On October 11, 1975, the first episode of “Saturday Night Live” was broadcast on NBC, and the opening credits featured a series of photos of Manhattan shot by model-turned-photographer (and my cousin) Edie Baskin. She was the show’s sole photographer for its first 25 years, and her now-iconic images of the cast and hosts, enhanced by hand-drawn color graphics, served as “bumpers,” shots between the commercials and the broadcast.

Those photos of luminaries, including Steve Martin, Burt Reynolds, Carrie Fisher, The Rolling Stones, Lily Tomlin, and eventually “The Not Ready for Prime Time” players John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Dan Aykroyd, have now been collected into a book called Live from My Studio: The Art of Edie Baskin, published by Simon & Schuster Books.

In an interview, she talks to us about how she got the job and her evolving technique.  

How did you become interested in augmenting photographs with color and adding graphic elements?

A few people were doing it at the time. Jean Pagliuso and Benno Friedman were doing it a little bit differently. I had a boyfriend, and we went on a cross-country trip. One of the places we went was Las Vegas. I loved the Las Vegas pictures, so I decided to put some color in them, and then in some other pictures, pictures I’d done of some cows.

What do you use? Paint? Crayons?

Yes, Marshall photo oils, pencil sets, chalk, anything that makes color. 

When you put color on a black and white photo, what does that interaction mean to you?

I’d like to see it change into something I’ve made.

How did you get involved?

I met Lorne Michaels at a poker game at the Chateau Marmont. And there was just a group of us that hung out, and we went to Las Vegas together. We were just a group of kids. And then I moved back to New York. I had lived there before, but I was taking a little break.

He did a Lily Tomlin special. And he hired me for that because we were friends. It was like, “Let’s put on a show in the barnyard.” Only Lorne got a real job. I moved back to New York, and Lorne knew I was there. So he called me and he told me he got a late-night television show. And he was coming back to New York, and said, “Let’s hang.”

I invited him to come to my loft, where I’d been doing my photography work on my own. And I asked him to come down and look at my work. I was very proud of my photos. He liked those and the pictures from my cross-country trip, and he asked me if I could do the same thing for New York City at night. I said, “Yes, I’m sure I could.” I did that, and then I was called up to NBC to show a couple of the creative people there, and they liked it. So, out I went into the streets, shooting for the title sequence, and that became the opening credits. 

The bumpers started on the second show. I was friends with Paul Simon, and I introduced Paul and Lorne, and they became fast friends. So Paul did the second show, and I took a picture of him standing by a piano and tinted it. And I used it as a bumper.

What did your experience as a model teach you about interacting with the subjects of your pictures? 

I always try to make people comfortable and welcome.

I’m going to ask you about some of the images in the book that I thought represented a range worth discussing. Let’s start with Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin, actors who were and still are married. You really captured their chemistry.

They were just really great together, very happy together, and lively together.

The Talking Heads. That was one of the most subtle in terms of your additions to the image, almost like sepia, a very light touch. 

I didn’t make a conscious decision. It was what I did at the time and how I grew, how I moved in and out of different things. And that was more of what I was doing at the time. I did a scribble on her blouse. I did put some skin color. That was when I was just beginning to work with the skin color.

Your portrait of Teri Garr is much more vivid, really expressing her vibrance.

That’s one of my all-time favorites, and she said she liked all of them. Teri was a friend of mine. We were in dance class together, and I have just known her throughout my life.

And you donated some of the originals to UCLA.

A series of my hand-painted works. Yes, I call it my wall of laughter.  

Lyrical and elegiac even while being rooted in hope and tenderness, director Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams” moves with the grace of a liturgy. 

The film centers on a logger, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), whose work building railroads tames America’s vast landscape into something manageable. The seasonality of his work means he rarely gets to see his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), or his daughter, Katy, and his life oscillates between the beauty and harshness of his vocation and the joy of being reunited with his family. 

One day, Granier witnesses and is unable to stop a fellow worker, Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing), from being the victim of a brutal and racially-motivated murder. In the aftermath, Granier believes himself to be cursed in some way, and it isn’t long before Job-like tragedies befall him. Amidst his hardships, he learns how to make sense of his place in an ever-shifting world that’s all too ready to leave him behind, and in his struggle, he learns to rely on the restorative company of good friends. 

For Bentley and Edgerton, human beings’ abilities to rebuild after loss are something they wanted to celebrate.”It’s a real sign of regrowth when someone, despite their gloominess, finds the joy of living in the moment where they start responding to jokes again and their mirth returns,” Edgerton shared. Likewise, for Bentley, the project was a way to reckon with the inherent finitude of existence, how “you give up something for everything you get,” and that that’s important to remember amidst the “hustle culture we have that’s very in fashion right now in the US.” 

Over Zoom and at a red carpet event, Bentley and Edgerton spoke with RogerEbert.com; about the beautiful unpredictability of working with animals, how the film challenged the false notion of linear healing, and how Granier’s struggle with the industry can guide creatives through the proliferation of generative AI. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Joel, you’ve had your own formative experience with Denis’ book, having gotten it as a wrap gift from “Boy Erased.” I believe you considered directing an adaptation at some point. Literature can speak to people in so many different ways, so was there any conversation about merging your interpretation of the book with what Clint was trying to bring to life? 

Joel Edgerton: You’re right, a book speaks to different people in different ways. I had read Denis’ book years before Clint reached out to me, and when he did, I reread it, which I usually don’t do. Rereading the book meant so much more to me because when Clint and I started speaking about the movie, I had become a father. This idea of loss and grief was so much more potent for me. 

The novella tells the story of an ordinary person who creates his own heroic journey; I really connected with that idea. The simple things in life, such as love, family, and work troubles, as well as darker experiences like grief and loss, are moments that an ordinary person goes through. It’s epic to live a normal life, but we often don’t see it when we’re in the mire and myopia of it all. 

Speaking of rendering the ordinary with a sense of loftiness, Clint, I’m struck by the ways you depict–and sometimes choose not to depict–violence in the film. We see Apostle Frank get shot from a distance; we don’t see the impact of Fu Sheng’s body when he’s thrown off the tracks. 

Clint Bentley: The interesting thing is that I can say some things that have struck me since, but the thing about making films is that a lot of times what ends up becoming stylistic choices come from just trying to solve problems and limitations. To make these moments of violence look real–especially on an independent budget– it’s easier to showcase them from a distance. 

Especially living in that world, though, I did want to make it feel like death is always just kind of there around the corner; it doesn’t always announce itself in a big way. It just steps in, has its moment, and then steps out, kind of like that scene with the cowboy who walks in, shoots, and then leaves. The proximity of death is true for all of us in life, but it was less sanitized back then, and there was less distance from it than there is now. 

I also think of that scene where the boy falls dead, seemingly out of nowhere, and the narrator says how had he been born a few years later, he would have been fine because the condition that killed him could have been treated. I was trying to get into Granier’s mindset and portray that for his world: a big part of it is the reality that death steps in at every moment, so he’s very accustomed to it. At least in the United States at this moment in time, we’re more separated from that and don’t have to encounter it as much. 

Speaking of “death stepping in,” I think about how you and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso framed Fu Sheng’s death, how there are these men who step into the frame suddenly and then throw him off the bridge. 

CB: Nobody seems to know why this is happening to Fu Sheng, even the guys who are doing it are moving as if there’s a force carrying them along. Going back even earlier, there’s that scene where Granier sees a Chinese family being thrown out of a store, and he’s baffled by the casualness of it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but today, you have groups of men in masks grabbing people off the street, and people are screaming at them and trying to get them to stop. It’s tragic.

To sit with that sequence for a bit, I’ve been chewing on the fact that the first thing Granier says when he sees this violence happen is “What did he do?” It’s such an honest response and speaks to how, as humans, we need to rationalize why bad things happen, when in reality there’s often no good or adequate reason why tragedy strikes. 

JE: One of the great things about the novella in general is that there’s this philosophical and spiritual religiousness around nature itself that’s separate from the classic religion of Christianity. It’s this idea that the bad things we do follow us around, and there’s a counterbalance to one’s guilt or complicity in a terrible act. Robert put his hands on Fu Sheng, then Fu Sheng was killed, and somehow, Robert owes a debt, and the world is going to justice for this situation. He feels like death is coming for him, even if the audience may not judge him or think what happened was entirely his fault. 

We all, since the beginning of time, have tried to make sense of our place in the world. That’s the reason why religion even became a part of our culture; it was to make sense of this world we’re living in and to get close to these questions of “What is life? What’s its purpose? What are we owed and what do we owe as a result of having this privilege or curse of being a person?” There’s something naive in a view of the world that doesn’t try to answer questions, but just poses them, and I think that’s very special. 

It’s made me think about how a film like this is a celebration of the divinity of everyday life. The thing about Robert, though, is that he’s a receiver throughout this film; things happen to him rather than him instigating change. I’m curious about both of you: where is this line in life? How are you discerning when to practice contentment and embrace limits, while also honoring your ambitions for more? 

JE: Clint, you’ve put it really nicely a couple of times. At some point, you realize, you’ve just got to put one foot in front of the other. Unless you make the big choice to give up on life and tap out, you’ve got to keep moving because the world asks you to keep moving; you can’t just sit in one place forever. The question of ambition versus pure existence is an interesting proposition. 

Robert is not someone who is going to take his own life necessarily. So he needs to, as Clint has said, put one foot in front of the other. What’s beautiful is that, like the forest is regrowing itself after a fire, characters like Ignatius Jack and Claire come into Robert’s life, and they’re the soil that helps regrow him by bringing things out of him. They offer him food, company, and warmth, and let him know there’s support. That’s a lofty idea: that, as human beings, while we can drag each other off the street and be part of the violence of culture, we can also be part of each other’s regrowth and rebirth. That, to me, shows the heart of human nature.

CB: That’s a wonderful way to put it. These questions around ambition versus contentment versus acceptance … it’s not an either-or. You give up something for everything you get, and I think that’s an important thing to remember, especially in this ridiculous hustle culture we have, which is very in fashion right now in the US. By pursuing something, you’re giving up time with your family, and by staying home with your family, you may be giving up opportunities. The answer’s different for everybody, but finding your place in all of this and settling into acceptance … that’s the epic journey of your life. 

JE: I was with my kids this morning, and they went through contentment and discontentment about ten times before they went to school. They were drawing a fairy, which was great, but then my son, Jack, drew the wings wrong, and he thought the world was coming to an end. I was trying to teach them this expression: “That day is the first day of the rest of your life.” At any moment, we can slip away from contentment and happiness into the opposite. Life is a constant struggle between good and evil, but rebirth and reset can happen at any moment. 

Clint, I want to follow up on what you shared about the hustle culture we find ourselves in. Constant stimulation is the norm, yet “Train Dreams” invites people into a more meditative, thoughtful mindset. I do think its rewards are evident after first viewing, but it can be a hard wavelength to tap into. How do you contend with the fact that art like this will live long after you, or its benefits may take longer to blossom and be fully appreciated? 

JE: I literally sent a message to Clint last night, telling him that what’s special to me about the film is that I think it will live forever. You can’t say that of every film, but thematically and aesthetically, I feel like it sits on a nice high shelf. It’s a positive message in the world, and ironically, I was watching an Instagram video where a guy was teaching people about how to spend less time on Instagram. He was encouraging people to stop doomscrolling and to find pleasure and stimulation in seeking the opposite of overstimulation and quiet. 

Joel, I could hear the audience swoon and breathe a sigh of relief when they saw you playing with dogs. I’m wondering if you can talk about what working with animals, with all their adorableness and unpredictability, does for you as an actor. With human beings, there can be some form of conversation and compromise about the performance, but you can only control animals so much. 

CE: (Laughs) Well, you can’t really control humans either. 

JE: (Laughs) Yeah, W. C. Fields should have changed his quote to “Never work with animals, children, or actors.” I think it’s actually pleasurable if you just choose not to throw the script away, but to at least ask yourself, “What is the moment you need?” and then explore how you go about finding your own version of that moment with animals or children, who are not robots that can repeat moments or learn lines? That’s the beauty of someone like Clint coming in; he doesn’t sit there saying, “Why won’t this dog or child do what I want it to?” 

CE: I grew up on a cattle ranch worked with horses, cows, and dogs; each animal has their own personality. If you can set up your film in such a way that you can kind of guide them in a direction, and then we can all kind of follow them, that’s ideal. The puppies you can’t control, but they bring so much joy to the work. They brought an element of life you can’t replicate. 

In filmmaking, you can try to control everything about it; you can control the frame, you can try to control the people in it, take out the animals, do everything on a green screen so you can control the way the light comes in, but doing all that means you lose life out of what you’re making. 

To bring life to the audience, you have to put things in there that are unpredictable and that you’re not able to control. It’s about bending with them; something more magical comes from that kind of collaboration. 

JE: I think Granier’s daughter, Katy, gets the biggest laughs in the film because she throws a pot in the river and yells. There are things you couldn’t script. Clint embraces those moments. For a film that undulates through some beautiful highs and some pretty low valleys of life, the reminder of innocence that animals and children bring is kind of extraordinary for an audience, and it just reaches into people’s hearts in a special way. 

It speaks to the ambience you’ve created on set, Clint, that welcomes and invites that freestyling and experimentation. I’m curious about how working on this film has challenged the linear timeline we often place on healing. Robert rebuilt his house after the fire, but he didn’t rebuild the bedroom. Healing, as shown in the film, isn’t always about “going back” to the way things were. 

JE: I’ll tell you, one of the great sounds I’ve ever heard is hearing the laughter of a friend after they’ve gone through a really tough and gloomy period. The first time you hear them laugh or genuinely smile … there’s nothing like that. As human beings, we can often flatline, and our joy goes away. It’s a real sign of regrowth when someone, despite their gloominess, finds the joy of living in the moment, where they start responding to jokes again and their mirth returns. 

It reminds me of the speech in Hamlet where he says, “I have of late, but / wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.” We find joy again. That’s the one hopefulness we can offer to some people. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. That sound of a person’s first laughter after a period of devastation is quite a special reminder of how we can rebuild ourselves.

That’s why I love the silly debate about the chief wolf and red dog conversation that Ignatius Jack and Robert have by the fire; we are sustained by those seemingly pointless conversations we have with good company. 

JE: Exactly, that’s what I’m talking about. We finally go, “Oh, Robert has a chance. Thanks to a friend.” 

CB: Greg Kwedar and I were writing this script as we were in the midst of and then coming out of COVID, where people had lost their family members and their jobs. I wanted to get across this idea that life is never going to go back to the way it was, and that’s okay. There can still be loveliness ahead, and the way that you heal, to Joel’s point, is through and with other people. They can lift you, and you can also lift them. 

That moment where Ignatius Jack and Robert are sitting around the fire, chitchatting and dozing off together, I could have sat there all night. We were filming that scene at a place that had been wiped out by the Medical Lake Fire a few months earlier. We were in the midst of this very tragic place on this bed of ash, and yet we were filming this wonderful moment between two friends. It felt so special to film, and these are the things I hold onto. You can’t stop tragedy from coming in from life, but you can hold on to these moments. 

A core provocation of the film is the reality that Robert feels displaced in his industry during his lifetime. The world’s resources were being used to fuel growth, leaving people like him on the wayside. It’s made me think about generative AI and how its proliferation is harming not just the environment but also the people in the industry. Robert left logging, but you guys are still planning to act and direct, I’d imagine. How are you finding your place in this industry as it goes through this massive change? 

CB: (Jokingly) Actually, I’m looking for an exit out of this business right now. 

JE: It is interesting. The filmmakers that really impress me are doing things that are new and indelible in their own way. The theory is that AI will learn and absorb everything and start thinking in its own elliptical, cryptic ways. But I just love when I see stories and I go, “There’s no way that this could be created by anything other than a human being, having an elastic imagination.” 

The thing humans do very well is that we’re good at knowing ourselves. What’s important in a story is that we watch it because we want to see human relationships; who’s better to describe, observe, and depict them than human beings? I want to challenge my creativity and create things that are indelible and new; I want to put stories out in the world that people know are bespoke. 

CB: I agree. I think we are doing something now in a medium that’s very specific to our time with cinema, but it’s a very timeless thing where we’re connecting. We’re telling each other stories to help each other, whether we’re just trying to entertain and give a good time, or to share a message that helps other people along. The novel was the vessel for that connection in the 1700s and 1800s, and in the early 1900s, it was an ancient Greek theater. 

With AI, I don’t fucking know… I think we’re looking at the steam engine version of this, and we can’t even imagine what the rocket technology will be if we stick to this analogy. But I do think we will always need that connection to each other through storytelling, in whatever form it takes. 

JE: Clint would actually like the phone number for Tilly Norwood. (Laughs)

I can’t wait to see her in “Train Dreams 2.”

“Train Dreams” is now in theaters via Netflix and will stream on that platform on November 21st. 

A profoundly moving portrait of a family reckoning with the painful memories embedded deep within the walls of their ancestral home, Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” finds the filmmaker reflecting once more on the existential themes—of time, love, identity, and history—that have abounded throughout his career.

The film reunites Trier with Renate Reinsve, a Norwegian actress whose performance in “The Worst Person in the World” earned her the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival; as a theater actress revisiting old wounds, her performance—opposite that of Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as her younger sister—distills the kind of agonized emotional clarity that has governed Trier’s recent work. 

Stellan Skarsgård stars as Gustav Borg, their father and a once-celebrated filmmaker whose efforts to repair his relationship with his two daughters are complicated by his interest in revisiting his own, fraught familial experience—including the suicide of his mother, who suffered during World War II under Nazi occupation, and whose lingering loss factors into this recent work. For Trier, the film is personal; his maternal grandfather, Erik Løchen, was one of Norway’s better-known filmmakers, as well as a jazz musician. During WWII, he was in the resistance and was captured, spending time in work camps and barely surviving; though that trauma lingered throughout his life, Trier believes his grandfather made films in part to process his pain. His presence is indirectly felt in “Sentimental Value” through the voiceover narration of Bente Børsum, who appeared in Løchen’s “The Hunt.”

Ahead of “Sentimental Value” opening in theaters, Trier sat down for a wide-ranging discussion of his film’s poignant themes, the challenges and joys of working with time, his unique personal connection to this story, the inescapable influence of Ingmar Bergman, and much more. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

I’ve always felt that you identify so strongly with your characters—that the empathy of your filmmaking flows from your impulse to understand and connect with them. You come from a film family, and I’m curious about drawing on that personal experience in shaping the characters of Gustav Borg, his daughters, and Rachel Kemp. 

It’s true. I think the idea of identification comes first from a writer’s point of view, then from a director’s, and finally from a collaboration with the actors. I need to understand them and identify their yearnings and their struggles. But that’s not the same as saying that the characters are biographically like me, or that you don’t need to vary up the characters. Still, this is a polyphonic kind of story, and so it’s nice to have that identification. 

For example, Gustav is a film director. As you say, absolutely correctly, I come from a film family background. Without him being anyone I know, I understand the struggles and the joys, the passion for making films, so I identify with that—and also the anxiety, perhaps, that it will come to an end, that “one day they won’t let me,” which is what he’s going through. But this film was also about having characters like the younger sister, played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who was in Gustav’s film as a child and certainly didn’t want to be in front of the camera again—something completely different. 

With her, for example, I found this identifiable point: she wants everyone to connect and feel good. I have that in me. I always want people to get along. You do find something with all of them, after a while, when working on them. But the last thing I’ll say is that I don’t want to hinder the possibility of the actors coming in and taking charge of the characters. It’s good to leave an open space for them to fill in, as well.

The term you use, “polyphonic,” refers specifically to sound. I’m curious about your creative relationship to music, score, and especially sound design, as this was your father’s craft. Your film opens and closes with two wonderful tracks, Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl” and Labi Siffre’s “Cassock Chase,” but how do you think about the role of sound design in your filmmaking?

Thank you very much for asking that. I really care about it. When I talk to friends about using music in film, I also tell them that one of the joys of life is the system of loudspeakers and the richness of frequency you get in a good cinema. It’s the best sound you’ll hear anywhere in the world. It’s a super hi-fi, complex, surround-sound experience. I feel that sometimes filmmakers forget how subtle you can be while still including a lot of sound and using the full range of frequencies. Hammering, loud sound doesn’t necessarily use the possibilities of a theater.

That’s something I think I’ve learned from my father: that you can create what feels like silence but is actually a full sound design of atmospheric subtlety. I love loud pieces of music; I love noise, but I also love the dynamics of daring to be quiet and gentle with sound. It’s almost like you draw the audience into the image by being very cautious about sound in certain areas.

For example, towards the end, there’s an almost climactic scene between the two sisters, full of emotion and action. And there’s no music. I tried to really build towards that feeling of presence: being there, hearing the breathing, all the movements of clothes. That can ultimately be so strong. Sometimes, when it comes to people talking about sound, they always talk about the loud films—And I think that the opposite could be equally complex and interesting.

Everyone has a childhood home, a place where they grew up; this film explores the poetics of such a location. You’ve referred to the house as a “witness of the unspoken.” But there’s an emotional residue in the house’s atmosphere; it reflects all this lived experience. What can you say about first conceiving of the house and its presence, and of mapping your story onto this setting once you had a physical location?

First of all, our spatial treatment of the narrative—to refine it so that it fit the space—was an exciting, visual task. When we write, Eskil Vogt and I write for the image in a way, and for the actors, but I think the sound aspect is really interesting as well. 

Hania Rani was our wonderful composer; this was the first collaboration I’ve had with her. She wanted to go to the house and record its reverb and other sonic qualities, which, to me, was fascinating. I’ve never had anyone think like that, but she said it inspired and affected her approach to reverbs for certain pieces of music as well. The idea of sound always being present is very interesting to me.

And to elaborate on that spatial treatment of the narrative, this film required characters to move between rooms and down corridors, and it needed a location with a room that could be dressed to play different roles over time. We first see Nora enter the house through what had been her mother’s psychology office, where there’s still an empty chair… How much did the story change once you had a location, and how much did the narrative dictate the location you were looking for?

It was a bit of both. The first draft contained pretty much the story you see in the film, but the relationship between the upstairs and downstairs—and that hallway corridor towards the room where such dramatic events we realize throughout the story had occurred, all of that repetition of angles that is so fun to play with in movies—I think this house really gave itself to that. Along with our wonderful production designer, Jørgen Stangebye Larsen, we also built a replica of the house. In addition to shooting in the real house, we had a studio version so we could go between them. 

The studio version got dressed for every 10 years of the 20th century, with different wallpapers and different moods. A lot of that was done through research; we also had in the studio these VP walls—virtual production walls—where we created an exterior, based on research, photo-realistically showing how foliage grew over time and how buildings were erected suddenly as others disappeared. We drew a map of time through the house and its surroundings.

You actually built a replica of the Borg family house on a soundstage to film a montage of the house across generations. What effect did that have for you, given the relevance of that filmmaking technique to the story? Gustav is so fixated on filming this deeply personal story in the actual house where so much has happened. 

I’m primarily a location director, so I always feel it’s wonderful to look out the window and receive a gift, as something will happen that makes it feel close to life. But, actually, with the team we had, the studio experience was wonderful, as was the feeling of being able to create specific moods with a lot of control. So, control and chaos were both alive in this process, in new and unusual ways for me.

The replica house made me think about how directly you depict time in this film. How has your temperament toward dealing with time, which you’ve described as one of the primary aesthetic considerations a filmmaker can have, evolved with this film?

It’s such a great question, and it’s an essential one to the core of this story. The aspect of time begins with the film’s opening, which shows Nora, the eldest daughter, and her essay on the house’s perception of her family history. It’s the idea that, for the house, a human life is very short, because the house is a constant, in a way; it’s this longer, lasting structure. I thought that was a nice setup for a story about reconciliation, where the adult realization of the sisters that they’re not going to have their father around forever—even though he’s a complicated character—means they, in their own individual ways, have to reconcile their relationship with him. 

That’s one aspect, but it’s also a possibility to put the idea of social history into context when we realize through the film that the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Norway were affecting the lives of families, and many people’s lives, in ways that still impact us. Many people say that a war trauma takes three generations before it lets go. For people who haven’t seen the film yet, that’s not in the forefront of the story, but it’s there in the house, and the idea of the house witnessing life helps us tell that story.

It’s Agnes who seeks out more knowledge about her grandmother’s experiences during the war, and this has a profound effect on her. It’s my understanding you’ve personally been through that process of tracing your family history back into that conflict.

My grandfather was in the resistance during the war; he was captured and spent time imprisoned by the Nazis across two different camps, and he was very traumatized by that. He made films after the war, and I think that was a way to survive and find a place in the world again. He was creating something and seeking meaning in it. 

I think that’s at the core of the process of making this film for me, but also the idea of the National Archive, the accounting of facts in a society, is fundamental. It’s a different narrative from the fictional one of the National Theater, where the older sister works; it’s the historical aspect of how necessary it is for democracy and society to hold themselves accountable to facts. 

I found, through a piece of paper, a witness to the accounts of my grandfather’s imprisonment. It’s provable. No one can deny there’s proof that a terrible thing happened to him. With where the world is right now, that’s a very important thing to remember: that we need to learn from history. And I think the film asks this question of the ambivalence of history and memory. On one level, we need to forget, to forgive a difficult parent.

On the other hand, we owe it to the past to remember certain things, not to repeat those faults. And we owe it to the people who experienced certain things. That’s the space where we live in time, in between those two notions.

It’s better to live in impermanence than in any kind of finality, in how we reconcile with the past.

Life is a process—and making films is a process. Now that I have talked a bit about this film, and you’re asking me about memory and time and our relation to it—and also the process of making a film—there’s always that retrospective narrative that now is slowly being created as I’m talking to journalists. 

But it’s a narrative that will never quite mirror the process, because in making it, you’re lost along the way. You think it’s about something, then you discover something else. It’s ongoing, but it’s nice, at the end, to try to summarize: “What the hell did we make?” and to meet people who can mirror it back to us.

To bring Gustav into that theme of excavating memory… Nora works within the theater, and Agnes explores the archives. As we see in Deauville, during a retrospective of his work, Gustav has been speaking through his art, making films like the one whose ending we see: a wartime drama about an orphan’s ordeal. What is he reckoning with? 

“Anna,” yes. We thought a lot about that, actually, since we knew that Gustav is a character who’s quite clumsy at relating to people socially, particularly his family and his daughters, but whom we realize has a more sophisticated, emotionally engaging way to create art. It was very important that those films expressed some aspect of him; in the piece of his film we see, though more pieces didn’t make it into the final cut, the ending of “Anna” obviously deals with some sense of survivor’s guilt. 

We later realize perhaps why that is a major theme with him. It was important for us to use everything in this film to get into character and to explain the layers of observation about human beings’ incapacity for communication, while still revealing them. That was an interesting way into him, the films.

Gustav speaks through his art in a way that he cannot in life; with the film he wants to make, it’s about his mother and his daughter, but it’s also about him. He’s trying to express something deeply personal by speaking through them. But one wonders whether he wrote this script specifically to bring about personal reconciliation, or whether he wrote it to revitalize his career because he knew it would be creatively stimulating. 

My feeling is that you have a really great understanding of the complexity of that in your question, and I’m almost hesitant to answer, because I think you’ve put it very beautifully. There are a lot of different things going on with him, I think you’re right. It’s interesting for the audience to consider whether Gustav’s primary urge is reconciliation. Does he want to do something with his daughter? Or is it primarily just wanting to make a film? Or is it mainly to resolve his relationship with his mother and the trauma around her death? Or is it everything, and he’s confused, and he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t quite have to know, because at the end of the day, he knows how to craft a movie, and that’s what he does? All of those things could be playing out at different levels of his psyche at the same time or at different times.

Tell me about your relationship with both Eskil Vogt, your co-writer, and Olivier Bugge Coutté, your editor. You’re long-time collaborators. How do you work together? 

Those two are people I’ve worked with since my short films and have made all six features with. I think Eskil is a starting point, then he leaves the project for a while, and I go and direct it—he’s not very involved at that point—and then, halfway through the edit, Olivier and I feel we have reached a place where we need feedback, so we show it to Eskil, and he comes back in. We sometimes have terrible arguments, but we always end up friends, all of us.

Olivier is all about what is actually at play in the material, and what the best version is now, while Eskil sometimes reminds us of the thematic complexities we shouldn’t lose. I’m the director in the middle, trying to listen as skillfully as I can to these smart people, to try to get it to land in the right place. It’s one of the most exciting things to have collaborators you’ve worked with for a long time. You have shorthand, so you can go deep quickly and get into the core of the challenges every new film will automatically present. It’s tricky making films and getting the balance right. That’s the art of it.

To the point, I felt your use of close-ups on your actors’ faces was beautifully balanced in this film. I know that’s been a fascination of yours through your career—and I love this film’s reference to “The Piano Teacher,” a film featuring one of the most unforgettable close-up shots: at the end, her with the knife. What’s the secret to maintaining that kind of proximity with actors, and what’s your process of knowing when you’ve found what you’re looking for in an actor’s expression?

I sit next to the camera and have a handheld monitor to check the frame, but I look at them with my eyes and try to feel what’s going on. That’s the best way of judging it. There is a very inspiring clip of Ingmar Bergman on set for one of his last films, in which an actor questions whether they got it right. And Bergman says something along the lines of, “Well, I felt it, and I don’t squander emotions with you guys. Let’s move on. I’m sure we could do a million other great versions, but I felt it now, so I’m done with this. Let’s move on.” 

At the end of the day, we try a lot of variations, but if I feel that we’ve explored it properly, it’s not a rational thing. You’ve got to trust your gut and say to the actor, “I’m really pleased with this. Thank you. You gave me a lot of your experience of the scene. Let’s move on.” And that’s the art again: when do you call it? There’s a programmatic side to it, of course, having limited time and all that. But I felt that, in this one, we got to explore the material at hand deeply. I’m very grateful and happy for that.

I’m glad you brought up Bergman. One film I sense reflecting into this one, and not just because of the family Borg, is “Wild Strawberries.” I’m curious about how film influences you. But to frame that question more expansively, “Sentimental Value” is narrated by the Norwegian actress Bente Børsum, now 93, who worked with your grandfather on “The Hunt.” How did you think, with this film, about working with both your own family’s history and this larger lineage of Scandinavian cinema?

There are a lot of interesting things to talk about there. I’ll start with Bente, and then go to Bergman. Yes, Bente played the lead in my grandfather’s 1960 film, “The Hunt”; both were very young. It was her first lead role. It was his first film.

Long story short, I actually have a gym close to my house where there are a lot of old people present—a physiotherapy center, really—where it’s cheap to go and work out. And I went there and suddenly felt very young amongst all the old people; suddenly, I realized that Bente Børsum was there. I’d just met her briefly, but we got to know each other. We met there on Sundays, sometimes during our workouts/ I thought, “What a magnificent chance to work with her.” I never really had a part I could offer, but I could do the narration, and it suddenly clicked that she knew my grandfather.

She also has this beautiful narration about Agnes going to the National Archive, which you and I spoke about earlier, and she could talk about those things with great authority, as her mother was captured during the war. I know that’s a very dear theme to her: the grief and woundedness of the war, even though it was so long ago, she still carries that. That was a really wonderful thing, to have a little homage back to my grandfather’s first film.

When it comes to Bergman, I am very happy you brought up “Wild Strawberries.” That’s such a gentle yet deeply melancholic film about an old man asking questions of whether he lived the life he was supposed to. Did he connect, or why didn’t he connect with certain people? I think that’s very relevant to Gustav’s story. 

It’s hard to talk about Bergman because he’s at play in so many indirect and unconscious ways for me, I’m sure. It’s always a problem when I say at home that Bergman inspires me; everyone wants to take me down a notch. “Oh, you’re not Bergman. He was much greater.” I’ve had a couple of asshole critics who are, like, “Oh, he thinks he’s Bergman.” I never thought I was anything. Ozu from Japan inspires me, as do many American filmmakers, as well as Bergman. 

It’s just the ongoing process of being a film lover and seeing what film is capable of, trying to take that energy and bring it somewhere else. I think that’s unavoidable—because I’m Scandinavian, everyone thinks it’s Bergman, and that’s not a lie, but it’s so many other things as well, is my point. [laughs]

“Sentimental Value” is now playing in select theaters, via Neon. 

In December of 1974, two close friends talked as a tape recorder captured their conversation. It was part of a project Linda Rosencrantz was working on, asking her friends in the arts community to tell her the story of how they spent a day. Ira Sachs’ new film, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” is a meditation on art and friendship, based on the transcript of that conversation with Ben Whishaw as photographer Hujar and Rebecca Hall as Rosencrantz. In an interview, Sachs talked about what a director has in common with a psychoanalyst, his use of light to tell the story, and the rare friend who really listens.

You use light in such an interesting way throughout the film, beyond just setting the place and time of day. 

It’s almost like the story of light is the story of the film. It’s the story of a day, the story of time passing, the story of portraiture, Hujar clearly being a portrait maker, of humans and of animals and of objects. And for me, light conveys emotion based on space and time. It is really kind of the second text of the film. There is the text of Peter Hujar describing his day, and then there’s the text of the characters of Peter and Linda in the course of a day, in this space. It’s also evoking the emotion of time, which is really maybe what the film is all about. So I tried to use cinematic means to share that with the audience.

There is something captivating about telling your day in such detail to somebody and having them be interested in all of it.

Peter Hujar is also a particularly uniquely gifted storyteller in the sense that if you asked me to tell you what I did yesterday, it would not be as rich as what Peter is able to do. He’s really kind of an extraordinary narrator. Like the details are the details of something written but unwritten. That’s also in Ben’s performance. He took an approach in which there’s a kind of egalitarianism. All the points that are made without being dull or monotone you know monotone there’s also a great range of feeling um he’s not a particularly um uh self he’s not an analyzing storyteller but he is a revealing one and for me the power of the film is really an artist revealing his vulnerability and how difficult it is to make good art.  

One of the things that interested me the most in the film is what it means to have a listener like that. Possibly a psychoanalyst might be that present and engaged, but that is a very different relationship.

That is the only other job I might have taken, to be an analyst, because the way that Linda listens to Peter is how I feel as a director. I need to listen to my actors. I need to listen with incredible rigor. And Linda does that through Rebecca so beautifully. What Rebecca understood, because she got to know Linda, as I have as well, is that she’s a very generous, curious, empathetic person and listener. But also there was a trust inherent in the two of them that allowed Peter to take the leap to talk for so long about his life.

Since they were just out of their teens, they’ve been friends. And for me, that’s the one element of the film which is really familiar is that it reminds me of my friendships as a gay artist and a gay man with certain female friends in my life. Very few, but one or two who seem to me to love me in the way that Linda loved Peter.

How did you talk to Ben and Rebecca about what you wanted from them?

With Ben and I, it was very instinctual because we’d already been working together on “Passages.” Part of the reason I thought of doing this film is that I was enjoying my collaboration with him so much that I wanted to find something to continue, which I still feel today. I want to find something else to make with Ben. And Rebecca was someone I met just before we started filming. What they have in common is both of them are actors who are actually primarily interested in living a creative life. 

What I found during the pandemic is that when I didn’t have that, I didn’t have a relationship to myself that seemed alive. I felt very dead. Because I think the conversation one has with oneself, whether it be positive or negative, as Peter shows us, sometimes it’s a very negative conversation of doubt. Sometimes it’s one of confidence, but it’s active and it’s intimate. And I think for me, it’s necessary.

I’d like to hear about the score, not just the sound and percussion and melody but when we hear it in the movie.

I think it’s important for a film to wake an audience up. Sometimes for me that’s through bold cuts. In some of my films, I don’t want things to remain too comfortable. I don’t want them to lull into the sense of knowing what they’re getting. And music was a tool, as were certain artificial elements of the film, in creating disconnect for the audience, which then allowed them to connect in new ways.

There are a lot of names in the film, some we recognize, like Allen Ginsburg, some not a part of our present cultural conversation. Is it important to know who they are?

To me, it’s not important at all. I mean, no one, including Linda or myself, knows who all those people were. They are the cast of characters of this character’s life, and that’s what’s significant. I mean, they’re only as good as Ben makes them vivid. That’s what I actually was surprised by myself, in Ben’s performance, how vivid every name is, every image, every feeling, every taste, it’s a very vivid performance. And if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have sustained a feature film. So to me, there’s a lot of names. You know them because Ben makes them real, not because they’re well-known.

Rebecca makes Linda very vivid, too, even though she has very few lines.

Linda is an amazing person. And I think her understanding that how we speak in everyday life is artful and full of meaning is beautiful. 

After World War II, US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson led an effort to create judicial proceedings to try the leaders of the Nazi military and government, coordinating the effort with representatives from the other Allied forces, France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. The charge was “crimes against humanity.” It was unprecedented in many ways, including the first international trial of officials for the treatment of their own country’s citizens.

“Nuremberg,” written and directed by James Vanderbilt, is based on his own research and the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, by Jack El-Hai. The book follows Douglas Kelley, the military psychiatrist who spent hundreds of hours interviewing the first 22 people to be tried, including Hermann Göring, second only to Hitler in power in the Nazi party. 

In the film, Oscar-winners Rami Malek and Russell Crowe play Kelley and Göring, and much of the screen time takes place in Göring’s cell, as Kelley tries to understand Göring and Göring tries to manipulate him. In an interview, Vanderbilt shared the advice he got from David Fincher, how his research shifted the story’s focus, and casting a then-unknown in a key role.

You have an audience that may not know about the trials, particularly how unprecedented they were. So you had a hefty burden of exposition, which I think you handled very gracefully. How did you think about giving the audience the background they need to understand the story?

That’s actually really important to me because I find that many of the movies set in this period assume a level of historical knowledge from the audience—“of course you know that Churchill did X, Y, and Z.” I love that audience. I’m part of that audience. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II. So I grew up with these stories, and I had friends who lost family members in the camps. But I wanted to make a movie for people who didn’t know anything about this period of time because I think it is so important. 

When I talk to my kids about this period, it’s like talking about the American Revolution. It just feels so far removed from their sphere, which I completely understand. That’s how time works. It moves on. There were debates behind the scenes: “Do you need to see that? Don’t people know what ‘the final solution’ is?” I said, “Not everybody does.” 

I wanted this to be a movie that people who knew nothing about this subject could come in at zero, not only learning what happened but also taking the emotional journey the characters go through. I really wanted to build the movie as a thriller. Sometimes you see these movies and they feel a little bit like taking medicine. I don’t love that personally as an audience member, and as serious as the subject is, I didn’t want that for this. 

A lot of this movie is two people talking. One has no empathy, and one has too much, professionally and at times personally. And they’re each trying to get something from the other. How did you think about creating those scenes?

That was the core of it for me. I started with Jack El-Hai’s book, which is really just about those two men and their relationship. I was very taken with the idea. Here are two guys. Rami Malek’s character, Dr. Kelly, is trying to get the better of Hermann Göring. He’s also trying to get one over on Kelley and trying to figure out, “What are they going to do with me? What’s happening? Do I get to go to court? Do I not?” So, they’re both trying to maneuver each other and charm each other. 

They end up striking up this—I don’t want to necessarily say friendship, but a relationship—that affects both of them in ways they definitely don’t anticipate. I loved that idea. One of the things we talked about right from the beginning was not just other World War II films, but “The Silence of the Lambs,” which is just these two people in a cell talking to each other and probing each other.  The idea of that was very, very delicious. And then you get Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, and you turn them loose on this material and on each other. And it just was, as a director, such a pleasure to sit at the monitor and watch them go after each other.

You spent a lot of time researching this. What surprised or intrigued you?

It was a ton of research, which I love. Whenever I’m doing a historical story, I want to make it as bulletproof as possible. And I want to know if there’s something that we need to omit or contract for the purposes of telling it. The trial was a year long, and the movie can’t be a year long, so you do have to make choices. I always wanted to make sure that that was a choice, not a mistake.

I started with Jack El-Hai’s book. Robert Jackson, played by Michael Shannon, is not really in the book. I learned about him through my research and the lengths he went to in order to make the trials happen. This was something I didn’t know—nobody wanted to put on the trials. Everybody wanted to just shoot these guys in the head and move on with life. It’s like, “We just won a war, so what are we still doing?” Jackson has to get the other countries to cooperate, then he takes a leave of absence from the Supreme Court and becomes the lead prosecutor. So, I was like, “Oh, that journey is incredible. I thought my movie was over here, in the cell. But oh, no, it’s also over here.” And then I read about Leo Woodall’s character, Howie Triest, in his story. And I went, “Oh, my gosh, my movie’s over here.” 

So, the thing that surprised me as the writer was that it just kept growing and growing and growing, which is also terrifying because, usually, adaptation is about subtraction. You have a 350-page book and you’ve got to get it into two hours. So it was terrifying in that way, but also ultimately incredibly liberating because I was like, “I need to be able to figure out a way to tell all of these stories, which do intersect.” And ultimately, I think the movie is richer for it because you’re going through all these different characters and experiences. That ultimately culminates in this courtroom showdown between Göring and Jackson.

You cast Leo Woodall before he was as high-profile as he is now.

Leo is incredible. And we were so lucky to have him. I really wanted that character played by someone with little screen baggage. It was very important because there’s a scene pretty late in the film. I don’t want to give it away, but it’s a crucial scene where he gives a monologue. And I knew that whoever we cast had to be able to deliver that monologue.

I have a lot of actors in this movie that you do not audition. I was adamant with our casting director that whoever plays this part would need to read for it. I need to know they have that gear. I had Leo come in three or four times to do that scene, just because I needed to know he had it. And he did. 

He was the baby in the cast. And everybody was impressed by him. I remember Russell and Rami both going, “Who is this kid? This kid is incredible.” That’s why he’s no longer the fresh-faced unknown I thought he was, hopefully going to be. He’s such a naturalistic actor. He’s so committed. He’s British, and he’s doing a flawless American accent while speaking German, which he doesn’t speak, so he had to learn it perfectly phonetically. He’s such a great actor and such a great human being, too.

What does being a director teach you about being a writer? Did directing change the way that you write?

I think it definitely does. I think it helps you understand what you’re not going to use or need. I directed my first movie, “Truth,” 10 years ago, and I was lucky enough to have Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford in it. So, I got thrown into the deep end of the pool, and I learned that when you’re dealing with actors of that caliber and the caliber of the actors in this movie, you go, “I don’t need a two-page monologue. They can do this with a look. They can do this in a moment. It really helps as a writer to figure out, “No, I don’t need this.” And obviously, you discover things along the way with the actors, too. There were moments where John Slattery would say, “I don’t need to say this line. I can just do this moment on my own with a look.” And it was like, oh, great. Fantastic. So, yeah, he’s great in the film.

I want to talk to you about the production design, particularly the courtroom. It is so impressive, and that’s all practical, right? You built that.

We built everything in that courtroom, and it was built to scale. Eve Stewart was our Oscar-nominated production designer. She’s in giant Hollywood productions. And she really fought for it. She was one of the first people I hired, and I’d never worked with her before. And she flew to Nuremberg, obtained the original plans, and measured the actual courtroom. That courtroom is to within an inch of the real scale. And it was 360 degrees. She insisted on building the ceiling, which you don’t always do in movies to save money, but there’s an absolute ceiling on that courtroom with the real giant lights. 

It’s just such a gift not only for the movie and for seeing it, but also for the actors to be able to step onto that set.  I’ve talked to all of them about it, and Russell and Michael, especially, who have to face off against each other. They are 50 feet apart. And that’s the same. The distance that Göring and Jackson were when they had the cross-examination. And she also built the prison to scale; the cells are the same scale. All of that was practical. And as a director, any time you can do it practically and immerse the actors in that world, I think it just pays enormous dividends.

Why was it important to you to show the real concentration camp footage that they showed at the real trial?

It comes down to accuracy, but also, I think it was important to honor what happened. From the very first draft of the script, I described what we were going to show, and our first AD asked how we were going to shoot the footage. I said, “We’re not shooting anything. We’re going to show the real stuff. And we’re not going to put music under it.” That’s the actual narration on the footage. We wanted to show the same images they showed in court. We only show about five minutes of it. In reality, that film is almost an hour long. 

I said to the actors, “Look, that footage is out there, the stuff that’s described in the script. I know you all do research. Do me a favor. Don’t look at it because I want it to be fresh for you on the day.” And then on the day we went in, we set up the screen. We didn’t do a blue screen. We actually brought in the projector, set up four cameras in the courtroom on our four leads, and had 300 extras every day. And so I went out and said to them, Okay, here is what we’re doing today, and here’s what you’re going to be seeing. And it’s going to be hard, but it’s very important for the story and for the film.” We had a moment of silence, then showed the film. I don’t want to say no acting was required, but you can see on their faces what they really went through while watching it. Honestly, that was the hardest day on set. But I think it was an essential thing for us to do. And I wanted the audience to have the same experience the people in the courtroom did that day.

What do you want people to talk about on their way home from the theater?

You have to have the highs in order to have the lows. You have to laugh, sometimes in order to be able to cry. I think that’s our experience in life. It’s important to me for the movie to give you that feeling. 

I worked with David Fincher years ago, who’s a brilliant filmmaker, and somebody who I just really admired, and he said something to me that always stuck with me: “Good films make you ask questions, but bad movies give you all the answers.” I hope this is a good movie and that it makes people ask questions.  

An overwhelmingly intense portrait of motherhood, passion, and mental illness, “Die My Love” brings together Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish auteur behind such anguished psychodramas as “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and “You Were Never Really Here,” with Jennifer Lawrence, the Oscar-winning actress whose tour-de-force performance marks a viscerally affecting high point in her remarkable career.

Ramsay’s latest (now in theaters, via MUBI) opens as a young couple, Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), move to a remote house in the Montana wilderness; it belonged to his late uncle, we learn, and appears worse for wear, but both are initially hungry for the start of this next chapter in their lives—and for each other, as they prowl through the tall grass and paw at each other on the kitchen floor. But soon enough, Grace is pregnant, and after the baby is born, the fervent heat of their relationship cools into something distant and unhappy. A writer by trade, Grace is creatively blocked, and the intolerable, enraging sense of abandonment that attends her experience of motherhood begins to emerge in increasingly destructive, unsettling ways. 

Based on the novel by Argentinian author Ariana Harwicz, “Die My Love” first came to Lawrence via Martin Scorsese, who’d read it in his book club and could immediately envision her playing the central character (who remains unnamed on the page). He sent it to Excellent Cadaver, the production company Lawrence co-runs with producing partner Justine Ciarrochi. Taken with this challenging material, the actress had only one filmmaker in mind: Ramsay, who’s been making harrowing films about broken familial dynamics and the all-consuming loneliness they can breed since 1999’s “Ratcatcher,” a Glasgow-set social-realist drama that stands among the greatest debut features.  

Paired up to discuss “Die My Love,” Ramsay and Lawrence spoke for a whirlwind 13 minutes about coming together to tell this story, running on instinct, picking the film’s musical selections, finding its sensorially overpowering visual language with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, and more.

This interview has been edited and condensed. It was conducted in two parts, also including a secondary, five-minute follow-up with Ramsay.

To ask you first about each other: Jennifer, you’d wanted to work with Lynne since first seeing “Ratcatcher.” What was it about that film, and about Lynne’s filmmaking?

Jennifer Lawrence: Well, when I saw “Ratcatcher,” I knew I needed to see this person’s entire filmography, and so I did—and it’s because her filmmaking was so singular. It was so unflinching. I had never seen anybody make a movie like that. It was just so raw, and it was almost like she didn’t even care if an audience [saw it.] You could tell she wasn’t making it for an audience. 

She was making it because of something so pure—she’s just a real artist. She’s been my favorite filmmaker forever, but I just hadn’t really come across something that I felt would be worthy of her. When I read this book, though, it was clear that it would not be a linear movie. It was poetic, so only one person could do that.

Lynne, what distinguished Jennifer as a creative collaborator, both as an actress and a producer on this project?

Lynne Ramsay: When I received an email about the novel, asking, “Would you read this? We really like your stuff,” I was really flattered.

JL: [laughing] “We really like your stuff.” I’m sure it was more effusive than that.

LR: [laughing] The way we started working together, and talking together, it was all about having a trust within our relationship that was unphasable. For me, what was then amazing was to expect the unexpected. I love when you’re working with actors where you feel—especially with a character like this—that you don’t even know what they’re going to do next. I think I gave enough space—I hope I gave enough space—for that to happen.

But, definitely, it was about a relationship that we developed over time: during the script [phase,] actually with sharing some images, by singing songs, and just talking—you shoot the breeze a bit about it, like, “Who is she?” Really uncovering this character, that was done over a month, so it was all a process of really getting to know each other and getting inside each other’s brains a little bit, you know? It just felt there was a match, and that’s—for me—always what I look for, so it was perfect.

How much did you work to plan out in advance in terms of performance, and how much did you want to leave open and reactive to the pressures of being on set? I was curious about the place of spontaneity in a character so driven by impulse and instinct, and what that felt like to embody.

JL: It was really, really fun—and complicated. I mean, it’s really fun to play somebody that has no veneer, that has no impulse control. You’re just kind of living this internal world. You’re living intrusive thoughts—which is satisfying and fun. 

But I’ve always relied on my instincts. And this was the first time I was playing a mom since becoming one, so I do have my own instincts, but they were very counterproductive to our journey, so it was a little complicated to try to dissect what I would do, as opposed to what Grace would do.

Ariana Harwicz writes in such a lyrical, unsettling style, and there’s similarly such passion and poetry to your film. Lynne, I know this is your fourth adaptation, but what can you say about finding a visual and auditory grammar to tell this story, adapting that text into sound and image? 

LR: Well, it’s a real process. I work a lot on instinct. I think that’s what just clicked with us two; I can feel when something works or doesn’t. Maybe you think it’s going to be great or perfect, and you end up thinking, “Do you know what? Something else is much better.”

You find it in the day. I try to be very present on a set, to look at things that are outside what’s happening, or at moments in between. It just felt like, on this one particularly—and it’s not in every film—one thing I knew was that I really wanted the camera just to follow, to give the actors enough space to let them play in this house, with props or whatever was there. 

She was bored at home; there were moments when I just let it run, and beautiful things happened. There’s a laundry basket in one scene that she tips over. It’s a moment of rage. Then she licks a window. Jennifer just went for it, went for these moments. I never asked her, “Every single beat, you need to do this, you need to do that,” but it felt like the character was trapped. 

And it was funny. That was important for me. I think Jennifer’s got great, great comic timing, and she really brought that to it, and that was important to me. The film was fun in that respect; it was set up to be this thing, but within that, there was a lot of freedom.

I’m curious to ask about the role of music in heightening our experience of Grace’s inner journey. Of course, the needle-drops—Toni Basil, Cocteau Twins, John Prine, and Iris DeMent—keep you on your toes as a viewer, and Lynne, you perform a magnificent cover of “Love Will Tear You Apart” that plays over the credits. At what stage were you envisioning particular soundtrack choices, and was the music in place during filming?

LR: It was very early on that I’d sent John Prine to Jennifer, and she was like, “I love this track.” It seems like a lovely country track, but underneath it is what’s really inside the relationship, you know? And it’s beautiful. Jennifer really responded to it. I hadn’t heard it before; my music supervisor sent it to me. When I did “Morvern Callar,” as well, I’d made all of that soundtrack well before I started. 

We did have music on set—“Mickey” was playing, for real. I thought of the couple having a good vinyl collection, that when they’d lived in New York, he’d tried to be in a band that was unsuccessful, that she threatened to cut off things, and this house was a new hope—even though it was a bit rundown. And it starts from there, then things go… the way they go. [laughs] That meant every piece of music was a little satellite indicator for me, I felt, of these points in the relationship. 

I think about music a lot when I’m writing scripts, and playing music when you’re writing is great as well. It was all open, but it was a process of working quite early on, which I try to do as much as possible.

JL: Lynne is the only director I’ve ever worked with who uses music on set. And so, when it was the wedding scene, you know, when you read a scene like that—where she goes nuts and starts throwing things—it’s a little hard. You’re like, “Okay, well, what? Where’s this coming from? What’s the beginning of this?” 

And so she played the song, “Infinity Guitars,” by Sleigh Bells, and it just immediately got me there. It was such an “arrggghhh” sound of rage — such a cool beat. And so I had that playing in my ear during that [scene].

One of the first lines of dialogue we hear from Grace, as she inspects the house she’s moving into with Jackson, is, “We need a cat.” I wanted to ask about animalism in the context of this film—rats scurrying upstairs, cats prowling in grass, flies buzzing, horses running, dogs yapping. What drew you to this animal symbolism? 

LR: I can talk about that in terms of this character. I don’t know so much in terms of everything, overall, in my work—it’s hard to say. But I used the book as a bit of a jumping-off point; this isn’t a literal translation at all, but there was something so feral, unapologetic, and animalistic about Grace being stuck in this house, like she’s this beast, like there’s something dangerous about her. It kind of came from that. It’s funny that you’ve noticed that it’s the first line of the film. She’s like, “We need a cat.” Of course, he brings a dog home.

Lynne, sound carries emotion so powerfully in all your films. How did you approach the sound design for “Die My Love” with Paul Davies? He’s one of your longest-standing collaborators.

LR: I have worked with Paul in all my films—apart from one short, and I think that was because he was doing something else at the time. We talk about sound being almost like a camera; we focus on this sound, this detail, and we get inside this character, and it’s bringing something up that you don’t expect. 

In the case of “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” it was a sprinkler sound, which actually means a lot in the film, but it’s the most innocuous, familiar sound, and then it becomes a sound of horror, later on. 

I wrote all that [sound] into the script, and I think we have that kind of relationship, certainly on this film as well. We talked about when the sound goes off, when she’s Alice through the looking glass, and when the changes happen. When do we hear? When do we have silence, and when do we let loose something that we’ve really honed in on? 

That process has been going on for years. I always think that sound works so much on your subconscious, in a way that’s often deeper than an image. That is something I’ve always been really interested in. In another life, I’d like to have been a mixer. [laughs]

Jennifer, I wanted to ask as well about the deeply moving scenes between Grace and Pam that you share with Sissy Spacek. 

JL: [grins] I mean, I am a huge Sissy Spacek fan. 

I love your shirt, by the way. [A/N: Lawrence is wearing a shirt commemorating Spacek’s seminal performance in “Carrie.”]

JL: Thank you. She’s an icon! I mean, I’ve known her since I was a teenager. We’ve just always been in each other’s lives, weirdly. I always remember her being so kind and maternal to me. And then I worked with her husband, [production designer] Jack Fisk, on a movie, [“Causeway,” the first film produced by Excellent Cadaver]. And so, when we started playing together… Sissy herself is so aware and sees everything. When she looks at you, it’s like she’s looking right through you. And she’s so maternal. 

It really leapt off the page. I think what was really in the book is more of a normal, average relationship between a mother and a daughter-in-law. But Sissy was so loving and so aware that she ended up being the only one who really saw what was going on with Grace. 

LR: I mean, she glows in conversation, Sissy does. She wanted to understand what was going on, to dig deeper. It was great. She’s a total icon. I didn’t know she was going to take [the role] at first, but she really developed that part. It became much more empathetic. It became much more—like Jennifer was just saying—like she sees what’s happening, or she understands what’s happening much more clearly than Jackson does. And so the film becomes about the two women, which I thought really added to it. It added another dimension to the original material.

I love that glorious, bitter, final sentiment there, in Grace’s toast: “May we live long and die out.” 

LR: Yeah! That scene was really interesting to shoot, as well, because of the way the two women are acting. There is that toast, where Grace says, “Pam,” and then Sissy says, “Grace.” The two of them are really seeing each other, you know? And I remember sitting gripped. I loved that. I was getting goosebumps at that moment, because there was a real understanding implicit between these two characters.

Lynne, tell me about your collaboration with your longtime cinematographer, Seamus McGarvey, who shot much of this film on Ektachrome, shooting night scenes during the day and then manually darkening them. I’m curious about that process and how it interacted with your artistic inspirations on the film. You had an early interest in photography, and you’re also a trained painter—there are compositions in this film that, to me, palpably evoked the work of Andrew Wyeth.

LR: That’s really smart, actually—Andrew Wyeth, I mentioned in the script, so that’s fitting. I have known Seamus for years. He shot “Kevin,” and we shot that in CinemaScope, which was totally right for that film. There, we talked about the epic in the everyday—you don’t normally shoot a film in scope when it’s all in a house; it’s normally landscape, but that choice suited this Mexican standoff of sorts between Kevin and Eva, the main characters.

With this one, it felt more like a portrait, like the actual location of the house dictated the Academy frame. I hadn’t used that before and wasn’t going to use it. We were going to shoot CinemaScope, but when I walked in, I thought we needed to be shooting Academy so we could always see the full length of the doors, to see them coming in and out. I always wanted to see that patio door, and I wanted later to see these layers of the house. It’s a real prison of a house in a way—not that it’s not beautiful, but it feels like that for her. She’s stuck there, so that dictated that. 

I was talking with Seamus also about “Morvern Callar,” which I shot some scenes of, [including a club scene,] on reversal film stock, but you can’t get that same film stock anymore. Seamus was like, “Why don’t we still shoot reversal? Why don’t we try it?” It’s about having it all feel heightened for her. Our minds were rattling; we were looking at these colors in a different way. 

We did all these tests. Seamus is such a buddy, and I think he likes working with me because he can experiment, and we can try things out. We could have come off something a bit more conventional before, and it was like, suddenly, we can be trying all this stuff out again. I’ve known him for 19 years, since I was at film school.

But [Kodachrome reversal film stock] had this otherworldly, dreamlike quality, so we were finding the character through how we were shooting it as well. Seamus is so kind; it’s always such a real collaboration with us, and I think that makes it exciting. He’s really thinking about the story and about the characters. Some DPs come in really technical, but he is thinking about what’s going on as much as I am. It was a real pleasure. We were getting excited like little kids when we were doing camera tests or coming up with ideas while we were shooting.

Finally, I was hoping you could share a bit about Nick Nolte appearing in “Die My Love.” It’s always so wonderful to see him, but this is a very special, moving performance. How did he get involved?

LR: Well, I’d thought of him, and so I asked him one day if he would like to play this. He wanted to meet in person, so I went to Los Angeles, and I met him in Malibu with my daughter, actually. There was just something about him, you know? I mean, his face is mesmeric. And, going back to Seamus as well, in thinking about shooting Nick Nolte, the camera can’t take its eyes off him. It is this screen presence he has that’s really magical and wild.   

It felt like, whenever we turned the camera on him, he didn’t need to do that much, and it was just mesmerizing. And it was beautiful to work with him. We were all quite taken aback by some of his scenes—the whole crew was—when Grace was with him in the woods and when she sees him later in the hospital… There’s nobody like Nick Nolte.

“Die My Love” is in theaters nationwide on Nov. 7.

On 16 April 2025, a day after Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi’s intimate documentary “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” was announced as a selection of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in the ACID parallel section, the film’s subject, Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, along with nine members of her family, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in the Gaza Strip. Suddenly, what had started as a film about life during wartime became an elegy for a woman whose spirit and smile will endure forever. 

As I seek to contextualize the impact of this stunning work of nonfiction cinema, I want to share what my colleague Isaac Feldberg so beautifully wrote out of the film’s Cannes premiere, which took place on May 15th, less than a month after Hassona’s murder: 

Farsi got her start photographing political protests in Iran before being forced into exile; she seems to intuitively grasp the unfathomable nature of her subjects’ daily circumstances, asking questions that guide their conversations as often toward beauty as bloodshed. […] The movie’s unconventional visual approach, which finds the director holding up one smartphone to record another, makes it impossible to forget the barriers separating this filmmaker from her subject.

Farsi came of age in Iran in the decade leading up to the 1979 revolution. An activist from a young age, while she was still a student, Farsi spent eight months in prison for hiding a friend and schoolmate during the 1981–1982 Iran Massacres. Although she had always found inspiration in the visual arts, she practiced photography in her home country. After finishing secondary school in 1984, she left Iran for Paris to study mathematics. Eventually, Farsi began making short films, and over the last few decades, has directed over a dozen shorts and features, working in both narrative fiction and documentary.

For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Farsi about her film’s unique visual language, how making this film irrevocably changed her relationship to image making, and her hope that people will remember the unwavering spirit and singular life of Fatma Hassona forever. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I’d love to start by discussing how you filmed your conversations with Fatma. The way you filmed these conversations, the viewer can literally see the technology that helps you two have this conversation. Could you talk about your decision to film the way you did, and also your thoughts on how technology can both isolate and connect us in such a beautiful way?

This was a subversive use of technology. But not only that, it was clear that our connection was fragile, unstable, and unpredictable, because it could be cut off at any moment, and each conversation could be the last. The one on April 15th was our last conversation, without either of us knowing it.

Filming with a mobile phone is a low-key approach that, on the one hand, confers openness and modesty to the image. Which, strangely, opens the image rather than closing it due to the default or technical limitations. On the contrary, it really opens it in a plastic way. Plastic, meaning the image becomes like a painting at times: Low-key, pixelized. That could only happen with this kind of filming, and not with a high-tech camera or 4K filming. This was one reason. 

The other reason was to be at the same level. Meaning that our conversations were going through two mobile phones, and I wanted to keep that same level, not to have a hierarchy of another camera taking over. That’s why I decided to film the mobile phone with another mobile phone, rather than with a camera. The third reason is that the whole witnessing that we have of this genocide and that of the massacres, everything arrives on our mobile phones. We also see it on TV sometimes and on computers, but most of the time we are on our phones scrolling through social media, witnessing the graphic nature of these images. 

So I intended to create a different type of image with this low quality, which makes it more human, more open, in a way. Of course, the decision was made quickly, but I analyzed it more afterwards. It was an intuitive decision. Then, as time passed, I got used to it. I never thought I would change it. 

The other decision was the framing. I put the phone vertically so I could really focus on her face. What I liked was also leaving some open space on the left and right, because had I taken both our faces, or had I kept it the other way, or had I cut, I would have lost those two bands left and right. That gives the image more depth. You see things happening around it—on my side, especially, and a little bit of my computer, my cat passing from the back. I think the intention was really to give the image some breathing room.

You said in Q&As that making this film changed your whole perception of image-making. Was that something that came when you were editing the movie, or was there a moment earlier when you realized your entire philosophy of film had changed?

It happened gradually. I’ve always been somewhat impatient and very speedy in motion. Filmmaking is a mix of quick action and long-term preparation, especially in editing and post-production. With this film, the filming was a long-term process, and also the editing and all the rest around it. Still, there was always this feeling of emergency that I felt that I needed to do something quickly with these images, to share them with the rest of the world, because I was aware of the importance of these images. For some reason, I was convinced about that right from the beginning. 

When the film was finished and when Fatma was killed in a targeted attack, then it really, I think, flipped in yet another dimension in terms of my relationship to image making and to images. Because now, when I pick up a phone to film, there’s a part of my head thinking, what’s going to happen to these images, what will I do with them? I’ve never had that immediate thought before in my other work. This time, something happened—whether or not she was targeted in relation to this film or because of her photojournalism—that led to her being targeted. But in any case, the fact that she was killed had to do with images. She said the camera is a weapon. This is not in the film. I kept it out, but there was a conversation where she said that. And indeed, the camera is a weapon. 

So yes, it totally changed my relationship to image-making. Now I’m thinking differently about my new projects—or my old projects. I’m going back to those that were in development before. My sense of priority, my feeling, and my physicality in image-making have changed. It’s not the same anymore. I need time to re-evaluate, because I’m still so much in the film and traveling with it every day. But yes, my relationship to image-making has changed a lot. 

Fatma mentioned she wanted to photograph everything, to capture everything, to bear witness to everything, and publish it all. But obviously that’s difficult. The more you publish, the more people, at least in America, get desensitized to imagery, and that’s where curation comes in. As you were having these conversations with Fatma, I believe you said you had about 80 hours of recorded conversations. How did you curate the film so that you told a story, as opposed to publishing essentially an eighty-hour live stream?

Publishing everything in this case would not have made sense, as the volume would have diluted the impact. So choices needed to be made. What guided me? Basically, my compass was emotion, also information, but mainly emotion. I needed to build a narrative. It is a documentary, but you need to develop a narrative arc with the images. So I really focused on the conversations where we were closest, where she was most eloquent, when her feelings came out, and when she was conveying something substantial in terms of emotion and information. It usually was when something extraordinary happened. So that’s how I made my choice about what to do with this huge chunk of footage. Then gradually the structure became clearer. It was like making a sculpture.

Editing is always a bit like that, except that I was alone for most of it —until the very end. Then I had an advisor who helped me a lot. Farahnaz Sharifi, a great editor and Iranian filmmaker herself, really helped me make the last cuts emerge. The decisions, for instance, to keep the news excerpts were there from the beginning. I was conscious and confident that I needed to keep it and to date the film with them. So it was a matter of how to use them and how to build the rhythm and the tempo. 

Then the photography is, of course, her images. That was the last thing, which was very important for the film, and I believe it became clear towards the end of the editing process where exactly they needed to be used.

What was really striking was seeing her vibrancy start to dampen. Her hope is always there, but you see her face grow gaunter as she isn’t able to eat as much. She’s still helping others, but I think you can see something change internally. The camera captures that. It’s really powerful. What was that like for you to witness? At one point, you say, “I can’t do anything,” and she responds, “You’re here with me.” That’s the power of human connection. 

Well, the film, as you watch it today, if you take out that last conversation part, the end is that long traveling shot. That was the real end that I had intended for the film. She filmed that for me. This was the real ending of the film until she was killed. Afterwards, for a few weeks, I was unable to do anything to the film. I mean, I was working on it to make it ready—finishing post-production and sound—but basically I had decided not to change the editing at all. 

Then, at the very last moment, maybe ten days before the premiere, I decided that I needed to put a little bit of that final conversation, and that’s how it is now. I intended to keep it as it was when she was alive. She hadn’t seen the final cut. We were supposed to see it together at Cannes. 

By seeing these images the way we are exposed as powerless witnesses to the horror of maimed bodies, bodies that have been made unrecognizable, burnt or scattered, I mean horrible things that we see. But also people who have been dehumanized through propaganda. It makes us, on one hand, numb, because when you witness a lot of graphic images, many people tend to look away to protect themselves, either not believe it or look away, thinking they cannot stand it. 

So another decision for me was to keep the war outside the frame, and keep it only through the sound, which is something that is, in my opinion, a powerful way to present the permanent and persistent presence of the military actions and the ongoing war and genocide. Through sound alone, our mind imagines the rest as we focus on her words and her face. Her face is like a territory in flux. We see the changes on her face, as you said, but it is a soft, very enlightened face that is slipping away gradually, and that is the ultimate horror of it. 

The rest comes through the sound only. This is what makes it so strong, I think: it’s not an image you look away from; her face is so magnetic that you keep following her. And what she says is also very strong, but you always have the quadcopters flying over, and you hear the gunshots and whatnot. This was a deliberate decision: not to include graphic images. 

What it was like to witness her face change and that internal change, and how it made you feel that?

Extremely bad. I told her this was the least that I was telling her. I felt much worse than what I would say to her, but it was very frustrating. If you really love somebody, you’re attached to the person, you feel the person is just drifting away, you can’t do anything, and the only thing you can do is talk to the person, and that too isn’t often. It creates a very aggressive feeling of powerlessness. But I had to do it because I didn’t have a choice. All I could do was be there for her whenever she could connect. I had to come to peace with that feeling, that with that guilt

I loved that you included her family members, both her younger brother on camera, but also the family members who’ve been martyred before you spoke with her. I wondered if you felt, in a way, that you were archiving these lives, archiving their existence, archiving these individuals?

Yes, because, even if—and I wish it were the case—gosh, even if they were alive, the connection is so fragile that I never knew whether we could connect the next day. Because of the unreliable connection, the sheer fact of disconnection was due to Israel’s control of the whole telecommunications system. So anytime they decide to, they cut it. I know that very well as an Iranian. The regime does the same thing, the Iranian regime, whenever they want to do it, they make a blackout, they just cut the internet, and that’s it, and you’re left with nothing. 

So, from the very first moment I got in touch with her, through that first connection, I knew. That’s why my camera was already ready. I mean, I was already recording when she answered. This was the case every time I called her, because I knew these moments were impossible to recreate. They were unique, so that sense of archiving was there all the time.

We talked a bit about the news footage that you included. I wondered at the time if you followed how the US news was covering these same stories and how you chose which coverage to include in the final film?

I did have that systematic filming of newsreels, in the sense that I had already started from the very beginning—actually, very early after October 7—during this episode of the conflict. I started filming the TV even before I met her. So I have hours and hours of footage, depending on where I was at that moment. I always had Al Jazeera and then either French media or CNN. I did think at some point that it’d be interesting, because I did film the same event, told differently by different outlets. Still, if I had used that comparison and put those same events together, it would have taken over the film’s main timeline, which, for me, was our conversation. 

So I decided to keep the news footage to a minimum. So, the way I chose the footage for each event, instead of using different media next to each other, I chose the one that was most eloquent to me, in either a good or in a bad way, and that At some point, Netanyahu was talking on, I think it was CNN, and so I put that moment in the film. At another point, it was Biden in France, so I chose that one. The UNICEF one, I remember very well, was an Al Jazeera one, which I find very striking, because at that moment the UNICEF chief was just revolted. He’s in the field, talking, and he doesn’t know how to keep his anger in check or control his reactions to this frustrating blocked aid situation. 

During the editing process, for each piece of information I needed to include, I picked the one I thought was best. Sometimes it was the way the image was shown, or the way I had filmed it, because I was commenting on the news myself while filming, in the way I was filming—zooming, letting a reflection in, or allowing my own image in the frame. 

For instance, that moment with Netanyahu, there’s my shadow on his, and I thought that was quite a clear comment, in the way I was filming it. No other comment was needed; the image in itself was, and because I didn’t make any modifications or interventions afterwards, what you see in the frame, as a frame, is the frame I had while I filmed. I didn’t change anything in post.

I was also really interested in the way you included so much of Fatma’s art, beyond her stunning photojournalism. You have her beautiful poem, and there’s the song that she sings. How much of that did she share with you, and how did you choose which of her works to include?

She started sharing many things with me very quickly. I think she wanted to. It was nice for her to share with someone. So, she sent me a song very quickly. I listened to it, and I was like, ”This is her voice.” Then I asked her if she sang, and she said yes. I was amazed at the beauty of the song she sent me. It’s not the one that is in the film. It was another piece. I asked her to send me more. That’s how it started. 

And it was the same thing with her poems. She sent me a poem before I asked her to read it. She told me she was a writer, so I asked her to share some of her work. When she did, I translated them. The next time we connected, I asked her to read one for me. It was fascinating because what you see in her photos is also evident in prose, texts, and other pieces of writing. In all of her work, there was this common denominator of her sensibility, the same eyes that would describe something through words or through images.

It was interesting for me to put them next to each other. So I have some of her writing. Some were destroyed during the attack, and I don’t think there are any traces of many more, but I have some. A dozen or so poems that she shared with me.

Her poetry is so striking. She comes up with such unique imagery not just in her poetry but also in her everyday conversation. Something she said in a normal conversation became the title. It’s such a striking turn of phrase, and it just came out. You can really see her brilliance in how she speaks every day.

Her way of building images is what I really loved. I have been asked this question: why not speak in Arabic, and why did we speak English together? I did try to talk to her in Arabic. I understand Arabic, but I cannot speak it. You didn’t ask this, but I’m saying it to explain that I think, through the limitations she had in English, and because of her sense of poetry, she would build images with her limited words. Sometimes, instead of having the exact words, she would create an image. And this sentence is similar to that. 

The film title is, instead of using a sophisticated word or expression, you know, she just builds poetry while talking in real time. And this was the brilliant thing we had, and this is why I prefer to keep talking to her in English: then she would invent new expressions, new words, new images. 

How did the perspective that she brought to life change your ideas of how you look at life?

It changed my perspective, yes. In terms of my faith and religious belief, no. But in terms of belief in life and hope, yes, it did affect my vision.

At one point, she quotes the line from “The Shawshank Redemption” about hope being a dangerous thing, and I believe, in the film, you say you hadn’t seen it. I was wondering if you watched the movie to get the context?

This is a weird thing. I can’t bring myself to watch it. I’ve sat down like ten times to say, “Okay, now you have to watch this.” I asked my daughter to find it for me. But it’s hard for me to sit down and watch it. So I haven’t yet, but I will definitely. Every time someone asks me, I say, “No, not yet, but I will soon.”

I was wondering how you felt about witnessing her humor and resilience, built on hope and humor, even though she doesn’t think she’s a normal person, keeping that bit of normalcy amidst not just this current moment of genocide but generations of oppression?

I’m sure you remember what I told her there: that hope is a dangerous thing, but we need it. I do mean it exactly for the reason that you’re saying. Partially, because if you do not have hope, then you will probably lose your mind and do something crazy, or you will just let yourself die and not hold on anymore. In the case of Iran, I told her that we have third and fourth-generation Iranians who are fighting for their freedom. Every time we go from bad to worse, but if there were no hope, people would give up. She said hope is a dangerous thing, but I think she meant you need hope. This is why she was saying it. It was a strange way of expressing herself, by negation; she was saying that because she had that smile. 

During the whole conversation, she’s just smiling, and it’s not amazing. She looks like an icon. I mean, the image was breaking. Her face was becoming like a painting with that low light, you know? She used to put open pages on her phone to light her face when it was too dark, and we were desperate to talk. So she said, “Let’s see. I’ll do something.” Then all of a sudden, her face was brighter. I would ask what she did, and she would laugh and respond, “I opened a page.” 

That conversation was a very special moment within the whole series we had. A day earlier, she had sent me that series of photos that are in the film afterwards, of the kid washing the blood and flesh with the water, which is the most horrible thing, but also the strongest thing, and most confrontational photos she ever did, and sent to me, and I had received them the night before that conversation. Still, in the film, I use them afterwards. I asked her about her choices and curation, how she thinks, and what commands her when she takes photos, and she explained the mechanism to me. So, then I put the images for the viewers to see what we were talking about. 

What do you hope people will take away from the film when they’re done watching it?

Palestinian dignity. Fatma’s smile. Hope for humanity. Her face, her words, her personality, become a face for the many Palestinians, many stories that have no face and no identity. The way she personifies that cause and that identity, I think, is so open and generous that it resonates with many other stories. That’s how she becomes an icon or representative of her people. So I want the audience to take these positive aspects away with them after they watch the film, and the fact that she wanted her death to be loud, and her photos to travel. I hope that people will remember her forever. 

Are there any women who have either made films in the past or make films contemporarily that you find inspirational or that you think more people should see?

In my view, there is a whole new school of documentary filmmakers in Iran who’ve done brilliant things and are doing so now. These women are all roughly the same generation, filmmakers, activists for women’s rights, and dissidents. One of them is the person whom I named earlier, Farahnaz Sharifi. She made a film, which I find really brilliant, that was at Berlinale last year, called “My Stolen Planet.”

Oh, I saw that. I loved that film. That’s another one that’s really about reclaiming archives. 

Exactly. There is another person, a filmmaker named Mina Keshavarz, who made a film titled “The Art of Living in Danger.” She also works a lot with archives. There’s another filmmaker of the same generation and group; actually, they all made a film together called “Profession: Documentarist,” which features eight or ten filmmakers. 

The third one I was going to mention is Firouzeh Khosrovani. She won IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam) a couple of years ago with a film called “The Radiograph of a Family.” This year, she had a film in Venice called “Past Future Continuous.” It’s a documentary, but it’s also a reenactment. It’s the story of a woman in exile in the States, unable to return to Iran, who asks a company to install CCD cameras in her parents’ home in Tehran so she can watch them from afar. The whole film is done through that perspective.

 It’s co-directed with Morteza Ahmadvand, another artist. I find this idea brilliant. It’s a powerful statement about the whole of Iranian society and this distance, and, in a way, it relates to my film, too, because she fills the gap with technology. It’s a very interesting film.

There are many others. Delphine Seyrig has inspired me a lot. Marguerite Duras, in a different way. But who else? Agnès Varda, of course. She’s one of the greats.

At the beginning of Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest,” music producer David King (Denzel Washington) does not pay much attention when his son recommends a young singer. But in the movie’s last scene, King finally listens to the young woman his son wanted him to hear. That singer is Aiyana-Lee, who co-wrote the song that lets the audience see King doing what he loves most and does best: discovering extraordinary talent.

In an interview at the Middleburg Film Festival, Aiyana-Lee talked about getting a surprise DM from “the real Spike Lee,” giving him 10 songs to choose from, and what it was like to film her first-ever movie role opposite Denzel Washington.

How did you get involved with this film?

So, a bit of a crazy story. Spike Lee DM’d me on Instagram, which feels like the most movie moment that could have happened. He was like, “This is the real Spike Lee.” That’s how he started it. “A long paragraph to follow,” in true Spike Lee fashion. And I saw the checkmark, and I was like, “Maybe it’s a fan who paid for the check mark. Maybe it really is him.”

I was thinking it’s got to be a fan page or someone that’s pranking me. It was 6 a.m. and I woke my mom up. And I said, “Spike Lee might have DM’d me.” She’s like, “Girl, go back to bed. This is crazy. There’s no way.” 

I took a bit of a leap and met up with him that same day. My God, it’s him. He’s just standing there like he’s a real human being. 

So what was it that he responded to?

I had posted this song that I had written in my bedroom called “My Idols Lied to Me.” My previous record label had been sold, and I was on the verge of being homeless, and there was just so much going on in my life where I felt like I had hit my lowest low, no pun intended. And then for that to have come right after writing the song … I feel like through writing the song, that liberation and freedom in being able to express how I felt and the emotions and the journey that I’ve been through really somehow landed on Spike Lee’s page and also resonated with him.

What music did you love when you were very young?

Growing up in such a musical family [her mother is a multi-platinum songwriter and performer Tanya Lee and her uncle is David Ruffin of The Temptations], there’s always been music in the household, so my mom was always playing everything from ’90s R&B, Boys to Men and Dru Hill to Mariah and Michael Jackson, who’s always been my favorite, to Stevie Wonder, to Christina Aguilera, who I absolutely adore as well, and Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, I mean, just like everything you could think of from all spectrums of music, from hip-hop to pop to soul and R&B, it’s always been an array of things.

And when did you start writing songs?

Four years old, yes. I did an international singing and songwriting competition in Germany when I was four, and I won with a song called “Stars.” I’ve always loved writing.  I was always a dreamer. I’ve always been somebody who loves the fantastic and the mystical, and who finds escapism through music and books.

How did Spike describe the movie to you?

The funniest thing was that he’s such a secretive, mysterious person that he’ll give you tidbits but won’t really tell you what’s going on. So, the first time that I met him, I didn’t even know he had me in mind for a film. At first, we were just having conversations about his movies and how he has been able to showcase musicality throughout them. Over the course of a few months, I got more tidbits. And he said that he was working on a project. He sent me the script shortly after we met, but he didn’t say, “There’s a role in this for you.” He was just like, “What do you think, my friend?” 

This happened over the course of months and months and at one point he just called me and was like it was like a Friday and he was like, “I’m gonna send you some sides for Sunday.” He kept asking me these questions. He would call me and be like, “What color are your eyes?” and ask random questions that I later found were included in the script. And he didn’t tell me I got the part. He just got me some Jordan sneakers.

Did you write the song specifically for that scene?

Spike has this really brilliant way of, by telling the truth—your own truth—you’re actually telling the story of the character in the film. He wants to tap into your honesty as a human being, and somehow that always feels like it translates to that moment, mainly because I had related to the scene so much as a musician, as an artist. I’ve been in that exact position, auditioning for an executive in the music industry. So I felt very spiritually aligned with this character, Sula.  

It was definitely a process to get this song, because we were back and forth for a week. I wrote 10 songs to get to this one, so I literally joke all the time; it’s like I got a folder full of Spike Lee joints in my computer.  But through that process, it was really cool because we got to go deeper and deeper. 

He really wanted that to be a moment that was empowering and something that simultaneously feels freeing for me, but also for the character. It just took a lot of trial and error and figuring out what would work for that moment, what would be most impactful, really and truly, and it was a very fun process. 

That scene is the connection between King and his son and also that that he’s back to what he cares about which is the music and not the other things in his life which i think is a really also important message for right now. Having that moment at the end feels like getting back to the humanity of King. 

Your character was nervous, I’m sure, about singing for King, but you must have been anxious about acting with Denzel Washington in your first-ever screen appearance.

Everybody just made me feel incredibly comfortable. I think a huge key to a set is just feeling comfortable—feeling like it’s an open space to make mistakes, an open space to just be yourself. Denzel said, actually, a lot of great things, just grounding me in the moment and trying to be as present as possible, and the biggest tip was to listen. 

The whole time, I was just in awe and also on my toes. Every single take, he would do it completely differently, so that made me jump from moment to moment.  

How do you like the way the film is being received?

It’s deep. It’s very deep. It’s very spiritual. I really believe that music, art, and film—that is what connects us all on a spiritual level.

Nia DaCosta is difficult to define. A Black woman director who has established herself as a big-budget filmmaker, in her still early career, she’s creatively moved through genres and worked on different scales without firmly staying in a single sphere. 

Her debut feature, “Little Woods,” for instance, was an intimate crime Western starring Tessa Thompson and Lily James that effortlessly instilled a spirit of sisterhood in a story about economic depression. DaCosta then parlayed her debut’s success into directing the Jordan Peele-produced, Chicago-set horror sequel “Candyman” before quickly jumping onto the comic book landscape by helming “The Marvels.” Next year, she’ll return to the horror space when she helms the “28 Years Later” sequel, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.” Before then, however, is her catty and queer high society dramedy “Hedda.”

Produced by Amazon MGM Studios, the stylish and bold “Hedda” is an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play Hedda Gabler. It’s also a return by DaCosta to the kind of character-based storytelling that “Little Woods” foretold. 

“Hedda” stars Tessa Thompson as the titular socialite, whose cunningness is tested on a single night when her old flame Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), an academic who also happens to be applying for the same teaching position as Hedda’s hapless husband George Tesman (Tom Bateman), arrives at her party brandishing her new book and devoted partner Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots). Set in the opulent yet repressed milieu of 1950s England—one of DaCosta’s many sharp adaptive choices—the film’s sophisticated sense of fashion, art, and interior design make for a sharp juxtaposition with the fractured and cutting jockeying happening underneath its resplendent exterior.

DaCosta and Thompson offer a complex portrayal of a Black woman whose position and place are perpetually questioned, to the point of Hedda’s own unknowability. The character’s personal ambiguity, therefore, ignites a questioning of her intellectual and financial ambitions in the face of her sexual desires for a visually controlled film filled with lustfulness and pettiness that touches on racism, homophobia, and sexism without ever overworking its thematic aims. With Thompson in what might be the best performance of her career, “Hedda” is the kind of film made by a battle-tested director fully inspired by the opportunity to put her recent experience to new use.            

On the day DaCosta received the Black Perspectives Artistic Achievement Award from the Chicago International Film Festival, I spoke with her in person about allowing Black women to be unlikable, retooling an Ibsen classic, reality television, and her interest in class.

In your career you’ve shown so much flexibility with regard to switching between genres and projects of different scales, from intimate indies to big budget comic book movies, as an artist, what do you find helpful about having that flexibility rather than staying in one mode?

I really just like doing different kinds of things, but I guess what is helpful is that you learn things that you don’t think can apply to other genres. Going into a Marvel film, for example, you basically have 80-day shoots for main photography and principal photography, not including second unit—you have to control and coordinate so many things across so many departments with so much cast and crew. After a while, whatever is instilled in you, in terms of your way of shooting or approaching a day, you just know what it is. 

Because you’ve worked at such a high level—it’s such a stupid amount of money those movies get made with—you start to understand different pathways and different ways of making a film. What you learn, going from the indie world into those big-budget movies, is that you can bring the real emotionality, nuance, and complexity of a character into a world that can sometimes forget that that’s important.

Was there a specific area in “Hedda” that you brought that experience to?

Well, “Hedda” was distinct because I hadn’t made a film that I’ve written since my first film, “Little Woods.” “Little Woods” I made with an amazing crew, but we were all on our first, second, or third movie. With this film, a lot of my crew came with me from “The Marvels.” My first time working with Sean Bobbitt was with Marvel. My first time working with Lindsay Pugh was on Marvel. All those people came onto this film and took a lot less money because we just had such a great time working together. I think we also learned how to maintain control of a set and keep things moving. Because the biggest thing you’ve got to know is that you’re going to figure it out. 

I think that’s one of the things that keeps my stress level pretty low. I mean, you’re always stressed when you’re making a film, but I didn’t have excess stress here. Because I think when you go through Marvel, it’s the craziest, biggest, wildest version of making a film, when you do do something like this that’s really intimate and personal with a script that’s not going to change, unless you’re in rehearsals, you know it’s a thing you can hold in your hands. So I think the rigor with which you approach a bigger film really helps with the smaller film. 

I’ve read that you’d done a lot of rehearsals for the film. There are so many oners and some wonderful focus pulling that requires some intricate blocking. Did you set that movement with the actors during rehearsals? 

A big thing for me with actors that I’ve realized over my short career is that many of them feel like they have no agency. Many of them aren’t actually that comfortable with just delivering some stuff and seeing what happens at the premiere. They really want to feel like part of the creative process. And sometimes actors will act out because they feel like they’re being ignored or left out of the process.

For me, I always try to cast really smart, creative actors so that when we get to rehearsals, I can invite them into the process. That’s when I open the script. I’m not interested in ad-libbing things on set unless we’ve already gotten what we need. But in rehearsals, I’m like: This is what it is, but what else can it be? This isn’t sitting right in your mouth; this doesn’t make sense to you; do you want to add this idea? Cool. Let’s talk about it. We do all of that in rehearsals so that on the day when we’re shooting, the script is the script. 

But Sean and I really wanted to block the film before we got to the shoot because we knew we wouldn’t have a ton of time. It was a 35-day shoot. And although it’s not a huge script, we wanted to be as prepared as possible by having the actors be prepared. So we would rehearse in spaces with the furniture, and if we didn’t have the furniture, we taped it out. That’s a super important part. That is, just making sure that we’re all together, trying to figure out what this is going to be while also sticking to the vision I have in my head.

Was that kind of preparation always part of your approach, or did working on big films instill that?

I’ve always been a rehearsal person and a blocking-a-rehearsal person. But I think that came from when I got my Master’s in the UK, and while working in theater, because so much of that creation is collaborative. The writers, the directors, and the actors are there, and they’re figuring it out together. That was really inspiring and fulfilling to me. 

You talked to a few actresses who previously played Hedda. How did those conversations help you to make this character your own?

I spoke to two or three actresses who played Hedda. But my favorite part was that everyone feels differently about Hedda, including the women who played her. One said: I find Hedda incredibly kind. I said that to another one, and she was like: What are you talking about? I love that. That’s what makes this character so fascinating and why she resonates today. Which actually made me braver. The fact that these women embodied this character and learned so much about her, taking her inside themselves, even though they couldn’t find a single way to think about her or an answer to her. So, I thought that’s who Hedda is; let’s not force an answer, which would be quite disingenuous. Let’s be true to what the spirit of the play is.

She’s so… complex. 

Giiiiiiirl. She’s woooh. 

You rarely see Black women who could be considered unlikable as the protagonist. 

I don’t know if you feel this while watching and writing about film and media in general, and this is just a cultural thing too, we as Black people are so afraid of being seen in a negative light because of how high the stakes are for our livelihoods. We know how real the general perception of us can be if we’re seen as negative, violent, or lazy, or whatever—it has real-world consequences. Subsequent to that, the way we are told to portray ourselves in media is very particular, especially with the unwritten rule that we shouldn’t say such and such in mixed company. But I think it limits us.

I often think about how to define freedom. Is freedom not being our true, complex, beautifully dynamic, messy, generous, and amazing selves to live in a way that still puts us under the boot of oppression? I’m committed to presenting complex Black women on screen, especially Black women behaving badly. I find that very important, which is funny because I really value kindness and generosity. But I also like to challenge the viewer. We don’t need to be elegant, dignified, strong, or all those things. We can also be messes. We can also be wrong instead of just being some approved characteristics.

Conversely, “Little Woods” is such a powerful film about sisterhood, and “Hedda” is the total opposite. 

Yeah, this is not that. These sisters are not together. 

But you know what’s interesting? For the central Black woman in both works, we’re concerned with her isolation. In both films, she’s in predominantly white spaces, which is something that I’m really fascinated by, you know, as someone who was educated in predominantly white institutions. You have to figure out how to be your own person while getting all these different messages about who you’re supposed to be. That’s something that’s fascinated me. I think that’s something that more than anything else connects us to films, actually.

Speaking of spaces, I noticed that many of the characters are often framed by artwork of Hedda’s home. Could you talk about accumulating that art and what artistic style you were searching for?

Sean, my production designer, Cara Brower, and I were all clear from the beginning that this cannot feel like your mom’s 1950s movie. It can’t feel like how we think the 50s were. It has to be like how they actually were. Something that I kept coming back to was that Salvador Dali, that crazy old man, was making art at this time. The Cubists are out there; the Modernists; avant-garde jazz musicians. Let’s represent the fact that this woman, Hedda, would be in tune with all of that stuff, and that’s what would be in her house as opposed to 1765 portraits of old women.

She would have been engaging in the world. Her portrait in the dining room, which is now in my dining room, was really important to me because I wanted a kind of Cubist portrait to show this fractured, slightly demented vision of her placed in a prized position. I wanted it to feel like she was looking over everyone at the various moments they’re in the dining room. Those were all painted by an artist named Thomasina Smith.

The comedy in this is so good, too. So much of it is in the edit and in the charged line deliveries. I’ve seen at least one person compare it to “Real Housewives.”

It’s so funny, with regard to “Real Housewives” because I genuinely don’t know anything about that. There are so many now that I can’t even start watching. My friend rattled them off: Salt Lake City, Atlanta, New York, Beverly Hills, Orange County. I can’t. There are too many now. Do you watch it?

No. But I do like reality television as a way to shut off my brain for a while. I love “Catfish.”

My reality viewing is more like “The Great British Bake Off,” “The Great British Sewing Bee,” cooking shows, and pottery shows. 

Do you watch the holiday baking shows?

I always start one, and I’m like: I can’t do this anymore. But the one I really loved was “Nailed It!” That one really soothed my soul.

I honestly had a similar reaction to watching Nina Hoss as Eileen in this film. She has so many great line readings that feel soul-soothing. 

When Nina saw the movie, she was like: Sometimes I just had to laugh at this crazy lady, Eileen. 

The gender flipping here from the original play is so inspired. What caused that decision?

I really wanted the movie to explore the female energy of the play, or at least Hedda’s perspective as a woman in a society trying to figure out who she wants to be, or even what she wants to be. Thea is a great foil to her in the play, but I wanted to bump her character up a bit, so I started to think about the Eilert character. He just makes more sense as a woman because the whole play he’s like: I’m brilliant, but no one sees me. No one understands me. I’m at risk of losing everything because of my alcoholism and depression. I thought: Well, if you were a woman, I could really see how torturous that would be and how painful it would be for no one to listen to you. 

Flipping him into being a woman then strengthens what Hedda is going through because the movie’s also about bravery and cowardice and what freedom is. How do you get freedom? How do you approach power? Hedda is told by Eileen: You could be me. Look at what I did. In a way, Hedda wants to show Eileen how easily that can go away.

That’s one of the many brave adaptive choices you made here. There’s also the decision to set this in 1950s England. Why then and there?

Because I took away some of the framework of the play, like Aunt Julian and George spending 20 minutes talking about Hedda, I wanted to ratchet up the environment of repression. England, of course, is very repressed [Laughs] and in the 1950s they were super repressed [Laughs]. That’s what’s so interesting about the 1950s. I could have done the Victorian era, but that felt a little too far in the past, even though they were repressed as hell. For me, the 1950s, coming after World War II, which was this horrific wound, are an era I’m really fascinated by because I think we’re still living in the postwar era. To me, society’s trying to heal and figure out how to find a semblance of equilibrium again after this mindlessly violent period. 

In the 1950s, there was this desire to return to normalcy. Ladies, thank you so much for working, the men are here now and we need them to go back to work. So, all these men are forced back into this structure, which doesn’t really suit them either. Many of them are traumatized, but some of them would’ve probably preferred to stay home with the kids. Even now, we judge men who want to be stay-at-home dads. Meanwhile, the women who are given this new sense of freedom, this new sense of access, are then told, Never mind, thank you,” that their freedom can be taken away at any time. Afterwards, of course, the 1960s came roaring, but I thought that decade might be too much of a tinder box to set the film in.

I wonder how much crazier this would be if this were set in the 1960s. 

Well, in the 1960s, it would’ve been like: Hedda, girl, just go fucking be a beat poet or whatever. Go travel to Harlem.

Well, in the 1950s, you still got the class element, which is fascinating. “Little Woods” is about class, but it’s about the economic fringes, whereas class here is defined in terms of gender. What interests you in class?

So much of the play is about class. Hedda’s father is this great general, but she’s his legitimate daughter. She’s Black. She never talks about her mother, her Black parent. She feels entitled to the access her father had, along with the social recognition and entitlements she would have as his legitimate daughter. At the same time, she’s so bored with middle-class people. I think that, especially in England, the idea of being middle class and being ambitious and yearning to improve your position is seen as a little bit tacky. So, I thought that would be really interesting for her.

I also find it really fascinating because I think in England, in particular, they very much say they’re all about class, not about race. Of course, that ignores that race can be a huge signifier of class. Also, race and class intersect completely. So, it was all like this beautiful sort of hodgepodge that made perfect sense for my transliteration. 

“Grow,” which opens on October 17, is a charming story about a girl named Charlie (newcomer Priya-Rose Brookwell) with a gift for communicating with plants. She was abandoned at an orphanage by her feckless mother, but when the staff locates her aunt Dinah (Golda Rosheuvel). Charlie joins her on her struggling farm in a small community where the most important event of the year is the annual pumpkin competition.

In an interview, Glaswegian director John McPhail talked about finding the right cast and setting and making a movie that can be enjoyed by the whole family.

The setting you found for the film really invites us into the world of the story. It’s so charming.

It is a made-up town, but we shot it at a place called Culross. It’s a beautiful little town. There’s loads of history to it. It’s like a British town, and it’s almost got this little touch of Scandinavian architecture to it, which I thought would lean into the fantasy element. It has a big orange building from when they used to tan, and I thought, “Ah, like pumpkins.” And it’s right on the coast as well, so I thought it would just make a really lovely little setting. 

You said you wanted to make this a family film rather than a film for children. What does that mean?

I wanted to create that shared experience, where the kids are laughing and the adults are laughing. It’s trying to find that happy balance. I make films for audiences. I am here to tell stories.  

The edit was so brisk that it taught us not to take it all too seriously because it is fun and not too tense.

My editor is incredible. David Arthur is a filmmaker himself as well. He’s not a yes guy. He tells you his opinions and fights for every frame as well. That relationship starts even before we start shooting. Dave’s cutting while I’m filming so I’ll get a phone call from him saying, “Oh, this is great,” or “Can you can you pick up a shot?” And he’s a father. So, 

having him there next to me through all this was brilliant.  

You have an outstanding cast, though it took me a minute to get used to seeing Queen Charlotte on a farm! Tell me about the casting process, starting with Priya in her first screen role.

Priya was nine. She is in practically every frame of the film, and she just knocked it out of the park all the time. She never cried. She was never huffy. She never stopped. It’s like she came in every day as a bundle of energy and a joy to work with. And I would talk to her the same way I would talk to Nick and Golda. I can’t praise her enough, one incredible kid. She just loves acting. 

The magic trick you accomplished in this movie is combining a lot of different tones and genres while keeping it very organic. 

Balancing the tone overall is something that I’m thinking about all the time. It’s a British film, a British cast, but I want it to be international. When you’ve got like American financiers and UK financiers, and the Americans want to make it bigger, and the UK is like, “Bring it back down.” I have to make sure that I’m looking after and servicing both those audiences. I’d get my cast to do other takes to be a bit bigger, and then other times dial it back. That meant in the edit, I got to have fun playing with things. I can either really push it or pull it back as well. And that allows a little bit more fluidity. It just creates this nice little push and pull. It meant we could find that sweet spot.

I sit down with all my department heads, tell them what I’m looking for, and then they feed into it. But film is such a collaborative process. I get to work with incredible talent, and they’re just building on everything that I’m doing. When you’re collaborative and open like that, it creates a more harmonious set. People feel like they can talk. 

And I like to have fun. We’re making entertainment. This is my dream job. Why would I be grumpy? Why would I be fighting with folk? I just want us all to finish the day and make something that’s great, but I want us to have fun while we do it. 

I’m very selective, particularly with my heads of departments and my crew, because I want people who are going to be like that. Not everyone will know me on the first day, but by the end of the film, everyone will know me, from the security guards to the execs, because I talk to everyone. It’s about appreciating each other. 

And honestly, I had the best cast. None of them had any egos. They just wanted to come in. They wanted to have a lot of fun. Golda and Nick [Frost] were never in their trailers. They were always on set. They just wanted to hang out with the crew. When you’ve got a cast and crew who feel listened to and appreciated, the audience can sense that kind of joy. 

I always told her to go with her gut. If it feels right in the moment, go. You get some of the best stuff that way. You may get absolute nonsense, but we go again. 

Something unusual in the movie, especially in a film for young people, is having two villains. 

Even with the score, we loved writing that villain theme. I love a villain, and like I love a villain that turns around as well. Jeremy Swift was so funny. And Jane Horrocks and Tim McInnerny are those posh weirdos. I didn’t want them to be posh idiots. I wanted them to be weird.