways. I definitely wanted to be a part of this film and bring the story to life.

Could you discuss your research process for this film, specifically regarding the foster care system in New York City?
A.V. R: Yeah, I mean, that was definitely a part of it. I think I started at the foundation of the film just based on what my lived in experience of New York was. But I think obviously I had to do research into the areas that weren’t my experience, like the foster care system and making sure that I if I’m going to represent that in the film, especially in such a foundational way, that I did right by that story, that I was really representing it accurately, in addition to just making sure that I had all the information I needed to know how Inez would have done what she does in the film. But it went beyond that, I think, beyond my lived experience with the New York… I really wanted to know because this would have been stuff that I experienced as a child, like what was happening in the world, and how did we get here to where we’re at today? Obviously, the movie takes place over 20 years ago, so I did a wealth of research. I really wanted to know exactly what was happening in New York over this time period and how that would have impacted the life of these characters and of the people of New York City. But I also just wanted to know what this moment in time meant for New York in general, like for a city that is always changing. Was this just another shift or was this something different? And I think the research that I did into the history of New York confirmed that it was something I think there was just this shift at the turn of the century. And you see the landscape of New York changing and a lot, and the continuity of what makes New York, New York shifting dramatically. And it doesn’t feel like the same city to me. Just taking that deep dive and just learning what this means within the history of the city, because I think the movie is so much bigger than gentrification, even though that’s talked about, talked about a lot. I think it’s really about just what New York is altogether, where it’s at in its journey. And so I think all of that was important as well as also really unpacking how New York relates to the black community, because I didn’t feel loved… and also how we were being treated amongst other groups, other marginalized, marginalized groups that are also fighting for their place in the city. But I realized it never did. You know, it is it’s not that it didn’t love us. Now it’s like every period of progress in New York’s development has been at our expense, you know, from the beginning. But even when we were a community that was just below Wall Street, every time the city expanded, it was at our expense. And so to me, this is just like a climactic moment where we’re being potentially pushed off Manhattan Island altogether. And so I hope that this story, in all the ways that I was informed in the research to speak to what this time period is, I hope it creates an opportunity to talk about how New York relates to its citizens and the progress of the city, why the chase and pursuit of commerce always has to come before the needs of its communities and its citizens.

The chemistry between Inez and Terry, in all his ages, is so incredible. How did you create that bond?
TT: Inez was extremely heavy to play, but it was also extremely easy to pour myself into her, since I had already seen a lot of Inez within me, and it was really therapeutic for me to play her, for that reason. I was dealing with postpartum depression when I took on the role. So, you know, Inez was an outlet for me. So not only was I doing postpartum depression, but to go back home to my hometown and see so much history be erased, so much of the things that was accessible for my community be erased… My friends literally be erased. I was dealing with a lot of deaths, literally going to funerals during my lunch break. So, yeah, it was a lot. And I think timing is everything because I was able to really just throw my cape to the side and just have a moment of weakness for once, you know? Not have to be the strong woman, not have to be the super wife, not have to be this superstar to, you know, my supporters, not be a super mom… You know, I got to just like, cry out loud, deal with whatever quiet demons I was fighting. You know, though, I never let my demons defeat me. I defeated them. You know, I was able to allow Inez to be that outlet and to be that therapy session for me to cry out loud, because I knew that when A.V. yelled “cut,” that I had to go home, put my cape back on, and turn back into supermom and super wife and just super everything… and be a superhero. And you know, people don’t realize there’s a lot of the time a strong woman has to be strong and it’s never really by choice at all. You know we’re praised for being strong for others and showing up for others. But when we show up ourselves it’s an issue, you know, and I think that that’s why I relate to Inez so much. I think all women can relate to Inez because we’re always told to, you know, minimize our voice. You know, we’re not protected, we’re not appreciated enough, we’re not loved enough. So, you know, it was it was really, really easy to tap into Inez emotionally and mentally.

Q&A with Jamie Dack, Leah Chen Baker, and Jonathan Tucker

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Palm Trees and Power Lines.

Was there an importance to telling this story at this particular time? What sort of feedback have you received?

Jamie Dack: I was writing this script at a certain time in my life where I was starting to look back on some relationships I had when I was younger—one in particular. I think due to my age, and time passing, I had started to look back on it differently. The Me Too movement was happening at that exact time and it definitely affected me. We were living in this time when women were beginning to re-examine things that had happened to them. That was part of the inspiration. It’s been super validating as storyteller and a filmmaker. People consistently come up to me after screenings and share their own stories and ways in which they identify and relate to the film.

If she has to go through it, I felt the audience should have to go through it with her.

Can you talk about creating the feature from the short it was based on?

JD: I made the short in 2017 and it premiered in 2018. As I said, a lot of people said that they identified with that story. That was the nudge that I needed to keep going and explore this further. I began adapting it… I usually call it an adaptation rather than an expansion because it really did change. The short deals with a rather small betrayal. I kind of kept that element, which is that this guy betrays her but in a much smaller way and she continues to hang out with him again. Those are the basics of the short. As I was writing the feature, I was also very interested in what I had been reading about sex trafficking and grooming. I decided to write the script by following the stages of grooming. I really wanted people to understand how she ended up where she did and to never think of her as making dumb decisions, but instead to understand how she got to that point.

Leah, how did you and Jamie come to work together? Did you meet at NYU?

Leah Chen Baker: Jamie and I both went to NYU but we didn’t overlap there. When I was a first year, her short film Palm Trees and Power Lines premiered at Cannes and really impacted me when I saw it. I was introduced to Jamie and I knew she was going to expand it into a feature. I loved her hand as a director on the short and when she shared the full-length script, I knew I had to be a part of it. Making this film felt a bit like going to film school together. It’s a very intimate process.

Jonathan Tucker: I want to add to what Leah just said about it feeling like going through film school together. Having made a lot of movies with bigger budgets with people with longer resumes, it didn’t feel like participating in a film school project, to their credit. It was so elegantly and professionally run. Or they hid everything very well!

Jonathan, it’s an incredible and challenging role and you bring such nuance to the part. What appealed to you about the project?

JT: The script was excellent. But excellent scripts don’t make excellent movies. Good scripts with excellent directors can make excellent movies and excellent scripts with good directors can make good movies. You don’t always know. Talking to Jamie and seeing her short film and her obsession with storytelling and filmmaking and then reading the script, well, the choice to do this film was crystal clear for me.

Given the limited budget, what was really important to you to focus on in order to make this film feel natural and authentic?

JD: I remember during my first semester of film school, my professor said that casting is half the job. I don’t know if it’s half or what percentage it might be, but it’s huge. Your cast makes or breaks your film and it’s one of the things I’m the proudest of in this film, particularly Jonathan and Lily’s performances. In terms of budgetary constraints, I actually felt that the limitations were helpful to us in some ways. It allowed us to focus on what was really important. We really put an emphasis on the vulnerabilities that leave Lea ripe to Tom’s manipulation, specifically the suburban malaise and the boredom and aimlessness that she’s feeling. That was intentional to set up the dynamics of their relationship.

JT: It’s important to highlight how deliberate Jamie and Leah’s work was to create an authenticity on the screen. It wasn’t by accident. There was so much deliberation and execution based on years of work. Jamie started production back in 2017, so five years ago. It’s really a credit to their craft of filmmaking.

What were some of the challenges as a producer, in regards to budget?

LCB: We had big dreams of what we wanted to accomplish in terms of budget. We shot in LA primarily, and LA is expensive. We also shot during the peak of Delta, so it was pretty interesting to consider what could happen with this budget during Covid. Jamie already had such a clear vision and an amazing cast and our crew was fantastic, because this was also a meaningful step in many of their careers as well—that made a huge difference in terms of energy and partnership. Given all that, the biggest thing we needed was time. We really had to dig into what we were going to prioritize and what we needed more days on. That preparation helped us a lot and Panavision was a huge partner to us in terms of getting more time to make this film, because of the grant they gave for indie filmmakers. That’s how we were able to shoot for twenty-five days.

Jonathan, can you talk about working with Lily?

JT: Everyone in the room today got to experience the magic of her work, which is innate and honed and guided by Jamie. It’s a privilege to be able to have the closest position to someone’s performance. It’s such a thrill being an actor and sitting a foot away from a young person at the beginning of their career. It’s really in coverage when I can be a little more cognizant of what’s happening around me in her performance and how to calibrate that for her coverage. People pay hundreds of dollars to go sit on Broadway so they can be in the front row, and in this I was just front row and it was fabulous. If she navigates the business and continues to work on her craft, she’ll have an amazing ride ahead and I’ll have gotten to say I sat a few feet away. It’s one of the true joys of being an actor.

Can you talk about staging and shooting that last scene in the hotel?

JD: I knew that I didn’t want that scene to be graphic and I didn’t want nudity. I often respond to what you hear behind a closed door, or maybe what you see is fuzzy and that can actually make something scarier. I knew I wanted to set the camera far back. The actors actually did that take twice. It’s a ten-minute take and we cut it down but I also knew I wanted it to play in real time. If she has to go through it, I felt the audience should have to go through it with her.

JT: I remember we shot at this hotel in Thousand Oaks off the 101, and the art department had a wall covering that was very specific that Jamie had wanted for this tableau shot, this pivotal shot. Lily and I had a scene in that room prior to the one you’re asking about. Somehow the attachment device to the wall covering was bubbling, so we did a few takes and finally Jamie was like, it’s not going to work, we’ll have to come back and do another day here. And I thought, I’ve been in like forty-million-dollar episodes of TV and they’ve been like, eh, the audience won’t notice it or figure it out. And working on this tiny movie, figuring out how to put a new wall covering on and wait another day, good luck! But it was such an important part of the movie and Jamie had such a specific vision of how this was going to look and Leah was going to make sure that was protected. I think it’s a great example of the value they put on executing this deliberateness of the vision. I had never seen that on a movie this scale. They knew exactly what needed to happen, and they were willing to figure out how to make that happen.

Q&A with Rian Johnson, Janelle Monáe, and Ram Bergman

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

When did you first conceive of this film?
Rian Johnson: The idea for this film came very very early, even when we were still making the first one, Daniel [Craig] and I, on-set, we didn’t want to jinx it — because we didn’t know whether the first one would be something people would want to see — but we said to ourselves, if this does alright… it would be really fun to keep this party going! Just because we were having such a good time with each other. And, the only thing I really knew was that I didn’t want it to be… if we were going to keep making these, I wanted to go back to the source of the inspiration for all of this, which for me is my love of Agatha Christie’s work. So I knew — as opposed to continuing on the story of the first one, or bringing back the characters from the first one — I wanted to do what Agatha Christie did with her books, which is, she took big, wild, different swings every single time. I think there’s sometimes a perception of her work that she kind of told the same story over and over, but anyone who really knows her books knows that the opposite is true: she mixed genres. Besides just changing the setting and the characters and the type of murder, she did basically a proto-slasher movie with And Then There Were None. She did gothic romance with Endless Night. She did serial killer thriller with The A.B.C. Murders. She was all over the place, in the best way! And so, that was the only thing I kind of knew, was that let’s keep making these, and let’s give them each their own reason for being, and let them each stand on their own, the way that Christie’s books did.

I want it to be a rollercoaster ride, not a crossword puzzle, for the audience

As a producer, how do you take the vision that Rian just articulated and try to execute it? 
Ram Bergman: It’s all in this man’s head! He’s the one who comes up with it. My job is just to facilitate, make it a reality. But it all comes from his brain.

Can you talk about how you came to the project?
Janelle Monáe: I think I just… manifested it, working with Rian! I had seen a film of his called Looper, have you guys seen Looper? Yes! And I was blown away. I thought to myself… “if I ever get an opportunity to work with this guy… I have to do it.” I went down a whole rabbit hole: I watched Brick, which was, you know, a high school version of a ‘whodunit,’ something innovative in that space, and then he kept it up with everything he had done up to the first Knives Out, which I loved! I was a big fan of that film. So I had already said “yes,” and then I read the script, saw the twists… looked at the character, and I was like, “hell yes!” And then they said, “we’ll be shooting in Greece… might you be available?” And I said, “f*ck yes! Get me on the first flight out! Off my couch!” So it was just a no-brainer, and then Daniel Craig… obviously who is so iconic in this role… was so gracious for inviting me to be a part of this. The whole cast, there was nothing about this role — which I got to have an opportunity to have so much fun with — that wasn’t appealing. I mean, Rian wrote this character to be so mysterious, so layered… so fun! Humorous. You have those big emotional moments… and there was action. It was a dream, as an actor, to be able to portray this role.

How did Covid impact the production?
RB: Honestly, my job was to make sure that Janelle, and Rian, and everybody else had fun… that they continued to be able to make the movie, in spite of the pandemic, and that none of them got positive covid test results! That was my goal. Because if one of them got it… we would be f*cked. We would have to be shut down for a few weeks… and blah blah blah. So, luckily, they had fun and none of them tested positive. So, I did my job.

JM: That’s very true. Ram, I think you should also tell them that you hired a spy, for each of us… I swear, even when I would step outside for a breath of fresh air… someone would appear out of nowhere who would say, “get back in that room! Get back in there!” But… we thank you for that. Thank  you.

RB: It’s all true!

How do you begin to write a story like this, with so many turns?
RJ: Well, I start… I write really structurally. So I’ll spend the first 80% of the process outlining. And I just work in little moleskin notebooks, and I need to be able to work the whole story out until I have the structure of it, and I have it really outlined, completely, scene by scene. I end up with the whole roadmap. And only then, at the very end, do I sit down and actually typing. And, I mean, the intricacies of the mystery are one thing— but anyone here who’s a writer knows that the real work goes into making the experience of watching it… I want it to be a rollercoaster ride, not a crossword puzzle, for the audience. The object is to make the audience have so much fun, they forget they’re supposed to be solving something. And that’s where the majority of the work goes, just the basic story work: what’s driving the audience’s interest? What’s keeping them engaged? What do they care about? How do we make the ending satisfying, above and beyond just the reveal of ‘whodunit?’ It’s just the basic stuff that, you know, you bang your head against the wall with for any other type of script. It’s the same stuff with something like this.

Janelle, can you talk about how the fashion in the film helped inform your character, especially since you were playing multiple people?
JM: Yes— shout out to Jenny Eagan, our wonderful costume designer. She was just… really so collaborative. She had great ideas, and I think after talking to Rian, and them talking, and we had a talk… and I feel like, at that first fitting, I just thought, “Ah— there’s Andi. Ah ha! There’s Helen… oh, there’s Helen being Andi…” You just have those little things in the costume that make such a difference: the dress that I had on, the type of fabric (it actually wasn’t a dress yet at that point), and I just thought it said so much about who she was. We got into the Grecian thing… there’s so much we haven’t even talked about, just in terms of the names of the characters! Helen… Cassandra… that whole Greek mythology angle. And it’s a lot. To answer your question, the clothes had to talk before I talked. Because a lot of those initial scenes with Andi, she actually didn’t talk. So the way her glasses looked, the dress that she had on… you felt like this was a person who was put together, but also hiding something. And her clothes were her mask. Helen’s sweater when she’s talking to [Benoit] Blanc… it’s so frumpy, and the t-shirts and all of that… and, it moves with her. Yeah, so: I think the clothes… Jenny Eagan, Rian, me… bam!