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Q&A with Colman Domingo and Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin

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

Mr. Maclin, I’d love to start with you. Can you tell us how you first learned about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program?
Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin: One night, I was going into the yard, but it got closed down, so everybody got directed to the theater. And while I was in the theater, there was a play going on—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I believe, with my brother Dino Johnson. I got to witness these brothers doing some creative work that I didn’t expect, because I know them from the yard. I’d seen them in the yard, I’d seen them in the gym, I’d seen them everywhere. But when I see them up on stage, the camaraderie that they had with each other was a beautiful thing to witness and I wanted to be a part of that. I actually had to wait a year because you have to have no infractions, no tier three tickets or anything like that. At the time I was still kind of rough around the edges, so I had to wait a year to get in. And once I did, I cherished the program.

It’s not about what these men have done. It’s about who they are going to become

How did the filmmakers gain your trust to tell this story?
CM: We first met at Brent Buell’s [writer] house over breakfast, and we just talked about everything. How we see the world. We didn’t really talk about the movie, about the play, not really like that. It was just getting to know one another. We had breakfast, we went to dinner, and we walked around my neighborhood together so that they could get a feel for who I was. We had other people that came to us wanting to do something with RTA from the outside, but they felt like they were trying to use us for the story. Or like they were just trying to help some poor prisoners so that they could get a good night’s sleep or something. We didn’t want that. We didn’t get that feeling with Greg Kwedar [director] and Clint Bentley [producer, writer]. We felt that they were genuine and they were true about what they wanted to do. And then when I met Colman, we started over Zoom. Believe it or not, we started rehearsals over Zoom. I seen a dedication and commitment in the brother because while rehearsing, he was in a car driving, and he would pull over in LA to go through lines with me. That type of commitment is commendable and that’s what I was looking for. I trusted him after that.

Mr. Domingo, you’re also an EP on the film. How did you go about getting this made?
Colman Domingo: I got involved with this through Clint and Greg. They had been wrestling with trying to make a film out of meeting with these guys and being involved in the program at Sing Sing. Being teaching artists, they wanted to tell these stories. Everybody had such an incredible story. They wanted to capture the work that this program was doing. And they went through this for six, seven years, and they kept getting stalled because they felt like they were making a bastardized version of what they experienced. Then they reached out to me to say they had an idea. I said, well, what’s this? Do you have a script? They said, no, we don’t have a script yet. I said, okay. Well, what’s this idea? And they said we’re going to send you an article from Esquire Magazine that talked about Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code and getting to know these guys. They also sent me some clips of some of the productions. It was so cool. I really felt like I got to know these guys. They also wanted me to meet Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin—they thought he’d be interesting to talk to, and that he could be a co-star. Then we all got together and started crafting this together. The filmmakers really wanted both me and Clarence—who is also an EP—to help shape this. It wasn’t just like we were artists for hire, but they wanted to know what made sense to both of us as human beings and men. I came in and brought everything I had. They wanted me as an actor, director, writer, and producer. I brought every skill that I had to help shape the room in whatever way we were in. I feel like we vibed off of each other and really helped each other out. Everybody had their own superpowers, you know what I mean? We gave it all to this film.  And I’ll use this word because I think it’s rare to use this word—I’ve done a lot of films, but I think this film was done truly with so much sincerity. That is the word from start to finish. Whatever you’re experiencing in this film, sincere heart went into it from the beginning, from our producers to every artist. When the producers talked to me, they said, hey, we have two ways to do it now that we have you attached. We can go out to studios, since you have relationships with a lot of them. Or, they said, we can do it in a different way. We can keep the budget low and build it in a very community-based model where everyone above and below the line shares in its profits. And we take care of everyone. Everyone’s paid the same rate. Everyone benefits, and everyone, especially my colleagues, absolutely own their stories. I think that’s rare, and it starts with Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley and Monique Walton, and it just trickled down. I wanted to be a part of that.

I read about that, and I thought it was remarkable. I’ve never heard of that in the industry, right? How does that influence the actors on set?
CD: I think it influences every single person—you feel like this is your film. You’re not an actor for hire, or a designer for hire, or a transpo. You’re like, this is my film. Let me take care of it. Let me do exactly what I need to do to get it done. There’s still a breakdown of the days you worked and that basically goes into the pie and the pie is divided in a certain way based on what you delivered to it. Everyone wins. How beautiful.

CM: Being that this is really my first film, I thought that everyone did it this way!

CD: Until I was like, no, it doesn’t usually happen like that!

I read that during your research process, you weren’t interested in what these men that were incarcerated for, but how they were afterwards and how they are now and how the program impacted them.
CD: I’m somebody who does a lot of research for any role that I do. And I thought, okay, I need to meet people where they are. Do I need to know a lot about the prison industrial complex? Do I need to know all of that and have stats in my head and all that? No, I don’t. I didn’t need to know any of that. It’s about this RTA program. I knew the movie we were making was not a prison film, at all. I thought, oh, that’s just the container. It’s about human beings. It’s about the transformational power of art and the effect that it’s had on people. And possibility. Which makes it a bit broader, it’s about all of us instead of this limited view of a prison movie. That’s the movie we were making.

And I wanted to meet people. I’m not somebody who, especially when it comes to real people, I’m not that person who sits down with John “Divine G” and interrogates him and asks him to tell me everything about his childhood and his trauma. I didn’t do any of that. What I did do is have dinner with him, and we had a conversation. We talked and got to know each other. He told me that he went to the High School for Performing Arts and he wanted to be a dancer and DJ. I asked him about the dancing, and he said, yeah, I wanted to do Jazz and Ballet. I wouldn’t have imagined that! And he said, yeah, I’d take the train back and people would want to beat me up anytime I was doing that, so I stopped. But when he talked about dance, he lit up. Knowing that, I wanted to see how I could incorporate it. That’s where that pirouette comes in. When I’m waiting while this knucklehead [Clarence] goes in and steals my role. He goes and takes Hamlet from me! So that’s how the pirouette comes in. Because I downloaded information that I thought could be useful. It’s just getting a bit more of a person’s soul and knowing who he is today. That’s what the film is about—the process these men are in. It’s not about what these men have done. It’s about who they are going to become.

I’d love to hear about the process of combining real people, playing versions of themselves, along with professional actors.
CD:  That was Greg Kwedar’s stroke of genius. He thought, well, there are folks who’ve gone through this program and they’re actors, right? Why shouldn’t they play themselves, a version of themselves? They’re playing aspects of themselves.

CM: My character is a culmination of a lot of the experiences that I’ve witnessed and the behaviors that I’ve seen. And a bit of me as well. But it’s a lot of experiences that I witnessed. I did almost eighteen years in prison, so I saw a lot and I poured all of that into that one character. I think it was Brent that gave them the information. If you really want to know the story, you might want to talk to the men who lived it. And that was when Greg and Clint really got in contact with us and talked to us individually. They must have figured out there was no one that could play the Divine Eye but the Divine Eye!  

CD: You know, I agree! I don’t know an actor that could play the role that you played. The process was pretty organic in that way, too. They had auditions. They auditioned all these guys who went through the RTA program and cast them based on whatever qualities that Greg and Clint were building with this. And they wanted me to help anchor this as an actor who does film as well. Every day was like molding clay. We would always have a private rehearsal, to talk things through the scene. He did it in a very collaborative way. We all have an opinion on what makes sense or doesn’t make sense. Let’s stage it there. There was one scene we agreed to throw out because it didn’t make sense anymore. Then they wanted a scene of us guys just all bonding together. I said, oh, well we were doing that when were doing break dance outside. You got some cardboard? So that’s how that scene came about. We rethought the whole scene. I’m a playwright as well, and I get obsessed about lines, and thinking words can do everything, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s something physical. Sometimes you’ve got to capture something organic in the moment and build something that can only last in that moment. Which is what we think the essence of this whole film is—theater. You had to be there that night or you’re going to miss it. That’s why it feels that kinetic and organic because sometimes it happened only on that one take. And that’s the take they used.

From what I understand, you shot in a decommissioned prison. It was a real space. How does that influence the performances?
CD: It makes it even more real. The fact that we shot at a decommissioned prison that was just decommissioned two weeks before we got there helps you feel the reality of that space… the way the air flows or doesn’t flow, how tiny the cells are, just everything about it. You’re like, oh, this is a house of corrections, but this is not a place for human beings. This isn’t human. And it’s perpetuating a system that’s going to keep going. It didn’t feel like a place where you can do the work and be on the path to being better. The moment we were done with a take, I would go outside. I was always outside. I couldn’t be in that environment. The air felt different. I always had to get somebody to take me back and forth to my literal holding cell. I couldn’t tell where I was because it’s designed that way. For  me, it’s intentional. You think about all the things that it does to the psyche. How it’s wearing and tearing on you. How it’s breaking you down instead of helping you do the work to rethink.

CM: For me, there was a lot of apprehension. Especially the scene where I’m in a cell by myself and I reach for the script—I’m actually in a cell that was right downstairs from a cell I actually was in, when I was in this prison. And it was that way for all of us because everybody, every one of us came through this prison. It was a reception prison, downstairs. You get everything you need and then you get sent to whatever prison you’re going to stay at. So all of us had been in this prison before. Sometimes you could catch us in the corner, just talking, because we had to decompress ourselves. We had a psychologist on set as well, in case there were any anxieties that we needed to talk about. I don’t even know who that person was but I may have talked to them! Because I talked to everybody on set. I was interested in the cameraman’s work, I was interested in Ruta’s [Kiskyte] work, the continuity. I’m interested in everything, in front of the camera and behind. But we found more peace just dealing with it on our own and talking to ourselves because there are some things only we understand. That’s how we got each other through it.

Q&A with Kevin Costner, Luke Wilson, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone and Ella Hunt

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1.

What draws you back to these Western stories? What is it like when you develop a project over the course of many years, as you’ve done here?
Kevin Costner: I think it’s the idea that this world we’re showing is not a part of Disneyland: it was part of our history. It was 200, 300 years of struggle. We can get across the country now in a plane—have a meal, watch a movie, take a nap, secure our seatbelt for landing. This was… it was so different back then. The struggle was so great. And it’s an opportunity to explore the literature of how women had to exist with men who drug them out there often without them wanting to be there.

Why are we out here? Why? It was the big question. It was just the promise of America that if you could go, if you were resourceful enough, if you were tough enough, if you just… if your dream was big enough, that you were going to realize them no matter what. And you could hold on to it: it would be yours. It just never dealt with the other side of the coin, which is where people have been for thousands of years, and the collision, the cataclysmic thing that happened when two cultures met.

It was an unfair fight. They didn’t stand a chance. But for 200 years, they did… Before sheer numbers would overwhelm them. Technology would overwhelm them. They fought for their way of life. And there’s a big difference about their anger versus ours. They weren’t fighting for a flag. They were fighting for their neighbor that slept next to them, for their religion, for their children. We were fighting for something that somebody promised us in Chicago that this was land and we could… you could have a home here.

Let the story be the star

The character of Ellen Harvey feels like one we really haven’t seen before. Jena, can you talk about your approach to her?
Jena Malone: Well, a script is sort of this beautiful DNA for a character, you know, and you’re sort of getting to work and sweating and breathing and building it into existence.

And it’s a really lovely gift of an opportunity, when a script has not only authentic, interesting characters, but also truth and lyricism. Things that lift. We don’t know all of the stories of the women that lived in these times, but we also maybe have inherited some of their trauma, you know? Like there might actually be parts of them still living today inside of us, you know, right here with us in this room, you know?

And so I felt very connected to her, and I wanted to step into and dive into her as deeply as I could, and Kevin allowed that. Because it felt like a… a healing space. You know, and I’ve done a few period pieces, and this felt different to me. It felt like I was accessing a true thing that happened. I don’t mean that my character was a real person; I don’t know, I don’t think she was. But it felt like a really healing experience, for me.

Sam, when we meet your character, it’s a beautiful sequence because you’re on horseback and you’re trying to reason. You’re trying so hard… but you’re coming up against the realities of being a lieutenant.
Sam Worthington: That’s right. I think every character on the front is trying to forge their own way and believe in their own path. I think that’s what this script’s creating, these characters that hope they can find somewhere to settle. Whether they’re in the military, or in the wagon train, or they’re one of the hunters, or one of the indigenous. But I think that even the indigenous to some extent are trying to find a bit of peace themselves.

They don’t know who these strangers are, you know, to use strange words. But it’s, I think, out of that search for hope they’re always going to hit these obstacles. The catalyst for drama is conflict. The great thing about the script that Kevin offered us was that this idea that it kind of elevated, it wasn’t just a fight that we’ve seen a million times before in westerns or in films where it’s straight one on one.

His script does a beautiful job of showing how the arguments can go around each other, like they’re dancers, that’s what these scenes were. It’s kind of interesting to play these scenes in a 2024 context, because there’s an… I wouldn’t say old fashioned, and I don’t mean that with any disrespect, but there is a romantic quality to when you’re doing these scenes. The scene of Kevin going up the hill, that’s essentially a romantic scene between these two killers, and we know what’s coming, and we’re just waiting for that button, but it’s a dance between these two men. And that whole script was built like that. I think that’s what I found very unique about it. There’s a poetry to it that I haven’t seen ever put on screen, and least of all in a Western.

The characters in this film feel seem as though they’re still trying to figure out what, exactly, their responsibilities are. Van Weyden, for instance, is almost a reluctant leader.
Luke Wilson: Yeah, I mean, one of the original things that Kevin told me when he hired me was that he didn’t want it to be a black hat and a white hat western. He didn’t want there to be clean lines between who was good and bad, and that’s something I kept in mind. Another thing Kevin told me at the beginning was that the town of Horizon is a lie… and I just thought that was such a cool idea, that this town that everybody’s banking on doesn’t actually exist.

I mean, it reminded me kind of elements of Chinatown: like, there is no Chinatown for J.J. Gittes. It’s just this kind of idea. In the scene where I get introduced, I’m talking about a young kid who has given a horse too much water, and how he can make the horse sick, doing that. It’s just interesting things like that, that you might take for granted. And also going back to what Sam was talking about, how Kevin would add in small things, like he added in a thing about “he’s just helping my daughter into the back of a wagon.”

It was a scene that wasn’t written, and we just kind of popped it off. Just these little elements that help, you know, of course they help me as an actor, but I also think they help an audience kind of get a sense of who somebody is. And, yeah, in terms of being the captain of the wagon train, I say to Ella’s character that it’s not a job I wanted, and I feel sick and burdened that, you know, I was elected to this job. You know, I didn’t run for it like I’m running for office. I got voted in by the other pioneers to take this job.

Ella Hunt: I think I was really drawn to playing this woman who on the face of it is a little bit unpalatable and difficult to like. When we meet her, she seems like such a product of her upbringing and so at odds with the West. She’s in this incredible yellow gown that Lisa Lovaas, our amazing costume designer, has constructed, that she ends up wearing it for the entirety of basically both movies. But, yeah, I was really drawn to that, although on the face of it she is forthright and protective of her husband even though he doesn’t understand the rules of the wagon train, and even though she’s also a woman who has probably been convinced by her thoroughly naive husband to travel west.

She has no idea about the journey they face. And at the end of the day, she just wants to wash it all off, and she can’t wash off the struggle of this journey. And we have this scene that ends kind of tragically with her bathing, but Kevin and I talked a lot about the beauty of the scene too, and the power of seeing this kind of prolonged moment of her allowing herself the time to try to wash off the place that she’s in. And she can’t, but it’s this beautiful moment until it’s ruined by the reality of the journey west and what the west is for people. That’s the truth of these movies and that’s just like scratching the surface of Juliet’s journey. It’s kind of all downhill from there.

How did you select your Director of Photography? It seems like a real challenge, given the scope of the project, and the scope of what is actually shown on screen.
KC: I’m really glad you asked that question for a couple of reasons. And I want the cast to hear this too, because maybe it’s never been articulated. It took me 106 days to shoot Dances with Wolves. And about 113 for Wyatt Earp. I shot Horizon in 52 days. Arguably as big as both of those movies. And so, how did I pick? I picked a DP who had enough confidence in themselves not to be put off when I said, “you’re not going to be able to wait for the light. We’re going to depend on our story.” So in a way, some of their art was going to be sacrificed. Meaning, even though he could do what the other guys do if he had the time, we just didn’t have that same time. I said, “we’re going to depend on our story, Jimmy.” [J. Michael Muro]. And he was my steadicam guy in Field of Dreams. And he was a steadicam guy in Dances with Wolves.

And I gave him his first DP job in Open Range. So, I needed a person who loved his art, but was willing to protect the story just as much. So he sacrificed something as a DP. But his imagery stood out. It didn’t become so precious. I said, we’re gonna film this and I’m gonna take you to beautiful locations.

Let the story be the star. I will give you as much as I can. But he didn’t have nearly the tools that you’ll see a lot of DPs have. He was out there and he was inventive.

Q&A with Annie Baker, Julianne Nicholson, and Zoe Ziegler

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

Annie, I know your work primarily as a playwright, and I was surprised to learn that you’ve been thinking about making movies for a very long time. Why did you decide to set this story on screen and not on stage?
Annie Baker: It’s never like an intellectual decision. For me it’s very instinct-driven. What is a play and what is a movie? I think I could come up with a lot of reasons. For one thing, getting this performance from somebody [Zoe Ziegler] that was ten when we shot this movie… I don’t know if any ten-year-old on the planet— even this genius ten-year-old—could do that every night for eight weeks. But that’s not why it’s not a play. It’s just a movie.

Julianne Nicholson: I think part of it is just visually this particular place that Annie chose, and an understanding of this place. You cannot create that. You have to be in the place.

AB: Absolutely. There’s nothing I like less than nature on stage being made to look realistic. That’s not to say there aren’t ways of representing nature on stage. It can be interesting and kind of abstract, but that’s not the same as pretending something’s real and alive. Anything on stage is wonderfully dead. Julianne’s right. One of the first things I knew was that this movie was about this place. I knew we had to shoot it in the place. Julianne and I are both from that place. That was baked in from the beginning.

every relationship has its own really particular set of rules

Was it challenging to try to get into the mind of an 11-year-old while you were writing?
AB: I don’t think I was trying to get into her mind. Part of the originating impulse was a movie about the intellectual and spiritual development of someone that age over the course of the summer. In some ways, the movie is her brain changing over a summer. Writing for this character was actually one of the things that made me want to do it. I was trying to capture a feeling that I’ve had. I’ve spent a lot of time with kids, taking care of kids, I’ve had a lot of kids in my life, and there’s a feeling I got from them that I felt like I hadn’t seen captured on screen before, especially for girls. I felt like movies about girls were often about trauma or puberty or burgeoning sexuality. Those are all are great topics, but I wanted this to be about a young girl and her mind and her mind in relationship to her mother.

Zoe, it’s such a wonderful performance. I read that you had never acted professionally before. You’re in almost every scene in the film!
Zoe Ziegler: That’s right.

That’s incredible. What made you want to try acting?
ZZ: One of the parents at our school—her daughter’s an actor—they sent it to my mom and said I would be perfect for it.

What would you say was your first impression of acting? Was it fun or scary or interesting?
ZZ: It was really fun. I liked memorizing the lines.

You also had the pleasure of acting beside Julianne Nicholson. Julianne, can you talk about Janet and what intrigued you about her as a character?
JN: The first thing to know is that I’m a really big fan of Annie’s work, so I was interested in anything that she was putting on the page. And I grew up in that area. When we met, I didn’t know that this was the story, or where it was going to take place. It just felt like such a gift to be able to read this thing that was so reminiscent of my childhood and so familiar. I had such a deep connection from the first page, and to dig into that with Annie was such a lucky thing for me.

The connection between Janet and her daughter Lacy is intense. I experienced such conflicting feelings about it while watching the film. I’m curious what you might have thought about their relationship?
JN: I feel like parenting in 2024 is very different than parenting was in 1991 and that’s something that Annie and I talked about a lot. Sometimes, I, Julianne, would have this sort of inclination to be nicer or more physical or warmer. But it was very important to establish this particular relationship. Not my relationship with Zoe, but this world that we were spinning. My mother and father split up when I was seven, and there was about a year where my mom and my younger sister and I were all very close. We got kicked out of the apartment that we were living in because the landlords didn’t want a single mom living in their apartment in 1977. We were a tight little threesome and we lived in this communal house in Newton and we had really interesting experiences. I’m intrigued by the relationship between a single mom and a daughter. I think it’s so interesting and beautiful and of course each one is different, but those lines are blurry. I think it’s really fascinating. And I believe there is some value in not helicopter parenting and not clearing the path for your kid, but letting them sort of try to figure stuff out on their own and fail on their own.

AB: Listening to you talk, I feel like we’re really accepting of the nuances and ambiguities of romantic relationships on screen. Like if you watch a romance, you’re willing to witness a lot of darkness, and redemption, and also sometimes nastiness. I feel like that’s its own genre. But with parent/child movies, there is this need to sort of come down on the idea that they’re either a good parent or they’re a bad parent. And the movie must have an ethical standpoint on the parenting because, like Julianne was saying, parenting is a culture unto itself now. To me, parenting is just a relationship. And there are things about it that are incredibly beautiful, and things that are kind of weird, but every relationship has its own particular set of rules. And that was part of what I wanted to do—to show that this is a relationship like no other and it has its own set of rules. That’s part of what we’re understanding over the course of the movie. There’s no parenting lesson to take away from it.  

I know it was a short shoot and you all didn’t have a lot of rehearsal time, but did you have any time to get know each other prior to the shoot?
JN: We met briefly in New York when we first did the scenes together. We also had a little time in Massachusetts, where I got in touch with Zoe’s lovely mom. When I’m working with younger actors, I like to start a relationship before we show up on set. So we texted a bit and Zoe really likes horses so I sent her a sweatshirt with a horse on it and I brought Uno—which I don’t think you had ever played, Zoe, and we obsessively played Uno together. We fast-tracked our relationship, which felt fun and easy. I also feel like something happens when the camera’s rolling between Janet and Lacy that you can’t predict or prepare for, and you’re really lucky when it happens.

I have a question about the writing process. The three-part structure is clear in the film, but I’m curious about how you flesh out your characters with a lot of little details. That scene of Zoe smearing her hair on the shower wall is so distinctive.
AB: The hair thing was really hard to pull off, by the way! Zoe was a champ. My first AD is like in the shower with her, passing her a clump of hair. First, we tried to have it in her hair, but it kept falling out. Do you remember this, Zoe?

ZZ: Yeah [laughs].

AB: Also, you had an allergic reaction to the St. Ives shampoo. But it had to be St. Ives! Laura Klein, our AD, was throwing clumps of Zoe’s own hair at Zoe. Zoe, you were amazing. It was one of those things, where you’re like, oh, we’ll get this done in five minutes. And we’ll get to spend two hours on this other thing. But then the clump happened. It felt like, we’re not gonna get it, we’re not gonna get it. And then we got it! Sorry, your question…

Do these character flourishes develop over time—are they fleshed out with numerous drafts or are they there from the beginning?
AB: I take a lot of notes before I start writing on every project. And a lot of the notes that I take are imagistic. You could call them character details, or you could just call them images—like when someone tucks their hand on the wall or something. Usually like 90 percent of them don’t even end up in the play or the movie. But in that process, I have gathered thousands of details. They don’t necessarily have a purpose in the story. I usually have a document with a million images and details and ideas, and then as I draft, I can pull from it. I think that’s usually how I work.

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Q&A with Kai Höss, Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, Wendy Robbins, and Daniela Völker

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Commandant’s Shadow.

Maya, I understand that the seed of the idea for this film originated with you?
Maya Lasker-Wallfisch: Yes: I wrote a book, which was apparently interesting! And one of the things I wrote about in the book were two themes that really interested Daniela. And so Daniela and I were connected through a mutual person that we both knew. And it turned out she was very interested in the things that I was interested in. And so at that time I was talking about my decision to go and live in Germany, as well as my interest in working with children of perpetrators, and absolutely recognizing the burden, the enormous burden, that exists there. So we kind of began an odyssey and Daniela obviously did everything that had to be done, and a million things more, but we were on a mission.

I wanted to see his heart pricked, I think, now that he’s in his 80’s

Daniela Volker: I think it was a coming together of common interests and trying to develop those themes, because Maya’s book was very much focused on her own life, and her experiences of transgenerational trauma as daughter of a Holocaust survivor, which I think is fascinating and it’s a sort of largely untold story, really, while Holocaust survivors are still alive.

Quite rightly, we focus on those survivors, but I thought it was interesting to look at Maya’s mother, at her experiences, and what it was like for Maya to be raised by a survivor. And then I, I thought, well, Anita had been at Auschwitz, so I found out that the commandant of Auschwitz had written a book… and it was extraordinary. He really was in a very unique position, because he was the prime witness and perpetrator at the same time, which is very unusual, and he wrote it all down before he was executed.

Then I found he had descendants, so I met Kai first, and Kai’s story and Maya’s story on opposite sides were in a way quite similar. You know, they were both about coming to terms with what happened in the past to your family. It then became a much broader story.

And I think, in a way, I hope that’s what our film does. It looks at individual stories that come together, piece together, and tell a much broader story about the past, the present, and hopefully the future, really. Because, you know, if your mother has it in her to meet the son of the Commandant of Auschwitz…That should make everyone think, “what can I do to make things better?”

MLW: I would agree. And I think that one of the central factors for me, about why I wanted to do this and all the things that I’ve done consequently and subsequently, was my mother’s work. Her work and her mission in life (once she came to terms with Germany, which she absolutely has), was to help the people talk to each other.

And I really wanted to continue the legacy and to try to do the best I can, because I had been handed the responsibility, which is a kind of awesome one. So when this opportunity came up… it was like it was meant to be. And I was able to be instrumental in creating a situation, obviously with Daniela and with the Höss family, to go on this journey and for my mother to receive us so beautifully and so voraciously and so honestly, and it was the most powerful example of of the capacity to take another look— to not hate, and I think she should win the Pulitzer Peace Prize, quite frankly!

Wendy Robbins: Well, it was quite a momentous evening, quite a momentous event, as Anita said, “this is a historic moment,” and Kai’s father, Hans Jürgen, said, “who would have thought?” And I was always interested in knowing: For Kai and Maya and Daniela, so what was it like the night before? Because obviously Maya had invited the Höss family to come to her mother’s house. And sometimes we’re never quite sure what mood Anita might be in: she’s almost 100 years old! And Kai… traveling in the car with your father to meet her… What were you, what were your expectations? What were you feeling just before you met Anita?

Kai Höss: I was just looking forward to giving this lady a hug, a sweet lady, you know, and I just… over the course of many years, growing up and, you know, finding out as a teenager who I was, I found out about my family, and about my grandfather. There was shame, but, again, when I read my grandfather’s memoirs… I felt the sadness for what he had done to all those people. Millions of people he hurt. Families and this shadow, right? It’s just down the ages, generations. And, for eighty years it’s been hurting people, on both sides. The victims, most importantly, but also the descendants of the perpetrators. We didn’t speak about it, when I was growing up.

And when I read that book, and when I found out at school, I asked my parents, “is that our name?” And, um, my mom said, “yes.” I said, “no.” And it put this whole topic in a completely different perspective for me. But I always felt very sad. And then, in my heart, I wanted to meet Jewish people. I wanted to tell them, I guess, “I’m sorry, I love you and if I could make it right and turn it around, I would.” And so that’s how I kind of went through life. And the day before, the day before going to see her, I was just thrilled. I was thankful. I was very thankful to actually have the honor to meet her.

And in her house, somehow she wants to meet us. She allows us to come to her home. All the pain our family caused her family. And when she opened the door, when we walked in, she was just so sweet. I just really enjoyed that very, very much. And I was thankful that that happened.

Wendy, when and how did you become involved in this project?.
WR: It’s actually an extraordinary story. Because I had worked with Daniela twenty five years before in India. And we then didn’t see each other or speak to each other again.

And I had gone to see somebody in London to discuss a different project, and on the way out the door he did a little throwaway line. He said, “oh by the way, my late father was very interested in the Holocaust and believed in constantly talking about it. If ever you come across an idea that’s a really special idea about the Holocaust, do please come back to me. I might be able to help fund it.” A few weeks later, I get a random call from Daniela, who I hadn’t spoken to for twenty five years, and she said, “I’ve been on this incredible journey for three years. I’m not sure what to do with this now. Can I send you what I’ve shot and the synopsis and see what you think?” And when I opened her link, I watched what she filmed and read her synopsis, and I got a goosebump moment. One of those very rare moments in life where you just think, “this is really special. This is really something.“ And the rest is history, and here we are today.

DV: It’s almost shameful: it’s so hard to get a film like this financed. You know, people think of the Second World War. They think of history films, newsreel experts… I had a film where four real people do things. We followed them, so that didn’t fit the conception of a World War film. You know, people tell me it’s not a history film. But it’s also not a reality film. It didn’t fit any genre. And I started doing this project actually in lockdown, then I started working again. I make documentaries for broadcast and streamers in my day job. So this film was in a way my hobby. I worked on weekends, evenings, and holidays. By the time I contacted Wendy, I was getting really desperate because I had no time, really. You know, it’s a full-time job, to raise money. I already had a full-time job! Anita and also Hans Jürgen (Kai’s father) weren’t getting any younger. And in fact, Hans Jürgen’s sister, she died shortly after we found her. So I felt, you know, this is our last chance. That was at the forefront of my mind. So I was going through my address book and Wendy’s name came up and I just thought, “I wonder…” I mean we hadn’t really seen each other for so long, but I just… I don’t know why, but I called her!

WR: But do you know what? This film has been so full of those serendipitous moments. So for example, we were directed, once we realized we could really do something with this, we were directed to another executive producer called Danny Cohen. And when we were talking through it with him, he almost went white and he said, “but I’m doing a film called ‘The Zone of Interest’ with a director called Johnathan Glazer.’ These children are still alive?” Yes they’re still alive and we’ve filmed them. And that was an extraordinary moment and obviously for this film.

Kai, when you were taking your father through this journey, what did you feel you had to do, in order to protect him in a certain way? He is your father, after all.
KH: You know, it was mentioned that we never really talked much about my grandfather or what he had done in our family. So it was suppressed on a subconscious level for the most part. What I wanted from my dad, what I wanted to see… I wanted to see his heart pricked, I think, now that he’s in his 80’s. I wanted to see his expression. And I saw it in Auschwitz. I encouraged him from the very start, and I encouraged him to come along on this journey… and he was very surprised I had asked – he was okay with it right from the start. We wanted to, you know, get this out, and this is an amazing opportunity.

So when I saw my dad in Auschwitz, and I saw his countenance, his face and his demeanor, and just heard his words… I realized it hit home. He was deeply touched, and there was remorse. I saw that, and he couldn’t— it was his first time. He’d never seen this before. He remembers his childhood in that little island of sanity and beauty and the gardens and where he lived and all that he did. He said he was destined to have that beautiful childhood. What he saw on the other side of the fence, I think it broke his heart that day, and it broke mine. I mean, that whole week I was, I don’t know how many times, just in tears.

Q&A with Viggo Mortensen and Vicky Krieps

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Dead Don’t Hurt.

What was the process of getting in sync with each other? Was there a lot of workshopping or did you wait until the outset to really work out the scenes?
Viggo Mortensen: I don’t think we workshopped anything. When Vicky was doing something that worked really well, I didn’t say much of anything. But when I had a different thought or wanted to try something different, I would say something. But mostly, I thought she always understood the character really well, which was great.

Vicky Krieps: Yeah, I think he trusted me. There’s wasn’t much talking about it really. I mean I was talking, but not like, what do you think she feels? Viggo was trusting me to understand her as a woman, really from the inside. So that’s what I did.

VM: The first time you read it we talked about it a little bit, but it was clear from the beginning that you had a strong idea of who she was and it made sense to me. Then you just prepared and came ready to play.

she’s really holding on in the movie

Viggo, did your relationship change to actors after you started directing?
VM: No, I’ve always been interested in actors. I like them. I don’t think being an actor automatically makes you helpful to other actors. It depends what kind of actor you’ve been. If you’re an actor that stays in the trailer—you show up and memorize and you know that on the third line in this scene there will be a tear coming from your left eye. If you’re like that, you may be polite when the director says, well, I would rather the tear came out of the right eye. And you go, oh, that’s interesting. Okay, thank you, I’ll try. Of course you don’t do it. If  you’re that kind of actor, you might not be very helpful when it comes time to directing, if you’re even interested in directing, because you’ve never shown much interest in what the other actors are doing. But if you’re an actor like Vicky, who’s interested in talking to people and is interested in what her partners are doing, then you probably can be helpful to other actors, because you are adapting to different kinds of actors.

There are some really strong themes here. You have the imagery of the saint, you have the imagery of the knighthood, and all the characters in this movie live in some kind of area in between.
VK: Viggo wrote the script not thinking of me, but thinking of his mother. When I received the script, I had—that very same week— been thinking about doing a western, just like that. Because I was in Arizona doing a movie about the border to Mexico. I don’t know why, but somehow, I had this image of being on a horse. And the same week I got the script. From the beginning, there was something surrounding the movie, or maybe the character that felt otherworldly. The connection to Viggo’s mother maybe? Maybe to my grandmother, to the woods, to Joan of Arc. But what are these things, what are these things that make us dream and hope and believe and hold on?  Because she’s really holding on in the movie. So while we didn’t talk about it, it was always there from the beginning. We shot in Vancouver Island. Even though it’s never mentioned in the film, there was a lot of awareness, always, of native people and indigenous people. What is land? Where does this land come from? Who owns this land? Why? And all of these topics are woven into the story even if they’re not clearly talked about. It’s kind of spiritual.

So what was it like finally making a Western? Was it everything you dreamed of?
VK: I really loved it. I mean, I probably suffered the most from everyone because I didn’t get to shoot guns, you know? I was mainly doing what women do—I was carrying the heavy stuff, the emotions. Next time I want to ride more and I also want to shoot some guns.

Viggo, this isn’t your first Western as an actor. Did you draw upon any of those experiences while making this or was that just more in the background?
VM: Not in any conscious way. I didn’t write the story from a starting point that was conceptual or paying homage to any western, not with any model in mind. I just assumed that all the movies I’ve seen, the movies I’ve worked on, and the things that have happened to me in my life influenced me. I’m assuming that nothing in this movie is original. And yet, as far as I know, it all is, you know what I mean? We are always influenced by every breath we take and everything we see.  But I wasn’t consciously thinking about any of it. Rex Peterson, our horse master, who helped us with the horses and the training of riders and stuff, he’s somebody I worked with on both Hidalgo and Appaloosa. That’s the only connective tissue to those stories.

VK: You did have a great knowledge though. Like, you would never accept it if the clothing or decor didn’t look right. That’s because you know, you’ve seen it before. You could tell that there was experience.

Can you talk about composing the film? Was it that you felt you didn’t have enough on your plate? When did you decide to do that?
VM: It wasn’t something I did after or even during the shoot. Almost six months or a year before we started shooting, I had all of it almost recorded. Which sounds kind of backwards, but I had done that on my first movie, sort of by accident, because I was restless. It took four and a half years to raise the money, so in that time, I was like, well, what else can I do? I had the script, I had Lance Henriksen, and I started to imagine it looking at the scenes. It was a form of work, like continuing to write the screenplay in a way. Maybe this scene or maybe this transition needs some music, maybe not, so I’ll try this or that. Then I had most of the music by the time we finally raised the money. I didn’t really play it for anyone, but I had it in mind when we were shooting certain scenes, and that was helpful. In terms of knowing how long the scene should last, and things like that. And then editing it was very helpful. So then I did it intentionally in this movie. And it’s a more complex score, but it really worked. We went with the musicians, and we came up with the right way to play those themes, and what the instrumentation should be, and all that. And then I did share that with the cinematographer, and members of our team, in order to understand certain transitions. It helped especially with some of the scenes that were not linear and in difference time periods. There’s a period where it suddenly moves very quickly from where Vicky is pregnant, and there’s a baby, and there’s a boy, and yeah, it’s like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There’s one piece of music that goes through all that, and it’s helpful. I mean, I don’t like it when the music tells you what to think or what to feel, whether to be scared or happy, or anything. And sometimes it can be counter rhythmized to what you’re seeing, but it somehow complements it. So that’s the idea. It was very helpful in the editing, of course.

The casting is phenomenal across the board. As a member of the Danny Houston fan club, what was it like working him?
VM: I’m a member of that club too. I was really happy that he wanted to play the part. I didn’t say it to him while he was doing the scene because I didn’t want him to be self-conscious, but the scene in the back where he’s speaking with Garrett Dillahunt and he’s quite verbose, at one point, I was just listening without looking. I was listening to his voice, and it sounded eerily like his dad’s. I told him at the end of the shoot. I said, by the way, in that scene… and he goes, oh yeah, I’m not surprised. I’m glad you didn’t mention it at the time. He’s a good sport and he was fun to be around and he did a great job. I mean, we had a great cast. Not intentionally, but there were three alums from Deadwood— W. Earl Brown, Ray McKinnon, and Garrett Dillahunt. We had some really legitimate Western actors in there, and also a mixture of other people. I felt really good about all the characters.

Vicky, what’s it like working an actor that is also a director?
VK: It’s interesting because in almost all the interviews this is the question. So now I’m thinking, do they always ask that? There’s always a question to the actors, how is it working with a director who’s an actor? I’m just me thinking.

We’re contractually obligated to ask it.
VK: It seems to be very interesting to people. But that is also interesting because that means that people think a lot about it. I mean, to come up with that question means that you’re already thinking about what it is like being an actor, and what it is like being a director. It really felt very natural to work together. The only thing is, of course, if you work with someone who’s also being solicited by, let’s say, the light crew or the sound crew or whoever comes talking to him, that will affect me in a way because then his attention suddenly goes off to the camera. I started developing a way to work when I was in a scene and suddenly the other actor went away. The actor was gone! So I had a very intimate relationship to all the decor and the vases and the furniture. Because I had to substitute it with something that felt real and was in the moment. I could hold onto that and I could be in the character and remain in that moment. I love that. It was a great experience and almost like a school of acting.