Your DP said that his collaboration with you is one of the most unique he’s had with a director.
Edward Berger: We’re both obsessed with precision and architecture in the film. It’s not haphazard and we don’t try to find the shot on set. It gives me true pleasure to set up a shot and in that shot, have every department create the illusion that this is reality.
Is it correct that you had a very small crew, during production? Was that always the plan?
Chris Smith: When we first went out to Robert Downey Jr.’s house in the Hamptons, he said that we couldn’t bring a crew. Which I only found out two days beforehand.
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 […]
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.
How did you two come to work on this project together?
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.