Archives

Q&A with Denis Villeneuve

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Dune: Part Two

Just as in the last film, this one starts with an incredible burst of sound, accompanied by some text, that really grabs the audience and lets them know they are in for an incredible experience. Can you talk about that decision?
Denis Villeneuve: When making movies, you try to plan as much as possible in the screenwriting. Even so, there are elements that come to life as you’re shooting. And similarly, in post-production, sometimes unplanned things happen, too. As we were developing various languages for the first one, Hans Zimmer started to do some experiments. Hans had permission to go very close to sound design… as close as he dared! Let’s just say it was a deal with the sound design team. He sometimes went a bit too far [laughing].

And, and as part of that process he developed a language that I absolutely was mesmerized by, but that wasn’t really used in the film. And I came up with the idea to open the film with that kind of… it’s a kind language that was developed from Sardaukar priests. I thought it would be interesting to use it as a kind of prophet, as a way to express some thought right at the beginning of the film… And it was also a nice way to say to everybody in the audience, “shut up!” But jokes aside, it was also a great way to take control over the movie before anything else, before the studio credits, even, which I love. And, for those who are familiar with the books, each chapter always start with a quote or an extract of the princess Irulan’s journal. So I thought it would be an elegant way to start the movie as well.

Casting is one of the most delicate moments of the filmmaking process for me

Let’s talk a little bit about the process of adaptation. You’ve done several adaptations now, and they are just incredible, between Dune, Arrival, and also Blade Runner 2049, in its own way. You make it look easy… and it’s not easy, because people haven’t touched this film [Dune] for decades. You were quoted as saying that when you adapt, you kill. Which is interesting to me, because when I watch your films, I feel like something other than killing is happening. It’s almost more like a reduction, as though you’re bringing the story to its essence. 
DV: But the thing is that when I say that I “kill,” it’s just that it is a violent, transformative process to go from the book – which people love, they are like poems. The books put so much of their strength into the description of the cultures and the rituals and, and of course I could only bring a little bit of it onscreen. So right from the start, I had to make some very bold choices.

One of them was to make this adaptation a Bene Gesserit adaptation. Of course, we looked at the Spacing Guild, the people that make space travel possible. There’s the Mentats, the human computers that are guiding the different families. Both of those groups are almost entirely put aside in my adaptation. I focused exclusively on the Bene Gesserit. It was a way to try to focus on the main theme that was interesting me in the book, which was the use of religion as a political tool.

I think the female characters in this film are just… all of them are impossible to take your eyes off of. They’re just so fascinating. Rebecca Ferguson in general is hard not to watch. She’s just an amazing actress. Can you talk about casting them, and about the decision to bring Chani to the forefront?
DV: Casting is one of the most delicate moments of the filmmaking process for me. It’s a very delicate moment, and you cannot make a mistake with casting… I mean, I’m stating the obvious, but if you get it wrong it can have a catastrophic impact. So I made sure to take my time before shooting part one. First of all, I made all of the casting decisions around Timothée Chalamet. I cast with a hundred percent certainty that he would be perfect for the part of Paul. And then I constructed all of the family, everybody, around him. And Rebecca is one of the first ones that came on board quite quickly, for many reasons.

First of all, I love actors that can make you believe in other worlds, and take you with them into those worlds a bit, like Amy Adams did in Arrival. They can make us believe in aliens, you know? Some actors can bring you into the unknown, and Rebecca is one of them, and she can absolutely do anything in front of the camera. I mean, it’s quite impressive how she was on the set. She’s a force. I can always rely on Rebecca when I need to go somewhere in the story.

And in the book, her character kind of goes into the shadows of Paul. And this time, in the adaptation, I wanted to keep her up front because she’s the most… for me Lady Jessica is one of the most fascinating characters. She’s the main architect of the entire story. And I always thought it’s sort of strange that in the book she disappears, so I wanted to work more with Rebecca. I just love working with her.

I have to ask you about the incredible array and variety of headgear in the film. It’s just unbelievable. You start looking forward to what’s happening next with Bene Gesserit costumes, for example, Florence Pugh’s character. There is an endless variety of interesting face masks! Could you take us inside that process, of deciding to cover up some of the world’s best actors, and what they thought about that?  
DV: Some of the headgear was born in the storyboards. There are some ideas that start there, and other ideas that start as I’m working with Jacqueline [West]. Jacqueline is a fantastic costume designer that is well known for her more historical work. And I wanted a costume designer that would bring some kind of historical consideration to the costuming. I didn’t want “fantasy” costume that would look like it was out of a “fantasy” movie. Dune, when you read the novel, feels like it was written by a historian. That he went into the future and came back with a time machine and filled the book with that kind of historical quality, that kind of gravitas, that kind of seriousness, and so I wanted the costume design to be similarly grounded. I wanted it to have deep roots, and to feel the history of each culture. And Jacqui was absolutely fantastic at doing this. And, yes, we tried to have fun with some of them.

Q&A with Carla Gutierrez

Posted on by

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

You’ve worked on Biopics before: for example, you edited RBG. How was making Frida different from those other experiences, apart from the fact that you directed?
Carla Gutierrez: I came to it with a personal connection. I mean, I think a lot of people have a personal connection to Frida’s art. But we also felt the responsibility of finding a way for her voice to really carry the story. So, yes, it is all archival… but we really wanted to make it feel as present as possible. And that was both a kind of exercise, and a challenge, and a beautiful process of digging into Frida’s own words and learning that she could actually tell her own story. That was really special.

And, you know, sometimes it was difficult, and a lot of times it was really beautiful and exciting when we discovered things. So I think that was a little bit different from RBG. In this case, it was Frida herself that really, you know, came alive.

your personal connection or attraction to a story is just the beginning

Let’s talk about the challenges of that approach, of letting Frida tell her own story. Because it’s one thing to have that idea, but I’m sure there must have been some points in the filmmaking process where you kind of felt that you were in a corner, creatively. How did you solve those problems while still keeping true to your original vision?

CG: Yes, there were challenges, but also, I think it was a gift. We didn’t have an opportunity to sit in front of her and ask her to tell us about her life! And so we relied on her writings. And they came from letters that she sent to loved ones and her diary. Her writings and her words lived very much in this world of emotions. So she wasn’t describing exactly what was happening in her life— and it was sometimes a bit of a challenge to make those connections, but at the same time, what a gift, right? And we kind of learned to be guided by that. To lean into just her emotions, and that was the exciting part of it. You actually get to hear the texture of her personality, the texture of her life, the feelings of those moments in her life… and I think that is what is unique that our film offers, to present that side of her to viewers, to let the audience really hear her heart and not necessarily hear people talking about her from the distance of history and the academic distance of understanding art.

One of the things that I noticed is how vocal she is about pushing against the patriarchy, pushing against the idea of a “man’s world.” Did this aspect of her story resonate with you in particular, or was it just one aspect of many that you found compelling?
CG: Besides a film that was done, I believe, in 1968 by a Mexican woman, I’m the first Latina to make a film about Frida. And I think that gave me a particular closeness to the subject matter. I think the understanding of growing up as a woman in this culture gave me a unique window into really capturing that experience in this film.

I always say that your personal connection or attraction to a story is just the beginning. Then you really have to do the homework and do the research, right? Because there’s still a distance that you have to go. You know, I did not grow up in Mexico. I grew up in Peru. I also have this sense of history, right?

We did a lot of research to be able to find every writing that there is on Frida that has been published or made public out there. And her writings are all over the place: you cannot find all her writings in one publication. So we had to follow tracks and different collections to be able to like get close to her real voice. And of course there was the cultural knowledge that I brought in from the very beginning. And I think my experience of the gender dynamics in Latin America — that I brought in from the beginning — was valuable. But there was a lot of work that we also needed to do to understand the context and understand the woman.

Q&A with Alexander Payne and David Hemingson

Posted on by

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

Can you start by telling us about your exposure, not only to the screenplay, but also to the world of Barton, and what drew you to visit this type of space?
Alexander Payne: I didn’t know the world. I went to an all-boys school, but it was a Jesuit school in Omaha. I had the idea for the movie, but I knew that one day I was going to have to do research and go out and visit these schools and talk to people and everything, and I just hadn’t gotten to it yet. And then I received a pilot script written by this guy that took place in a private school, a boarding school, and it was good enough that I called him up and asked if he would consider writing a story for me in that same world. Well, it turns out he does know that world. He’s from Connecticut. He didn’t go to a boarding school, but he went to a private day school. And Giamatti went to Yale!

David Hemingson: I wrote this pilot about my own experiences at the Watkinson School in Hartford, where I went for six years. And it was kind of a deeply personal story, because it involved my father, who was teaching there at the time, who I was estranged from, and my mother, who was a registered nurse. We were from a lower middle-class family and it was a strange transition for me. And I had an uncle who was a World War II veteran, a guy named Robert Hale, who was this remarkable guy. He’s the prototype for Paul. I mean, just like, baroquely profane, fantastically kind of stoic. He was like a modern-day stoic.  And he kind of raised me in some of the strictest and most hilarious terms at times, but through it with a lot of love. A lot of aphorisms that are shot through the movie are directly from him.

AP: Once we had the screenplay, I went out there with script in hand and really through just being there and location scouting, was able to soak up that environment.

DH: You were there for how many months? Eight or nine?

AP: I’m always in a place for a lot of months before shooting. I gotta soak up the atmosphere and get it right, or some version of it right. A lot of that came through location scouting. Location scouting is really a magnificent process because that’s when you kind of get to know where you are, because for every house in the film, you’ve been to 30. For every school in the film, you’ve been to 30. And you meet people and talk to them and you lightly weave yourself into the fabric of that local community. It’s limited, it can be superficial, but given the limitations, it sure helps me. My big experience previous to this was going to Hawaii for The Descendants. I was there for about nine months before shooting to get it right. In that movie I was trying to portray a certain class of people and it took me a while to get to know them so that I felt I was representing them accurately.

you lightly weave yourself into the fabric of that local community

What was the process like between you two as you developed the screenplay?
AP: Well the the screenplay developed in a really—to use an overused word—organic way. I knew he was a fine writer. I gave him a premise that I had been sitting on for about a decade. He did the writing, but we developed the story and the feel and the texture of it together. The soul of it. By the time we’re done, it’s personal to us both. And I feel it’s directable by me. And he feels good about it.

DH: It’s great because I worked about 27 years in television and this my first produced feature, so I’ve had a lot of experience and a lot of different genres, you know?

AP: And adapting yourself to different showrunners, right?

DH: Yeah, I had to work with showrunners, but working with him honestly has been, I know you’re tired of hearing it, but it’s really great…

AP: Why would you possibly think I’m tired of hearing that?!

DH: He’s a very generous guy, he smells great, he’s a lovely dude. No, it was a lovely experience and it was great because I didn’t go to film school. I’m kind of an autodidact that way. I was an attorney. But I quit my practice when I was in my 20s to do this because I hated being a lawyer. But I spent 27 years doing this, and he has this incredibly deep and vast knowledge of film. And I kind of had to go to film school on his back by going to CineFile at the corner of Sawtelle and Santa Monica in LA, a great resource. Two guys there, JP and Greg, they’re phenomenal. And they have like 30,000 movies, so in the process of developing the script, I read short stories, and I’d send him a short story and be like, well, this feels like an area. And then I’d get down to breaking it into a loose outline, and we’d start talking about movies—Hal Ashby, for example. I watched all the Ashby, I watched all the Altman, and saturated myself with all these movies and we kind of went from there.

This film is deceptive in a lot of ways. Because it feels like it was an indie film made in the 70s, but it’s made today, with tremendous care and detail. I mean, you have a helicopter that flies. It’s incredibly ambitious in its scale.
AP: Helicopters actually aren’t that big a deal! I was like, oh we got a helicopter. They’re actually not that expensive to rent. But finding the period one was. We had to get one.

DH: Finding a place to land it was quite a piece of work.

It’s this character-driven film but it has so much, like you said, pomp and circumstance happening in the 70s.
AP: We were just chatting outside and I brought up something that happened last night. We screened the film up in Pleasantville at the Jacob Burns Center. And a guy comes up to me afterwards and he goes, I’m a property master. I have to ask, where did you find those rowing machines? You know, they’re pretty hard to find. I said, thanks for noticing! For a three-second shot in the movie, you’re the first to notice! They’re not in the screenplay. Somebody had the idea, I think the production designer said, wouldn’t it be cool if we got rowing machines? We finally tracked them down at Harvard, and they had to go up into the attic or in the basement to pull them out, and then we brought them to St. Mark’s School where we were shooting. It’s a three-second shot, but yes, there’s a deceptive scope to the movie. Even for the smallest details, we tried to make them accurate.

The screenplay is kind of fascinating because we believe we’re going to follow these four kids through the whole film, and then you pull them right out!
I wanted to do that on purpose because when I was writing, I started to think about Dead Poets Society. And I love it, but I don’t need to do that. I don’t need five kids, I don’t need to service all their arcs. I don’t want to!

AP: He’s too lazy (laughs)!

DH: I’m way too lazy. But no, I wanted to get down to three people with very distinct issues that they were holding over on their own lives. In other words, people with pain, people with damage that weren’t getting past it, and I didn’t want to do it for eight people. I wanted to do it for three people. Obviously, it was going to be Paul, and I very much wanted to do it with Mary, because she felt very spiritually and emotionally like my mom in many respects. And then with Dominic [Angus Tully], I felt I was plugging in a lot of my angst and indignation as a kid into him. And I just wanted to see these three people, as opposed to like eight people. I wanted to make it a more concentrated experience.

How did you cast Dominic? He’s tremendous.
AP: It’s tough casting kids. Because you want them to be believable. And not seem too old. I went through this on Election 25 years ago. It’s challenging to get teenagers who look like teenagers, and not like actors in their 20s pretending to be teenagers. The professional kids are often much too professional and too polished. And then you have to worry about the non-professionals and the non-actors having the chops to do it. Anyway, it just takes time. And the casting director here in New York—a woman named Susan Shopmaker—fielded about 800 submissions. We didn’t find Angus. We felt maybe we missed one. We found some of the other parts, but not him. As the auditions kept trickling in, dwindling, but trickling in, we finally did what we were going to do anyway, which is go out to the schools where we were supposed to shoot the movie and just contact the drama departments and ask, who you got? And there he was at Deerfield. When we shot, he was a senior at Deerfield, playing a junior at a version of Deerfield. From Deerfield, I also picked up another actor. The blonde kid in class who says, “He does what in the Cobb salad? I eat that Cobb salad.” He was an actual junior at Deerfield. And not an actor!

Q&A with Reinaldo Marcus Green

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Bob Marley: One Love

Can you talk about the research that you did, and about the consultants that you brought in to make sure you got it right? I was so impressed with how authentic this story was.
Reinaldo Marcus Green: So, I’ll start with the consultants. We had a gentleman by the name of Neville Garrick, who we represent in the film. He had done the album art work, and he also did the lighting for all of the shows. And so Neville was still alive. Rest his soul – he passed away recently. But he was on set every day.

Neville was in the room with Bob. So, we had people that knew Bob and that were in his close circle. They were very, very helpful in, you know, bringing out character details and nuances… of helping us understand what these moments in Bob’s life were like.

When Neville was helping us, obviously he is older now, everybody has their own recollection of what it was like. So you have to… you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but certainly he was there the night Bob got shot, he left, he was the one that drove Judy home. So we knew enough and then we had to fill in the blanks.

there was an outpouring of music, there was an outpouring of this musical genius.

So Neville was a big, a big part of our puzzle. Fae Ellington, who’s a cultural icon in Jamaica, she was there for language and dialect, and to make sure of the historical accuracy of what we were doing. The film takes place in 1976, 1977, and that required a certain understanding of the time period. They use certain words in patois today that they didn’t use back then, for example.

And of course the family helped tremendously. Ziggy was on set pretty much every day. And it was great for us because he walks like his dad, he looks like his dad, he moves like his dad…. Just having that spirit around was really, really helpful.

And, again, it’s usually the characterization. Like, you know, Bob skipped two steps or whatever it was. Those kind of little details that really help add specificity to the performance.

The casting in the film is incredible, particularly the choice to have Kingsley Ben-Adir play the title role.
RMG: Well, I didn’t know Kingsley’s work that well before casting him, or I should say that I didn’t realize that I knew his work. I saw the movie One Night in Miami, but I had forgotten that it was him. And so, you know, when we were searching, we looked everywhere – all over the world – to try to find Bob, and obviously we were looking for a needle in a haystack.

To state the obvious, we were never going to find Bob himself, so I needed someone that had enough of Bob’s attributes. And after about eleven and a half months, maybe a year, Kingsley’s tape showed up. And there were just a lot of really great actors that didn’t even want to tape for the role, because it’s Bob. It’s really scary, you know, and so many things might not go right.

You know, he really captured the look, the feel, the movement of Bob, all of that stuff. And so, when Kingsley’s tape came in, even though he has short hair, and he’s quite a big dude (he’s like 6’2”… he’s a big guy), but still, there was something really interesting about the tape. He had me leaning in, and, you know, not quite grabbing the popcorn, but sort of, that was kind of the feeling… like, man, there’s something really interesting, super intriguing, going on here. It was everything he wasn’t doing, you know? I’d seen so many tapes that were mimics of the Bob interviews online, and he didn’t do that, it was really an interpretation of Bob, and I thought that was very smart of him. And I knew I wanted to meet him, and now, of course, I’m thinking, “okay, if I put him in a wig, and prosthetics, like… how do we get close to evoking Bob?

But he brought that believable baseline character. And so that, that’s really, was the start, you know. But I didn’t know if he could sing, or dance, or do any of that stuff. But I wasn’t concerned about that. I mean, obviously I was— but ultimately it’s about the vulnerability of the performance. I knew if he was a great actor, he’d be able to get the level we needed.

And Kingsley, he did the work. I mean, he lost 40 pounds. He taught himself how to play guitar, how to sing, all the choreography. Just the work that he had to do in seven or eight months, to really just dive into creating Bob.

At the time shown in the film, Jamaica is a nation that is just coming out of colonial rule. Can you talk about that element of the story, and how you incorporated it into the film?
RMG: You know, the first script was a great skeleton for us, and kudos to Terrence [Winter] and [Frank E. Flowers] for getting us there. There was a lot more backstory in their draft. And there was just a lot more movie, to be honest, which was great—if we were making a limited series or something it would have been perfect. It was so, so big, it just was too much story to pack into one film. We were trying to find, like, what is the heart of the movie? What is the movie that we’re going to tell in two, two and a half hours? What’s the most critical time in Bob’s life that we thought would capture the essence of the man?

Now, can you possibly do it all? There’s been 500 books written about Bob. Whose truth is it, right? There are so many stories, you can focus on the Wailers, you can focus on Peter and Bunny. There’s just so many different avenues. But this avenue just felt like the right one for us. It’s 1976, there’s an assassination attempt on Bob’s life… Jamaica was in political turmoil. I didn’t know the intricacies of that when I took this project on, you know? But how do we make that accessible to people that don’t know about Jamaican politics or history? And all the stuff about how the CIA was maybe involved… there’s a lot of, so we had to try to set people in place in time right away. And Bob was at the center of that, but he was not yet a global star. He was a national star. And it was Exodus that really put him on the map, put the music on the map, and that just felt like a critical time to focus on. Like, he went from being just a musician to a revolutionary, truly.

It’s what brought his music to the masses. Now, he also created Kaya at that time, which our movie doesn’t go into, but there was an outpouring of music, there was an outpouring of this musical genius. Obviously, he gets his cancer diagnosis during that time and our movie ends before then, but it just felt like that was the right period of time to try to capture in Bob’s life that gave us some insight.

I’m still learning about him. I mean, you know, I wanted to try to show us the man behind the buttons and the pins and the bags. And, you know, Bob is still something of an enigma to most people. He’s a tricky one to pin down. But hopefully we got some juice from his family, and from things that we didn’t know about.

I understand you premiered in Jamaica. What was the response there like?
RMG: It was incredible. That was incredible. I mean… I was nervous. I was a wreck! So yeah, I was a wreck. That was crazy. Jamaicans… They do not play. Like, they were coming into the theater saying,, “nah.” But then leaving they were like, “you did your thing…” So it was the energy of, ‘we’re okay. We did our thing.’ “It was good,” they said. And “good” in Jamaica is “excellent” anywhere else, I swear! It was very humbling. It’s a humbling place to premiere your movie. They are people who have been through a lot, and the fact that they accepted Kingsley as Bob Marley is a pretty big deal, so I think we did alright.

Q&A with Martin Scorsese

Posted on by

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

Marty, the book and the film tell the same story, but they tell it in a different way. Can you talk about the process where you saw this film as a love story, a marriage story, and an Osage story?
Martin Scorsese: I think it goes back first to my love of the American Western genre that I grew up with in the 1940s and 50s, and that was capped off in the early 60s with The Wild Bunch. Then that ended. New world, new time. We came in, we started making films, I made my own scores. I rarely worked with composers because they were part of the Hollywood studio system. I eventually got to work with the likes of Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein. In any event, I’ve always kept away from it. When I was given the book to Killers of the Flower Moon, I was even more cautious because it had to do with oil. I remember movies like Boomtown and things like that. But I don’t like oil in the street, in the mud, and that sort of thing. I had read the book, but I hadn’t really understood about the nature of the Osage Nation, and how sophisticated and how rich they had become. The scene you’re seeing at the beginning in black and white with the airplanes? That’s their actual 16mm footage. We couldn’t fake that one. The rest of the prologue we shot, and Ellen Kuras directed it for me. We have an old camera from 1916 where we do hand cranking, in black and white. And that was based on their actual footage. All of this was really fascinating. I said, then what happened? They were the richest people in the world, per capita. Then all of a sudden, they’re dying off, just like that. Eric Roth and I started working on the script, and no matter what I did with it, I found that Leo DiCaprio playing Tom White felt too familiar. I felt I had seen it before.  

The violence is done through love and trust

Yeah, you would have basically been making Thunderheart.
Right, or at best, I kept seeing Henry Fonda on the porch of My Darling Clementine, with his legs up on the post. Or the best of Clint Eastwood. We were trying to find the way to make it different. Eric and I were trying to find different ways, and I kept thinking, what’s going on here, really? And, the biggest influence was the visit to Oklahoma that first time. Because I’d never seen land like that—I liked it, I loved it. I tried to create with the Atmos some of the sense and the feeling of being in the prairie. You see differently and you get to know people differently. We started by having a meeting with Chief Standing Bear. At first, I was rather cautious. And so was he. 

How did you make initial contact with him?
When the producers first gave me the book, I told Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas and Rick Yorn that the first thing we have to do is make sure it’s okay with the Osage. First, let’s see how far they’ll go with us. Not a hagiography, right? And it went very well. It was in Pawhuska, in the Chief’s office with him and his wife, Julie, and Addie Roanhorse, and Chad Renfro. They were very polite. But they knew the movies I made. And they were concerned about victims and depicting the violence. I was told the meeting would take about half an hour. But instead, it lasted two and a half hours. I started telling stories, we were listening, laughing a little bit and I told him about Silence. He could see Silence.

And Kundun.
And Kundun. One of the guys said, listen, you need to be careful. You’re going to have Mollie Burkhart—Mollie Kyle—as a character and you’re going to be putting words in her mouth. She’s a person that we admire and a person we love. And he was absolutely right. These people are all dead and we’re going to be putting words in their mouth.  After that meeting, we felt more comfortable. Then there was another meeting and they said, well now you have to make this film. Then they took me on location scouting. That’s when I fell in love with the place. There were three main places— Pawhuska, Gray Horse, and Hominy. Three units of the Osage Nation. And because most of the events occurred to the people in Gray Horse, the people in Gray Horse insisted that we meet them too. I felt that that was going to be even a bigger difference, and they organized a dinner for over 250 people, and they were in full regalia. It was beautiful. And, during this traditional dinner, a number of the descendants got up and started talking about it, and that’s the story. Once I heard them, I said, what are we doing with the Bureau guys? I’ve seen that movie. I like those movies, but…

But you haven’t seen this other movie.
Exactly. And then these guys are getting up to speak and talking about their uncle coming in the room and dying in front of them. Margie Burkhart got up—she’s the great granddaughter of Ernest Burkhart. And she said, don’t forget that it’s not just victims and villains, it’s not that straightforward. Ernest and Mollie were in love, she said. Remember that they were in love, and that stayed in my head.

There’s a lot of complexity there. Did you really see it as love story? I kept questioning whether he loved her.
Absolutely. And her too. How much did she know? She must have sensed something. But she trusted and loved him so much and he tells her, “I’m behind you.” When we shot that scene, there were other takes, but that was the take where I believed him. I said, he is behind you. Nothing’s going to hurt you. Of course, they’re giving her this medication, but nothing’s going to hurt her, you know? It’s just going to slow her down. That’s it. Does he understand what’s really going on? No. He’s weak and he’s afraid, and he may be a little dim at times. But the reality is that he doesn’t really believe that Uncle King, that Hale is going to let it go that far. I think Ernest really begins to get it when Hale says, you just got to sign this paper. When Steve Spielberg saw the picture he asked, So Marty, what’s on the paper? I said, I don’t know—are you going to sign papers from that guy?! We didn’t even know when we were shooting if he was going to sign it. Then Leo just took it and signed it. He’s so weak; he gave in. It was perfect.  

You have to be really smart to play dumb.
He would sometimes laugh about it and ask me what was going on in his head. I said he has to be totally delusional about his uncle.

And he deceives himself about the marriage.
The marriage between the two of them, they really loved each other. Everybody kept saying that. Even the FBI guys at the end in the book, they kept looking at each other and asking why she was still in the courtroom. What is it with her, when is she going to realize the truth about this guy? And then she broke up with him afterwards. After, yeah. But I thought, well, that’s the metaphor. The violence is done through love and trust.  

One of the things I really loved about the film, and all your films, is the anthropology. All the details… the cups and saucers, the chairs, everything. It’s amazing. It really looked like Oklahoma.
Well, that’s Jack Fisk. He’s great. Paul Thomas Anderson suggested him to me. We were talking about this… I had to change so much of the crew after Covid. And I put Jackie West on costumes. Originally, when they talked about the rich Osage, I had imagined Mollie’s house to be almost like Tara in Gone with the Wind. And Jack did the research and pointed out to me, it’s more like this and that. Oh my, I said, so we don’t have her coming down the big staircase? My biggest question to him was, how do we know that they’re rich? And he said, well, they spend money differently. And we realize, of course, the cars. It’s a joke, they used to say Europeans would buy cars and when you get a flat, you just go buy another one. Well, it’s a joke, but in reality, a hundred years ago—you know, no roads. You get a flat tire in the middle of a field, you might as well leave the car there.  

That’s right, because you can’t get the inner tubes for them. (To the audience) These are old people talking up here!
You might as well leave the car there, go buy another, and eventually go pick it up, if you can. But the thing that Jack pointed out was that to them, cars were like horses. So, no problem if you had six horses, but if you have six cars, you don’t know what you’re doing with your money.