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

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 Charlie Kaufman, Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

The film adheres to the novel in some ways, and not in other ways. Charlie, when in your process do you make the decisions about where to stick to the text and where to depart?

Charlie Kaufman: When I’m starting to adapt a book, I read the book again in a different way than I first read it, when I’m just reading stuff. I start thinking about how it can be a movie and what I understand and don’t understand about the book. I had conversations with Iain Reid [who wrote the novel] and then I decided I needed to adjust some things for the movie version. I wanted to bring the young woman’s character into some sort of actual dynamic with the Jake character, so she would have some autonomy and some reaction to the things that were occurring.

When you send the script to your actors, you must know they are full of questions. Do you welcome those questions? And for the actors, how much do you want to know?

CK: I feel like I’m happy to answer any questions that I can about the script while talking to the actors. One of the things I did in the adaptation was make sure the scenes were playable, by people. That everything could be related to an actual human emotion or interaction. I think it’s very important when you’re working with actors that they have that, because it grounds it in something and makes it work on an honest human level, in addition to whatever symbolic level it might work on.

Jessie Buckley: I think that’s what was so incredible from the minute it became a reality, when we were shooting. The questions make you so much more involved. It’s such an active living when you get to set. Each moment is so active. Nothing in life is certain, so you’re constantly asking yourself questions about how you’re going to be in each moment, but also when the moment happens, that opens it up for you as well. Nothing was ever answered fully, it just became its own thing. And it could’ve been a million different things on different days. But the questions were so rich and useful, and they still are for me when I watch the film and talk to people about it now. That’s what’s beautiful; everyone has their own questions and it opens up your perspective about what you’ve understood of this world from your place because of how someone else understood it from their place.

Jesse Plemons: To a certain extent, in the beginning we did all the trying and getting close to one understanding. Close, on a basic general level. But it almost felt like just the asking of the questions was the most important part because when you do a scene that’s eleven pages long and sixteen minutes long, it kind of does what it wants to do in some ways. You can have an intellectual idea and then when you’re actually playing opposite someone like Jessie, or Toni [Collette] or David [Thewlis], the script is so rich and so open to so many different paths and thoughts and feelings. That’s where everything was discovered. We sort of picked at it intellectually ahead of time, but it was in playing with it that the real answers came.

It’s the exact gift and challenge you want as an actor

The design of the film is remarkably tight, from the camera movements to the framing. It feels like it’s designed to put us off balance. Can you talk about working with your DP [Lukasz Zal] to achieve that aesthetic?

CK: We talked about a lot, and we talked about the idea that this story exists in a somewhat alternate reality, sort of in a combination of memory and fantasy and thought. We chose the 4:3 aspect ratio because it felt right in terms of the closeness of it, and the claustrophobia of the story. In addition to that, we started working with the idea that when you’re imagining something, you know what the next step is in the story that you’re telling yourself. So we included this idea that the camera would anticipate what was going to happen next. There were a lot of camera movements that were designed to arrive at somebody before they start speaking. A clear example is at the beginning of the movie when Jake says “Have a seat in the living room,” and the camera anticipates that and actually moves away from them and positions itself where the young women is going to sit. There’s a lot of stuff Lukasz and I discussed… what the emotions of the story were, what different things needed to feel like. We were dealing with almost static situations – a big scene around a dinner table, all the scenes in the car – so we had some concerns about the limitations of those scenes and whether it would look boring. But I think what saved us, aside from those choices, is that the actors are so fun to watch. I never felt it was an issue in the editing room. Initially I didn’t know, but once I started working on it with Rob Frazen, the editor, we realized that there was no issue in terms of that aspect of things.

The set pieces in the car are remarkable and feel like theater. They’re long and thoughtful and full of allusions. How did you approach those?

CK: We did have some rehearsal beforehand. Jessie and Jesse were able to be there early and we did get to run through those scenes.

JB: I think we just kind of got into it! The takes were nearly twenty-five minutes long and we didn’t have that much time on each take. We probably had one or two takes before they’d try to wrap. We both got on and loved it very early, so there was a feeling of trust where we could just sit there and see what came out. Even from that first time we read it in the office, things were happening and that’s always a good sign. When you’re spending twelve hours a day in the car together, it is quite a bit like doing a play. You sink into something. It’s nice and there’s not much that can come in to distract; it feels intimate and protected.

JP: It felt like we were at the bottom of the ocean, or on another planet, and then Charlie would sometimes visit with an idea! Or sometimes he would sit in the back on a take, or jump in the car and chat in between takes. It was conducive to the feeling we were getting after. Once we got over the shock of it – which happened the first day – it just became so much fun. It’s the exact gift and challenge you want as an actor.

CK: I think that Jessie and Jesse were so good at keeping it alive. It’s always a concern when you rehearse things that there’s going to be a rote aspect to it, but it never felt like that. It always felt like they were in the moment that they were in and whatever was happening was being reacted to by the other person. Each take we took was always surprising and always exciting.