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Q&A with Laura Dern, Adam Driver, and Noah Baumbach

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Can you talk about conceiving this story and your writing process?
Noah Baumbach: It was inherent in the title that we are asking, “Does anyone really know what the story of a marriage is, and if that story has an end of sorts, does it mean it wasn’t a marriage?” I was really trying to come up with a way to write a love story, and I wanted to find a new way into a movie love story and within this material I kept finding all these other embedded genres in it. It gave us opportunities to expand in ways that I don’t think I’ve ever felt before in material I’ve written. There were the thriller aspects, the screwball comedy and horror, legal procedural and a musical. It gave us and the actors a real opportunity to push at the boundaries of the material.

Noah’s writing is just flawless

What were your first impressions of the character when you got the script?
Adam Driver: The first time I read it, we had talked about Noah being interested on making a movie that on a structural level plays with audiences allegiances; maybe you’re following someone and then something happens. This maybe changes your perception of them and then you kind of like this person. Noah doesn’t sacrifice structure or an idea for the life-blood that is happening throughout the scenes. There is the thing of, “how do you tell a love story through the lense of a divorce, how you tell the story of a relationship at the end of it,” but kind of in a way start at the beginning. My first impression after reading it, and after months if not a year of these conversations, was how impressively all of these ideas fit into this very lean script, where the stakes were high in every scene. There wasn’t something you could pull out and the film would survive without it. It all seemed urgent and coming from a very immediate place, so I was impressed with that and then also with how rare an opportunity it was to get something like this. 


Laura Dern: I don’t know that I can add much to that experience of reading this for the first time, except to say that Noah’s writing is just flawless so that any actor finds it as a gift of a lifetime. There is a humility in the storytelling that allows every craftsman and woman involved to know their place in the storytelling. Whether the production designer or the actor playing the role, there is a fluidity in the narrative, there’s a heartbeat and a rhythm to the language. We all were a tribe to tell this story for Noah. It was like a composer working with all of these different players to come up with this language that Noah made out for us. Not only did Noah build this family early on with having these conversations for quite a while before we read the script, but we felt that all the way through. I still feel that way even through the press: hanging out with my family. It’s an incredibly rare gift to feel that feeling of a hundred people coming together with not just this common cause or this energy and awareness of the story, but really the rhythm of the language. That I had never seen before. You describe it as like working on a play, but its an amazing experience on a film to work like that.

The musical numbers in the film are completely surprising, and, somehow, they completely work. Can you discuss how you thought to include them?
NB: It spoke to the flexibility I was talking about earlier that I found. I feel like all of our jobs is to be open to those possibilities. I’ve seen it in past movies, things I wanted, the big ideas that the movie could not accommodate in the end. But here those ideas did work, for ways I both understand and don’t. Working with Randy is a privilege and one of the beautiful things about this job is you get to work with people you’ve grown up with who have meant so much to you. We both really loved the work of Georges Delerue, the french composer who did so many beautiful scores, like that of Truffaut and Godard, and how that music embraces and honors the characters for their struggle and loves them. But it can also be surprising how the same music can play at different moments and mean something different. It does not shift and it doesn’t play the scene: It’s a kind of response or memory. With the opening sequence was a way of scoring the everyday. On the one hand it’s a highly romantic thing, but it’s also about the ordinary moments, and those ordinary moments are going to continue throughout the movie. Even though the divorce overtakes these peoples lives, it doesn’t change the fact that they have to get their hair cut and get their kid dressed for school. All those moments that you see in the beginning are going on, but they’re different now. They’re the same and they’re different. I felt Randy understood that implicitly. I sit next to him at the piano at his place at the Palacaides. He plays and we talk. I talk non musically, but emotionally and he finds this musical language for these things. He will do things that I will take home with me and put into the cut. The pieces continue to grow and they inform the movie. Having those themes early on, because I cut in order, helped me cut the movie going forward. The movie has a musicality that helps me go forward. The more I do this the more I try to have all the collaborators involved as early as possible. I don’t write all these scenes if I don’t know these actors have their parts. I don’t write Nora’s monologue or have her saying, “sorry I look so schlepy– I had an event at my kids school.” Laura Dern delivering that line makes it brilliant. Otherwise it’s just fine as a line. Randy is just a wonderful collaborator in that way. 

There is that fantastic scene where Scarlett tries to be amicable and then things fall apart into catastrophic collapse. How do you put yourself through that, Adam, and how many takes can you do in a day?
AD: We shot the sequence over the course of two days. We blocked it out and had rehearsal before the movie started. We rehearsed it in a room, similar to a play, in L.A. We taped it out on the floor, just like a play, and we ran through it by saying it to get used to each other, and then we rehearsed it the day of, if not the day before. At that point we had a couple of weeks of knowing each other. You have to know it, and thats easier with Noah’s language, because it’s so well written, so you’re not memorizing lines, you’re memorizing ideas and thoughts. Then we rehearsed it on the day. We blocked everywhere we were going to go. With Noah’s scripts, the lines are very similar to a play– there’s no changing the lines, but the intention is up for grabs. You can adjust as much as you want. I knew this from doing runs of plays, you do a play for four months, eight shows a week and always at the end, it has evolved into a better version than where you started, either through repetition or a new idea or the actors are doing something new, or something in your life has happened to you that influences your performance. Noah has compressed that into a day. You are given a lot of opportunities to run it, you can play with intention and either Noah or you will come up with an idea, sometimes just the act of doing over and over again wears you down and makes you more available. You look at a light on the set that somehow opens you up to a new idea, which only comes from good writing. Only good writing gives you enough places of your imagination to help you reimagine it. This is because there is no right way to do a scene. There are infinite possibilities. It makes sense on the page, but sometimes theres an emotional truth that makes even more sense than on the page. We started at the beginning of the day and went through to the end of the day. We did a lot of takes to make sure there was no regret. The second day, we realized it was hard to just jump into the second part, so we would have to run it from the beginning through to the end. There was just one camera that we were pushing around. Noah set very clear blocking and lines. Being within that is very freeing to me, because you know what your base is. What happens, you never push for emotion, because it never comes. You always rely on the text, which was very strong and very beautiful, and then I relied on my scene partner Scarlet, and even the crew. You could feel the focus in the room, and when you have a director who’s there with you who you feel is acting the scene with you, who’s not vacant or a spectator, you feel very free to not waste time in getting hung up on your own insecurity. You have to say it and mean it, and if the environment is comfortable to do that, then the conscious and unconscious part of acting that is most exciting for me takes over. You’re not processing anything. You’re just trying to mean it as much as possible. Inevitably, maybe something will happen if you’re there with your partner and the people in the room.  

What was your approach to the clothing and the movement of your character, Laura?
LD: It is all in the writing. Even the costume design was laid out. Even the red shoes and how she flicks them off was a description. We had this amazing collaborator, Mark Bridges, who I worked with a few times and love so much. I’ve worked with amazing filmmakers, but the’re not at my costume fittings. Noah was there for every conversation. Every detail and choice was important to him and it mattered. So to feel like we were not only designing, but defining how she uses her physicality to win, was pretty fascinating, perhaps especially at this time to consider a woman in her previously male dominated workplace environment, considering the take over, in order to represent a woman; to win that woman’s voice and using everything she has as a woman to beat the men, is weird and thickly layered. We met a few incredibly generous lawyers, particularly in Los Angeles, some of them who have even moved toward mediation because they know the system is so fractured. They are stealth and part of it is their physicality. I’ve never seen people at work using even their body and their physicality to win a legal case, but it’s a real thing. It was fascinating that every single detail was considered. I just wanted to add, and that Adam is describing so beautifully, is what you’re given in every moment in the space that Noah creates. It can’t be taken lightly the reverence for a set that Noah has. When you walk in, everyones checked their cellphones at the door, because this is space where we get to invent and find the story. There is a ritual and something that is a deep opportunity, where we are given this safe haven to find these characters whether its the physicality or the emotion of it, or from the painting on the wall, or days of exploring. It takes not only the auteur that he is, but the deep love for film, and the reverence that he has for storytelling that I think sets the tone for the entire cast and crew. So that you keep wanting to go on. You get so excited to keep exploring every possibility to tell this story he has laid out for us.

Q&A with Shia LaBeouf, Alma Har’el, Noah Jupe, and Byron Bowers

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Can you take us to the beginning of this process, when you had bits and fragments of the story?
Shia LaBeouf: I was in an emotional rehab facility. It was court ordered that I go to a mental institution in Connecticut. I got arrested in Georgia and they sent me to this place. I got there and they said, “you have PTSD. We have a solution called Exposure Therapy for you.” It’s in the film. You go into a room and do a sort of Gestalt therapy two-step, with a therapist who walks you through your deepest darkest. You pick at your shadows. It is all recorded and then you listen back to it at night. You go over this stuff. Once a week I had access to a computer, and I was never good with grammar, so there’s this website called Grammarly. I would take my notes, transcribe them on Grammarly, and then once a week send them to Alma as good as I could get it. This went on for close to two months. Even before that, she said, “hey maybe there’s a narrative here.” We’ve been collaborating with each other on and off throughout the years. She’s got the best taste of any woman I know. There’s a whole lot of love between us. We collaborated on a bunch of auxiliary projects and we were looking for a narrative. I knew her process felt good as an actor. I would send her these pages and she would send me back notes and we wrestled this thing into something with structure, and even that changed later on. It was enough for us to go shoot, and we found this incredible young man, we found Lucas. They made it their own, relinquished all agency and were focusing on this one little thing I was trying to do. Everybody zeroed in on what their gig was and together we built something we felt was close to the truth. 

That is what broke me and made me feel like I had to make this film.

What elements came to you that you really gravitated towards in this story, Alma?
Alma Har’el: It definitely was not imagery that captured me the most at first. It was actually the dialogue and Shia’s ability to bring me into the room in the motel and I think it all started with that. The idea that we can step into his father’s shoes and writhe in both the pain he inherited from him and the addiction and anger, but at the same time have so much kindness and humor in him. That is what broke me and made me feel like I had to make this film. A lot of the imagery was actually something I was shoving down his throat. Those are things that came to me. The “no no no” thing came from youtube clips where Shia says “no no no” during Transformers. It’s one of my favorite things to watch. It tells the story of what Shia had to do on those sets in order to make things real. He’s such a talent, and is being treated, in a way, like a marionette. Hanging from that harness was something that felt haunting to me, but it wasn’t what got me to do the film. It was more like the thing I put on top. What made me want to do the film was the relationship between father and son and the way Shia wrote the script.

Noah, Could we talk about the motel scene and how it was built with your performance?
Noah Jupe: I guess this movie felt like a family to me. I think that came down to Alma a lot and the producers. The crew was really close and also me, Shia, Alma, Lucas, Byron were all hanging out all the time in the months before the shoot. We were building that relationship, friendship, and trust. I think that massively influenced how the scenes played out. We wouldn’t have got the emotion that was found if we didn’t have that safety to take risks. There were a lot of hugs on this set.

There is a calibration between the dark parts and the humor in this film, and I was wondering how you were able to find your performance as Percy, Byron?
Byron Bowers: The only thing that was solid was what his character was going through. In my mind I knew what this character needed in the moment, so I was just trying to make him feel comfortable. I know he didn’t want to be there, and I was just trying to make him feel comfortable and relaxed. I told him there are worse places he could be. You get to finish, but I don’t get to finish. It’s my fourth time here. I was feeling guilty about being the son of an addict myself. My brother and sister both did extensive years of crack. Me and my cousin Mike turned out different. He was in prison at the time. They gave him ten years, and I was doing this. And I complain about this! It was a version of my real story too. I used that to help Otis get through those scenes.

Q&A with Taika Waititi and Thomasin McKenzie

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The author of the book had a great line about your films: “Laughs are never free. There are always strings attached.” Can you speak about the humor in this film and its fine calibration, especially in its opening sequences?
Taika Waititi: I always thought that humor and comedy are very powerful tools and effective weapons against bullies and bigotry. For a very long time it has been effective against dictators and people who enjoy spreading intolerance and hate. Sometimes people might feel nervous that there’s a mixing of this subject matter and infusing it with humor. The power of comedy is that it opens audiences up to deeper messages that you might want to deliver. It subverts what would normally be a very dramatic experience. When you open up, you’re more alert and more focused, and then the heavier things that happen in this film are more effective and I think are more impactful. Humor is not a new thing. It’s been eighty years since The Great Dictator came out. It’s not a very controversial idea to be mixing humor with this kind of subject matter. There’s this great story about Groucho Marx in the thirties. I think it was his daughter that was with some friends to celebrate a birthday in Beverly Hills in a country club. She wasn’t allowed in the pool because she was Jewish. There was a no Jews in the pool policy at the time. Retaliating in typical Groucho Marx fashion he said, “to be fair, she’s only half Jewish, so would you consider letting her into the pool up to her waist?” When you retaliate with humor and the ability to poke holes in these ridiculous ideas, if you poke enough holes in the fabric of these ludicrous world views, then you start seeing through it. You start to see it for what it is: a sort of thin veil. It then starts to disintegrate and fall apart.

All my films are a mixture of light and dark

Thomasin, I was wondering if you could speak about your first read through and where you first saw your character fitting into this story?
Thomasin McKenzie: I think Elsa is one of the more grounded characters in the film. I wanted to make sure not to play her in a funny way and to take her more seriously in the end. Definitely in the script and the writing there is a lot of humor. Elsa is a bit mean to Jojo and kind of pushes him around a bit. There is a kind of humor in there. When I first read the script, the tone was there. It was such a perfect script; I think everyone who was attached to the film knew what they were filming immediately going into it. Sometimes you do a film and you’re not quite sure what the tone is going to be. I think everyone kind of knew. We knew what we were making and we were proud of what we were making. We knew it had an important message and we knew it was going to be something special. In creating Elsa, I definitely did as much research as I possibly could to get her background, and then when we were doing the Holocaust lesson at school, I learned a lot about the structure and the facts about World War II. What were the causes and what were the consequences. I was curious to know what was the everyday life, what was it like to live back then. I talked with a historian, who was able to fill in a lot of gaps for me. And I spent time reading, I read books like “Anne Frank,” and I also went to Terezin concentration camp where Elsa likely would have gone had she been found. Only 150 kids survived that camp. I spent a lot of time in a Jewish order in Prague and in a synagogue. I just kind of walked around; it was really pretty and well preserved. There were a lot of Jewish artifacts as well that were well preserved in Prague because the Nazis planned to used the art in a kind of museum for an extinct race, which is a really terrifying idea. It’s really just wrong. Something really special about this film is that it allows us as an audience to look at World War II in a different way. I think in terms of Elsa, I approached the role having done all the research and all the preparation which allowed me to realize that of course Elsa is the victim and she’s been put through something that no person should have to experience; but she also is just a human being. She’s like me. She’s going through puberty, she’s got a crush on a boy, she is a really talented artist and she’s strong, courageous, and witty.

This film was a book first. Could you talk about adapting it?
TW: The book is a lot darker and more dramatic, while also being less humorous. But the story is essentially the same about a boy growing up in World War II Germany, the induction into the Hitler Youth, and then his discovery that his mother is hiding a girl in their attic. Then he has to deal with what in his mind is a monster living in his house. I took that storyline and I tried, but I’m not very good at making a straight drama. It’s not really my style. I worked quite particularly to my style of filmmaking. I added humor and this imaginary buffoon friend character, Hitler. All my films are a mixture of light and dark because I think that is more indicative of the human experience day to day. I don’t think there are many are many people who wake up and think, “it’s a comedy all day long!” I wanted to mix these things because everyday life is a turn from humor to tragedy, back to humor, to horror, and to drama. That is how I’ve always shaped my film.

Q&A with Tim Seelig

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Were you the one who conceived of this tour in the first place?
Tim Seelig: We were coming out of the 40th anniversary of the gay men’s chorus. San Fransisco Gay Men’s Chorus birthed the movement. It was the first chorus in 1978 to proclaim its sexual orientation. It was a small musical organization, and now it’s worldwide. On the 40th anniversary, we were going to go to China, because we looked around the globe and the only really major country that did not have a gay men’s chorus was China. The election happened, and we were spending a lot of money to go to China knowing that we would be shut down by the state media anyway, so the impact we would be making was limited. Literally the day after the election, our board chair called and said, “let’s postpone China: The South really needs our help.” Boy did we ever underestimate how much help it really needed! Just last week, the Supreme Court announced it will decide whether gay people can be fired for their sexual orientation on a National level. It’s insane. This message, that we thought might have a shelf life, that we hoped might have a shelf life, is apparently urgently important to deliver today.

I have seen it twenty times. I cry every time.

What percentage of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is from the South?
TS: I don’t know that exact figure, but I do know that I conducted the gay men’s chorus in Dallas Texas for twenty years before I got the job in San Fransisco. Even Dallas was this way– where young men who had come out in urban areas were happy, and then the people who grew up in rural towns all over the ten state area were looking for a place where they belonged. This is not unlike San Fransisco as you can well imagine. No offense to New York, but people do think of San Fransisco as the gay Mecca! I would say a good twenty five percent of them come from the South. I can start a good ol’ southern baptist hymn and they all join in. It’s frighting that they carry that brainwashing with them.

Did you have any fear going into this project?
TS: I didn’t have any fears because I grew up in the South. I know that Southern people, while there is a fringe, Southern people are nice. They don’t ordinarily gather their guns to shoot gay people. I was not frightened knowing we were going to larger cities. Our board of directors, however, was frightened. The people who had never been out of California were freaked out. We had a large police presence, the FBI was listening into ‘chatter,’ which I think is just the best marketing ever. Two weeks before we left on tour to Charlottesville, it made our board people crazy, so they just said, “this is what we are going into.” They doubled the budget for security. We had a police escort wherever we went. The afternoon we got to the First Baptist of Greenville, we were doing our warm up in the big sanctuary and they said, “uh… we’re going to change our plan. You’re not going to rehearse. We’re going to go to Fellowship Hall down the way and we’re going to get you some food. On your way out, make sure to pick up all your bags and all of your possessions and take them to the Fellowship Hall.” This was because of a bomb scare. We had no idea that they had been getting bomb threats at First Baptist. This is not surprising in Greenville South Carolina, that the fringe rednecks would not want the gays at the Baptist Church and boy, they didn’t.

At what point did David Charles Rodriguez come into this, and when did you you decide to make the experience into a feature documentary?
We had no idea. We planned the tour. When this got out, we decided to call it a “Red State tour.” Immediately, two days after the election, our PR firm put out a press release that the “Gay Men’s chorus goes on Red State tour.” It took off. The media hits were in the hundreds of thousands. If you remember the aftermath of the election, it was not a pretty time. People were looking for anything that was hopeful. So it really caught on. There was kick back, saying, “you can’t go on a Red State tour. There are 33 of them.” Some are actually pretty progressive. We changed the name to the Lavender Pen Tour. This name comes from the fact that our first performance was on the night Harvey Milk died. Before he died, Harvey Milk gave a Lavender Pen to Mayor George Mascone, who was also assassinated, to sign the country’s first equal rights bill for LGBT people. We took that as our baton for Harvey. People have told me, “that is just the weirdest name ever.” We like it and we don’t care what others think! Shortly after that, we had three different entities come to us and say we want to make a documentary. They said this is so cool, and would you allow us to go along with you. We were clueless. We interviewed all three of them. They were all wonderful and they had their hearts right out where we wanted them to be. The one that rose to the top was the pitch from Air BnB, which is a San Fransisco company. Their brand is “We Belong.”  They wanted to support this. They had a media department doing commercials and short films, but they had never done a longer film, and we didn’t know any better. Air BnB went out and found David Charles and hired him to be the director and the crew. We didn’t know. We thought we were going to get a nice little tour video to show “What I did on Vacation last Summer.” They had three hundred hours of film, they hired an editor in Los Angeles and just said, “here is the three hundred hours. Call us when you’ve watched it all.” It all just unfolded. It was sad for us because they did not ask our opinion. We saw the final product. This was surprising because we did not know what any of the process was. On the airplane home from LA to San Fransisco, Chris and I wrote notes. We said this might be better. We sent them to David Charles and the lovely group, and they tore them up! We were stunned when we saw this. I have seen it twenty times. I cry every time. I just see this message. Everyone needs to see it. Not because of me or anything else, but because at this time in our country, the fact that people should not be together came together, shows us that it can be done. After Tribeca, Sheila found us and that was a happy day. 

Q&A with Ira Sachs and Isabelle Huppert

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You are such a quintessential New York Filmmaker, Mr. Sachs, but now you’ve made this film set in Portugal. I was wondering how the story came to you and how you worked with your writing partner, Mauricio Zacharia, to develop this film?
Ira Sachs: Probably around fifteen years ago, I saw a film by Satyajit Ray, the Indian master Filmmaker, called Kanchenjungha. It’s about a family on a vacation in the Himalayan mountains, and it takes place in one day. There are nine stories; there is a crisis that brought them together. The role of nature in that film is part of what makes it such a resonant film for me. It stuck in my head for a really long time as a really great set of boundaries about how to approach a film. When I met Isabelle after Love is Strange, she had seen the film and we started talking about the possibility of working together — among other things like life, family, and art.  It seemed  to me that this mountain project  would be a good one to go on with Isabelle, because we would both be somewhere different from our home. I then went with my co-writer, whose family is from Portugal. He recommended that we consider Centra. When he said that, I remembered I had been there on a family vacation when I was fourteen with my mom and two sisters. So my co-writer and I went back there. I visited maybe three or four times in the course of writing the film. This is not a film about Portugal, but it is a film about the landscape I discovered in the time I spent there. I had a very strong and intimate emotional response to the things I saw and felt. So we wrote the film specifically for the locations that are in the movie.

I think there is a certain amount of mystery to all good scripts

Isabelle, do you want to talk about your first reactions to the script?
Isabelle Huppert: We had conversations before I got the script from Ira. We started this conversation about two years before and we expressed the wish to work with each other. I had no idea what Ira had in mind, I knew that he was going to write something for me, but I had no idea what it was going to be about. He then sent me the script and I thought it was wonderful. It was well written enough to leave some blank spaces so I can fill it with my own imagination. I think there is a certain amount of mystery to all good scripts in a way. A script is a very weird material. It’s not a book or a film. It’s an amount of indication and information. The two main lines for me were that she was an actress and also that she was going to finish her life. The third fact about the film was that it was going to be shot in Portugal. I think the film says it all about the relationship between the drama that the landscape carries and the inner drama that all these characters have. This family’s journey and the landscape have a mirror effect. I was really excited when I read it because it was very promising.

IS: I think for me there are two ways of thinking about that sense of what is not known at the beginning of the film. As a director and a writer, I’ve always had an instinct to position people somewhere in the middle of the story. This way you get a sense that there is a movie and a set of stories that happened before the film and there will always be a set of stories after the film. There’s a sense that part of watching a movie is finding your way into the middle. That is done elliptically. It is not easy to create intimacy. When a movie asks you to engage with the conversations and in that work, I think there is a relationship that is between the audience and the characters. The other thing was that the film was a very personal one for me. It was not an autobiographical film, but a personal film in the sense that in the past five to ten years, I have been closer to illness and death in a way that I had not been in my thirties; I am now in my fifties. One of the things I felt very powerfully was not a secret, but that there were so many other conversations about life. That life is what goes on until the last moment. I felt there were many different genres going on. Not long ago I was very close to a very good friend who died of breast cancer at 50. I felt that I could have done in any one day, with her and her family and friends, done a story about money, sex, love, generations, loss. To me this film is less about dying and death, but is ultimately about loss.

I wanted to talk a little bit about your shooting style. With so many wonderful long takes, it feels like one flowing piece instead of like fragments. Can you talk about the scene where Mr. Gleeson purchases some pastries and then talks with Frankie?
IS: There was definitely a shooting style to the film, which came from a wonderful Portuguese cinematographer named Rui Poças. When we started, we thought about making a film about people walking and talking through nature and outdoors. We took a look at Éric Rohmer. We discovered a very particular language in Romer that we adapted for this film. It involved that there was no cutting without the actors making a movement that generates the reason for the cut. You never get to cut in for emphasis. What this ends up doing is leaving the actors with the space, and you are watching both the character and the performance, which I think is part of the pleasure of this movie. Its watching how the characters get from one place to another. In that particular scene, it is very choreographed work and we planned on doing it in three sections. As we were shooting, a hurricane, which was the first in 200 years, started coming into the region. What was supposed to be a twelve hour day became a one hour day. We thought we could come back and Brendan Gleeson said, “Well we have twenty minutes. Can we do the whole scene in one take?” There is this playful, joyous performance that happens between the two that feels very natural and very much what they as actors could bring to the scene. I’m glad it worked out.