Archives

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

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q&A with Viggo Mortensen and Vicky Krieps

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

she’s really holding on in the movie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q&A with George Miller and Chris Hemsworth

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

The Mad Max mythology has been with many of us for our entire lives. Can you talk about bringing Furiosa to the screen, particularly as it relates to the previous film and the way they were, in some sense, created simultaneously?
George Miller: That’s exactly right. The movies made three decades ago really weren’t connected except for the Max character. They were kind of exercises in storytelling, but never connected. This is quite different in that we had the story, as you know, of Furiosa before we shot Fury Road. There’s no other way to tell the story of Fury Road, which happens over such a compressed amount of time; there was no way to get the internal logic of everything, not only of the characters, but of the world and the objects and the costumes and language of that world, unless we really understood it.

So the actors and the cast and the crew and the designers on Fury Road had this story before we launched into that one. And we have a film now, all this time later, that runs directly into Fury Road, as you saw here. So I’m really grateful that the internal logic of this film was apprehended, basically, by people who had seen Fury Road already, and that they were then able to expand on it more in this film.

I’ve come to think that directing is a little bit like being an athletics coach

Part of the mythology is also introducing it to new people. And I’m curious, Chris, what did you think when you first encountered the character of Dr. Dementus, the script, and this world? Because in a lot of ways, this is not only part of our collective mythology, but it’s also a particularly Australian mythology.
Chris Hemsworth: Yes— David Collins, who plays Smeg in the film, summed it up well. He said, “the Americans have Star Wars, the Brits have Harry Potter, and we have Mad Max.”

GM: Says a lot about us!

CH: Exactly— says a lot about us. So, obviously I had grown up watching the Mad Max films and I was inspired in many ways as an actor, but also I thought a lot about the sort of the adventure that the stories had taken me on as a young kid; they were very prominent in my thinking.

I, like many people, saw Fury Road and was blown away. Having worked in the industry at that point for a number of years, I’d seen behind the curtain enough and I understood sort of how the tricks worked. When I first read the Fury Road script, though, I was back in the seat as an audience member and I was truly captivated as a fan and forgot that I was a part of the movie making business. I was a fan again, and I called my agent and said, “I have to work with George in any way, shape or form… I’ll carry coffee to the set if he needs it, just to be on the set.” A few years later this opportunity came up and I read the script and we met at his office in Sydney and spent a couple of hours talking about the world… but mostly about the psychology and the character of Dementus himself, that for many different reasons resonated so loudly with me. And that began the endless discussions and journey into creating the character and finding a window in.

Part of the mythology of every Mad Max is that there is a villain with a potential mentor / mentee relationship. But in this film, the audience really gets to be with the antagonist and his proposed mentee for the first hour of the film. George, can you discuss that choice?
GM: Well, when we first had the character, I had no idea who could play him. Because it was… if it was diving in the Olympics, I had a sense even from the beginning, it was a dive that was the highest degree of difficulty, and I wasn’t sure who could pull it off.

I remember early on we did some concept art of Dementus: he looked nothing like the one we’ve made here, but he did have a teddy bear. And that teddy bear, somehow, was amplified through the story and became significant. The other thing we did in some early concept art was to make him a bit of a showman. A different mode of basically ruling his tribe, as it were, his bike horde, then that of Immortan Joe, who’s a kind of a demigod, kind of deified in some sense. We’ve seen variations on both of those themes throughout history, I believe, and particularly in Dementus, it was all about pageantry: his vehicles, his dress, his language. His behavior is all about that thing that we’ve seen right throughout history. He changes as the story goes on, but to be honest, I had no idea who could play him.

I’ve come to think that directing is a little bit like being an athletics coach. I mean, without going on too long, actors have to be physically athletic, intellectually athletic, and emotionally athletic. And I’ve come to realize in a way that, for me, they’re kind of warrior-like. Warriors of the psyche, I think. And as a director you don’t really know – just as with an athlete – whether they’re going to deliver the goods. You know that they’ve got the innate talent—they’re born with it in some way. And then you get the athlete and they drill and they work and so on, and basically amplify those talents.

And then you get the actors together in a team. And the team has to drill and work. But it’s in the moment of performance, it’s the moment of the game, when they completely surrender all of that, all that preparation, to their instinct. And you don’t know what’s going to happen. And you hope that the game is going to go well, but when you see it, when you’re sitting there, nowadays on the monitor watching it, and quite often you’ll have, you know, more than one camera, and you’re watching it, and you see it there or you more than see it— you feel it, you experience it, and that’s always a great moment for me… and then to see it again and again and again, in the cutting room, and get the same feeling every time.

That’s really, sorry to go on about it, but it’s really interesting to me, like a great bit of music. No matter how often you hear it, you still get that experience. It brings you back into that. That’s when I’m thankful for those moments that we see, because it’s just a wonderful feeling.

In the Mad Max world, characters don’t wear their personal tragedies on their sleeves. Even in Road Warrior, Michael Preston’s character says to Mel Gibson something to the effect of, “you think you’re special because you have someone that you lost? Everybody lost something.” But Dementus is very open about having experienced loss, and he wears it like it is something that’s important to him. Can you talk about building the backstory for Dementus?
CH: You know, I’d had the script for two years and had a lot of different ideas about the character. And different sorts of inspirations. And it wasn’t until about two weeks before shooting that I started to kind of panic because I didn’t quite have a grasp on the character. I knew that he was villainous; I’d logged all my lines at this point, and it was all sort of in there… but I was still kind of uncertain. George suggested that I write some journal entries in character. And… even when he said it, I thought, “oh yeah, okay, maybe…” you know. And I woke up one night (not that I just forget anything George tells me), but I was in this sort of frenzied state of… and I woke up in the middle of the night and just put pen to paper and thought, “just don’t take the pen off the page and just write.”

I closed the book, didn’t think much of it, and then I showed it to George the next day, and I think a lot of it landed for me at that point. The why of who this character was, it was about backstory. It was about his own suffering, his own trauma, and then I had the sort of light bulb moment: there is an arrested development to this guy, you know, through his traumatic experiences, his own abuse, he suffered.

It was a stunted maturity and growth. And so that explained to me the sort of childlike, impulsive, flamboyant actions he takes throughout the film. You know, he’s throwing a tantrum at one minute, and then he’s screaming for attention over here. He’s celebrating over there. I began to understand what he was screaming for, which was his own way of trying to ask for love. You know, it was his own way. He wanted the same thing everyone else wanted. He wanted connection. He wanted to be part of a family. The teddy bear, as you said, it was, it was from an illustration. Then it was in the costume, but it was never discussed in the script what it meant. And we were in the scene where I think I suggested maybe I’d give it to Furiosa in that moment. And, and then it was later I think we added in the line that it had belonged to him.

It interestingly sort of took on a life of its own at that point. It became very symbolic to him for his own reasons. It also becomes symbolic to Furiosa. It also represented a loss of innocence for the entire wasteland. It was something that they’re all searching for.

It had been taken from all of them at one point or another. It was perhaps a prisoner that Furiosa then frees later. It’s interesting trying to sort of, you know, reverse engineer, or go back and remember at what point things kind of came to life, but again, I think not seeing the character as a villain, actually seeing him as a person too, it then it started to make sense: the villain sees himself as a hero just as much as the hero sees himself as a hero.

I think he’s very… the impulse is to say, “he’s just this bad guy.” But once he was a real person to me, I really warmed to him. And now I have to be careful sometimes publicly articulating my compassion for the guy! Because he’s also a savage, obviously. And so I don’t justify any of the things he does, but you understand.

Some people, when abused, take that energy and that past and continue the cycle as he does. Whereas with Furiosa, there’s a revenge in it, but she chooses to exist in a more noble fashion. But for him, it was this excuse: “I’m allowed to treat you this way because that’s how I was treated.”

GM: Can I just say from the coach point of view, the first response that I got was your response to the screenplay. And I thought, “oh my goodness, he… I’ve been working on this for years, and he already seems to understand more than I do.” And then reading that journal, those five pages, I thought, “yes, he’s going deeper!” And then as we were shooting, he used to say, “you know, if there was this relationship with curiosity, if it was clearer…” and as that built through the shoot, basically expressed through the exchange of the teddy bear and all that sort of stuff, I thought, “wow, that thread of the tapestry is much, much stronger than I anticipated it would be.”

And for me, I found that if I have an understanding of not only their character, which is the obligation, but also an understanding of the context of that character and the interaction of that character with others, that’s when it becomes really powerful for me and it’s just like, you know, training some great Olympic gymnast or diver or something like that. It’s just a great feeling. You try to create the space for the actors to work together and then you put them together, and when you see them stick the landing as they say, it’s just a great feeling. I’m very grateful to this film that this happened with all of the cast, particularly when you’re working together. We’re not interested so much in what the individual actor is doing—it’s what they do to each other, or the characters do to each other, that’s really where the drama lies. Anyway, thanks Chris.

.

Q&A with Jane Shoenbrun and Brigette Lundy-Paine

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of I Saw the TV Glow.

Jane, this film has so much depth and vision. It’s obvious how much thought and work went into it. Can you talk about where the inspiration came from?
Jane Schoenbrun: Thank you. I know, it’s crazy. They take a lot of work. I made my first film right before the pandemic. It was called We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. And I made that film after working in the New York independent film world for about ten years. I think I knew more than most filmmakers about the ways in which the system isn’t necessarily set up to support radical art making. And I made my first film for no money. I made it in the woods with like ten people. I’m glad I did that so I could make a movie that was fully on my own terms. And I’m really proud of it; it was such a deeply personal film, but I think by starting my fledgling film career by doing a project like that, it allowed me to make something this radical with the budget. And through the process of making World’s Fair, I figured out I was trans. I think that film was very much me looking for myself through the process of trying to unpack why I was so scared to make my own work as an artist. By the time I finished that movie and it premiered at Sundance, I had come out, I had started to physically transition, and I was very early in the process. And this was also when TV came out onto the page. It was a very intense time not only because early transition is a very precarious time, but it was like a complete reappraisal of everything that I had thought of as my life as like a 32-year-old married quote unquote straight person. It was also this time of possibility, but in a very fledgling way. Early transition, you’re running very quickly towards something that you kind of can’t even imagine yet. It’s very raw, and so much of what felt raw about it was trying to recontextualize everything that had happened over the first thirty years of my life instead of thinking of it as… just how life is. It almost felt like so many of the things that I thought of as home were actually keeping me from myself, because I knew that the price of entry to that world was repression.

Writing this movie in the first month or two of physical transition while all of that was so present, and none of the good parts of transition had really started yet—like meeting Brigette—I was just really trying to capture it. I was trying not to necessarily explain it to an audience, but to make something that felt as overwhelming and did justice to the complexities of it without watering it down. To aid audiences. I loved television as a kid and it made sense to return to this sort of fixation of being so obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I cared more about those character’s high school experiences than I did my own. It felt like a natural way to continue talking about the ways that we cope before we’re ready to see ourselves as trans people.

what felt important to me was really believing in what Maddy believed

Brigette, what was your first impression of the script?
Brigette Lundy-Paine: I had met Jane on Zoom, and I think I read the script right after, and watched World’s Fair at the same time.

JS: At the very same time?

BLP: Oh yeah, I was like [imitates going back and forth between the two]. I was really moved by the script because I felt that it was like being at the mouth of a cave and I was only seeing the very beginnings of what it would mean to me. And I felt the colors and the vibrations of it so vividly and palpably in a way that I hadn’t been reading in other scripts in a long time, or maybe ever. I also just loved the character of Maddy right away, and I loved the way that the teen dialogue was used. It was familiar, but it felt very self-aware. I could just feel how smart Jane was and how I would get to say these things that I’d read in scripts before, like “I’m getting out of this town,” but I’d get to say it with real devastation! And I really loved meeting Jane, which lent itself so much to my understanding of the script, and then there was no turning back.

I really appreciate how earnest your performance is. Did the two of you have discussions about the allegory of the film, or did you play it very directly based on what was in the script?
BLP: We had a lot of discussions about the allegory. Jane and I would meet every week for a while, and they would tell me about the character of Maddy, and their ideas about Maddy, and then they told me the sort of lore of TV Glow and what The Pink Opaque meant within the story and the world of the show. And I think that the trans allegory was very natural for me to play. I always knew that that would be a part of doing this character but what felt more important to me was really believing in what Maddy believed. And really understanding the literal extremes she went to in order to save herself.

The use of color and the look of the film is so unique. Did you have any idea what you were going to see on screen when you were playing it?
BLP: Sort of. Jane is a very detailed and precise filmmaker and so much of the preparation for the film was about the color and the shape of it. Jane and their friend Albert Birney spent two weeks or so in Baltimore. Albert is an amazing artist, and they drew like every shot of the film…

JS: Like twenty shots, okay! That’s all there was. We didn’t count it.  

BLP: And then later, Jane and Eric [Yue] did the same thing with photographing every shot.

JS: Yes. There are some big differences between making a movie for no money and making a movie with actual resources. But you do lose certain things—I missed a lot of what I got to do with no money and the nimbleness that that buys you. Not in terms of what you end up seeing on screen, but in terms of, mechanically, what a crew can pull off. Because having a lot of people in different departments makes nimbleness harder on set. Shout out Elias! But I knew that what it did buy me was this opportunity to paint and create beautiful images and worlds that aren’t just like, “oh I like that building so let me go shoot it.” And, yeah, Albert and I made these collages that he then animated, just tinkering with the most detailed little things, like the color of the green of the grass, and when the TV is burning…

The green of the vegetables in the grocery store when Maddy and Owen reconnect was really beautiful too.
JS: Well, that was actually just a location scout find. I had a totally different idea for that scene, and we were on our way out, and then I was like, wait, there’s something weird about this place. And it was the giant vegetables printed up on the wall!  I was like, I must film that.

BLP: What was Owen going to make with those leeks?

JS: Soup?

BLP: Soup!

JS:  He eats raw leeks. It’s free from the midnight grill.

Speaking of actually having a greater scale and a greater budget, what was the coolest special effect that you got to deploy in this film?
JS: I mean, I loved making the monsters. From the very beginning, I remember thinking, for the next film? Let’s go monsters. Just getting to create monsters from scratch and in the way that we did it with a lot of practical makeup effects and people in the makeup chair for like ten hours for one shot. Watching that process come to life and really trying to take a creative role in it was so rewarding. One thing that was very important to me with special effects in the film—whether it was practical or CGI, because we did a bunch of both—was that I really wanted it to feel handmade. The goal wasn’t Marvel-like, state of the art contemporary quality. The goal was something that feels within the realm of my personality. The CGI people made the mistake a few times of showing me an early rendering before they were done, and then they would have their fleet of amazing animators make it look really good. But I always took a camera phone picture of the earlier version that they had showed me over Zoom, and I would tell them we had to bring it back to that. So I forced them to take the 2024 state of the art work to like 1994 state of the art. Whether I’m conscious of it or not, I think I’m pulling from this lineage of seeing weird stuff on the internet and what sticks with me or haunts me are indelible images that aren’t necessarily showing you the most or the clearest view. It’s fuzz and it’s atmosphere and it’s distortion. With Mr. Melancholy, especially at the end of the movie when you see him, that was one that we tinkered with obsessively to try to make it look both really good and impressive, but also… wrong in some way.

Can you two talk about working on that pivotal scene at the planetarium with Brigette’s monologue?
BLP: The transition from teenage Maddy to Maddy coming back was delightful to prepare for. There’s three Maddy’s. There’s baby Maddy at fourteen who’s sort of an emo skater kid, hasn’t quite landed in the physical world but knows she has something to protect. And she has complete childlike wonder about The Pink Opaque show. And then second Maddy is like Courtney Love, she’s angry and punk. She’s experienced abuse in the home. At least we assume she has an abusive stepfather. I can never actually tell if she’s joking about him breaking her nose. But she’s definitely familiar with violence in a way. Then, when she comes back at the end, she’s been completely transformed into a different being. As she says in the monologue, “I’m me again.” And what that “me” felt like to me and Jane, what we talked about, was this creature that’s almost crawled out of the gutter. But she also feels to me a little cowboy like Harry Dean Stanton or like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, but less plucky. She’s got something to say. The planetarium scene was broken up into five sections, I think. Emma Portner, who played the monsters, did some choreography on it, and that was super effective even though it was so simple. We worked on it for a year. I had a lot of time with it so I knew it really, really well. By the time we got there, I was able to just open my mouth and it spilled out.

JS: Bridge is such a wonderful performer and human being and when I met them it was very early in the process, and I wasn’t even thinking about casting. I was just incredibly moved to have the opportunity to explore transition and evolution of self with them and give them the freedom to build the character. Watching them, I realized that it was amazing.

Q&A with Michael Showalter and Cathy Schulman

Posted on by

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

What made Michael the perfect director for this film?
I’ve been a longtime fan of Michael’s, and as a matter of fact, early on in the process I reached out to him in hopes that he might be able to get involved from the very beginning.

And when we finally sold the movie to Amazon, the script had been developed, and Anne Hathaway was already attached. And so it was after we got to Amazon that we started talking about directors. I just find that Michael’s movies are an incredible cornucopia of tones. He sort of fondly calls this movie a “rom-com-drom.” And there’s probably more “-oms” that could be attached, because one of the things that I love about his directing – I’m sorry I’m embarrassing him saying this in front of him – is that he takes each scene and treats it as its own thing. If this scene is a dramatic scene, or if that scene is a comedy scene, or if another scene is some combination of the two, or whatever it might be… he allows each to have whatever true integrity it needs to have, and I think it’s the combination of those tones that creates a certain grounded integrity that allows you to work within a genre, but also to be elevated.

And so we can’t even call this a rom-com because there’s so many reasons why it already breaks that model. And I think that’s really what Michael brought to it. I should also just say that from the beginning, one of the things that struck me about the book was that (unlike a typical romantic comedy, where the woman is choosing between two men), she wasn’t doing that here. She was choosing between which kind of happiness to have. And what intrigued me and made me want to do it was that I wasn’t sure which option I would have picked for myself: the “self-actualization in the yurt,” or, “going to go about trying to fall in love again.” And I was starting to think the yurt seemed just fine to me! And so, I thought it was really interesting to make the choice not about one man versus another man, but about how to live out your happiness, and probably any version could have been okay.

these movies teach me a little bit about the kind of person that I want to be

Michael, your filmography is a murderer’s row of incredible roles for women. Is that a conscious thing that you’ve tried to do throughout your career?
MS: No, not consciously. But I do think I oftentimes find women characters more interesting, for myself. I don’t know exactly what that’s about. I could come up with some theories, but, um, Yeah. Does that answer your question?

What’s one of those theories?
MS: Oh, okay. Well, I like characters that are misunderstood, maybe unseen, in some way. I feel like I can relate to those characters. I need to relate to them in order to tell their stories. And so I think I relate in this case to both characters, both Hayes and Solène, who feel like they’re more than what they seem to be to outside observers. And maybe it’s to themselves or to each other. Like, it’s not all conscious, but maybe both characters have more to them than what the world sees, or on some level, it’s like needing to be seen in some way. A lot of the women characters that I’ve directed tend to have that through-line, whether it’s Sally Fields’ character in Hello My Name is Doris, or certainly Anne’s character here, and they’re a character who isn’t being seen fully seen and wants to be seen more. I guess I relate to that.

It feels like we haven’t seen a genre movie like this – with a major star like Anne Hathaway in the lead – in quite a while. When did you start to see that maybe there was a gap in the market?
CS: I’m not sure I was aware of the gap! I do think it’s true that we all need a movie like this, though. We were developing this during the pandemic and I think the need for togetherness, happiness, love… like all of that was feeling really, really necessary. And we kind of kept having to wait to make this movie because we had these huge crowd scenes that are hard to manage during COVID… And we also had a lot of intimate scenes, which were also hard to manage during COVID. So I feel like it was kind of coming back around in some ways. And I’m very much like Michael in the sense that I love to work in genres, too. I just like to try to do a twist on them. Like I look at my own movies: The Illusionist is a whodunit, but it’s dressed up. Or, you know, The Edge of Seventeen is a YA, but it’s slightly different. Or, you know, Crash is a melodrama, but it’s different. I try to look at it kind of like, you know, “what can we do to twist it?” And I felt like there could be a twist on a rom-com that specifically dealt with an older woman as the protagonist. That was what was intriguing to me. You know, I had a kid at the same time we were shooting this, a teenager, while we were developing this and really questioning why Anne’s character keeps being compartmentalized. You can be this or you can be that, or you can be this, but you can’t be everything. And I just liked those ideas of sort of bringing that back into the conversation.

You’ve made send ups of rom-coms and you’ve made more earnest ones and everything in between. What brings you back to romance as a genre so often?
MS: Well, I love the genre. There’s so many things that the genre offers: it’s dramatic, it’s funny, there’s opportunities for incredible performances. I feel like it can be about something. There’s social commentary. There’s all the things: great music, great costumes, great production design. Like it has everything that I look for as a storyteller. And I’ve been talking a lot about romantic comedy as a genre, or rom-com-drom, or rom-dramedy, whatever you want to call it. And I also just like the genre. I like the tropes of the genre. They’re comforting to me. And something I like to talk about is the difference between tropes and clichés, because to me there’s a very big difference. Or “convention” could be another word. Tropes and conventions, if done correctly, are great to me.Cliché, I find, is when you do the trope or the convention, but you don’t know why you did it. So it’s in a movie, but you don’t get the sense that the filmmaker even knew what it was doing in the movie. But I love convention. I love tropes. So those earlier movies, even though they’re kind of poking fun at it, it’s coming from a place of love. Obviously, this movie is filled with references to other films that I love. Most, most notably, Notting Hill. I just feel like the genre has meant so much to me. All the movies that I grew up loving, whether it was When Harry met Sally, or Say Anything, or… or the list is really quite long.

Certainly, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral…  these movies teach me a little bit about the kind of person that I want to be. They teach me about what kind of an adult I want to be. They teach you about life, loss, love, career, family. All these things that I need, these tools that I need as an adult, these kinds of movies have the potential to address.