Archives

Q&A with Saoirse Ronan and Greta Gerwig

Posted on by

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

One of the most priceless moments in the film is when Lady Bird escapes from the car. What was it like putting that scene together?
Greta Gerwig: That scene was such a monster on the page because there are so many emotions. It starts out with them crying together and then they get mad at each other and then the fight gets crazy. We actually scheduled that to be shot as one of the last things that Laurie Metcalf and Saoirse shot. I feel that it’s best to schedule the first scene of the movie late in the shoot to give the actors time to settle and learn each other’s patterns. They’re so locked in by the end of the shoot that there is no more pressure to perform, so they’re just riffing off of each other.

Saoirse Ronan: This is the introduction to the characters. It’s the first time we are seeing them, who they are, and how they interact. So, it’s great to do that at the end because we had built a rapport with each other and had gone through our own journey together as actors. It was great shooting this in a car because nobody can get to you during the scene. Greta was on the walkie and was just a voice in the air somewhere. We only shot it for an hour or so, and from the very first take it just felt right and every beat felt real and natural.

“I wanted it to look like a memory, but something you only realize in retrospect.”

When you read the script for the first time, was there a scene where you fell in love with Lady Bird?
Ronan: I think it was that first car scene because so much happens. There’s also an incredibly written rap that was cut! I remember reading it and thinking, “a mom and a daughter are in Sacramento talking about colleges and she jumps out of a car… that’s a bit weird.” A minute later she’s rapping a title to try to win class president of her high school and it was just so funny to me.

What was the process of developing the look of Lady Bird?
Gerwig: Our costume designer, April Napier, is an artist and a real storyteller from the perspective of costume. Everything for her has to be grounded in who the person is. Something they did was instead of choosing costumes, they built a wardrobe for her based on the idea that these are the things Lady Bird owns. April and I talked about wanting her to have a tomboy way to wear the Catholic uniforms like the skirt is pants instead.

Ronan: There’s also something about the shoes. We had these clunky shoes and the character of Julie has, like, these fancy white Sketchers, so I think that says a lot about the characters. I find that wardrobe is always a really great way into the character and it informs how they move. I think it helps to look a certain way because of the physicality.

Gerwig: Even the hair was great. I remember that I got this idea that Lady Bird has this bright red hair that she’s dyed herself and it’s kind of terrible. We found the perfect shade of red that she would have done in her sink. I also like actors to pick their details and personalize to so there is a sense of ownership over these characters.

What was it like working with Laurie Metcalf, especially in those two shopping excursion scenes?
Ronan: Laurie was very good at rehearsals. She was adamant that we find the trigger points in each of these arguments to find why it blows up at a certain point and how we can make each argument different whether it’s more emotional or hot headed. I think that because she comes from a theater background, there was a real pace that just developed with all these scenes between us that really did happen organically as we got on set. We found the rhythm quite quickly and I thought we really bounced off of each other well. It was almost like music and it was nice just to have a pace to it.

Gerwig: It’s important to understand that we’re meeting these characters at this moment where they’re being pulled apart by life and how difficult that is for both of them in different ways. I think that Laurie and Saoirse established this real respect and affection with each other, which comes across even when they’re fighting. I love that every scene had so many layers to it and was never just one thing. I wanted the audience to feel like they understood every character and never felt this need to pick a side even if they said the wrong thing.

What was the process of working with your cinematographer, Sam Levy?
Gerwig: He’s a great cinematographer and just the person you want to spend fourteen hours a day with. We started working on this a year before we were actually in preparation because I just knew he was the person I wanted to work with. We spent so much time together looking at films, photographs, paintings, and talking about how he wanted it to loo, and the philosophy of shooting. I kept saying to him that I wanted it to look like a memory, but something you only realize in retrospect.  When we were looking through all this art, he made a lot of photocopies and there’s a quality of photocopies we realized was the look we wanted. Photocopies are more saturated but they look like they’ve lost a layer.

Q&A with Finola Dwyer, Saoirse Ronan, and John Crowley

Posted on by

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

What in your own life has helped you connect with the story?
John Crowley: I moved to London when I was 27 to direct a play at the National Theatre. Having been back and forth from London since I was about ten, I knew London better than I knew Dublin. I grew up in Cork, which is a smaller city. But I was very struck by how homesick I was. If I’m honest, I thought being a sort of sophisticated young urbanite that I fancied myself as, I thought that homesickness was a preserve of immigrants who had fallen on hard times, who couldn’t quite get on with it. The thing that Colm gets so right in the novel, and it’s the first piece of writing that I came across that really got it right, is the universality of that condition, which is when you leave home and you’re obviously not from the new city you’re living in, but your relationship to your homeland has been altered fundamentally and finally, and people view you differently when you go back, and you view the country differently because you are having experiences which are changing you. That doubleness, that sort of feeling like you’re not actually living anywhere for a period of time, that you’re sort of hovering and you don’t have what you would call a home anymore, which is very clearly dramatized in the film in the choice between two countries and two guys. That struck me very forcefully, so that’s the sort of emotional connection I felt to the material.

Saoirse Ronan: When John and I met initially about the project I was 19 at the time—only a few years ago—and I was quite anxious to leave home, it was something that I knew I needed to do in order to kind of push me out my comfort zone, and it needed to be in a different country in order for me, like everyone, find out who you are in the adult world, and that wasn’t going to happen in Ireland. I was the same. I had been working in London since I was about 10 and was quite familiar with the city and how it—so I thought—how it operated. But then I got there and I think to go there when it’s not for a specific purpose, when you’re just going there to live, to exist, to take care of yourself in a different place, it’s very daunting. Because I had gone through that maybe about six or seven months before we shot the film, those emotions were very much a part of my psyche at that time, and were very, very raw for me and it was what I was going for. That was the first time I had ever really had that experience on a film where I was playing a character who was emotionally running parallel to me the whole time. It was terrifying because of that to begin with because you kind of think, “Oh god, am I acting at all?” I think for me I was so affected by what John would speak to me about in relation to the character and story and just the text itself, the script was so powerful and every single scene would have at least one chunk of dialogue that really got me. That happened daily. It was kind of about adapting to that and trying to manage that emotionally as much as you could. It definitely felt like we had run a marathon.

Finola Dwyer: My mom left Dublin and went to New Zealand in 1951 and then I came and lived in London. I go home pretty much every year and I still feel, whenever I’m there, I want to be there because that pull of home is very strong. I was actually very homesick as well when I first moved to London. I was probably thirty and it was very—I didn’t expect to be at all, I thought that was all behind me. So, yeah, it touched me very much.

“if nothing needs to be said, then shut up; if something needs to be said, then we figure out a way of saying it.”

Can you talk about the challenges of production and where you shot?
Dwyer: It was a difficult film to put together. We wanted to put it together in a way that we could make, that also fit John’s vision for the film. So we did it as a three-way international co-production with UK, Ireland, and Canada. We had Montreal standing in for New York because that bought about a quarter of the budget, shooting in Canada. We shot two days in NYC. We shot the brown stone streets and Coney Island, because we couldn’t find that anywhere, and I remember during one of our first conversations with John, I said, “At the very least, I know we’re going to have to go shoot a brown stone street, even if we have to put our actors in there if we can’t get permission to bring them in for those two days.” That was kind of essential to place the film firmly there. We made it for a budget of just over 11 million dollars, which is very little for a period film shooting in three countries. We were a small group that traveled together. We three obviously, our cinematographer, editor, first assistant director, script supervisor, hair & makeup, costume, just like the key group. We were…

Ronan: A traveling circus.

Dwyer. Yeah. It was a very close-knit group. We had to land right into a new crew of two hundred people wherever we went.

Ronan: That was another thing as well. Adapting to a different crew halfway through a shoot is huge because it’s such familiar thing when you’re on a film set. When you’ve shot so many important scenes in three-and-a-half weeks in one country where you’re dealing with essentially a different kind of volume, a different kind of energy, and then we went to Montreal and also had an amazing crew. We were really spoiled with our Irish crew, and then we went over to Montreal and just had these terrific people who were working with us. No matter what, you’re kind of shifting and you’re adapting to that then as well, and they have to come in three or four weeks into this shoot and pickup where everyone else left off.

Dwyer: It was like thirty-five days, so seven weeks, over eight weeks, which is very, very short as well, so we never had a lot of time—several scenes a day, often two location shifts in a day. It was really intense.

Crowley: We went off and did three big scenes a day. You get to the end of the second one and the third one would feel like a mountain. It’s psychological, it’s something about the day dividing it into two that you can get a good morning’s work, and then a good afternoon. But at about four in the afternoon, you’re looking at doing a third big scene and it’s every bit as important as the one that you were fresh for and did that morning… it was intense.

What do you find most helpful in your work together as director and actor? How do you mark your script; what do you talk about?
Crowley: I tend not to mark my script. I make notes in a notebook on what I need to make notes of. In rehearsal, I sit with the actors and we read through the scene and you get a feeling for what it is; if nothing needs to be said, then shut up; if something needs to be said, then we figure out a way of saying it. There are all different actor styles. Emory and Saoirse couldn’t have been more different in style and approach. Emory is a wonderful young spirit who is very used to improvising and being loose with the script; I sort of had to say, “Oh, we’re not doing that film. This is different.” He was great about it. But it was a shock for him, because I wanted the dialogue to be quite crisp, sort of streamlined, almost like an old fashioned film in a way. It was a bit close to rehearsing a play, sitting around a table with the script, not really getting up on our feet. It was more about intentions and where the sort of bedrock of the story was sitting underneath the scene so that people could quite simply understand stuff if it wasn’t clear how it was fitting together.

Ronan: It was really about connecting to the text more than anything, wasn’t it?

Crowley: Exactly. Closing the gap.

Ronan: I’m the same, I don’t make any notes, and I’ve never made notes in the script. The only thing I’d make notes on would be dialogue, or dialect—accents—and I really didn’t have to do that as much on this, because it was only a slightly different accent to mine. For me really it’s just good script, good director. You can delve into it and go, “Well, I mean, when I think of it…” but that’s basically it for me anyways. And I like that. Of course it’s very complex and the thought process—whatever is going on in my head is very complex, but I just let that do its thing and get on with it.