Hello: Melanie Meets Marx

Hello I Must Be Going is Playing in Theaters

Hello: Melanie Meets Marx

(from brinkzine.com 9/5/12)

You probably recognize the title of Todd Louiso's Hello I Must Be Going as the title of the hilarious Groucho Marx song in Animal Crackers. Louiso's sweet serio-comic third film, with a debut script by his wife Sara Koskoff, actually bears no resemblance to any of the anarchic Marx Brothers comedy classics, but surely by watching them the unhappy conformist protagonist Amy Minsky, played by Melanie Lynskey, is inspired to rebel. Lynskey seems to grasp Amy's need to break away from conventions and expectations because that's pretty much what she has done herself in playing Amy. I've been among those waiting for her to get another memorable staring role since 1994. That's when the 16-year-old New Zealand native and young Kate Winslet received accolades playing real-life murderesses in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. Lynskey temporarily went back to school--while Winslet went on to superstardom. She returned to acting and has for the most part quietly played supporting parts, including a recurring role on Two and a Half Men, but it's way past time for this talented actress to move into the spotlight. Now she gets her long-awaited chance and will capture hearts as a broken 35-year-old who is vegetating at the Westport home of her well-off parents Ruth and Stan (strong performances by Blythe Danner and John Rubenstein, with a phone in the photo). She is doing a lousy job of recovering from her split from her husband David (Dan Futterman), for whom she had dropped out of grad school and pursuing a career in photography to marry. She comes back to life when she falls for Jeremy (Christopher Abbott of HBO's Girls), a 19-year-old actor whose mother assumes is gay. But this relationship threatens her businessman's father's chance to close a deal (with Jeremy's step-dad) that will finally allow him to retire and travel the world with his long-patient wife. The film opens this Friday in New York and I hope you see it for Lynskey-and the excellent cast--and also because you'll be discussing it afterward. In anticipation of its September 7 premiere in NY and LA, I had the opportunity to discuss it with the personable Louiso and Koskoff, who met when they acted together on television.

Sarah Koskoff and Todd Louiso  Photo by DP
Danny Peary: You live in Los Angeles, so did you come to New York just to publicize the film?
Sarah Koskoff: My parents live in Connecticut so are here to visit them and to do this.
Todd Louiso: It's a summer trip.
DP: Todd, you did your first film, Love, Liza, with the Sundance Directors Lab. This film you did with the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.
TL: I did a film in-between, The Marc Pease Experience, that ended up being kind of a train wreck.
SK: The script for this was at the Screenwriters Lab at Sundance, which is separate from the Festival. We went together to the Lab. Usually they have just writers-directors at the Sundance Institute but there are also writer-director teams, as we were.
TL: I was already attached to direct it. I sort of tagged along to read the notes Sarah was getting, just so when she came back to Los Angeles she wouldnt have to explain everything that had happened there.
DP: Sarah, this your first script. Did Todd tell you to go off and write it or was he always there?
SK: I wrote it separately and then showed it to Todd. He had a few notes and I did a rewrite. Then we went to the Lab and I got just a crazy amount of notes from all the advisors there, who are all screenwriters. That's when a slow down happened because it took a while to sort through them all. I've heard that's common for people who bring their scripts there. It takes awhile to figure out what's yours and what's coming from another screenwriter.
DP: I'd think that the hardest thing for anyone reading the script would be to figure out the tone. Was part of the discussion there about what was supposed to be funny, what was supposed to be funny-painful, and what was supposed to be serious?
SK: Yeah, it was clear to me where the script was off tonally when I'd get notes from the advisors that were so wrong in regard to the story. I'd wonder why I'd get a note that had nothing to do with what I'd written. I decided it was because there was something unclear in the script. So the rewrite was definitely a process of finding the tone. We could tell more when it was off, but it was hard to articulate to the others.
TL: Both Sarah and I always knew the tone we wanted for this piece. We were on the same page with that.
DP: At what point did Melanie Lynskey come onto the project to play Amy?
TL: About a year after we took the script to the Institute,

 Sundance asked us to do a staged reading of the screenplay in Los Angeles, which it will do a couple times a year. So we had to go out and cast the reading and we asked Melanie. She was actually in Toronto and flew back for it. I thought she would be an interesting choice for the read, and I wasn't even thinking of casting the movie yet. But it was through the reading that she stole the part. It was hers afterward.
DP: What did she get about Amy that made such an impression on you?
SK: It was the grounded, real person feeling she brought to her. She took it out of sitcom terrain. Even though she's very skilled comically, it's hard to find someone who--again tonally--can do serious as well. Her reading was so sad and funny and moving in a different way, and I just believed her as this girl.
DP: What's interesting is that Melanie Lynskey talks of herself as a supporting character actress and here she's playing the part of a woman who is a supporting character in her own life, particularly when she was in her marriage. Ironically, like Amy, Melanie's breaking out and playing a lead role. Did you think about that?
SK: It was one of the things we thought of about after she did the reading. We said, "Let's do it with her!"
TL: She was kind of perfect.
SK: Yes, there is a credibility in the film that you get right off the bat with her in the role. The film goes to a deeper level instantly with her and that was so appealing to us. You say of Amy, "I know that girl, but where do I know her from?" That's what we wanted because Amy is not a center-stage character.
DP: I read an article on this film that was written when it opened at Sundance and the writer stated that it was told through the female perspective. I don't necessarily agree with that. Do you?
TL: I don't see it as either male or female because I can really connect with Amy's character. I showed it to male friends of mine before going to Sundance and they connected to it just as much as female friends of mine.
DP: Sarah, in writing this I think you're writing from Todd's perspective as well as your own. In all three of Todd's films, the lead character is trapped by the past and can't move forward. It's a prevailing theme. There is also a man-child element where characters cant grow up. Amy fits in with the male characters in those films because she can't break away from what happened to her.
SK: Everyone in the movie has this thing they hold on to, and it's not gender specific. There are a lot of people propping up other people's fantasies. For instance, Jeremy's mom has this fantasy about her son becoming a famous actor and he doesn't want to ruin it for her.
TL: In not facing the truth of their situations, they're doing what they need to do to survive mentally. Blythe Danner's character Ruth, Amys mother, builds up her husband, saying he's going to retire and that they're going to go on a trip and finally spend time together. But somewhere inside her, she knows the truth and that he's not that type of person. Those facades are what Amy is really trying to break through.

Danner and Lynskey

DP: The characters in your films--played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and now Melanie Lynskey--have been hurt by something. And... Sarah, you just starting rubbing Todd's back comfortingly because...?
SK: Because Todd connects to that hurt. I'm being soothing. [*Below, see part of Sarah's writer's statement, written about a week after this interview for the Landmark Theater site.]
DK: Todd, I assume there are things in your past that you have a hard time breaking away from or you wouldn't be making these movies.
TL: Yeah.
DP: Jeremy says to Amy, "Sometimes it's easier to be what other people want you to be than fight it." That applies to both of them. Is that a major theme in your life?
TL: Yeah. [To Sarah] You wrote it.
SK [To Todd]: You kept it in.
TL: Sometimes it is just easier to go along with things.
DP: Obviously these films are very personal to you, so does it help that someone else writes this for you?
TL: Yes, but it's not that it's not my idea. It helps me grow as a person and as an artist.
DP: You want these characters to break through and move forward.
TL: Yeah. I think this film is joyful in that way, in terms of where Amy gets to. I've certainly struggled with that. Her struggle is something I felt from the beginning after reading the script.
SK: We were both trying to keep the story close to us, so that we were always checking in because we've both had experiences where the work goes really far off course from what was intended and the connection between us and the work is lost. The work really suffers when that happens and it's painful to see it. The critics are harsh no matter what but if you at least know you did what you are connected to and set out to do, it's really okay. People can have their opinions, that's fine, but when you put work out that's not what you intended, it's really painful.
TL: It's not connected because you've listened to so many different people during the production.
DP: And you end up saying, "That's not the movie we wanted to make, that's the movie you wanted us to make."
TL: That's right. I have a tendency to listen to what people have to say and I end up losing my instinct about a scene or a full film. That's why Sarah and I really tried to stay in touch with each other and do checks and balances.
DP: So, Sarah, could you remind Todd, "That's not what you wanted to do."?
SK: Definitely. And other people spoke up. It was a labor of love for everyone who signed on to the film; they were invested in it and if something didn't seem right they spoke up. They would say, "This doesn't feel right for this movie." It would be too broad or too harsh or too subtle and they'd want another take. We collaborated and it was great.
TL: When I look at the final film, I feel so happy because Sarah and I kept that connection and I did my best to stay connected. Everyone in the film wasn't doing it for the pay check, they were doing it because they loved the material. Everyone was on the same page with Sarah and me and there was a shorthand between us that saved time, which was so important with our short schedule.
DP: You've acknowledged a Judd Apatow influence on this film--including with the inability-to-grow-up theme--but my guess is that you were also influenced by The Graduate, particularly the beginning when Benjamin is stuck at home without any idea about his future. In your film, Amy can't even leave her parent's house. And there's a party here too, though smaller. There is an age-difference theme as well, although in this case the older woman isn't the seducer. Did that film influence you at all?
SK: It's kind of inverted, isn't it?
DP: Instead of it being Jeremy's story, it's Amy's story.
TL: We talked about The Graduate early on. The Graduate had always been in my brain, but we hadn't thought our film had any similarities to it until Sundance.
SK: Somebody mentioned it to me at the Sundance Institute. And I thought, "Oh! Great!" I was thrilled hearing that because I felt, "Oh, I can write such a small story." We went back and watched it again and a couple of other films and we saw how small the stories really are.
DP: Is it important that Jeremy is young or is just easier to have him be 19 so the 35-year-old Amy can't commit to him and can go off by herself as she should?
SK: I don't know. The age difference was always there in the script, right from the beginning. So I never considered it without that.
TL: It isn't essential that he's young but it does a lot for the film. It adds to the film, but I dont really think that their age difference is what the film is about. It's about two people who are observers and stay in the background. Their connection is that they both are not living the lives they truly want to lead. They give a gift to each other by the end of the film: they give each other permission to express themselves and do what they want to do. It's ignited by their sexual connection. Through Jeremy, Amy goes back to being a kid again.
SK: In that way his age is important. She gets the chance to act out what she probably should have done in high school but then she was such a good girl. It takes this young guy to make that happen. To do what are inappropriate things for her is really big thing. It breaks all her patterns.
DP: Is it good for her to now experience those young things she missed--skinny dipping with a guy in a pool, throwing rocks at his window to get his attention, having sex in a car? She even wears pigtails in one scene.
TL: You caught that.
SK: I think all this connects her to herself and the artist inside her. They connect when she defends Robert Mapplethorpe at the dinner table.
DP: Why Mapplethorpe?
SK: It's part of that same thing. She's trying to fit into a world that she doesnt fit into. She cant go along with the conversation at the table about how Mapplethorpe was insensitive and inappropriate. She has to say that he is a master.
DP: She speaks about how his shocking images are side by side with his beautiful images and that lets us see beauty in the shocking images. Does that pertain to anything about Amy?
SK: Yeah, I think it has to do with breaking rules. That's where the Groucho Marx clips come in, too, from the comic side. It's anarchy and what's underneath the socially conventional, very stratified-status world Amy lives in.
TL: Mapplethorpe is brought up in what was meant to be a light conversation. But Amy comes to his defense.
DP: Jeremy is impressed.
SK: Thats what sparks their interest in each other.
TL: He was in a Mapplethorpe play and discovered things about the artist that he fell in love with. And here it's allbeing talked about very flippantly until Amy speaks seriously about it because she's connected to art also. I don't think either of them can listen to what's being said.
DP: So they get up. I really like the first kissing scene, when they leave the table and start kissing the moment they're alone. He chances kissing her, and she kisses him back. They felt vibes for each other at the table. As a writer, Sarah, were you thinking if you could get away with it?
SK: Yeah, can we do it?
TL: You have to see what the two of them were at the table. They were props being used by the others. Amy's mother says,, "Amy will eat anything you put in front of her." Jeremy barely has any lines at the table because his mother Gwen is doing all the talking for him.
DP: When they are the car, he is touching her and saying "I want to see you cum." The other film that has a scene like that is Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, where Michael Cera brings Kat Dennings to a climax with his hand. Todd, you cut the scene before Amy's has an orgasm.
TL: You don't want to cum too soon. [Laughing] We're only in the first act!
DP: Sarah, when you wrote that scene did you just keep writing or stop afterward because you realized it was a strong moment?
SK: It was a moment of discovery. I was thinking, "Can I really write this?" It was at the point of writing when I saying, "You know, I'm just doing what I want here." I had gone past the Lab and--this is how it works-everybody's interest had waned after the initial big flurry. I was working steadily by myself for days on end with no influence when I stuck this in. I was trying to track intimacy. There is something pure about witnessing somebody in that vulnerable a stage. It's thrilling. I love that question because it's a moment people aren't really asking about. There's something about that intimacy. Can we be that vulnerable on screen? Can the actors be that vulnerable? Can the audience handle it? The editor even cut it and we said...
TL:.."Put it back in!" I love it.

Abbott and Lynskey

DP: It validates Jeremy as a good, unselfish guy.
SK: In a simple way, I think.
TL: He pays attention to her, which is different from her experiences in relationships.
DP: You have said elsewhere that Jeremy is the first person who is genuinely interested in Amy. For the first time she's the star in her life.
TL: Right. There's a scene when they're driving around town and he's asking her questions, and she becomes very uncomfortable because he's not used to someone wanting to know anything about her. It's almost as if she wants to distract him so he'll stop asking the questions. She says, "Why am I telling you all this, it's very uninteresting." But he says he is asking questions because he is interested.
DP: So are they the perfect couple? Or, in terms of writing this movie, is their relationship a rite of passage that each needs to go through to move forward?
SK: I think they are kind of a perfect couple. That's what I find sad. They're not going to be together because of circumstances--sometimes things don't work out. [To Todd] What do you think?
TL: I think so in terms of how great it is that they can let each other go, because they see it's important to the other person--that's how much they love them.
DP: Why does Amy take photographs of rivers and water? Is it sexual and is it through Jeremy she has a sexual awakening and is ready to take photos again?
SK: It's quite a bit. The images are dense and every time I try to unpack one it sort of feels less interesting than just the full image.
DP: Rivers flow off into the distance and that's similar to what Amy might eventually do.
SK: "You can't step into the same river twice." I can throw that one out there.
TL: We talked about her images, visually, at the beginning of the film. The photographs were very clear but the further she went into her head the cloudier they became, until she lost her focus. She speaks about this in the car ride with Jeremy, when she explains why she didn't finish her visual thesis. At that time, when she was in grad school, she was being taken over by her relationship with David. That was obliterating her eye as an artist and making everything out of focus. You can see that in the slide show she shares with Jeremy. Things start out very clear but when she gets closer to some rocks underwater everything is really out of focus.
SPOILER ALERTDP: And when she travels to Europe at the end, will they be back in focus?
SK: Her mother will be in them and there will be a kind of integration in her photographs. She will be integrating something personal into her cerebral aesthetic. That's her first step to moving forward as an artist.
END SPOILER ALERTDP: Talk about Amy's carelessness, how she's repeatedly caught doing stuff in public.
TL: That's Groucho Marx really.
SK: Yeah, I think so, too. She's trying to shake things up, unconsciously. She's caught between these two worlds. She is careless. That's part of her being. Spilling a milkshake all over herself. She's always just fucking everything up.
TL: That's how she was in her marriage. She was trying to act like a different person.
SK: Like her mother.
DP: Do you think Amy has always wrongly seen the marriage of his parents as the model for good marriages?
SK: I do.
TL: Yes, thats what she is striving for but can't make it work. Then she realizes that it's not what she wants.
DP: She never realized that her mother has actually been as unhappy in her marriage to Stan as she was in her marriage to David.
SK: Yeah, she would have done the same things as her mother probably. But now she can then step outside of the pattern of wanting what she thought her mother had.
DP: The pattern she speaks to David about is how she was content being unhappy in their marriage.
SK: She was comfortable in being unhappy.
TL: It's what she knew.
SK: Sometimes its more comfortable to be miserable than to change, because its familiar.
DP: Why didn't she and David have kids? Did she have an instinct not to have kids with him?
TL: Toward the beginning it's mentioned that she had a miscarriage but its kind of off-camera. So they were trying to have kids. I don't think it was a major issue for her, which is why it isn't talked about in the film. It's just a layer, a formality for the actors to work with that I think helped them. If the audience catches it, it's another thing...which is great.
DP: David seems so much worse than Amy's father. Stan is so low-keyed and less dramatic than anyone else, but he's among the most important characters in the film.
SK: He's pivotal.

John Rubenstein
SPOILER ALERT
DP: He's supposedly the nicest, most considerate person but he turns out to be probably the worst. He does invite Amy to stay in the house to prevent intimacy between him and his wife. Is that accurate?
SK: I think that's one of several ways to look at it. He's stuck in past-pattern with his daughter. She is kind of a buffer.
TL: He doesn't know he's acting out in a certain way. He doesn't know the effect he has, it's unconscious.
DP: I think he does.
TL: Really?
DP: He walks out the door at the end, when Amy really needs him. He can finally act as he really is because his intentions are no longer secret.
TL: I think he's incapable by that point. He has been revealed.
END SPOILER ALERTDP: Did you know the ending before you wrote the script?
SK: No, it ended differently in the first pass, but similarly tonally.
TL: Amy's finally able see clearly what her parents marriage is and see her connection to her mother in her own marriage to David. It's not just that she dodges a major bullet, she's also able to step the other way and change.
SK: It's funny because I kept moving scenes around. That scene in which she thanks David for ending their marriage is a step along the way to seeing her parents clearly. Finding the compassion that she feels for her mother is a breakthrough for her, and helps her move on.
DP: Could you have ended this movie unhappily?
TL: No, no, it had to be this way...for me.
*Sarah Karkoff statement: "When I told Todd Louiso, my husband and the director of Hello I Must Be Going, that I was going to write a script for him to direct about a woman who gets divorced and has an affair with someone much younger than herself, he wasn't happy. I went ahead and wrote it anyway. Thus began our first collaboration as writer and director, respectively, with my radical act of rebellion. I had to ignore him. He was suffering a loss of heart, just like Amy Minsky, the lead character...And like Amy, he wasn't thinking clearly. Somewhere along the way, he'd disconnected from himself and his love for his work. But I hadn't. We had a family to support, by God! We would go back to the beginning, I decided, to what we both loved: to simple and truthful story-telling, the power of connected and committed actors, beautiful and rich photograph, grounded and expressive language, and the more-than-occasional pratfall. Making the film became a regenerative process as much as a story about personal regeneration."

Three Pacifist Women Warriors

We Women Warriors is Playing in Theaters

Three Pacifist Women Warriors

(from brinkzine.com 8/11/12)

'The beauty of exceptional documentaries that are set outside the United States is that we can catch a glimpse of people's lives that are entirely different from our own. An extreme example can be found in Nicole Karsin's eye-opening We Women Warriors, which opened Friday at the IFC in New York City and will have its Los Angeles premiere on August 24. The gallant human rights activist and print journalist turned filmmaker put herself in harm's way to tell the story of three Colombian women whose lives we can barely comprehend. Flor Ilva Trochez (on right, in march photo), Doris Puchana (on left), and Ludis Rodriguez (in center) are three courageous native women who have long been, as the films notes state, "caught in the crossfire of Colombia's warfare and who use nonviolent resistance to defend their people's survival." (Ludis, whose husband was murdered, even spent a year in jail on trumped up charges during the three years of filming.) They have assumed leadership roles in their respective tribes (the Nasa, the Awa, the Kankuamo), which, like many of the 102 indigenous tribes, face extinction because of the never-ending internal conflict between government forces, paramilitary groups, and insurgents. The conflict is spurred by the drug trade. Below is an interview I did this week with the personable Karsin about her exceptional debut documentary:
Danny Peary: Tell me your background.
Nicole Karsin: I was born and raised in Los Angeles but went to college in New York. I went to Sarah Lawrence and then grad school at Columbia. Prior to getting my masters in journalism at Columbia, I had lived in southern Mexico and done human rights work. I went to Chiapas in 1995, a year after the Zapatista uprising, through a non-governmental organization, Global Exchange, to support the human rights movement and be an observer in the Zapatista communities that were being threatened by the Mexican army. Through that work I became involved with and became an adviser to various artisan cooperatives in the Mayan women's communities. That inspired me to go to journalism school because I saw how poorly that whole conflict was being covered. I saw that being on the ground was oh so different from what was being reported. So when I went to journalism school I knew I wanted to cover conflicts in Latin America.
DP: What's your ethnicity?
NK: I'm half Ukranian Jewish, a quarter Irish, and a quarter Sicilian.
DP: So how did you initially become interested in Latino human rights issues?
NK: Los Angeles has a large Latino culture. Because of my looks--Sicilian is what comes out most I believe--people in Los Angeles just assumed I spoke Spanish, but I didn't till years later. But I always cared about women's rights and human rights. When I was coming of age, civil wars in Central America were taking place and Los Angeles received a huge influx of people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. I watched the Iran-Contra scandal unfold but I was just a little too young to fully understand it. I knew there were injustices occurring but I didnt fully understand the dynamics, the how and why. When I was at Sarah Lawrence, I had a bit of an existential crisis my sophomore year and wanted to be out in the world and to see what was happening. So I took a semester off and went to Nicaragua because I had this curiosity to learn what was really going on there. I was nineteen and that's when I started to learn to speak Spanish. This was 1992. My first week in Managua was the five hundredth anniversary of the Spanish conquest. I was fortunate to be there at such a historic moment and I'm sure that affected me. When I went there were no college programs, no credits to be received. I was a volunteer through a program run by Father Miguel d'Escoto, who also went to Colombia Journalism School and was a Maryknoll missionary involved with the Sandinista government. He had an organization that helped support people in Nicaragua. I lived in the home of a very poor family in what was then called Barrio Carlos Marx. It was very post-Revolutionary--Violeta Chamorro had been in power for two years--and it was a real eye-opener.
DP: You were a journalist but you ended up telling this story in your documentary.
NK: It was a natural progression. I was doing print, radio, and photography and felt digital filmmaking is a combination of those. I bought a camera in 2004 and took it with me when I did interviews. I never had any formal training, I just had some colleagues give me pointers here and there. Film was more visceral and while it's true that Colombia is so complex it's also beautiful. The people are beautiful, the culture is beautiful and film was a more impactful way of conveying a story.
DP: From the beginning, were you thinking you'd do a story about these three women?
NK: No. At the beginning I wanted to do a film about how the indigenous people are caught in the crossfire, and how mostly their stance is nonviolent. But when I set out on my first pre-production, investigative trips to Colombia to find my stories and characters, it was immediately the women I was drawn to--I'm sure it was because I'm a woman.
DP: Did you meet Flor, Doris, and Ludis separately where they live?
NK: Yes.
DP: An emotional moment for me was seeing the three women together late in the film. Was that emotional for you?
NK: It was emotional. Logistically, it was a difficult shoot. There was a march that moved from Cauca to Bogata. Because the three women are leaders they have commitments and there are a lot of situations that are unfolding all the time. It didn't work out that they could start the march together. Landmines had exploded and people were killed in Doris's region and she had to leave early, and Flor was having a crisis in her region and had to come late. So I had those three women together for only 24 hours.
DP: Did they know each other before then?
NK: No.

(L-R) Doris, Ludis, and Flor

DP: Did you think that it would be great if you got them together?
NK: Kind of. I had applied for a grant with ITVF. When you didn't receive funding, they would give you a feedback session if you requested one. I had a feedback session, and one of their head people asked me, "Do your three stories intersect?" In all honesty, I hadnt even thought of it. Then I thought it would be something they could do of their own accord if they had the resources. I definitely invited them on the march. I thought about putting in a card saying that I had invited them, because I wanted to be totally transparent, but that would have thrown me into the narrative when I really didn't want to be there. That was something I grappled with most in terms of the narrative.
DP: Did they bond naturally and not need to tell each other what they'd experienced because they knew they all experienced the same awful things?
NK: No, actually they had experienced similar things but not the same things. They could understand each other, and each other's suffering and pain, but they had experienced different manifestations of the conflict.
DP: One of the women expresses one of your film's major themes: When you suffer, you feel the suffering of others.
NK: That was Doris, who mother was killed in a car accident when she was young. Yeah, they can feel the others suffering for sure.
DP: Were they proud of being women who are leaders or do they just take it for granted?
NK: Definitely they dont take it for granted. It's hard work and it's still taboo in the native community. There aren't many women leaders. Flor was elected and during the elections the indigenous radio stations would make jokes about there being a female candidate. These women are obviously very self-assured and have conviction of what they want to do, but it's still not easy.
DP: Everybody in America knows something about what's going on in Colombia, but what don't we know because, as you say, our journalism hasn't been good enough at telling the story?
NK: There's a lot. There's a very complicated, convoluted conflict, which is why newspaper editors shy away from it. The most important things for U.S. citizens to know is that our tax dollars are supporting military and paramilitary forces that are responsible for widespread and systematic human rights violations; and the amount of military aid that we give to Colombia far exceeds any social aid. Inadvertently, our tax dollars are responsible for the severity of the human rights crisis in Colombia, and we can change that.
DP: In your movie, Doris says that the people would be happy with the United States if it were giving money to the right causes. Is most of our money supposedly going to fight the drug trade?
NK: Until 2002, U.S. aid to Colombia was only under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, but that year it expanded to include an anti-insurgent mission. That changed things. Unfortunately, it hasn't mattered what administration we've had.
DP: And what about the effect on Colombia of Free Trade?
DK: The Free Trade Agreement was finally passed but multinational corporations have been for a very long time and have historically paid off whatever armed fighters are in the region at that time. The way it usually plays out is that the paramilitary organizations are supported by Coca Cola or all the different multinational corporations so that they can either clear out the Compatinos, which is by massacres and displacements, or protect their interests in other ways. It usually has to do with the land.
DP: Your film takes place in rural areas, where the livelihood of the poor indigenous people is tied to growing coca. Is it an issue that the people would like the government to support their growing other crops?
 Nicole Karsin films in Cauca

NK: Yes. They can only support themselves now by growing coca. There are no alternatives. There is no infrastructure whatsoever. The centerpiece of Plan Colombia, which began in 2000 under Bill Clinton, is fumigations with herbicides and thats been in effect for twelve years and hasnt much affected the cocaine trade. But it kills the environment and harms your health. I got very sick while reporting in those regions. Plan Colombia was 80% military aid, which included the fumigations, and 20% social aid. The social aid was kind of a joke. They'd give the Compatinos cows in the hope they'd stop growing coca, but the cows would die from the fumigation. There was no thought put into it and no real desire to help the people. It was all very superficial.
DP: Most of your filming was done between 2006 and 2009 so people might say, that's three years ago, a long time ago.
NK: I was back there a year ago to do pickups and nothing had changed. In fact the story that enfolds in Flor's region with the police barracks and the military occupation actually just flared up. In early July there was major combat between the army and the FARC and entire communities were displaced. And the Nasa people you see in the film have in their self-autonomous process made resolution stating that they want their territories free of armed combatants. That includes all sides--the paramilitary, the guerilla, and the state forces. So in the past few weeks they went around trying to remove army posts and find FARC fighters and destroy their weapons and flogthem in public assemblies.
DP: Flogging?
NK: They have constitutional rights to self-governance, and that is why they have the right to punish the FARC fighters who are part of the Nasa tribe. It's part of the culture.
DP: The Colombia media is portrayed in your film as presenting the company line. In terms of the indigenous people, are they more sympathetic today?
NK: The mainstream media, not so much. Two weeks ago the Nasa people went to an army post that was put up on a sacred, ceremonial site. Flor told me that they told the soldiers to leave their land. They were very cordial in negotiations with the army and as a sign of good will removed all their encampments. Colombian news was there but never showed this nonviolent actions. The army still refused to leave and the indigenous people were fed up and started removing them physically. There were a few shots fired by the army and it got tense. That part was covered by national TV! I saw the national TV reports that said that removing the army posts could be against Colombian law. There was no mention of what the Constitution protects or of international humanitarian law. After this news coverage that further stigmatized the indigenous people, Flor went to the city where her daughter is going to college and the owner of her apartment told her daughter to move out in two days. That was the backlash of how the news was covered.
DP: We see Flor's tribe dismantle barracks in your film while soldiers look on. Were they part of the tribe?
NK: Maybe a couple here and there, but generally not.
DP: Did you know beforehand about the dismantling of the barracks by the people in Flor's town and decide to go film it?
NK: I had planned on going there to join a human rights verification mission as part of my pre-production, searching for characters and finding my angle to tell the story. I got there two or three days after the 11-year-old boy had been killed, so it just happened to coincide. The human rights mission was in the region for only two days and when it left I decided to stay on. I stayed for three weeks and filmed the process.

Nicole Karsin, photo by DP

DP: There's a scene where you're filming Flor relaxing on a hillside. A government soldier comes upon you. A scary moment?
NK: A scary moment. Definitely. It wasn't on camera but strangely enough it was diffused because one of the policemen in the group was staying in the same house we were in so he knew we were really journalists. I wonder what would have happened had he not been staying in that house with us.
DP: Nothing happens but you include that scene--perhaps to show how quickly and randomly there can be danger.
NK: Also I was trying to show that despite the Nasa's small victory in removing the barracks their land was still militarized and they were still in danger.
DP: You did know about the march in advance in order to invite your three subjects to participate.
NK: Yes.
DP: You say that Ludis traveled for the march for indigenous rights. What are these rights specifically?
NK: In 1991 there was a new Colombian constitution, and the groups in Flor's region in particular were very involved. They achieved that the Constitution recognize Colombia as a plural ethnic society, which is huge in the Americas, and basically granted the indigenous people autonomy. On paper it's probably the best indigenous rights in the Americas; but it's an issue is how it is in practice. Indigenous people in Flor's region were practicing self-governance when they made the resolution saying they wanted the region to be free of armed fighters. That's where autonomy and the rule of state law clash.
DP: Does autonomy by the people deal specifically with the control of land?
NK: It's more. It's self-governance, which includes land issues. It also is about having respect for their form of punishment, which includes flogging. That's their culture. The land and self-governance are probably the two biggest ways to define indigenous rights. But now the big issue is--and it's not just in Flor's region, though that,s the best example of it--having the right to not be part of the armed conflict. It's their right under Colombian law, international humanitarian law, and other international conventions. The way the Colombian armed forces have installed their barracks and posts throughout indigenous town and surrounding areas puts the indigenous peoples at risk; it makes them possible collateral damage. That's what they are protesting.
DP: In one segment you have what amounts to be a montage of widows. It's powerful.
NK (emotional): Yeah. I love all them. I tried to call Ludis this morning but she wasn't available but I spoke to her friend Suzana, who is one of the other widows in the film. In a way I wanted it to be like a choir. This is what happens when there is systematic violence. Getting them to share their stories and speak out like that wasn't easy. I had been filming for a very long time and had known them, but it was still very difficult for them to open up and share or speak about on camera. Or just speak about it, period.
DP: It is stated several times by women that the kids are still traumatized years after their fathers' deaths. But three years have past and these kids are three years older and approaching being young men. Are the women worrying about these kids eventually becoming targets too? It seems that men are in jeopardy in this environment. Is that a concern?
NK: There are a lot of civilians who are killed randomly because of the conflict. But hopefully if they don't join one of those groups then they won't have to be part of the violence. Ludis has made some hard decisions to withhold information from her sons so they wont try to avenge their father's death at a later date. Ludis spends a year in prison on trumped up charges.
DP: There doesn't seem to be any good options there for young men.
NK: No. One extreme example was Alvaro Uribe, who was president for two terms (2002-2010). He was the governor of Antioquia when his father was killed by the FARC and as a result his administration was very bloody. He was someone who was constantly seeking revenge and that brought about even more bloodshed.
DP: The widows in Ludis's group weave. Talk about the weaving metaphor regarding the bonding of these women and all tribes.
NK: It's also female solidarity. But in Ludis's case it's also about survival. They weave to feed their kids. It's also a native tradition--women have been weaving for five centuries so it's a way of maintaining the culture.
DP: Do they make any real money?
NK: There are intermediaries who exploit the women by selling what they weave and keeping most of the profits.
DP: What three things would you like to happen in Colombia?
NK: I would like the Colombian government to respect the indigenous peoples rights and remove the army from their territories as they have requested. I would like the insurgent forces to leave as well. I would like U.S. policy to drastically improve in regards to respecting human rights. And I hope that the women's groups in Colombia --those in the film and other ones--gain the support they need and the training of the skills they need to start businesses to be autonomous and provide for themselves and their families.
DP: What about the drug trade?
NK: I think drugs should be decriminalized because there's so much violence. The government, politicians, and members of the armed forces are all involved in the drug trade. It's a pretext for groups to keep pumping the herbicide and the military-industrial complex to keep selling arms.
DP: Talk about your film in terms of universality. This situatio can be happening in a lot of places.
NK: I think so. Peoples all over the world are caught between armed fighters. The situation in Colombia has gone on for so long. The fact that these women still have hope and still stand for nonviolence and still are working to improve the world is a positive message that I believe can inspire many people.

Reunion in "Union Square"

Playing in Theaters

Reunion in "Union Square"

(from brinkzine.com 7/12/12)

Nancy Savoca photo by DP

After she burst onto the scene with two of my personal favorite films of the last twenty-five years, True Love (1989) and Dogfight (1991), I called Nancy Savoca "one of America's most exciting and original directors." She went on to direct the much praised Household Saints and seminal three-part HBO abortion-rights film, If These Walls Could Talk, but Savoca hasn't made enough films for someone so talented. That's why it's an exciting occasion that she has a new indie film that will be released this Friday, at the Angelika in New York City. Although made on a shoestring budget, Union Square has played at prestigious film festivals and received good word-of mouth, including from star Mira Sorvino, who says her character Lucy is the juiciest part of her career. Savoca herself believes some viewers will be too impatient to get past Lucy's early histrionics, but there's no doubt that many people will relate to this film about two estranged sisters--the highstrung Lucy, who is having a meltdown when her married lover won't see her, and the uptight Jenny (dark-haired Tammy Blanchard), who hasn't told her fiance Bill (Mike Doyle) about her turbulent upbringing in the Bronx, her crazy mother (Patti LuPone), and Lucy's eccentricities--who suddenly find themselves thrust together over the Thanksgiving holidays in Manhattan. I recently interviewed the personable Savoca about her much-anticipated movie and her beguiling characters.
Danny Peary: When someone asks you to describe Union Square in one line, what do you say?
Nancy Savoca: When I did True Love, John Sayles advised me that when I did interviews I should make sure to have that one line ready. For True Love I had it, but every time I did an interview I changed it, so I didn't have it at all. We don't really have a tag line for Union Square but in our press notes it says, "the reluctant reunion of two sisters." I think "reluctant reunion" is a good description.
DP: And if people as you why you made Union Square?
NS: It's the same. Every day I have a different reason.
DP: Rachel Getting Married was made several years ago but still is popular, Your Sister's Sister is now in theaters, and Caroline and Jackie just played at the Tribeca Film Festival--that one is also about troubled, secretive sisters who were raised by bad parents and who push each other away but are drawn to each other.
NS (laughing): My movie is part of "the sisters-wave."
DP: Do you have sisters?
NS: I have two sisters but I get along really well with them. They were already teenagers when I was born and they were both married by the time I was seven. So this movie wasn't based on my relationship with them but on a combination of other things. But siblings are interesting to do.
DP: As someone says in the movie, blood is thicker than water.
NS: You stayed till the end to catch that. Not everyone stays that long!
DP: I feel badly if people are walking out of your movie.
NS: I'm only guessing that not everybody sticks to the very end. It's a hard movie.
DP: In my 1993 book Alternate Oscars, in my essay about Lili Taylor deserving a Best Actress Oscar for Dogfight, I wrote that you "proved yourself to be one of America's few directors who makes films about characters, male and female, for whom she has a true affection." In Union Square, Lucy and Jenny aren't 100% likable, but I imagine you have a lot of affection for them.
NS: I always like my characters and want to spend time with them. I end up living with these people, and I guess there's a reason I myself want to take a look at them. Since I was a kid I've lived in a world that is very ambiguous. Morality was ambiguous and people's behavior was ambiguous. I couldn't help but see that there are all kinds of possibilities in the same person. So I get frustrated if people are painted in just one way, simplistically. It's always a challenge to see beyond the first impression. What else is going on? I had a lot of fun with Mary Tobler, my cowriter on this, digging deeper into the characters as the film moves along. In the opening scene, Lucy is on the cellphone in Filene's Basement on Union Square and having a meltdown. I saw a version of that actually happen. I thought it would be interesting to begin with that. Here's a kook on the street, but what if we don't walk away from her but find out what's really going on?
DP: That's like a writing exercise in film school. You see a character who is having a meltdown and is not at all endearing and then you write something that explains how she got to that point and/or what happens later. And you may see the character in a different light.
NS: In a way this film was an exercise. It was about trying to go beyond our parameters. We started out with our coproducer Neda Armian saying, "Use my apartment to shoot something." We didn't have money or time to do location changes, even with a small crew. We said, "We have only one space to shoot in. What can happen with two characters in a room that won't bore people to tears?" We had the one indoor location and we decided to venture outside a little bit to get some air, but we even did that in the neighborhood, around Union Square. We tried to make it in ten days but went two days over budget.
DP: Did you consider having a low budget a good thing because it challenged you or a bad thing?
NS: It was a very bad thing. It's like someone saying, "Oh, I love being poor." No one wants to go out with a low budget because you know what's going to come. 

DP: But wasn't the guerilla filmmaking aspect exciting?
NS: That was the good thing. The first impression is horror,but then you get kind of excited because for the first time in a while you aren't running around and chasing money, which is a huge early part of every movie. So it was exciting just to say, "We're really going to make this movie." We didn't even have to get well-known actors, although we thought that would be nice. As a matter of fact, we had a conversation about getting theater actors. But my main choices were always Mira Sorvino and Tammy Blanchard.
DP: Having only one indoor location, how could you prevent your film from being "theater" rather and a movie?
NS: It was hard. But I played with the idea of doing a homage to reality TV, which I think is very funny. The beginning of the movie feels like a reality television show. My DP and the other camera operator have worked on reality television. I told them, "Listen, our actors are going to come in and tear up the place and we're going to follow them."
DP: Did you have a few weeks of rehearsal?
NS: No, I wish we did. We had only one week, and that was with everyone, not just the scenes with Mira and Tammy. I would have liked more time alone with them because they were coming from different places. Mike Doyle, who plays Tammy's fiance Bill, said that was the most rehearsal time he ever had. He was thrilled! It was so intense. That week of rehearsal was just getting everyone on the same track. Once we were on set, everyone just took off as if they were horses at the gate.
DP: Once you started shooting, how similar were the various takes you did of scenes?
NS: Depending on the scenes, sometimes they were wildly different. The first day of shooting was Mira in the street. On day two, Mira charges into Jenny's apartment, a surprise visit. That was the first day of shooting them together, Mira and Tammy were trying all kinds of things. Tammy was the receptor and everything Mira did differently would make her react differently. What I loved was that Mira is like the Jenny character, and Tammy is more like Lucy. Tammy is a Jersey girl from Bayonne who is incredibly intuitive and Mira is a supersmart, Cantonese-speaking, East-Asian Studies major from Harvard. They couldn't be more different. Mira, like Jenny, would eat the curry tofu Jenny and Bill make in a flash whereas Tammy would want a burger.
DP: Why did you cast it that way then?
NS: I could see their potential for what they could do with the characters. Sometimes you don't have to be exactly what you're performing and being removed is beneficial as long as there is an understanding of the character.
DP: In the press notes, it is pointed out that Lucy and Jenny are very different, which is true, but as the film progresses we see there are moments when they are the same. I'd think you were going for that.
NS: We didn't articulate everything as we made the film, but certainly that happens in the story and script, and it truly happened on the set. That was very cool. Because we didn't have money or time, I worried about getting the performances that I needed. There was a story but if the performances didn't work and there was no nuance, the story wasn't going to hold up. I was very worried, but then my assistant director showed me a schedule for the shoot and I noticed that the scene numbers were going in chronological order, which rarely happens. We filmed almost all of it chronologically, which was huge. Because we did it chronologically, the change you see in the characters was happening with the actors in their performances. I'm not sure we would have seen the change if we hadn't shot in order. They were always able to understand what happened in the previous scene. On typical shoots, you might film the previous scene the following week and the actors have to pretend they know what took place.
DP: Did you do all of Mira Sorvino's outdoor scenes around Union Square at the same time?
NS: Yes, on day one. At Filene's and the Farmer's Market, it was her alone having a near breakdown. The scene when the sisters go shopping was days later.
DP: In the press notes, Mira Sorvino says she was afraid that Lucy's mood swings and histrionics at the beginning of the film might turn off the audience.
NS: I didn't have the same concern. Every time we'd come up with a new idea for Lucy, we'd say, "That would be really awful of her, let's run with it. What could make it worse? Okay, let's write that." When I think of independent films, I don't think they're about cheap filmmaking--I'm tired of hearing that definition--but about challenges. People who go to independent films want to actively participate in some way, more than with a big studio film that is supposed to satisfy all their needs and expectations. So the hope is that this movie challenges and engages them in a conversation. In this particular case the conversation might be about how there is the surface image of things and how you find out a little bit more and then a little bit more. You learn a little about Lucy at the beginning--and now do you want to hang on and learn a little more? To be honest, some people don't. Some people will watch the first twenty minutes of this movie and say, "I'm leaving." Lucy wears on you.
DP: And if you saw Lucy coming down an escalator and screaming into the phone, you are unlikely to invite her over for dinner.
NS (laughing): But what happens when that person is your sibling? That's the problem Jenny has. Lucy is her sister. But you're right. If we don't have a connection to someone like Lucy we will avoid this drama because we don't need it and aren't invested in it. From an audience's point of view, this movie is about hanging in there to see what else there is and where that drama comes from. The question becomes: who will want to do that? Who will think hanging around is worth it because the information that comes along may relate to them in some way? Like with any of these characters--who are we? People always take things too literally when they see a film like this. They'll ask me, "Which sister are you?" I'm not either sister. I appreciate both their sides, I understand both their sides. For me, in the end it's less about judging whether what they do is right or wrong--although some people do judge--than about empathizing. Not sympathizing. Is Lucy or anyone else a likable character? I don't care. But I hope you empathize with them. In Hollywood they say we have to sympathize with characters but I don't agree with that. Then you make them bigger and better and heroic and then I personally can't relate to them anymore because I feel they're better than I am.
DP: But would you tell Mira Sorvino and Tammy Blanchard that you didn't really care if people like Lucy and Jenny?
NS: No, no. They were taking care of their characters in the way I was taking care of the movie. I'd always say to them, "Just focus on being honest. If you're honest with that character, you're respecting her. Whether your character is doing something that is right or wrong, you need to justify it." That's what we do when we make mistakes in life, we justify them.
DP: Is it rationalize or justify?
NS: It could be rationalize or it could be justify on an emotional level, like when Lucy yells, "You left me to take care of mom by myself, that's why I'm crazy!" That's an emotional justification.
DP: So you're unconcerned that Lucy and Jenny are not completely likable. Do you agree that nobody is going to fall in love with them?
NS: I don't know if you'll fall in love with them, but you might identify with them. People have come up to me after screenings and said, "My sister did that to me, too, and blah, blah, blah." I'm open to whatever the reaction is. This is a very interactive movie!
DP: I'm not sure if your intentions were different when you made Dogfight, but I do think people fall in love with Lili Taylor.
NS: Shouldn't Lili Taylor be considered one of our greatest actresses? She has a nonverbal quality and does things that have nothing to do with what's on paper. Her performance in Dogfight is unbelievable. But I have mixed feelings about her character. I had issues with her because she's way too innocent and she holds on to that too much. She's only twenty and she can so embrace the world but then at the end when she goes to hug the returning vet, she doesn't push him away but she doesn't quite know what to do with him.
DP: I think the hug is exactly what he needs.
NS: I agree, although the studio didn't. But I think the hug reveals that she's not together at all. Here's this guy who's coming back to fall apart in her arms and if you look at her face you see that she's not together either.
DP: Well, I think that there's a lot of things that she can't say at that moment but she knows the important thing is to just give him her body to hold and make him feel he's come home.
NS: I love that people come away with different points of view!
DP: You spoke about viewers learning more about the characters in Union Square as the movie goes along. Did you learn about the characters you had written?
NS: Absolutely. We prepare and do everything we can but in the end you hope there will be surprises. One of the fun parts of directing is when accidents happen. You hope they don't go how you planned it in a good way.

Tammy Blanchard (L) and Mira Sorvino

DP: Do you like when at some point your actors get to know their characters more than you do?
NS: I hope for that. It should happen. They're going to get possessed. The movie itself possesses me. I need for that to happen to them for me to do what I need to do. I hand over my characters.
DP: Did that happen on this film?
NS: Oh, my god, yes. It was uncomfortable. Tammy could barely talk because she was having such a hard time during those twelve days of shooting. She was wiped out and almost in tears every night.
DP: I would have thought that Mira Sorvino was playing the emotionally-draining sister, so why did Tammy Blanchard react that way?
NS: Because she was receiving so much. It was like she was being struck by a laser.
DP: Was she feeling her character's guilt?
NS: I'm sure there was guilt, but the real reason was that Tammy is a party girl and she said, "Being this uptight kills me." It was hard for her to keep her emotions under wraps because she's not like that at all. She's very emotional, but she was playing someone who is very emotional but keeps a lid on it.
DP: What do you think the relationship between Lucy and Jenny was like when they were teenagers? Was their always friction?
NS: They were probably always beating each other up. It feels like there was friction. There are moments in the Thanksgiving dinner scene where you see there is a connection between them due to their shared experience. Whether you get along with your sibling or not, that shared experience has an impact on you.
DP: They are the only ones in the world raised by that mother. Do you think they used to hug each other?
NS: Lucy goes around hugging people. I think she always wanted to hug Jenny, but I believe that when Jenny was about thirteen she started pushing Lucy away when she tried to hug her. I think she started to build a wall.
DP: Later on we see a home movie that Lucy took of her mother, played by Patti LuPone, before she died and Lucy seems almost stable. But when we first see Lucy not long after she's having a breakdown.
NS: That's her release. She had to keep it together taking care of a mother who was unstable. Lucy stayed connected to her mother and was her caregiver, but Jenny saw the drama and bailed as soon as she could. It always amazes me that there can be siblings who grew up at the same time with the same parents and in the same house and they have a completely different stories about what it was like. And I think we have that here.
DP: In regard to Lucy, did you ever use the term bi-polar?
NS: Yes, often. That was one of the things that was interesting to me when we were writing the script. Usually I do research and then write the script, but on this we wrote the script and then I did research, including watching a beautiful documentary by Stephen Frye about being bi polar [The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive]. And I interviewed psychologists about its symptoms, and I was glad that our script seemed to already have a lot of what they said.
DP: Bi-polar usually manifests itself with extreme mood swings, so maybe Lucy, who seems to lead two lives, is schizophrenic?
NS: I love psychology and minored in it in college, and I love labels, but I think we're unsure about all of them. Today it's called bi-polar but a few years ago it was manic depressive and a few years before that it might have been hysteria. We keep changing the labels because how we analyze it keeps evolving. Having grown up with a lot of people who were eccentric, who don't fit the norm, I don't know what to call it anymore. I do like that bi-polar label because it set me off to do research, but I don't stand by any of those labels.
DP: I think there's a greatness in Lucy. She has a great kid, she took care of her mom.
NS: She's very loyal. She's very loyal to her sister.
DP: Where does her hurt come from?
NS: I think in part from how she was raised. It's so individual to her personality. Jenny hides her hurt, Lucy wears it on her sleeve.
DP: It seems that their mother, who has dementia, gave all the credit not to the daughter who took care of her, Lucy, but to the one who wasn't there, Jenny.
NS: That happens. The prodigal child, the missing child, the one who is away is the one who captures the imagination of the parent.
DP: We get only a glimpse of their mother, in the video, and she didn't seem particularly troubled.
NS: She was suicidal. I didn't want reveal too much information about the mother because I think movies that explain everything simplify things too much. I think why people are how they are is mysterious. Suicidal thoughts run in the family so why is it that Lucy got them and Jenny didn't? That's something I don't pretend to understand. When I look at the mother, I don't know how she got to be the way that she was.
DP: And that's fine with you?
NS: It's fine because I feel that way in my life. I don't understand how people end up with their personalities or flaws or destructive qualities. And maybe we can empathize.
DP: Why does Lucy wait until now to visit Jenny?
NS: It was only a few weeks. Everything happened at Halloween and now it's Thanksgiving, which is only a few weeks later. Jenny doesn't know that her mother died. There was a phone call that she may or may not have received. For me, it's Lucy coming out from under the debris of everything that's happened. Look at her: She's all dolled up and ready to take on life again in a way that's totally absurd.
DP: It seems to me that Jenny secretly wants this disruption to her life that Lucy brings.
NS: It's like a bank robber who wants to be caught and goes around telling everybody what he did. There's a lot of pressure on her hiding her past and she's going to do things to trip herself up. She invites chaos to come into her life so she can come clean. She does open that door and let Lucy in. She could have pretended to not be home. Then we'd have no movie.
Blanchard and Sorvino

DP: There is no reason to send Lucy away. Lucy had never done anything terrible to her.
NS: But Lucy tells Bill all this stuff that makes it clear that Jenny hasn't been honest with him. Lucy is very intuitive and knows she's opening up a door that Jenny wanted closed.
DP: When you wrote the script, did you laugh when you not only had Lucy manipulate Jenny into letting her stay the night but also invite her equally loud friend, played by Daphne Rubin-Vega, over to her sister's apartment?
NS: Oh, yeah. Mary said, "You know what? She's got to start inviting people over."
DP: What does Lucy get from Jenny?
NS: That's the sibling relationship. Jenny is the only person who can understand what she has been through. Her relationship with Jenny helps her figure out what happened that brought her to this point.
DP: How beneficial is it to Jenny that Lucy does come back into her life?
NS: It's like Lucy detonating a bomb and there goes the life Jenny built. You can look at it as beneficial or the opposite.
DP: Well, what comes out is that Jenny's husband Bill is a good guy. To him, it doesn't matter what is revealed about Jenny's past.
NS: Well, I have mixed feelings about that. I think we see that he didn't push to find out more about Jenny. I know that this happens in relationships and if someone is reluctant to talk about something, you don't push them. Jenny and Bill agreed that not talking too much about where she came from is okay.
DP: There seems to be something strange about his family, too.
NS: It's interesting that you say that. All I know is that they seem to be very much in touch with each other and are very connected as a tribe, while Lucy and Jenny's tribe is splintered.
DP: For us male viewers, Bill is us watching these sisters.
NS: These two crazy chicks.
DP: It shows his character in that he's not turned off by them.
NS: Which I really appreciate. Maybe he came from a big family with sisters and realizes that if sisters are emotional with each other it is healthier than if they aren't. He doesn't run away from it, he kind of rolls with it. If he'd reacted differently it would have complicated things; in this way, the conflict is only between the sisters.
Tammy Blanchard and Mike Doyle

DP: Why did you give Bill his profession, working with organic foods?
NS: That was because Mary had worked on some web sites that did that. But I really love it because it goes with the whole idea of Jenny [changing her life]. It's great when you have a turkey made out of red pepper and hummus--that was a recipe I found online. I googled it. I sometimes laugh about it, but I'll eat organic food. The L.A. Weekly once had this great headline that was something like: YOU-- NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU EXERCISE, NO MATTER HOW MUCH ORGANIC FOOD YOU EAT, NO MATTER HOW WELL YOU TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH--ARE GOING TO DIE. So it can be fear-based. The movie isn't about Bill, but I think he's very controlled. He likes things that are very safe and healthy; it's all good and measured, all the things that life is not. That's where the organic food thing comes in--it's hopeful! If you eat all organic, will you live longer? I love it when Mike Doyle's character and Michael Rispoli's character talk about raw food over dinner. That's my favorite conversation. I adore Michael; only he could have played Nick.
DP: Nick turns up out of nowhere.
NS (laughing): I know!
DP: Before then we think the only male Lucy is interested in is the married Jay. What if there were no Jay? Would the film be different?
NS: I think Jay is just a part of where Lucy is at the moment, part of her meltdown and how life isn't how it was. Growing up, Lucy was probably a popular girl in her neighborhood. She was not able to mature because she stayed there and took care of her mother. Now she's no longer in the caregiver role and she's gone out to have relationships, which is a problem because she already has one. So there's something very adolescent about her now.
DP: Well, she's self-destructive.
NS: Yes...
DP: And the hope is that she can replace her mother and replace Jay and develop positive relationships with the people who are there for her.
NS: I hope that, too. As with the endings of True Love and Dogfight, you can hope that things go well with the characters. For me, all these characters are at the brink of something else. They've finished something and now there's something else because for me everything is always in movement.
DP: I believe your films deal with conflict in different ways than other films. There's not simply the good against the bad. What do you see as conflict that you want to put into your movies.
NS: That's interesting. I see conflict everywhere even in a good situation.
DP: This movie is a situation.
NS: Right. In situations, I think everything is in constant motion and doesn't stay still long enough to be good or bad. It just keeps moving on to something else. Moment by moment, there are new conflicts. In that it is mimicking life. You can't say this to a studio, which is why I can't pitch a film to save my life. I was watching Minnie and Moskovitz again, and that's New York in the seventies when garbage literally flew in your face when you walked down the street. And John Cassavetes was very interested in watching these humans behave with each other. Human behavior interests me and my films begin with behavior. Who do we want to watch behave next? It is satisfying to work with all this complicated stuff that touches us in different ways and to put it up on the screen so we can all look at it.
DP: Talk about your soundtrack, which I like.
NS: We have fun music. Lisa Lisa is Lucy's ringtone, very '80s retro disco. We have the Italian version of Edie Gorme's "Blame It on the Bosa Nova." Like Connie Francis would sing the "Greatest Jewish Hits," Edie Gorme and others would do different versions of songs and I grew up with that because of my family of immigrants. Edie also has a Spanish version. I think the song fits. It's so random why people are who they are, so you may as well blame it on the bosa nova.
DP: You end with one of the great songs ever, Warren Zevon's "Keep Me in Your Heart for a While," sung by Madeleine Peyroux.
NS: It's a beautiful song and Madeleine Peyroux is amazing. I was a big fan of hers and thought her voice was what we needed to hear at the end. We sent her an email and asked her to sing the end song. At the time we didn't know what song it would be so I gave her a CD of songs that I thought might work and she picked it. Before we had a song, we were showing the film and it was very upsetting to people. We had them on a roller coaster and we needed to get them off it with the right song. I was so grateful when Madeline said yes and recorded it. It helps to sit through the song at the end. I got chastised for the ending to True Love because there is no resolution. I was told it wasn't fair for me to do that to an audience. The man who told me this said that afterward he and wife spent an entire weekend talking about it. And I said, "If you spent an entire weekend talking about it, it's not a terrible thing." As I said, it's interactive: where my story ends is where you can begin your own story. You can use the movie as a tool; I use certain movies as tools and they are very helpful psychologically.
DP: With True Love, we watch the whole movie wanting and expecting the engaged Italian couple from the Bronx, played by Annabella Sciorra and Ron Eldard, to come together because we like their characters.
NS: But look at the end of The Graduate.
DP: I don't think anyone will have a problem with where Union Square ends. But were you tempted to keep writing past the what is now the end?
NS: Directors are seen as generals leading the army and I probably am like that on some level but as a storyteller I feel my job is to keep my ear to the ground to understand what my movie needs. On Union Square, we shot a scene in the park with the two sisters on a bench, and even as we shot it I told Mira and Tammy that I didn't know if it was going to work. The movie itself wouldn't allow me to use it. I couldn't do it. The muse dictates and it's got to be what it wants to be.
DP: Was this a happy shoot?
NS: Yes, as troubled as things were, it was exhilarating, kind of guerilla and rambunctious. It was wild.
DP: Did you feel twenty again and starting out?
NS: Yes! Very much so.
DP: And did you say, "I can't believe we did this!"?
NS (laughing): Every day!
DP: And did you say that you could never do it again?
NS: I have three kids and every time I went into labor I'd say I couldn't do it again. It's like that! I'd like to say that I couldn't do it again, but I can't.
DP: Do you have films in your head that will require bigger budgets?
NS: Yes. I have bigger palette stuff. But Union Square wouldn't have worked bigger. It is what it needed to be.
DP: Isn't it strange that a movie that's set in November is coming out in the summer?
NS: That's what I say! I'm worried! It's Thanksgiving in New York and people are wearing coats. I asked if it's a good idea. But it's the way the business works--you take theaters when you can get them. They made me feel better by saying Frozen River and Winter's Bone came out in the summer. I think it's weird, but I hope the audience can forgive us. Maybe there is no one season for family conflicts.

The Girl Who Finally Said No

Trishna Is Playing in Theaters

The Girl Who Finally Said No

(from brinkzine.com 7/10/12)

Freida Pinto photo by DP

Michael Winterbottom's sumptuous Trishna, in which he transports Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles from 19th Century England to modern-day India, was one of my favorite films at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. The scenery is gorgeous, the lovely Freida Pinto delivers a daring, assured, and exquisite performance in the title role, director Winterbottom breaks rules and takes interesting liberties with the novel, and the jolting ending is sure to be controversial. The result is that there should be lot of discussion on your way home. The film opens this Friday and I highly recommend it. The story of the ill-fated heroine will stay with you, as it does me. I took part in the following roundtables with Pinto and Winterbottom during the festival. I note my questions.
Roundtable with Freida Pinto
Q: When you go back to India, as you did on Trishna, does it shock you how little or how much has changed?
FP: It doesn't shock me because I grew up in an environment in Bombay where not everyone had the same opportunities that I had. I feel that Trishna is a perfect way to bring Tess of the D'Urbervilles from 19th Century England to 21st Century India, because you see so much urbanization and the onset of these educational systems because children want to be educated. Things are changing and it is happening at a fast pace, although it will take time until it trickles down to rural communities. It was actually shocking to see the changes that are already happening in rural areas. I would expect them to not happen because they're so far away from city life, but it has changed so much. You know, 21st Century India is so different from what it was in rural England even when Hardy wrote about it. It's happening much faster than it happened back then.
Q: You grew up in Bombay and in a very different class than Trishna. She is far removed from your own experience, so how did you connect to her?
FP: It was really difficult because of what you say. I never grew up in a situation where I had to be submissive, not just to men but females in my life. I had the independence and liberty to always make my own choices. I didn't know what the other world would feel like. So I started my research a month prior to the film starting. I went down to Rajasthan and spent time with a few families. Some of the families we actually used in the film. I met a lot of girls, all kinds of girls. There were girls like Chanchal, the really talkative one at the start of the film. They were kind of traditional but a little more outspoken than Trishna. And then there were girls like Trishna. I remember meeting a 16-year-old girl who was married and staying with his family. I asked her, "Have you finished school? Do you want to be educated?" She was like, "Yeah, I'd like to but now I've got to cook." She was not openly resentful of it. She had almost accepted that this was going to be her life from then on. Those are the kind of influences I brought to my character. Because that's when it struck me that there is a reality that exists outside of my own.
Q: Under what circumstances did you see this movie for the first time and what went through your mind afterward?
FP: Michael wanted me to see the film before I watched it with the audience at the Toronto Film Festival. Unfortunately, they burned a copy of the movie but the quality wasnt really good. I didnt want to ruin the experience so I stopped watching it. And I remember telling him, "Everything was too dark and I couldn't see anything." And he's like, "What? That was the feel of the film and you didnt like it?" And I was like, "I didn't mean that. But let's watch it at the premiere." When I actually watched it I looked at the way it was pieced together. Obviously, when you're shooting a semi-improvisational film you really don't know which direction the director is going to take it using the footage. It was really up to him on the editing table to decide what direction he wanted to go in, because we gave him all kinds of things to choose from. And what actually went through my mind after the screening was how everything he had said completely made sense. This was especially true when I wanted to have more of a say in what was happening with Trishna's situation, and he said, "Don't talk. Just be quiet and absorb what's happening around you. And we'll see how it goes." That now made the most sense because Trishna's passiveness as she absorbs pain, and her internalizing of it of it justifies Trishna's final act for me.
Riz Ahmed and Freida Pinto

Q: How would you describe Michael Winterbottom's directing style?
FP: He's very quiet but he's to the point. What I found amazing about his style of working was how unconventional it is. There are no Actions or Cuts. The camera didn't stop rolling as soon as the scene was over. It would go on to capture even mistakes because sometimes a mistake makes for a beautiful take. He was always encouraging his actors to improv on set, which is a leap of faith. A director has to really believe that they'll be able to do it and carry out his story. He was trusting and very welcoming to suggestions and very democratic on set. I can still hear him.
Danny Peary: Does Trishna ever say NO to a man in the film?
FP: Toward the end actually she says to Jay that she doesn't feel like dancing for him any more. And he kind of persuades her to do it anyway.
DP: Her passivity is really interesting.
FP: I needed Michael's help with that because it was really, really hard for me to keep quiet in a lot of situations. It was improv and Michael helped me quite a bit by saying this is probably where Trishna would say something or wouldn't say anything. That's the difference between letting the actor just play out the character and letting her own thoughts and own upbringing interfere with her character, especially when she's that passive. It was almost to the point that it gets disturbing
Q: Is the submission of a daughter to a father still true in India in every class?
FP: Not in every class. Definitely not in my family. Actually, down south in Kerala there is a matriarchal system. So, it's completely the opposite of what we would see otherwise. I think it really depends on the family, the extent of education in the family, and how much of the world they've seen. You'll find this kind of submissive situation in Trishna's lower-class society and also in the Rajput society, which is the rich and the royal family of Rajasthan. One of the girls I met was going off to get married. An arranged marriage. She used to ride a bike and have a completely urban lifestyle, and I was interviewing her and she said, "Oh yeah, this is going to be my last month at the hotel. I'm not going to be working here after that." I'm like, "Oh, a new job?" "Oh, no. I'm going to get married so I'm going to enjoy this bike riding for the last few months." I asked, "What do your parents have to say about it?" "Oh, my father wants me to get married." So, it doesnt really hold the same for all.
DP: Because you're a female from India playing a female from India, would you contribute anything to Englishman Michael Winterbottom's knowledge of the subject?
FP: Yeah. You know, I'm very happy that he went there before all of us. Even eight years before when he was shooting Code 46 and that's when he found Osian. He loves Thomas Hardy and his books anyway. I thought this would be the perfect place to shoot Trishna because he found the similar Tess. And he was very welcoming to suggestions that came from Riz Ahmed and me, especially from me because I am from India about my character, her passiveness and how she would probably possibly respond. Most importantly, how she would be with her father? There's a difference in how she would interact with her father and her mother. You know, she's never that open with her father. She never really has an open conversation with him. Not so much with her mother either. You know, the only person that she loves talking to are her siblings. That's the only level that she can actually relate to. Yeah, so Michael was very open to suggestions. And he already knew how he wanted Trishna to play out. So, it did help that I wasn't there telling him, "Oh no, she wouldnt wear that because thats completely not believable." He would just let me do it because he knew that I would not mess up.
SPOILER ALERTDP: Heres a question that you dont want to answer. Would Trishna kill herself even if she didnt kill Jay first?
FP: I thought about this so much and it's a really good question. I was very conflicted about whether she actually had to kill him. I was thinking that maybe she should just go back to her family and find another job on the farm. Maybe she should just do that. But then it struck me, this girl just had an abortion. You know how it is in villages. Everyone knows what everyone's doing. The word spreads like fire. She lives in a social situation where she's already looked down upon for what she's done in the past. She's brought shame upon the family. So, going back and living there is as painful as being looked down upon as someone dirty. It would be almost as difficult for her to do that as it is to stay with him. There is emotional torture, which rips her apart. But neither with him nor with her family can she really live again. I felt like she has so much strength in her, which she has used to kind of plow through all the situations she's been through. Maybe she can go that one extra mile and just live with this pain. But you never know actually with human beings, when they just flip and they just dont want to do it anymore. I would want her to be a survivor in this situation. But unfortunately--also because we were going according to the book--she does end her life. In the book she gets hanged, so it's a different thing. But her death is inevitable. I also feel like it's the death of her pain and suffering when she physically leaves the world. It's sad that she is always one inch closer to what she wants but she never gets it--whether it's the fact that she wants to complete her education or to be in love with this man or help a family.
DP: Or dance.
FP: Or dance. And that's the most important thing because the only time she comes alive is when she's dancing, even when she was in Osian with her family. So I almost feel like some kind of a death is almost inevitable for this character. Trishna is an unfortunate character. However, if I were playing her as Freida, I would do it so differently. I would go back to Bombay and find a career as a dancer or I would kill him right at the start of the film! I dont know. It's a tricky situation. I was rooting for her, I really was.
Q: She has the responsibility of earning the money for her family;her siblings depend on her, as do her father and mother. So when she kills herself, she essentially cuts them off of any financial aid.
FP: That is true. That's horrible. When she says goodbye to her siblings she pretty much knows that it's going to be very difficult for them to even complete their education. She's prompting them to just keep going, keep going, something that she couldn't do. And I felt that would be so damaging for a family because she was bringing in the income. But I was like, "Okay, this girl has gone through so much." Maybe this is the answer too. Maybe it is. I'm not promoting it, but maybe it is for her.
END SPOILER ALERT
Q: Tell me one thing you learned from Trishna?
FP: Just to say no when the time is right. Don't wait for time to fly by. Saying no,
even in situations in the film industry,

Freida Pinto as Trishna

maybe with publicity, here you're asked to do certain things that you don't think are right for you or you can't relate to. Instead of beating around the bush, I think the best thing to say is: "I'm just not going to do it."
Q: How did your parents feel about you getting into acting?
FP: They were fine with it. They would be surprised if I did anything else because they knew I was dramatic enough when I was a kid. They had no idea what I was going to do when I grew up. I knew that acting was a passion but I never knew that a profession could be made out of it. I did not have a godfather in the industry or someone to guide me. I had none of it. So, I kept saying, Oh, I'm going to join the army, and then it was something else and then something else and then a wedding planner. So, they knew these dramatics would stop somewhere when I finally found my calling.
Q: I'm wondering if you think that beauty is something that helps you in your career or has it also been something where people have looked at you and said that she's really beautiful and we're going to use her only as a beautiful girl.
FP: It's funny because when my second film happened, none of the beauty questions even came up. I played a Palestinian-Italian journalist in Miral. So, I was just playing her as a 17-year-old girl and that question never really arose even though she is so beautiful.. In the Woody Allen film, yes, in playing a next door neighbor who is a seductress, that did come into the picture. But I feel it really depends on me, how I want to pitch myself when I go into meetings and how I want to play a character. I hate saying this, but sometimes they look for this "exotic" girl in the film. Then they'll send a script for an "exotic girl, " and I'd have two lines, which you can take
out without affecting the film at all. It's for me to say that the part is not for me.
Q: What's coming up next for you?
FP: I have two independent films that I'm working on at the moment. They're not really financed. I feel so passionate about doing independent projects and promoting them at Tribeca and other festivals that welcome independent films. I've been prepping for one of them since December. I really do hope it takes off. I wont say much because I know they want to make an official announcement before I open my big, fat mouth. It's contemporary, almost based on true life.
Q: What kind of prepping?
FP: Oh, physical prepping. It's not an action film even though I do physical prepping. But another film of expression, which is not necessarily just acting through dialogue but acting through body movements.
DP: Through dance?
FP: Yes.
DP: Like Trishna.
Roundtable with Michael WinterbottomQ: Did you see Roman Polanski's Tess?
Michael Winterbottom: Yes, I saw it when it came out and fell in love with Nastassja Kinski from that. Partly because of that, I later worked with her on The Claim. It was a western and the writer suggested borrowing a story [The Mayor of Casterbridge] from Hardy. She's lovely.
Q: Why did you choose to move the Hardy story to India.
MW: Because it's partly about a society in transition and change. In Britain, it feels like it's stagnating, which is a different sort of problem. In India, people's lives are changing a lot. A lot of people are improving their lives and trying to make changes in a world that is different from the one their parents grew up in. For all the people who make it, there are others who don't. There's the danger of falling through the gap between one world and the other. It's interesting because it generates a lot of stories that are simple but have big things at stake. Obviously the rural village community where Trishna comes from doesn't provide her with a lot of opportunities to express oneself as an individual. You're protected and safe as long as you don't venture outside; but as soon as it becomes modern and urban, all that protection disappears and you have to get what you want by yourself. There are still opportunities but the protection disappears.
Q: Did you like shooting there?
MW: I'd shot in India twice before and had difficult experiences. I'd actually shot in Rajasthan before and though we didn't have actors who the people knew, when we took the camera out we'd get three hundred people in the street following us. This time that didn't happen and I'm not sure why. It was quite challenging technically but most of the problems we anticipated didn't happen. It was easier in the hotels but even in Jaipur we were able to shoot this time. Maybe the economic changes have affected people and they have gotten more used to everything.

Riz Ahmed and Freida Pinto

Q: At which point did Anurag Kashyap come into the picture and when did you decide to have Anurag, Kalki, and Amit act in the film?
MW: Trishna likes to watch films and dance and the dance element was in from the very first draft of the adaptation; obviously cinema is part of Indian culture. Anurag himself I met at the beginning of the process of making the film, at the beginning of pre-production and he introduced me to Amit and Kalki. I always wanted the film to be in that world and had hoped to get real people to play themselves in a way but I didn't know Amit would be up for acting. He's actually quite up for that! And he's really good. Amit's quite shy but it was great because I'd never really worked with a songwriter writing songs for film. So it was really fun and sweet that we were able to have him in the film. And the dancers we met were great and they had parts in the film.
Danny Peary: You changed the accident at the beginning of the film from being her fault in Hardy's book to being her father's fault. I think it wasn't a minor change but affected everything that happens later. Did you feel that, too?
MW: Yes and no. When you read Tess, you don't really feel the accident is her fault. Of course she feels obligated to make up for that but I think she'd feel obliged anyway because she is the oldest daughter and she is who she is and has the possibility to help the family. It was more an expression of the character than what formed the character.
DP: I'm actually asking about the difference in the fathers. Because the accident is his fault in your movie, he feels obligated to her and does things like help her have an abortion without saying anything. He always gives her the evil eye, but she knows his weaknesses.
MW: Right. He is weak in that sense, but then again, in Tess, the father is weak, too. Maybe it balances out. One of the reasons I made the change was it was practical. In reality, in India we couldn't have her drive the truck. Women don't do that, it just doesn't happen. The family in Tess is much more marginal and he is much more feckless as a father and is a drunk. I talked to lots of drivers and this was a guy who actually, like a lot of people in India, is trying to make things better. His economic stage is going up before the accident. He has a decent house, his kids are going to school, he is paying off the jeep in monthly installments. It's like India as a whole is becoming better off. Until the accident. And she becomes the breadwinner and he feels shame because of where he is from.
Michael Winterbottom, photo by DP

Q: Something else that you changed is that you combined the two main male characters into Jay.
MW: It's tricky. I love Tess, but it's frustrating that Hardy makes such a clear distinction between Alec, her sensual lover, and Angel, her spiritual lover, because most people are both. I thought that in the movie it wouldn't be as interesting to have two black-and-white characters than one character who is wrestling with both aspects of why he is in love with her. Jay is someone who wants to be in love with Trishna and makes love to her because he thinks he loves her yet he has an armor of weakness. If you think about it, if he genuinely loves her he wouldn't make love to her. He's the owner of a hotel and rich and can make love to her without consequences, but for her as a woman and an employee, he should be able to imagine that he can't make love to her and have it all be fine for her. As soon as her fellow worker Chanchal is aware she has gone off with Jay, Trishan's position changes. Jay wants to be good but he's weak and spoiled.
DP: Basically everyone hates Jay by the end of the movie...
MW:..Good...
DP: ...and also at the beginning of the movie. But is he also a victim of the culture?
MW: He's a victim of his father in a sense. His father is infuriatingly strong and confident and has made his fortune. Jay, like Alec in the book, is a bit of a victim of that upbringing. He doesn't need to work or have a career, so he doesn't know what to do with his life. But it's really hard to have sympathy for a spoiled rich kid. You see that he is likable in lots of ways and could be a good person, but in the end he doesn't have the strength of character to carry that through. For me, he's the least clear character in the film. When Trishna tells him that she aborted their baby, that throws him. They don't communicate much. He falls in love with her but doesn't really know her, other than that she has a lack of imagination. Although in Bombay, they love each other in the moment, they come from two very different worlds.
He has an idea of her that her story of the abortion disrupts a little bit. But in the end that's not why things go wrong. When he returns from Britain, he has already decided to go back to Rajisthan and he sees this as being a good son who takes over his father's business. But he doesn't think what that means to Trishna. There, it's impossible for an incredibly rich person and incredibly poor person to be together. He basically forces her to go back to being his mistress and a worker who pretends not to be his lover. Although neither wants to acknowledge it at first, as soon as he turns her into his employee who is having sex with him on the side, as opposed to being his partner, he destroys their relationship.
DP: When you say Jay is not a clear character, did you intend him to be vague?
MW: I like that it's open to interpretation. I like the idea that you watch something and have to make your own mind up about what happens. It's not where this moment must be the moment when characters realize something or laugh or cry or whatever. I don't want one conversation to be where their relationship is destroyed but just one part of the process. I don't mind that people have different views. I like not having things scripted precisely; I like improvising and seeing what people do and then deciding what works.
Q: In that conversation when she says she had an abortion, he gets angry but just before that she accepted that he'd been cheating on her.
MW: Exactly. There's a double standard. He believes she's pure and simple because she has a different background than his.
DP: Did Feida understand Trishna right away or did she develop her?
MW: She did develop it through performing rather than a long time before, because in a way what's in the script is the story rather than the characters. The actors knew roughly what they needed to communicate, and Freida spent a lot of time talking with the real people in the film--the hotel workers, the dancers, and especially the young people in the family because she had to play scenes with them and know how to behave as a daughter in that family. She'd watch how the other sons and daughters and nephews in the house behaved. If you got actors from India to play those roles they'd have preconceptions about people behaved in that house but life is always much more varied and all the children behave differently and not a standard way.
DP: From talking to Freida, it seemed like she really thought about her motivation.
MW: I didn't have to worry about that! I let the actors do that!