I’m not sure I’ll do that next time. I was on the Cannes jury this year, two or three months after I had finished my final mix. Looking at some really, really interesting films, I realized, oh, you can do whatever you want if you’re following something truthful and I don’t think I knew that.
What was the hardest thing about adapting?
I found that adapting actually used a similar muscle to the one that I have used as an actress in terms of taking a text, whether it’s excellent or has got problems, and figuring out the essence of this piece of material. There are some things that are literal, but they’re so strange. Like the line, “I’m an unnatural mother.” That’s just 100 percent Ferrante, a straight lift, but a lot of people told me, take that line out. I did actually do what [Ferrante permitted]Although I have changed many things, I believe that the script is in conversation with the book.
Leda is an author and it is a big part that the movie shows her ambitions in her early years. Did you see? “Bergman Island”This year? Both movies explore the question of how you can be both an artist and a woman simultaneously.
I do believe there’s such a thing as women’s writing and women’s filmmaking. There are many fascinating feminist women who disagree with me. It is different when women are honest with themselves than when men are. This is a very dangerous topic to discuss. When I am let loose, given a little bit of money and space to tell the story I want to tell, it’s about motherhood. It’s about the domestic, which does include many scenes in the kitchen. Can stories about the domestic be considered high art? Because to me it’s an opera. I do not come from women who have their apron strings tied to the kitchen. My mom is a professional. [Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal is a screenwriter and director], my grandmother was a pediatrician in the ’40s and my great-aunt was a lawyer. I’m educated and I’ve got a professional life, and yet my identification as a mother is a massive part of me.
What was it like to work alongside Olivia Colman
Olivia really didn’t like to talk about much. I wonder, actually, if it’s because it was relatively recently that she got power as an actress, if she feels similarly to the way I feel as an actress, which is it’s very rare that somebody values my ideas. Although they may say they do, people get annoyed at actresses with many ideas. I’m not an idiot, and so I mostly keep them to myself. I remember asking Olivia if she likes to rehearse, and she said, I don’t, actually, and I totally relate to that.
Source: NY Times