Archives

Q&A with Jessica Chastain, Niki Caro, and Angela Workman

Posted on by

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

How did you make this film without relying on CGI? The animals are incredible.
Niki Caro: I couldn’t conceive of making an authentic movie out of this story about a female zookeeper with fake animals. I didn’t want to direct an animal on camera, so we created an environment where they were free to be themselves and to react and respond according to their individual natures. The way we were able to pull that off was Jessica Chastain. It was such a rare treat to see her work with the animals and share such an otherworldly kind of bond with them.

Jessica Chastain: There was never this feeling of capturing everything in the script and analyzing what was in front of us. The scene with Lily, the elephant, I had spent a lot of the time before the cameras were there so the animals wouldn’t feel like I was imposing myself on them. The first take of the elephant scene she was not interested in the puppet, but spending time with her I found that she loved apples and so I started to hide them. In that scene she’s actually looking for the apples. I remember thinking this is why I love what I do. It’s the magic of movie making and people thinking it’s an animal in distress, but it is disguised into something else.

“Antonina found her sanctuary here as she fled the darkness and created a place of love”

How difficult was it to shoot the scene where the zoo gets bombed?
Caro: When we in pre-production, I had my assistant go through the internet to find every little piece of an animal moving it’s head or seemingly reacting to something. I sent them over to my editor and asked him to put a sequence together to the sound of bombs to see if this would work because we never had the resources to make a huge sequence of the zoo being bombed. I felt that it would be good if the animal sensed the war before it came. If you take away the brilliant sound design of that sequence, you basically have a bunch of animals looking around. While the animals seem agitated, they’re not. The tiger was following the boom pole and the monkeys were playing with someone. It’s all created very organically and I just love this about making movies in an old school way. So many things nowadays can be achieved in the virtual effects world, but as an audience member I don’t feel the same way when it doesn’t feel authentic.

It’s incredible that Antonina’s diaries exist at all. What was the research process like, and how did you go about adapting it for the screen?
Angela Workman: Well, I primarily used Diane Ackerman’s book, and her book uses the diaries. Diane’s book is nonfiction and heavily researched. She was my greatest resource putting together this script. She sent me her research and photographs and it was very immersive. I spent a lot of time at the Holocaust museum in DC, which was immersive and moving. You learn everything about how the war began, the history of it, you’re watching videos and it’s incredibly painful to see. They brought in cobblestones from the streets and the museum is a pathway or journey that gets more painful as you go through.

Self-sacrifice is a common theme in war films, but feels unique here. How did you approach it in this particular story?
Workman: We talked a lot about that in the beginning and I don’t know that we could ever actually put ourselves in the mindset of these people that risked their family to do this. Instead, we focused on how we present and justify it. We had to think about what does it say about Antonina, that she does this while she has a son and a daughter. I think the only thing that we came up with was the greater impulse to save everyone and risk you life to do so, which meant also risking her family’s life.

Chastain: It was important also when we were filming the scenes that we not show that it was an easy decision. For Antonina and Jan to just do this, it undervalues the danger and sacrifice that they made. I love the scenes where Antonina questions and even pushes back and has doubts about doing the right thing. Otherwise it would diminish what she did.

You have a beautiful dialect in this film that blends in wonderfully with the European cast. How did you approach and prepare the dialect?
Chastain: For me it started with learning about Antonina. She was born in St. Petersburg and she fled to Warsaw once her parents were killed. Because of that and what the story was about, I wanted the feeling of Antonina being of another place. With creating the voice, I made sure the way she spoke was delicate, so I took certain pauses in places like she’s finding the right words. I pitched the voice higher based on what Teresa, Antonina’s daughter, said about her mother’s femininity. Then I worked with Joan Washington on an accent that was Polish, yet had a history of where she was from in Russia. The thing I kept thinking was that Antonina found her sanctuary here as she fled the darkness and created a place of love. Now that the darkness is coming to her sanctuary, she’s going to maintain this space of love.

Q&A with J.C. Chandor, Jessica Chastain, and Oscar Isaac

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of A Most Violent Year.

Mr. Chandor, why did you want to bring this story to the screen?

It was sort of two ideas that ran into each other. There was this core story that I had been working on for many years – probably six or seven years, actually – about a husband and wife who ran a business together. Actually, that was sort of inspired by parents of friends of ours who ran a car dealership empire all over the southern United States, and I thought it was fascinating how personal drive and ambition become merged into a family business and personal life. And then I also noticed that I kept getting offers for movies that relied heavily on violence, which I found strange and interesting. So I decided to explore these two topics in a film.

“The clothes are suits of armor.”

Ms. Chastain, can you talk about your first impressions of Anna?

The wonderful thing about working with J.C. is that everything is constantly evolving. And I remember at one point he said to me – after I was already attached – “I have a great idea with the deer: She’s going to shoot it!” And to me, that really busted the character out. Once she shoots that deer, it’s just understood that this chain reaction is going to happen where she’s really starting to be who she is. What I loved about the way that he wrote Anna is that even though it’s New York City in 1981 (it’s definitely a man’s world), and even though she wants to be with the most powerful man in the room (which is usually her Dad, actually, when he’s there), when she feels that her husband is not acting as he should in order to be this kind of man… she steps up and becomes the most powerful man in the room herself! She’s not just ‘the wife’ sitting at home supporting her husband. She’s actively participating in the world around her. She’s doing so much behind the scenes that you don’t even realize, and J.C. brought this out in the script in the most wonderful way. It’s such a great experience to work with someone for whom the film and characters are developing as we go.

Mr. Isaac, how did you start to develop your character?

He’s a very formal character – he’s written that way, brilliantly, by J.C. – and he doesn’t give up his secrets easily. It was difficult to claw through that. You don’t know really where he’s from, he intentionally doesn’t reference that. Being Cuban myself and from Miami helped somewhat, but getting to the emotional core of him was a challenge. One of the great things that J.C. said to me early on, when I would ask questions like, “what’s he feeling about this,” J.C. would just say, “I’m not sure… but his hair! It’s always straight up.” And I would press on with, “OK, but what’s he want?” And J.C. would reply, “I don’t know, but his suits…” And those things reveal a lot about the man. The hair, the suits, the matching cars, they’re defensive elements. The clothes are suits of armor. They weren’t about vanity or fashion, they were strategic. They’re less about what they actually are, and more about what they represent to the enemy. They are elements carefully considered by someone with confidence and a singular vision of how he wants to portray himself to the world. And these insights really influenced how I approached the character.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is that this couple is moving to a big house in the suburbs while also working so hard to build a business in Brooklyn.

Absolutely. ‘White flight’ was destroying the tax base of the city at that point, and these characters followed suit. And yet, their business was based in the city. So while they’re personally evacuating the city, they’re also making a huge investment in the city, which is a highly optimistic thing to do. It’s that ambition and optimism that really takes guts—to go against the grain when the rest of the world is going another way.

Q&A with Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Matthew McConaughey, and Christopher Nolan

Posted on by

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

[Note: Spoilers ahead]

Mr. McConaughey, how did you approach Cooper?
I always saw Cooper as a man out of time. Early on, Chris and I were talking about him being the ‘every man.’ I remember going to Chris after a few weeks of thinking that over and just saying, “I don’t know who that is… how can I think about that?” I don’t know who that is today, really, but I understood that he needed to be accessible and someone that people could relate to. He’s a guy who has been widowed, he’s been literally and figuratively grounded – NASA’s no longer being funded so he’s stuck on the Earth doing his duty, raising his children – but he still has a lot of spite, I think, and even fear that he may go through life without being able to live his dream. So when that dream comes knocking again, he’s got to say goodbye, because he’s got a chance to save mankind. I always wanted to make sure – whether it was said or not – that there was a personal quest for him, to get to live his dream. A pretty selfish quest, really, but one that motivated him to make the choices he does.

It was fantastic to play a woman who saves the world!

Ms. Hathaway, your character has a very different history than Cooper. What shaped your understanding of her?
Dr. Brand is someone who was raised by a great man. And it’s said that great men don’t always make great fathers; you’re lucky if you get both. While I thought she was someone who had a tremendous amount of respect and awe for her father, I wasn’t sure if they really had a ‘cozy’ relationship. There’s a scene in the movie between Mathew’s character and mine where I ask him, “couldn’t you have told your daughter you were going off to save the world,” and he says, “no, because I wanted to make her feel safe, and to make your child feel safe you don’t tell them that the world is coming to an end.” And I remember reading over that scene one day, and a light bulb went off for me, in regards to my character: I realized she’s known the situation on Earth since she was seven years old, there’s no way that secret could have been kept from her. So she actually grew up in a world separate from everyone else. And this helped me understand what she’d be like after growing up in that kind of isolation, that she’d be socially impossible. As the film progresses, the longer she spends with the other characters, the more she relaxes around them.

Ms. Chastain, your character has a complicated relationship with an absentee father, and also an adopted father figure.
One thing I discovered through doing press for the film – which I didn’t even know when we were shooting – is that my character was originally written as a man. And I was so moved to learn it had been changed! Because I see themes involving the father/son relationship so many times in film and in writing, and I think the father/daughter relationship is really subtle and important, and underrepresented. So it was a great thing to get to play a woman who accomplishes so much. She’s actively participating in the world around her: I got to be the one who decides to turn the car around, to drive through the corn, to light the corn on fire… All of these activities I wouldn’t normally be doing. At one point, Topher Grace even turned to me and said, “why do I feel like the girl here?” And I said, “Ah ha…! Welcome to life as an actress.” So it was wonderful to have the arc of the character that was provided – the thaw of having the physics be the barrier of love – and then actually finding love through physics, which I thought was great. But it was fantastic to play a woman who saves the world!

Mr. Nolan, In many of your films incredibly intricate plots revolve around fairly straightforward emotional arcs for your characters. How do you integrate these two different elements when you’re creating the film?
To achieve the proper balance of these two things, it’s primarily done in the writing phase. When you’re on set, you can only work on one thing or the other. And then the crosscutting in the edit suite is what brings it to life. In other words, because you shoot films non-linearly, calibrating the balance you’re asking about has to be done in the script stage. I think, for me, it’s always been about trying to achieve a kind of emotional clarity, and the more complicated the ideas that you’re trying to put in, or the different layers you’re trying to get in there, the more important it is to have very simple and clear emotional beats. I’ve consistently made films that reward the viewer for simply taking it all in and enjoying it, as opposed to studying the technicalities and the science as though there’s going to be a test at the end. And I think the reason for that is that I always try to write as if I’m an audience member just watching the story unfold. And for me as an audience member, it’s about a connection with the characters and whatever their emotional beats are that keep me hooked into the film. I’ve always tried for emotional clarity, no matter how complicated other aspects of the story might become.