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Q&A with Sacha Baron Cohen, Jason Woliner, and Maria Bakalova

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

Sacha, the original Borat was a tremendous success. Why did it take so long to make a sequel?      

Sacha Baron Cohen: Well, we just assumed it was impossible to make. The first movie, when we made it, we thought no one would watch it. It was about a Kazakhstani journalist, it was with real people, it was a documentary… we thought it would, you know, make $15M worldwide, and we really made it for our friends and for comedy nerds. But it blew up! And it meant that it was impossible to– you know, you couldn’t go undercover with one of the most popular comedy characters of the last decade. So we just assumed it was impossible. And then I went on Jimmy Kimmel during the midterm elections. I didn’t know what I was going to do. And the night before (I’m going to do some name-dropping now, because I’ve heard that people love that), I called up Chris Rock, because I didn’t have any idea what to do on Kimmel. And he said, it’s the midterms, why not do Borat? I told him that Borat was impossible to do now. And he just told me to try it, so I did– we got the whole team back together, we found where the costume was, found the lawyer who has defended us in the past, got the old writers… and managed to have Borat interact with Trump supporters, and found out that the dynamic worked really well. Because Borat is a more extreme version of Trump: He’s a bit more misogynistic, he’s a bit more supportive of white supremacists, he’s a bit more into caging children… he’s probably a bit less into paying women for sex… But essentially Borat was this mechanism for allowing people who supported Trump to go further. You know, to agree with statements like, “in my country, when we chain Mexicans in the cage it’s better than the Almaty four seasons!” And these people were saying, “yes that’s right, they’re lucky to be in cages… of course!” So it was a reminder that this could be a satyrical way to expose Trumpism and the dangers of Trumpism. To show that, essentially, America was becoming Kazakhstan. That was the sort of underlying theory of this. And so we decided to use my most popular character as a form of protest, really. We knew that the election was coming up, that as an actor/comedian/celebrity… whatever you want to call me… asshole?… there’s not much I can do, but to bring back my most popular character, to use him in this way to show the dangers of Trumpism, and wrap it up in a funny movie that’s an emotional father/daughter story… the aim was, OK, let’s do what we can to challenge and protest the present political situation, so that we can look ourselves in the mirror on November 4th and say that we did everything we could. We didn’t believe we could affect the election directly of course, but we thought maybe with our fans, maybe we could motivate some of them to vote.

we wanted to make a really funny movie, but we did want to reveal certain dangers of Trumpism

Maria, your performance is amazing. But you haven’t had many comedic roles, correct?

Maria Bakalova: I come from a dramatic background, and this was my first part in comedy. Sacha and Jason helped me to develop my comedic abilities, and they’re the ones who found me.

SBC: We interviewed hundreds of actors, and Maria is one of a kind. She’s a total revelation. She’s absolutely hilarious without ever pushing. So you never realize that she’s telling a joke, which is crucial when you’re with real people. Because you’re walking that tightrope where you’re trying to get the audience in the cinema or at home to laugh, hard, and we do that by actually writing jokes. We believe in really crafting one-liners and specific gags. But the performer, and the performance, needs to be completely believable, so that the person you’re sitting in front of doesn’t realize they’re talking to a comedian. She’s hilarious, and she’s incredibly courageous. She’s filming scenes with real people, often in some terrifying situations. She’s an incredible actor. You know, we flew around the world interviewing different actors (actually, I’m not sure I ever told Maria this…). There’s one scene – we got her to improvise, we got her to work with real people, to get to see if she could convince real people that she was Tutar. Because we knew that the emotional through-line had to work, you had to really be invested in their relationship and want them to be together at the end. And in this breakup scene, in the middle of the scene, I found myself on the verge of tears. And I just said, “stop the shoot! She’s got it.” We knew we couldn’t make the movie until we found Tutar. And we had auditioned brilliant comedic actors from America, and they’d sit down in front of real people, and within a minute the person would say, “you’re an actor.” So it’s this kind of ability to improvise, to have that courage, the depth of the emotion and the subtlety of the performance… the ability to get the performance right in one take – this is how this production is very different than a typical film – you’ve got one take to get it right. So we had to know that we could completely rely on whoever played Tutar. And so we were lucky. I think she’s one of a kind.

Jason Woliner: Yeah, you know, these guys can’t say it, but to me this was a discovery on the level of Vicky Krieps in Phantom Thread, of you’re taking someone that no one knows, and putting them next to the person who is the best at what they do in the entire world. No one does what Sacha does, to do this stuff in the real world. And it’s incredible to watch, and it’s incredible on screen. Even a great actor, as Sacha was saying, can’t necessarily do that. And I feel like Maria is really a revelation and we were so lucky to find her.

One stand out sequence involves Tutar eating a baby-shaped cake-topper and your subsequent efforts to get it out of her body. Can you discuss? 

MB: So the physical comedy… that was the moment when we started acting like two clowns, with the swallow the baby scene. It was a little bit scary because I started it by doing it outside of this place, and then we went there, and we started dealing with this person, and we were telling him that Borat was my father. And when you have Sacha right next to you, and he is brilliant, and he says so confidently, “yeah, I am her father, so can we take it out now please,” it’s really hard to not laugh, for me as a person. But at the same time, it’s crazy because it’s making me think, “what if I was really in this situation? What if I was having my father’s baby? Should I not be allowed to have an abortion? Is that the right thing, really?” And this is another example of how we have to think about what is good and what is not so good. But it was weird. I mean, you’re there, you’re experiencing something that might actually happen to someone unfortunately. But it was funny and important at the same time, like the movie itself.

So much of the comedy in your films comes from getting ordinary people to do or say horrible things. Are they just typical weak human beings, trying to please their interlocutor? How do you think of them, after so many interactions?

SBC: I don’t think they are weak people. We have certain criteria for who we will interview. I mean, Rudy Giuliani is not a weak person. In the cage match in Bruno, those 2,000 people who are ready to storm the stage are not weak people… in fact a lot of them had just come out of prison, so… I’m not sure they’d be called weak. I think the interesting thing in this one was that we wanted to also show the humanity of people. So two of the biggest characters in this movie are the babysitter and the holocaust survivor. The babysitter is essentially the fairy godmother of the movie. And she shows an incredible beauty and humanity. She unwittingly moves the story forward: Tutar is about to have plastic surgery, and because she’s developed a bond with this woman, she plants the seed in Tutar’s mind that she’s beautiful as she is, she doesn’t need to be owned by somebody else, that her father is a liar. And also, for example, with Jim and Jerry, the two conspiracy theorists. We wanted to show that there was a humanity in people that we would normally dismiss. I lived in character with Jim and Jerry for five days. They’re actually good people; they take it upon themselves to convince me that women have equal rights. You know, they are essentially feminists! In spite of the fact that they believe that Hilary Clinton drinks the blood of children, they actually hold a number of very positive and humanistic views. So the idea was, in an increasingly divided America, to present people that we would normally completely dismiss, and to show that, actually, the issue might be the ideas that they’re being fed – force fed on social media – rather than the people themselves. These were conspiracy theorists who had adopted beliefs that were very obscure years ago, but had become mainstream, because they were repeatedly fed them, either by POTUS himself, or by social media that was making money out of propagating these vile theories.

JW: It’s interesting. Take the lady in the cake shop. I don’t think it’s true at all that she’s evil or anti-Semitic. I think the reason that that scene is in there, and why it’s justified, is because it is so shocking to see her reaction to that horrible request. That wasn’t a scene we shot for hours. We didn’t have to do any tricks to get her to do that. We walked in, we started filming, he asked her to put that message on the cake, and she said OK. Does that make her evil? I don’t think so. If anything, I see that as a lesson about complicity, which I think is as important as anything else right now. The character was the one who was saying something truly horrid, and she was going along with it in an unblinking way. And as Sacha was saying, I think so many Trump supporters are not necessarily evil people – of course not. But, nowadays, and forever, and especially during the holocaust… turning a blind eye, or going along with authority, or just being compliant to insane or evil things going on around you or being asked of you is certainly to me, and I’m sure to Sacha, is something worth shining a light on. To me, that scene is shocking and funny, but also says something more profound about human behavior.

SBC: One of the great historians about Nazi Germany, Ian Kershaw, has a quote: “the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.” And it’s when we as a society become indifferent to Islamophobia, or the caging of children, or we just say, “hey, the stock market is going up, sure there’s some stuff that goes on… but yeah yeah yeah,” and we’re indifferent to that, that is the danger of an authoritarian demagogue like Trump. And that is what we were trying to show, that there’s been this dangerous slide in America. Look, we wanted to make a really funny movie, but something like the rally where Borat goes up on stage and sings this insane song… we were trying to show that there’s been a dangerous slide toward authoritarianism. And that if Trump was elected again, the fear was that people would “just go along” with things in the song, like “slicing up journalists like the Saudis do.” Our theory was that you’d see, in the second term of a Trump presidency, that people were following him so blindly that they would transition America to a form of democracy like we see in Russia or Turkey, where it would be a democracy in name only. Inevitably it would lead to a situation where people were being persecuted, or violence was being used. So, again, we wanted to make a really funny movie, but we did want to reveal certain dangers of Trumpism.

Q&A with Darius Marder and Riz Ahmed

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

The character of Ruben has such a distinct physicality. Can you both talk about the process developing the physical look of the character?      

Darius Marder: Riz and I set kind of a high bar for what this drummer’s body was going to look like and what Riz wanted for that, which was one aspect of the physicality. We referenced this drummer Zach Hill. Zach Hill has a very specific body and you [Riz] where going after that… I remember where you put that bar and I thought “good luck, buddy,” and you just went at it with your trainer. The physicality of Ruben is super important not just so people can see Riz’s abs, but because Ruben is regimented. Ruben needs rhythm and walls around him to survive. So that’s an essential aspect of who he is as a character and his addictive nature. It’s part of how he’s trying to keep himself on the wagon. The tattoos were another aspect, and they were a very deep dive. There’s a lot of references in there to punk culture and its history, like “Please Kill Me.”  A lot of those tattoos have to do with his relationship to Sean Powell, who is the drummer of a band called Surfbort. This kind of goes to the heart of how we approached everything in this movie, which was to try and draw from things that felt real and exciting and connected to the heart and spirit that we were after. Sean Powell is an incredibly generous soul and was a heroin addict. He has this wonderful sense of humor that I think he wears that as a survival mechanism. He really introduced that to us during the research process.

Riz Ahmed: Yeah, the dark humor within the punk music scene was so important. Ruben is someone, like Lou, who is trying to construct his identity, as many of us do. But he’s doing it very proactively—he’s dying his hair blonde, he’s defining himself with all these tattoos on his body, and this is who he is. This guy, his life is music, he lives in an RV with his girlfriend, tours America, that’s what he does. So he has a clear but almost brittle sense of who he is, a very clear attempt to define himself. It was important to have that as a starting point. He’s someone who very much has ownership and construction of his identity. That’s important because by the end of the film the journey he’s going on is one of realizing that you can’t control anything in life, least of all who you are or who you think you are. We thought it was really important for there to be a visual transformation of the journey of the character that is almost a stripping back of some of these masks and armor to get back to a place of simplicity and nakedness and to the core of who Ruben is outside of his labels.

DM: When you say almost naked, it’s funny because you are almost naked in the beginning of the movie, and at the end of the movie, you’re not. Literally. And yet it’s an inversion. I think that’s very well-spoken. Because this is very much a journey about shedding those trappings of identity.

Ruben is regimented. Ruben needs rhythm and walls around him to survive

The use of captions in the film is really innovative. At first the audience isn’t aware that you’re setting up a convention and getting us used to the captions so when Ruben starts to become fluent in ASL, the captions seamlessly merge into that and we understand. But in the scenes where he doesn’t understand, we don’t get the captions. Can you talk about including that element?

DM: It became clear to me when I was setting this movie up that we could not make a movie about deaf culture and not open caption it. First and foremost, above and beyond any intellectual and artistic aspects of the captions, which there are in the movie, that’s the most important thing. We all have to question why it is we don’t open caption every movie in a movie theater. That’s very different than closed captions. People mix up the two. Open captions mean they’re burned in and everyone sees them. Closed captions means it’s an option. You can turn them on or off, like we have on this talk. And like we will do on the platform when this is released on [Amazon] Prime. I’d love all versions of this movie to have burned in captions, but in fact it’s not really a good thing to do for the deaf community. That’s something I’ve learned in this process. It’s because they already have their built-in settings. So to have burned in captions means you’re actually taking that control away from that community. On Prime, you’ll have options. I would say that I encourage people to watch it with the captions, for the very reasons that you just said. Open captions is a whole discussion. Frankly I think that as long as we don’t open caption movies, we’re essentially closing the door to deaf culture. That’s a huge world, a lot of people we’re closing these movie theater doors to, even if we have closed captioning in some theaters. It’s not really fair. It became clear to me that the film should be open captioned and then that became this total dive itself. It’s very intentional. Even the title of the movie. Sound of Metal, not “The Sound of Metal.” That’s not a caption. The captions are very important to me and they took a lot of work to get even the descriptions of sound right.

I’m curious if Riz orchestrated anything physical to restrict his hearing. The way he reacts to not hearing what is being said around him is so authentic. 

RA: Darius and I discussed this and we landed on the idea that the approach to Ruben’s hearing loss should be explored by us as filmmakers in an emotionally-led way. That would be our access point into this character and into this story. It’s not through our lived experience but being able to relate to him emotionally. What that meant was, when Ruben feels that his deafness is a loss or a lack or a disability, we use auditory blockers, which are customized hearing aids that are placed deep in the ear canal and placed on a white noise setting. When they do that, it blocks out everything. It blocks out the sound of your own voice. And once they were in, they were in for the day and they weren’t easy to take in and out. So we’d communicate on set with pen and paper. And that is when Ruben thinks the deafness is a disability. It’s disorienting to him and cutting him off from himself in the world. However, there are other sections of the film where Ruben starts to realize that deafness is not a disability, it’s a culture and a way of being and can be an invitation as a way to connect more with others and himself than ever before. In those situations, we didn’t use the auditory blockers and it was kind of irrelevant at that point because we were communicating on and off set with the deaf cast in sign language. It was an attempt to inhabit some of the disorientation that Ruben was feeling by losing his hearing.

DM: And to ground it in a version of reality. Obviously, there’s no way to perfectly simulate that, but take for instance that moment when you first hear his tinnitus in the movie. Riz didn’t make it up, there was actually something happening that he was responding to; there was a literal tinnitus in his ear that he then had to contend with, and it’s enough to make anyone go crazy. It was really a meta experience that way.

Q&A with Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds.

The people you speak with are so engaging, and so sincere. How well did you know them before you started shooting?

Clive Oppenheimer: I only knew Simon Schaffer, who is a historian of science in Cambridge. The others were all unknown to me. Meteoritics is not my field, so I did have to do a lot of research to identify our characters, and also to understand some of the scientific work that was going on, as well as other parallel themes. For instance, what have people thought about heaven through history? So it was quite a ramifying research program in our pre-production phase. But the other thing that is important to keep in mind during the casting process is that scientists are not dispassionate authorities. Scientists are intimately concerned with understanding, in a very passionate way, how the world works and how the cosmos works. And I think that’s what really comes alive in the film.

Werner Herzog: And through phone conversation I think you got some sort of feeling, a sense of the pulse, and you would say, “oh yeah, that’s a very interesting site but the person who runs it is kind of boring,” so it really is like traditional casting! Casting like in a feature film. You know pretty quickly through one or two phone calls whether or not a particular person will be good on camera. And Clive is really good at casting, thankfully.

CO: I think many scientists have great stories to tell. It’s also about engaging in a very authentic and interesting way. And that’s why we’re there: we only meet them for a short time, we point a camera in their face – perhaps for the first time – so you have to elicit what we’re after pretty soon thereafter. So it does take some preparation.

WH: Yes, but sometimes we had a general knowledge of what was contained in a particular archive, for instance, and yet we had to remain open for the surprises. Open to where our curiosity would lead us. In Arizona, all of a sudden we are presented with a rock, the “doghouse meteorite,” that came down only a few weeks before we arrived there and hit a dog house in Costa Rica and almost killed the dog! It missed him by a few inches luckily. And it’s a particularly precious item, and Clive is admonished to please please please don’t drop it! And then he’s allowed to take a whiff… and he sniffs out the stone… and on that stone you can smell the scent of the universe, how it smelt 4.5 billion years ago, the universe, objects out there, had this scent… and there’s one surprise after the other, and you have to be open for it.

I like to have conversations with these kinds of quick-witted, intelligent, profound men and women

You’ve done two films together now, and a unifying theme is the exploration of how faith and science are related to one another, and how they can both coexist and help us understand the world.

WH: It’s a sense of awe. A sense of wonder. A sense of the excitement of discovery. If you don’t have that, you shouldn’t be a filmmaker. If you don’t have that, you shouldn’t be a scientist. It’s as simple as that. And that’s why we connect the two characters, Brother Guy Consolmagno, the Jesuit lay brother, the pope’s astronomer, at the pope’s summer residence at Castle Gandolfo. And he’s really going wild, and I love him for that.

CO: The two films are companions in a way. Into the Inferno takes us to the underworld, and this film takes us to the heavens. And they both connect the ostensibly geophysical and cosmological phenomena with the human imagination of the afterlife, of the gods, of the underworld and netherworld. So that’s an important theme that connects both. And I think another thing that both do is to put indigenous knowledge on an equal footing with scientific knowledge. And you see that in our encounters on Maui Island in this film, or on Vanuatu in Into the Inferno. 

WH: One thing that’s very beautiful in this film is the moment when Clive poses a question to the Jesuit: “What if the green men came down in a spacecraft – a flying saucer. Would you baptize them?” Without missing a beat, the holy man says, “yes, if they asked for it.” And it doesn’t take him more than half a second to come up with his answer! I like to have conversations with these kinds of quick-witted, intelligent, profound men and women.

Q&A with Max Barbakow, Andy Siara, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti

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

How did you guys come up with the idea for this project?

Andy Siara: Max and I met in film school, we finished up and we decided to make our first movie together. I’ll write it, you direct it, and we’ll come up the idea together. We didn’t know what that idea was, so we headed out to Palm Springs to figure out what we wanted to do, with a focus on doing something on a containable budget. We had kind of our own “lost weekend” but one that didn’t include any hard drugs. There was a lot of drinking and gambling and talking about life and sort of an existential exploration of what we were going through. I was about to get married, so we dissected that a bit and out of that weekend grew this seed of the character of Nyles, and the setting of Palm Springs. Over the next three years it evolved into this wedding time loop movie about love and commitment and whatnot, but in the earlier stages it was this thing that was growing even though it wasn’t one clear sentence of a movie.

Max Barbakow: It was a hipster death bender movie. Like an absurd version of Leaving Las Vegas, set out in the dessert, that didn’t really make a lot of sense. There were a lot of false starts and I think those ended up helping us once we got to the foundations of the movie that is out there now, because we got to know these characters of Sarah and Nyles. It’s a pretty clean, high-concept premise but it took a lot of false starts to get there, and to figure out who these people were, and what their versions of hell were before we were able to properly develop that concept.

we wouldn’t give anything away about what’s coming, but we would also honor what’s coming

What were some of the logistical challenges of shooting a film where you have recurring locations and scenes that take place throughout the whole arc of the film at different points for the characters, but were assumedly filmed back-to-back?

Marbakow: Our DP Q [Quyen Tran] was amazing and before we even talked about visuals or shots in the movie, we talked about understanding each moment within these scenes, what was happening on a human level, even if they’re happening in the same place. Because of that, every moment is pretty unique the way it’s shot. It was challenging on a physical level to move around each space and re-set the camera to get all the different stuff we wanted. It could be tedious when it was taking a long time but I think it got fun at some points too, when you’re working at a fast clip and you’re doing series of takes and jumping in and out and doing different versions of stuff. I think it was very challenging when we’d shoot one side of a scene one night, like the dance floor at the wedding and the speeches, and then the next night we’d have to shoot the other side. That’s when things kind of got crazy—when you’re doing different parts of scenes on different nights. But by and large, it was such a quick shoot that it was a blur and we were just trying to keep up the momentum.

Cristin Milioti: In some ways I think that was one of the most fun parts of it, as well as the most challenging. I had very extensive notes, like A Beautiful Mind shed of scribbles that I had to constantly refer back to. All of the scenes of me waking up throughout the film, we shot that in one day. So every time I woke up, I had to say to myself “okay, I think this is right after this happened, which I think is going to go like this,” and there were a lot of logistics. What I really kept in mind was actually one of my favorite parts of the film, the first fifteen minutes of misdirect. You think, oh these people just met at this wedding, and you kind of want to rope in the audience until that moment that you bring them into this dark weird alley. I wanted to be able to fold in things in the early part of the movie so that we wouldn’t give anything away about what’s coming, but we would also honor what’s coming.  And what’s she done and what she’s already grappling with, that was a very fine balance.  

Andy Samberg: The way I started out acting was us shooting our own stuff on home cameras. And you’d call ten takes in a row without cutting or resetting or anything. We’d do it on the SNL shorts too, it would be go, go, go. It was a little like voiceover where you’d do four different ways of saying the words. And I feel like we did a lot of that because of time constraints on those particular occasions when we needed to get all the scenes that are little quick pops and were all at the same location. Max would do a great job and Cristin was really on it. I feel like we had a constant conversation about scheduling and we made sure to pinpoint the scenes that we couldn’t rush. Where we needed to explore it more and let it happen more realistically, and give ourselves time to get it a few different ways. A lot of the emotions in the movie are played kind of ambiguously; you’re supposed to feel a little conflicted. So you want to get those nuanced more sub-texty takes that match up with the more nuanced sub-texty writing. Communication is always important in all things in life, but in this project in particular it was really key in terms of getting out in front of it and making sure we didn’t run into problems as we went.

Can you talk about the wardrobe?

Milioti: We had a really brilliant costume designer Colin [Wilkes] and she just killed it. Everything was very specific. For Sarah, we were looking for that outfit that she would have gotten wasted in the night before, almost like a fuck you to the rehearsal dinner that she doesn’t want to attend. I imagine she showed up to the dinner in those shorts and boots with maybe a slightly nicer shirt, got black out drunk, put that sloppy pajama shirt on, and then… did whatever she did. There were very intense thought-out conversations, even in those little pops in the montage. We had long talks about, what could Sarah have found at the CVS down the street. Because they only have 24 hours. She didn’t come with a suitcase of tomfoolery costumes! She came to a wedding she didn’t want to be at, so what could you get a Walgreen’s at Palm Spring? The crappy pirate’s hook or that sparkly jacket. One of my favorite parts of the wardrobe was that none of it was fantastical—though it was beautiful and cinematic—but it was all grounded in what you could find in Palm Springs.

Andy Samberg: A lot of it was really well drawn by Max and Andy and the script, and our initial talks. I really felt like you could see it when you read the script. There was definitely a lot of discussion over the “hero” outfits for Nyles and Sarah. We went through a lot of Hawaiian shirts. It ended up looking exactly how I imagined. We’ve just passed Halloween and I’ve been seeing a lot of Nyles and Sarah costumes, which is pretty dope. When you make something there’s nothing better than people saying they want to be your characters.

What was the research process like in regards to the quantum physics angle?

Samberg: We had a “real-life” scientist we consulted with, who was fantastic. And he actually ended up in the movie as the scientist Sarah is talking with at the diner. We had a couple of nice chats with him where we basically asked “how embarrassing will this be in the science community if we say x, y and z” and then he would give us adjustments.

Milioti: He’d be like “oh, that’s not what you should be embarrassed about!”

Samberg: A lot of the stuff that we worked out with him ended up getting cut because we found people in the test screenings didn’t really care that much. They were really more keyed in—thankfully—to the emotional component. But poor Cristin had to learn like three pages of physics.

Milioti: I saw the final cut and it was me finishing the speech that was three long pages of dialogue, and it’s essentially me saying “… and that’s how we get out of it!” And I was like, no! I spent days memorizing the whole thing.

Samberg: But I am glad we did it, because I think it gave us all a much better grasp of what we were doing internally. If you dig a little deeper, it still holds up. And if you dig past a certain point… it’s all theoretical so who knows. But it all starts with, if your theory is this, then all of these rules apply and there’s a logic to your world.

Q&A with Thomas Bezucha

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

How did you find the book this film is based on, and what attracted you to adapting it?

Thomas Bezucha: The novel “Let Him Go” was written by Larry Watson, who I’ve been a fan of for well over twenty years. He wrote a book called “Montana 1948,” which I also loved, and just by being a fan of his I found this book. And it was actually a confluence of things: it was reading this book just coincidentally within the same week when I saw a documentary called Dear Zachary, which is a very painful documentary about loss. It tells the story of a couple, who are grandparents, who have lost their son. And it just really resonated with me. And that gave me an idea of how to adapt “Let Him Go.”

He’s not afraid of playing opposite a strong lady, and I really admire him for that.

There are so many iconic actors in the film. How did you go about casting? Did you have particular people in mind as you wrote?

TB: I don’t have particular actors in mind as I write, actually. And that’s just because the vast majority of the time, the person who plays the part doesn’t end up being who you think it’s going to be originally, as you’re writing! That’s just the nature of the business. But I never would have thought Diane Lane, for instance, would be interested – let alone agree to play – a grandmother. I was fortunate enough to have lunch with her and talk to her really early on, and she felt so passionately about the character, and representing her age, and wanting to have gray hair… and to, you know, look as much as possible as a Montana rancher would look in ’63. And off of the strength of casting her, we approached Kevin [Costner]. And I still can’t believe he did it. But you know, there’s a thing with Kevin – and I hope I’m not telling tales out of school – but it occurred to me one day when we were on set, when I was looking at him and watching him interact with Diane, and he’s so iconic… he’s such a ‘guy running around with guns,’ and he’s so accomplished. But if you look at his body of work, and I think this is a less obvious take on it, he’s really always been dedicated to telling stories that feature strong women, consistently. And I would joke to Diane that this was The Bodyguard Part 2! You know, he’s her safety net out on the road. He definitely does not believe she’s going to get that kid, but he has to be there when she doesn’t. I think it’s an unusual thing for really iconic leading men to lean into strong female characters. He’s not afraid of playing opposite a strong lady, and I really admire him for that.

For moments when there isn’t dialog, how did you direct that? It felt very naturalistic to have breaks in the conversations among characters.

TB: I like an awkward pause! I definitely do. I think if there are pauses, I think most of them were probably written into the script. Is there a scene in particular that comes to mind for you?

I think about when they’re leaving in the car, you know they’re setting off on the journey, and up to that point too there’s just not a lot of dialog. And then of course the deeper into the film you go, the more characters you get.

TB: They drive and then they go up to that hillside. They don’t have an argument about him going to the son’s grave; he says, “you don’t know when you’ll be back,” and she says, “I know what I’ve lost.” And he says something like, “sometimes that’s all that life is,” and he leaves, and she’s left sitting in the car. Maybe I rely too much on subtext, but I kind of… I feel like that’s how people actually talk. It’s interesting to me when you have to lean in a little, as an audience member, to interpret what somebody means… as opposed to, you know, dialog like, “you killed my brother and now I’m gonna kill you.”

When you are telling a story within a genre, how do you balance audience expectations for that genre vs. organic character impulses?

TB: I like genre, but then I like to tweak a bit. I don’t know– it’s just what’s interesting to me. That’s partly what drew me to Let Him Go. It had this super simple genre story, but then I could sort of pursue the other stuff that was interesting to me. Which is, you know, watching her make a coffee cake or whatever it is!