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Q&A with Laura Poitras

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

You really weave so many stories together so beautifully in the film. How did you and Nan weave in and out of each other’s lives?

Laura Poitras: Nan and I have intersected, sometimes literally or sometimes we’ve come across each other’s work. I was first introduced to Nan’s artwork when I was studying filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. That was the late 80s and she had already published the book version of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which I think is how the larger audience came to know her work, those that weren’t in New York. But she was also still traveling with the slideshow and she would come to the Bay Area to screen. I never got to see it with her projecting, but I did see Ballad in the early 90s. She was always a groundbreaking woman and artist who was just creating a new cinematic language. I find her still photographs to be so cinematic, right? They suggest stories that you lean into with the framing and the mise en scene. And then obviously the sequencing creates a storytelling in the slideshows. When I made Citizen Four and was traveling with it, we met at a film festival and then we reconnected around the Sackler issue and pain. We were working on a letter—there had been another situation of toxic philanthropy in the art world and a mutual friend invited both Nan and I for breakfast. It was during that breakfast that she told me about the film because Nan had already begun filming her actions with the intention of making a film. During this meeting she said she was looking for collaborators. She was also was looking for producers and we started talking about Howard Gertler, who she had just met and who was one the producers on How to Survive a Plague, about the AIDS crisis. I kept thinking about the project and volunteered for it after that.

I was struck by your background and her background and the two of you doing this together. There must have been a point where you had this conversation about how this was going to work.

LP: With non-fiction filmmaking, there is always something of an organic process that happens. You go in with a set of ideas and then they evolve and change. I was originally very compelled by the contemporary story of Nan taking on the Sackler family and these protests and the sort of direct action that felt very in line with my previous works. I was a little nervous about the artist biography part just because there are so many films about renowned people and I wonder how they function as stories… do they rely on the renown of the subject versus standing alone as films? So I had a little hesitancy there, but I couldn’t not do it. I couldn’t not go into her or go into her work. It was a very specific thing that happened. I was working on the film and saw her piece about her sister which is called Sisters, Saints and Sibyls. There’s a short excerpt where you see the three screens. It’s a devastating work about her sister. And there are certain lines in that, after her sister’s suicide and after her mother says to tell the children it was an accident. It sort of felt so much about what drives Nan. Like this relentless pursuit of truth. This idea of pretending it was an accident, I think that catapulted her at a very young age into being someone who is in resistance to what mainstream society is thinking. That’s what her family was thinking, or what the 50s and 60s thought of young girls and sexuality. I think at a very young age Nan was thrust into oppositional positions. When I saw this piece, I felt like it was so important that the film include her sister. But I didn’t know if that was something that Nan wanted. I would have obviously respected if she didn’t want to talk about something so deep and so painful. We talked and I told her why I thought it was important to the film, and she said that it was something she would talk about in the film. And we worked very closely on how the story of her sister is told in the film.

There’s something so fierce about Nan and she’s been on the right side of history for so long

Were there other specific parts of this film that you felt strongly about including in the film that you two had discussions about?

LP: Going back to the theme of portrait versus biopic, I was very clear that I wanted not to make a film that was, this happened, then this happened, and that was just following the beats of her life. I wanted to be selective around the story we were telling and particularly that it’s casting a critique on the larger society. This is the cruelty of society—of this society, not all societies. With the editing team, we first had Joe Bini who is a really incredible editor and who had worked with Werner Herzog and Lynne Ramsay, among others. He worked on this document by going through the material and built this dramaturgy document which had this kind of weaving and these themes. And each of these chapters had a theme. The first theme was “Merciless Logic,” which is a kind of like, this is who we are as a society. This is a society that destroys people, a society that crushes people that rebel, it’s a society that is conservative and allows the Sackler family to profit off many generations of Americans dying. And the government says nothing. I knew very early on that it was going to move in the direction of cinematic societal critique. And I knew very early on that the exhibition she did in New York at Artists Space was going to be a pinnacle of the film, at the beginning of third act. It was something so important that Nan twice stopped herself in that situation and was looking around and saying, generations are dying, my generation is dying here. And the government is doing nothing; people are doing nothing. I knew there would be a convergence between the contemporary pain thread and what happened around the AIDS crisis and particularly this exhibition, which was an unapologetic celebration of queer sexuality, while also acknowledging the devastation of this community. It’s kind of hard to imagine all that Nan endured. Someone who found her family and David Armstrong in the work she did and the trans communities in Boston and New York and then lost so many of those close friends. I knew I was always going to have include that, from early on. Then who to focus on kind of emerged from that. There’s a lot of people in Nan’s life that aren’t featured in the film because we had to make certain choices. David Armstrong was clearly important, Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz… what a man. If only we had his voice today.

Well in a way we do, because of his art. Can you talk about the interviews and over what period of time they took place? I was very moved when we were allowed to hear Nan say “could you please stop,” and I wonder if there were other moments like that.

LP: We wanted the audience to feel that something was happening over time and the interviews didn’t just happen in an afternoon. And that there was a back and forth. They took place probably over a year and half. They were audio only in Nan’s apartment in the same room where the meetings would happen, in the living room. I would come over and I sort of joke we’d procrastinate for a few hours because it was not easy stuff to get into. We were specific in each of them about what we would talk about, so she knew ahead of time. Sometimes someone else would be there. When we talked about Barbara [her sister] it was important for both of us to make sure someone else was there to make sure we were okay in how we processed it before and after. That was her close colleague, Alex Kwartler, who is an executive producer on the film and was very involved by working with her and making sure it was safe, because it was really intense stuff that she shares in this film. So we did these over a year and half, we did the first round and made a rough cut, we showed it to Nan, and then there were things she wanted to back and talk about more.

Were there things you thought you knew about Nan and her work where you realized, I didn’t really know this at all?

LP: In the second chapter called “Another Realm,” I hadn’t realized she was so young when she was sent to foster care and was kind of on her own at such a young age. And then this whole body of work that MIT gave with the polaroid cameras. That story I didn’t know the extent of—the fact that she still had these photographs, and that they feel like the work of a mature artist. Those David Armstrong photographs are so beautiful and she was such a young person making them, yet she was so fully formed as an artist. That was an incredible discovery. There was one of her first pictures of David and Tommy in the sand pit, and we had that photograph from far away, and late in the editing process she found the close-up. It was just these two beautiful queer men in a time when being queer, there wasn’t language for it.

Can you talk about the questions that you chose to answer, and the questions that you chose not to answer?

LP: We were not interested in teasing the audience or withholding anything. I think with any film, there’s a time when the audience has the emotional capacity to connect to something. And in the film we’re talking specifically about her sister. There were times when things in the third part were earlier, and we experienced that the audience was not ready. There were certain things we wanted to lay out, and certain things we chose to withhold because we felt like the audience’s emotional capacity had shifted over time. For instance, there’s this very powerful line where Nan says “that’s the problem. How do you show the world that you did experience it, you did feel that, it did happen, that’s why I take pictures.” It’s a very thesis-like statement. We tried that once earlier in the film, and it just felt like random exposition. A thesis statement, but not in a good way. But hopefully when you hear it at the end, it’s with emotion and says something about not only her sister, but why she does what she does as an artist. That’s just storytelling. You try things, maybe this doesn’t work here but it’s important and we’ll come back to it. I did think that this film takes you on a journey or down rabbit holes and you don’t know why you’re going down it, and then you learn later. For instance, some people know some of the characters like Cookie, but some people don’t, they don’t know she was such a force, and we don’t want to manipulate that.

What has been interesting for you as you’ve traveled with this film?

LP: I think the thing that’s been moving is how this film emotionally resonates with people, and sometimes in very different ways. Sometimes people have experience with addiction or they have a sibling that they’ve lost, or coming out. It’s powerful to see the different ways it resonates and that’s what we wanted. In the editing, we really wanted it to stay with people and move them in some way. When you direct non-fiction, you’re having your own experiences, and you hope that the audience has some of those as well. There’s something so fierce about Nan and she’s been on the right side of history for so long. She had to makes these choices at a very young age, and they’re not easy choices.

Q&A with Sarah Polley, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, Rooney Mara, and Dede Gardner

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

Can you describe your approach to adapting the novel, and to making the story so cinematic?
Sarah Polley: I think I always thought of the story as somewhat of an epic. So I always felt like it had to breathe, and feel expansive, and you had to feel the world they were going to be having this impact on, by having this conversation and thinking about both dismantling the world they were a part of, and building a new one. So it always seemed to me that it needed a scale and a scope and to breathe. 

How do you find your way into characters that have experienced such trauma?
Jessie Buckley: I guess… you’re working with such incredible people, you know? And everybody showed up for everybody every day. And you just have to sink into the stream and see how it affected you. This wasn’t like… it was an experience from something that was kind of being formed and projected, and you’d feel like you were changing throughout the course of a scene.

It just dawned on me that we’ve all got to come to the same conclusion…

Ona is a very centering presence in the film; she’s quite measured in how she reacts. Where do you think that comes from?
Rooney Mara: I think Ona has always been an outsider in that community, and has probably always had a higher level of consciousness, or connectedness, to some sort of spirit. I think she does have a sort of peace to her, but I think it’s also because she has a sort of peace with herself that she probably had to get at a young age because she was different. She has more of an education than the other women… and she has a real love for her community and her faith, in spite of the fact that she’s different. And she’s chosen to live not like the other women, but she still has such a deep connection the community and to her faith. I think she has an extraordinary amount of empathy, and sensitivity, and an ability to remain open. And that’s why she is able to sort of… not mediate, but she’s able to remain open through all of this, through whatever the other person she’s talking with is feeling, without judgement.

The character of August bears such a huge responsibility to these women. Can you talk about discovering the character, and what it was like being the only male in the ensemble?
Ben Whishaw: In the book, there’s loads more information about August. So I had a whole backstory given to me in the book, which is amazing. So it was all there for me, right at the start. It was wonderful being the only male on the set! Yeah, I don’t know: it was just an amazing… very unusual experience. I’m very blessed to have been there, and to watch, and it was beautiful. I had such a beautiful time. I just love this cast. That said, it’s a complicated position August is in. He is a man, after all. I mean, he’s aware of how complex it is for him to be in that room with what’s unfolding in front of him. But, yeah, he’s like Ona: he’s an outsider as well. He doesn’t really fit into that community at all.

RM: He’s a different kind of victim. Like Ona says in the film, they’re all — the men and the women — they’re all victims of the circumstance.

In the book, August is the narrator. Can you discuss the decision to change that, for the film?
SP: In the book, we’re reading August’s minutes of the meeting. And I wrote the script that way, we shot the film that way, we recorded it… and it was a beautiful voiceover. In the book it works beautifully. Ben’s voiceover was beautiful. And then at around the three month mark in editing, we just realized something wasn’t working. And I think it was a realization that the immediacy of sound, the intimacy of it, and of picture (adapting the material into a different medium, essentially), meant that not hearing the story from the voice of one of the women who’d experienced the trauma was distancing. So Dede [Gardner] and Fran [McDormand] had a big conversation. And Dede said, “should we look at the narrator? What if it’s Ona telling this story to her unborn child from the future?” And then Chris Donaldson, our editor, had this beautiful idea: What if it’s Autje? And I always wanted more of Autje! I was always trying to get her more central, just based on Kate Hallett’s performance. I just wanted her there. So Chris said, “what if it’s her, as the youngest person in the room?” And so it became a real experiment. And I kind of went away and wrote for a week: stream-of-consciousness voiceover, and very intentionally did not think of where it would go and how it would work. And then we would kind of choose a section and see what we could construct around that, and how that would feed into the film. But we kind of did this… it felt very reckless! We’re not doing this literally, or in terms of structure… we’re just going to throw the whole film at the wall and break it, and see what we can do as we pull it apart. And it was so exhilarating. You know, Kate was sending little voice memos as temp voiceover tracks, and we would try to construct something… and it was so fun.

JB: I’d love a voice memo from Kate every day! That’d be so nice! 

Dede Gardner: It was one of the best times of my life, when we were figuring this all out. Because you go from terrified (but so in it together… so, so committed and you think, “we’re just not stopping until we’re done, and we’re not done until it’s excellent.”) And we had this… partnership, and trust, with Chris the editor. Every night was fun. Every night they would send me a scene, and it would be cut with something, or the Kate stuff… and what about these lines, where do you put them? And it was just… building something together. I don’t know; it felt miraculous, to be honest.

SP: It was truly exciting. What was great was, we were starting from this point of, “this definitely doesn’t work.” So then anything after that was fun! You can’t be disappointed in that moment. And just to get to sort of collectively find our way closer to closer to the film we always wanted to make was incredible. And, weirdly, I think it feels truer to the book in how it is on screen than how it did when it was more literally done in the script.

DG: It makes you feel the way the book made you feel. So inside those two points, I think the guardrails can be super elastic. But we were making something every night— it was amazing.

JB: I think being on set with those two young women was quite profound. For me, it was quite profound. And knowing that these young women were the catalyst for change, for this story to start. I kept thinking about the dynamic between mother and daughter and actually how the daughter says, “stop looking away! Look at it! Be brave! Have it!” And what’s been so moving is seeing these young women, as women in the world, as young actresses, having had this experience — which is their first ever filming job — and Kate said something which I keep thinking about: “I stepped into this film thinking that I had to be good… and then I realized that there was a lot that was expected of me… and now I know that I can expect a lot.” And, like, as an eighteen year old woman, I’m like, “holy hell!” If this film can have that effect on this person, with this experience, that is the most incredible gift we can give. But I felt that throughout the whole film, I felt that from them, when were doing it.

SP: I think we were always looking for ways to make them more central. I feel like everyone, at some point, came to me and said, “how can I get more scenes with Kate?” And it was very clear, instinctually from the beginning, that Kate was central…. but it just took us a long time to figure out how that worked. 

JB: Well she’s such a silent power in that character; she’s so elemental to this meeting happening. And Kate as a person is quite silently powerful, in a really intense, direct, beautiful, interesting way. And she never let that go, you know? You feel that from her as a young woman.

Did your own conception of your character change, as you went through the process of filming? Was your understanding informed in any way by what your scene partners did?
Claire Foy: I’ll admit that when I read a script… I’m not very good at seeing the arc of the whole story, basically… it’s a failing of mine. I can see my particular character’s journey, but I can’t distance myself from the story. I really struggle with that, for some reason. And so for this film, I didn’t realize until we’d gotten to the point in the film where… it’s when me and Rooney have a moment where I’m like, “you’re changing your mind!” And I realized… “oh fuck. This is what the film’s about!” But I just didn’t really… we had never talked about the ‘Big Ideas’ of the film, we had never talked, necessarily, about the grand scheme of everything; we never talked about it from a wider viewpoint, from a distance. And suddenly… that was very significant, for me, as a character; I realized, “I’m on a slide, now, and it’s getting faster and faster and faster and faster.” I realized everything was different— my character suddenly knew where this was headed. Everyone is looking at me, everyone is wanting me to change my mind. Maybe that’s exactly how it should happen: That it didn’t hit me, what was going on, until it hit the character. It just dawned on me that we’ve all got to come to the same conclusion… and we’ve got to leave.

Q&A with Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Helen Hood Scheer

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

How did you two come to work on this project together?

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan: I made a short film called What Happened to Her a few years ago which was about dead women on screen and our cultural obsession in the media with those images. I interviewed an actress who played the part of a dead body, and I thought there was something interesting about that combination of not only these images, but what goes into the making of them. At that time, Helen approached me and wanted to work together with me on my next project. We started working on what we thought would be a triptych, looking at sex, birth, and death on screen from a women’s perspective. We started the one about sex and it was an avalanche of ideas and people and different actors that we wanted to speak with, and that’s really where it began.

Helen Hood Scheer: By that time Kristy and I were both living in Los Angeles, teaching at UCLA and Cal State Long Beach, where we both run the respective documentary programs. Before we taught in southern California, we taught at a community college together, Northern California, and that’s where we met. We were already professional colleagues and friends when we started making the film

It’s a slow, thoughtful, reflective process

There’s a precision to this film that only academics can bring. How did you cast your net for interview subjects?

KGF: We were not only interested in big celebrities, but also people who worked behind the scenes, people who weren’t your well-known identified celebrities, the working-class actor. This range of perspectives was always going to be an important part of the film. I consider it an ensemble piece.

HHS: From the get-go, having a diverse range of perspectives was really important to us; diverse ages, diverse stages in their careers, diverse types. When we started out, building on Kristy’s initial short, we thought we would record all the interviews with audio only and mix them with images and animation. When Jane Fonda agreed to do the film, we had already done a few audio interviews. And very quickly we said, we can’t record Jane Fonda with audio only. We brought out the cameras and it was at that point that the film began expanding from being a short film focusing on body doubles to being a feature focusing on intimacy and nudity in a much larger perspective. And we thought initially that once we got Jane Fonda, we would have an easy time and the doors would just open for access. That turned out not to be the case. It’s continually really challenging to get through the gatekeepers—the agents, publicists, managers. There were a couple of reasons for that. One was that many celebrities were still very hesitant to have people reconsider early work they did when they might have been less clothed than they are now in their careers. There was a lot of fear and also some fear of retribution. Despite the fact that people were being more open after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, we actually started production months before that scandal broke. So we were sort of poised to take advantage of the new energy people had towards sharing their ideas. But the fact of the matter is, many celebrities were still very hesitant to speak. Jane was very courageous, as were many others, but a lot of celebrities turned us down. A lot of lesser-known actors were willing to participate and we found that to be ultimately really fascinating because those are the people that don’t have access to the machinations of power and publicity and the ability to get their voices heard. The celebrities can tell their stories other ways and they do, so we again created an ensemble piece from people from different fields, directors, actors, writers, and all from different stages in their careers. It became an asset to the film, but it was something that evolved from our initial plans once filming began.

Can you talk about your interview process? I was really wowed by Rose McGowan.

KGF: As scholars, we really love research so we did as much research as we could. We read the trades. People like Rose McGowan and Jane Fonda have memoirs, I read all that I could and tried to watch all their work. This film was also made over a number of years, so people were at different stages in terms of going public with things that had happened in the industry. We did have the fortune of interviewing Rose after she had gone public about Harvey Weinstein and people had finally listened to her. She was so brave and it was such a wonderful interview. We always tell our subjects, this is what we want to talk about. We give them the scope of what we’re interested in discussing to make sure that they’re aware we’re going to be asking hard and difficult questions. We’re also aware of what’s already been said publicly. That offers some information about what they might feel comfortable talking about. It’s a slow, thoughtful, reflective process. I do the interviews and give them a lot of space. We have a small set and crew so there’s intimacy. There’s always a pre-interview process where we talk about what we’ll explore. I’m looking for what is emotional and what is going to relate to an audience to help them understand all that goes through an actor’s head, all that they have been put through behind the scenes. Revealing that and unearthing it in a way audiences can understand is key in order to make them sympathetic to the people we’re interviewing.

HHS: As Kristy mentioned, she does pre-interviews, and also her interviews are not short. Each of those interviews was about 90 minutes. There are a lot of questions, a lot of follow-up questions, and she also opens up the questions to me. I’m doing sound on the interviews in order to keep the crew small. Rose was really spectacular because, frankly, we had heard people could be hesitant to interview her. They had said she comes across a certain way that makes her very hard to edit. We went through with the interview and thought she was a dream to work with. Honestly, it seemed like she was responding to our emails directly. She didn’t seem to have assistants around her. She didn’t want makeup, she didn’t want anyone to drive her; she did those things herself. And she was phenomenal. There was so much we weren’t able to include in the film. She was a brilliant speaker and everything we had heard about her felt like it was part of the machine, the abuse she had been through. It felt like she had been typecast in a certain way that was so different than what our experience with her was. She was so smart and articulate and she had been through a lot of public speaking as a result of her book. We might have benefited from that. By the time she did our interview, she had a really strong clear distanced way of explaining some of her ideas in a more intellectual way, and not only in a personal way. She was able to navigate both lenses at the same time.

What is it like to spend so much time listening to women re-experience their trauma?

KGF: It can be emotionally exhausting for many reasons. Documentaries take a really long time to make, so that’s just our own labor outside of the content itself. Then these interviews are intellectually draining because they’re long and detailed and you’re trying to bear witness to people’s experiences. This idea of bearing witness is a guiding one in terms of my approach to documentary filmmaking and what gives it a bigger responsibility that I am beholden to. My gold standard is that I’m bearing witness to people that have opened up and are vulnerable and are willing to share their stories. I feel obligated to make the best of that in the film that we make. That ultimately guides everything. But there’s also a benefit to that. With Times Up and MeToo, because two women came forward, more women came forward. When we bring this to audiences, they will consider what goes into the making of the films they watch and consume—who directed it, whether there was an intimacy coordinator, what the experience was like for the actors involved. The hope is that within the industry we can hold them to a certain accountability.

HHS: There’s an intimacy involved. We didn’t do more than two interviews per day, most days. We also had a look we were going for, and that took time and care. The thing about working with small crews is that it’s not always fast, so we had choices to make. We did the interviews with a modified Interrotron, which means there was a monitor on Kristy’s face and a monitor on the crew, which made it feel like an intimate conversation even though they were sitting twenty feet apart. Even though Kristy’s face wasn’t being recorded, she was on camera and it was a really emotionally engaging activity. Sometimes it wasn’t even the interviews that were draining; those are rewarding because you get to connect with people. But the prep time can be draining—watching a series of abusive behaviors or women being represented in a way that makes them uncomfortable. Kristy had many working nights where she would need to hide her screen from her young daughter because she didn’t want her to see what she was watching.

KGF: We were also really careful about how we presented this to audiences, so we were also really thinking about the impact of that as well. We didn’t want to re-traumatize people unduly. In terms of the images we shared, particularly with the ones where actresses were talking about unsettling or bad or violent experiences they had had on set, we didn’t want to re-exploit their likenesses for our audience and for them. We tried to be as careful as we could in that curation of clips. To show enough where people were able to understand what we were talking about while not contributing to a further exploitative process.

Q&A with Tony Kusher, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, and Gabriel LaBelle

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

Can you talk about the origins of this project?
Tony Kushner: Steven told me the story that’s the core of the movie on the first day of filming Munich, in 2005, in Malta. We were doing a night shoot, and I asked him if he remembered when he knew that he was going to be a filmmaker. And he started telling me stories about the early years, including the camping trip story. And I said, “you have to make a movie out of that!” And he laughed, and then, over the years, it was kind of a running joke; I would bring it up periodically. And then, at some point (neither of us can remember when), over the last nineteen years, it turned from a joke into something that we were actually.. beginning to think about doing. And then, when we were doing West Side Story, and fighting with each other every day (especially during the rehearsal period), he called me and said, “come over and let’s start talking about my childhood memories, because I think I maybe want to do this movie some time soon.” I think he did that mostly just to make sure that we were still friends, in spite of the terrible things I was saying to him every day on the set! So we started doing interviews. I just took notes. And at some point during lockdown, he said that he was really feeling like he wanted to take this seriously as an idea. So we did more formal interviews, and then in the summer of 2020 I wrote a long, eighty one page novella of sorts based on his memories (with things rearranged), and then we took that, and condensed that into an outline, and then in October of 2020 he said, “let’s start writing.” And we wrote three days a week, for four hours a day on zoom… and we finished the script in two months. Which, for me… I still can’t believe it happened! Usually, after two months, I’ve written the first line seventy-five times over and over again, thrown it away, started therapy, quit therapy, gained ten pounds, lost twenty… actually, the other way around. But, we finished it. And he was shocked too! And we did a bunch of re-writes, and then we got the actors and we filmed it. 

the shoot really was a kind of trip through somebody’s psyche

Michelle, what was your reaction, when you learned you’d be in this film?
Michelle Williams: It was the middle of the pandemic — deep pandemic — and a text came through on my phone that I didn’t understand, or know how to read. I showed it to my husband, and he said, “no, that says what you think it says… he ‘wants to zoom with you.’ ” And we sort of jumped around the room, and did awkward middleaged people dances… and then I took a shower, put on a dress, brushed my hair… all new things. And didn’t know what was waiting for me on the other end of the screen. And… he started talking to me about his life, and his memories, and his mother… but he didn’t explicitly say to me, “this is why I want to talk to you.” And I had to brave mortification and say, “I think what I’m hearing you say is… you want me to be your mom.” And he said, “yes, yes, yes!” And I tried not to, you know, not to lose it in front of him. And then spent the next day crying, and the next day laughing, and the next day working… because the script had arrived, and then the work begins.

Gabriel, what was your experience like, when you were cast?
Gabriel LaBelle: I had just finished shooting a pilot in California, and had come home to Vancouver. So I had to quarantine for two weeks in an Airbnb. And the first audition I had, once I had been released from this quarantine was “an untitled Amblin film.” And everything TBD — you have no idea what it is. And there are two scenes to look at… and it’s not until much later that you hear, “I think he’s directing it! And it’s about his life! And that character you’re reading for… is him!” And then I find these articles: Michelle is attached, and Paul, and Seth… and Tony is writing it with him… and I hear nothing for three months. So, you assume you don’t get it. And then suddenly they want a callback over zoom, with Cindy Tolan, the casting director. And that went well. And the next day, they’re like, “Steven would like to meet with you now.” Which is the most validating thing on the planet, to be told that. It feels amazing. Two days after that, I have another scene over zoom with him, and it goes really well (I think), and I just felt like… we had this amazing conversation for thirty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes I was acting, but thirty-five minutes we really connected on what this movie is, and about his life… and I just came away thinking, “if it’s not this, it’s the next one.” Maybe he’s looking for another character some day. I did what I can do, and this is amazing. And then the next day, they tell me that I had gotten the part. And, umm… the work begins a week later, when I get the script. And I just wanted to understand the story— understand his life, who he is. What story he wants to tell, about his parents, about him, his perspectives, his relationships and how they all change.

You’re playing characters based on real people, but those people aren’t known by the audience. However, they’re very well known by your director. Can you talk about that dynamic?
MW: I guess I didn’t think of her as being a fictionalized version of Steven’s mother; I thought I was his mother. It’s actually why I’m not really able to look at playback, or look at stills, or watch things, because in my head there is no separation. So I wasn’t really… there are certain aspects of selfhood that are very difficult to escape. And so… the thing I’m always working for is to get as far away from myself as possible, because there are things I’m going to take along for the ride that I hope I can shed over time, because I want to grow and expand and not be bound by certain aspects of myself that may or may not be helpful in playing a character. I’m really trying to get as far away from myself as possible. Because the things that are inherent to me, I bring them along anyway. I really didn’t think, “what’s my interpretation of this woman?” I was really interested, mostly, in the source material: all of the facts, the details, the memories, the… everything that was this woman, as those things meet, as they collide, with this titanic script. And that, to me, was really the synthesis that I was looking to make.

Paul Dano: It’s funny, because one of the first things that Steven said was that he was not looking for any sense of mimicry or imitation, or any of that. But each week, as we zoomed and we talked about his father — and you could feel his memories coming back, the closer and closer we got to the film, just more things would come up — you could tell, sort of… and, by the way, his father had passed away probably not more than eight months before I had read the script, and the last scene of Burt’s in the film we shot on the day of the one-year anniversary of his passing… So, I think I could feel in him… you know, his yearning for his father to be alive, in some way. And this was a very unique experience. Steven’s had the same crew for twenty, thirty years, and they all said this one was different. And I think that the process, to me, felt very alive throughout. Not only was Tony there (and still working on things every day), but I think Steven also had a big experience making it. And within the first two weeks, I saw his young point of view, his present self seeing this material as an older person, and then the storyteller. And I just remember being surprised, considering that it’s a period piece and it’s based on someone’s life, how alive it felt while we were doing it. The nostalgia in the film is so beautiful… but it felt very alive. I tried to take the lead from the character. So, meaning, he’s an engineer— so I literally tried to build a character. And how do I get to page one of the script? What can I build to support that? We had incredible resources. And we had each other. It was at times a heavy cloak to bear, even though Steven’s fun to work with, because of his relationship with his father. And I often felt relationship in the room in some way, shape, and form in ways that I couldn’t always identify… but that were there.

TK: You know, it just occurred to me: When we were making this movie — Steven’s worked with the same crew for decades, over and over and over again — something happened: everything moved really, really slowly. On Munich and on Lincoln, Steven would have a boombox, and if the crew was taking too long to do the next setup, he would push a button and the theme music from Jaws would play… so he wouldn’t yell at anybody, but everybody would just start moving faster: “I’m getting tired of waiting,” you know? And West Side Story, which was just a gigantic movie…  moment after moment, dances, incredible setups… and they happened like clockwork. And we got to The Fabelmans (which in some ways, felt like a really small movie compared to… the civil war, this giant musical, or blowing up and murdering people in Munich)… this one is, you know, just a nice bunch of people sitting around having a hard time! But everything… I don’t know, you guys have made way more movies than I have, but… it was just like, “what the heck is taking so long?!” Everything was taking years to setup. And I really began to feel… because I’m an old Freudian and I think everything happens for a reason… that the crew was very connected to what you were just talking about, Paul. Steven was really struggling with this stuff. The day that Paul arrived to start filming (Gabe had been there for months at that point), and then Michelle came in… And it was like, “momma’s here! Sammy’s here!” But the day that “dad” arrived, Steven had a little tiny nervous breakdown. We were filming in a car, and he was freaking out when things didn’t look right for technical reasons. But there was a way in which the shoot really was a kind of trip through somebody’s psyche. And I think that Steven’s crew, these people who had worked with him for years and years… I think there was a way that everyone was hooked into that. And it made the experience more interesting. It felt like therapy, in a way, in that you’re sort of struggling session by session to get through.

Q&A with Oliver Hermanus, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Bill Nighy

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

Can you talk about genesis of the film?

Oliver Hermanus: The genesis is a famous dinner party, so Ishiguro should talk about that. 

Kazuo Ishiguro: I can tell you about the origin story of this film, before the real work started. I can take credit for having the original idea, because it was kind of an obsession of mine for years. It was partly because I was a Japanese kid growing up in England and I was always very interested in any Japanese film that was shown in England. From the age of eleven or twelve, I was obsessed with the original Kurosawa movie, Ikiru. And as I got older, I had this idea that wouldn’t it be great if someone made a version set in England. I just thought it would be a very interesting effect to put that story, the Kurosawa story, into a British setting just after the second World War. I could see it would become much more than just a remake. This was an idea I had for a long time, but I’m not a screenwriter, and I just hoped somebody else would make it. It was really in that spirit that I talked about it half-jokingly at a dinner party three or four years ago. It wasn’t even a dinner party, it was a small gathering with myself and my wife and Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen, the two producers. We called Bill on the telephone after we finished eating—

Bill Nighy: I had fallen asleep on the sofa.

KI: He was supposed to be there for dinner but he never turned up, so we stirred him. He came along later, and that’s when I threw out this idea. And I thought someone else could go away and do this, and it would be great. Stephen persuaded me to at least have a go at the screenplay. For us, the crucial thing was that it started off not just as the remake of Ikiru, it was remake of Ikiru set in this period of Britain with Bill Nighy. The whole thing came together around the idea of Bill being at the center of the film, because we thought that would be the gateway to the particular film that we wanted to make. That was the start of it; I wrote the script, we had backing, then the real work started when Oliver showed up.

it really is about the recovery after the second World War

Oliver, how did you react when they brought the project to you?

Oliver Hermanus: I was asked ,do you want to make a remake of a Kurosawa film? And the answer to that should be no! But then they were like, well, we want to remake a Kurosawa film written by Kazuo Ishiguro, and I was like, okay, wow, that sounds stressful. Then they said, would you like to make a Kurosawa remake written by Ishiguro and starring Bill Nighy? And I was like, very stressed. I came to a meeting with Ishiguro at BFI and he had questions for me, and we spoke about movies, and it just seemed like something I couldn’t say no to because it would give me the opportunity to work with these two men. And then Covid happened, and we started the slow process of casting and thinking about it, and Bill was sitting under a tree for about a year in middle England. I was in South Africa, and we slowly started to move forward. I did all the casting for this film except for Bill via Zoom. Then before we knew it, we were all London to start shooting.

Why were the 1950s the right time period for this film?

KI: The original Kurosawa film was made at a time when Kurosawa and his team, particularly his great screenwriting collaborators, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni—they had no idea if Japan would recover, economically, never mind turn into this powerful liberal democracy. They had come through years of fascism and a militaristic regime. I think they were justified in having a pessimistic view when the Kurosawa movie was made. We had the benefit of hindsight, both about Japan and about Britain. Personally, as someone who grew up in Britain fifteen years after the second World War, I have a lot of admiration for Britain as well as Japan, and how that generation rebuilt those countries. And not just rebuilt the infrastructure, but made society something better. Britain became this more welfare state, the health system was introduced, the public school system was introduced, and there was the determination to restart the country as something much better. It was a really fascinating time, but we had the benefit of hindsight so we could see the kind of endeavor that Mr. Williams the character shows, just in his small world. He puts this effort into it, it might just be a tiny achievement, but we can see with the benefit of historical hindsight that it went into something profound and lasting. For me, it really is about the recovery after the second World War.

Oliver, can you talk about the camera movement and the composition? As a lover of still photography, the look of this film really spoke to me.

OH: My background is in still photography. They always say that directors have one other department that they really obsess about, and for a lot of filmmakers it’s apparently production design, but for me it’s definitely photography. The joy of coming into this film from South Africa, not being English, was that I was able to approach it with a certain freedom as an outsider that was not too bogged down by my own historical understanding of a lived experience of the UK. I was able to pour over images of photographers who I love and whose work I had seen, a lot of them Americans who had gone to England in the early 50s. When there was the great fog and there was this amazing work and I started looking at what were the elements of those things that I gravitated towards. One of those things was top shots and the loads of images of people coming out of buildings like ants and this very German Expressionism. Ishiguro was actually a big influence as well, sharing some films with me and that became a motif that I thought about for Living in terms of always wanting to show ways of Bill coming out of buildings and the building being the majority of the frame and really hugging these big cranes against our locations. Then I watched Ikiru, knowing that I was going to remake it, I watched it once and I told myself I’d just see what washes over me and take an essence out of it. And what really stressed me out was that it felt like every frame of Ikiru was like a magnum image. One, because that form was contemporary so it was shot at a time when they were going out into the streets of Tokyo and sort of capturing the real world. The pressure for me was how do I take that and make it into the graphic and photographic experiences of film without feeling like a failure if I don’t achieve a similar sort of photographic control. I had shot my previous film in a made-up aspect ratio I invented called 1.48:1. I wanted to do the same thing again and I was waiting for Film4 and Lionsgate to say absolutely not, but then they said yes, and that was amazing because that aspect ratio lends itself to portraiture. Then Jamie [Ramsay, the Cinematographer] came on and I shared all my images before we shot. We had worked together four times before. He understands my obsession and is very good at managing it. He looks at all references and says I get it, and then we go forth from that point. It was a joy to think very photographically. One of my other secret obsessions for Living was Edward Hopper. That scene in the café where we first meet Tom Burke was chosen because I felt I could put this man in black in a room that was very white and have a very washed-out window and have a lonely man in a hat walk by outside.

Bill, it takes a while before we are introduced to you on screen. How did you get into this character?

BN: Oliver and I met every Sunday for a few weeks, prior to shooting, and we went through the whole script very minutely. He wrote me a very long and detailed backstory, which is something I don’t personally do with my roles but it did help me a great deal. The script was beautiful and there was an atmosphere that persuaded me into a certain style of behavior. Beyond that, I don’t really know… I was there, at that time. It’s weird when you watch ancient footage and then you realize you were there. I would have been one of those kids playing in those dreadful shorts on the playground. But I have a sense of the atmosphere of that time and I know those kinds of figures and I know the class system. My father was a reserved person. I’m not playing my dad, but I know what it’s like to not really express anything at all of any great magnitude. From an acting point of view, it was fun, playing that degree of restraint. It’s kind of funny if you’re doing it, because you have to express quite big ideas without very much. It was right after the war and most people were suffering from trauma, including my family and the whole country. And there are parallels that have been made between the complex system of manners in Japan and the complex system of manners in England. But I am fascinated by it, and there is heroism in it. But when it gets to the extreme of having to apologize for dying, that’s nuts.

One of the moments that really resonated with me was when you took on the new hat.

BN: Now you’re talking! If anyone here has ever worn a bowler hat, it’s tough. They are the weirdest things; how they ever caught on, search me. It was a great moment when I was reading in the script that the hat got stolen, I was like, “yes!” and I got the soft hat and it made all the difference. It’s hard to relax under a bowler hat. It’s built like a crash helmet. If a house brick fell from a very high height, you’d be fine. But the clothes do make a difference for anyone, not just actors—the way you move, the way you think about yourself.

How did you work with your costume designer?

OH: Our costume designer is an artist, a very famous artist, Sandy Powell. One of the great joys of making this film was getting to work with Sandy. I was so curious to see what she does, and what Sandy does is she has about 75,000 people working for her. There were parts of her office I would go to, and they were like, that’s Sandy’s fitting room, cutting room, dressing room… 90% of her office is costumes. And it’s because she knows what she needs and she’s incredibly intuitive. The mandate from me to Sandy surrounding the production design is that we wanted to have this very controlled palette of black and white, and Sandy was like, fine as long as I can have some blue in there for the men that’ll be okay. For the office sequence, we bought a black set, black walls, and folded in the darkest charcoal gray suits. And then all the other men were in three shades of blue, and the darkest blue is on the character of Peter. And then the only accent color is Aimee [Lou Wood], who wears white. I was very nervous about giving her this really controlled palette, but I could sense for her it was really exciting. The idea is that Bill’s suit is so dark. And she found the perfect suit for Bill, which was a real suit. She was like, actually I found the perfect suit and you’re going to love it because it’s all dark colors but with the thinnest white striping to separate it from the black set. And I think he wore it every day.

BN: It was my one costume and I wore it every day. I always like having one costume. No more decisions.

Bill, can you talk about the scene where you sing?

BN: Singing is not something I’m entirely confident about and that was the one thing on the schedule that I was worried about. There’s always, on every film, certain days you don’t look forward to. But on this film, it felt different. I didn’t just have to just sing the song, I also had to indicate that he was opening up. It’s like at funerals… you’re fine at funerals until they ask you to sing. You get through the second line of Hey Jude and you fall apart. There’s something about the act of singing that does unlock you in a way. I have a friend who is a professional singer and I asked him about it, how do you do that when a song is sad and powerful? And he said, it’s really hard. You have to fight it back. In reality, I was in a room with a lot of people while singing that song. So you’re kind of singing for the crew, since that’s the audience. It was very moving and I tried to get out of my own way. I wanted to do it with as much humility as possible.