Seventh Row

A place to think deeply about movies

Film Interviews

Interviews with female directors / Index of Interviews

Here you will find all of our interviews with film directors, actors, cinematographers, and more.

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‘Cinema is the only art ever where you share somebody’s loneliness’ and other insights from Céline Sciamma

Writer-director Céline Sciamma discusses Girlhood,  the genesis of the film, how cinema is the only art form in which you can share someone else’s loneliness, how she created the remarkable “Rihanna” scene, and how she creates the dramatic tension that makes you want to see the face of her lead.

This is a preview of our book on Céline Sciamma’s work, Portraits of resistance. Portraits of resistance is the first book ever written about Sciamma’s work. It covers all of Sciamma’s films, including Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Find out more here.

[Read more…] about ‘Cinema is the only art ever where you share somebody’s loneliness’ and other insights from Céline Sciamma

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Director Anne Sewitsky and actress Ine Wilmann on Homesick

Anne Sewitsky, Ine Wilmann
Ine Wilmann stars in Homesick, directed by Anne Sewitsky. Photo by Erik Aavatsmark

Norwegian director Anne Sewitsky’s (Happy, Happy) wonderful new film, Homesick, screened at the Sundance Film Festival this week in the World Dramatic Competition. Starring Ine Marie Wilmann, who gives a terrific performance, the film follows a late 20-something children’s dance teacher, Charlotte, who, because she never received any real parental love, has become desperate, clingy, and self-destructive.

When she meets her half-brother for the first time, now that they’re both adults in their late 20s, they strike up a romantic relationship, in part because they’re the only two people who truly understand each other’s emotional trauma; they both had the same self-absorbed, absent mother.

The film is beautifully shot on location in Oslo, with many romantic images, inviting us to empathize with Charlotte always, and never judging her. After the World Premiere of the film, I sat down with Sewitsky and Wilmann to discuss their preparation for the film, the film’s aesthetic, and Charlotte’s loneliness.

Anne Sewitsky
Director Anne Sewitsky. Photo by Anna Myking, courtesy of Sundance Institute.

The Seventh Row (7R): Ine, how did you prepare to play the role? Anne, what preparation goes into the shoot: storyboarding, location scouting, etc.? 

Anne Sewitsky (AS): For this film, I wanted to have a very real feel to it, but also I wanted it to be beautiful. It was a mix of trying to find all the locations — we were shooting on location — but also finding very cinematic locations, and trying to make it a mix between a very rough look and a more beautiful look.

We spent a lot of time looking at images, paintings, and other films for inspiration. And then, we spent quite a lot of time preparing with a script and with the actors. We read through it several times, and we improvised and changed things. We shot long takes, like 10 minutes at a time — they got a little crazy.

Ine Marie Wilmann (IMW): During the very intimate scenes, we were working quite a long time. It was in the middle of the night, and she was like, “Yeah, we’re just going to do a short, different camera setting. Just a very short little piece of it.” And then we’d done what she’d said, and we sensed that the camera was still rolling, so we were like “OK, keep on acting.” She held it for like 10 minutes. When she said cut, we were like, “NEVER do that again!” That’s too long. And she was like, “Yes, but it was very nice.”

I got the part in May or June, and then we didn’t shoot the film until February. So I had plenty of time thinking about it. When they auditioned all the men, I acted again [and read with them] so then I got to try out a lot of the situations. We also talked about the situations so much. We would try it out, and then this just doesn’t feel right, or this feels a bit constructed. When we actually shot the film, I never thought about lines. I could just concentrate on the situation. It never felt like, “Stand there, say that line.” It just felt very organic. I felt very free.

AS: I thought she was so amazing. I’ve never said so little on the set. I was thinking, “I don’t have to touch this. Just let it play.”

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I’ve never said so little on the set. I was thinking, ‘I don’t have to touch this.” – Sewitsky” quote=”‘I’ve never said so little on the set. I was thinking, ‘I don’t have to touch this.” – Sewitsky”]

7R: One of the things Ine mentioned was the way that you often found your character apart from other people, physically. Anne, how did you think about framing to create that detachment?

AS: We had some very planned pictures with her alone, and we knew that we would have some [shots] that were very close to her. We also had so much material. It was about following the characters. A lot of what you see has also been formed in the edit from many choices. For one scene, we had 30 pictures, and we used five. It was a very intense editing process, because I had so many choices to make, where I could do so many directions. Through the editing, that style became more and more clear — putting her more and more alone, like when she walks over the city, the hill, or walks through the town alone.

IMW: That was actually something new for me, when I saw the film. When I played the character, I was always trying to achieve something. But then, looking at it from the outside, when I saw the finished film, I almost hadn’t thought about how lonely she was. When I looked at it, I was like, “In the end, Oh my God, she’s just all alone.” So it was a more lonely journey than I thought when I acted it myself.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘When I saw the finished film, I almost hadn’t thought about how lonely she was..when I acted it.'” quote=”‘When I saw the finished film, I almost hadn’t thought about how lonely she was…when I acted it.'”]

AS: I think that was important, because it’s also about her desperation. You can’t necessarily play loneliness or self-pity. This can go melodramatic — it’s a very fine balance. I needed her [Ine] acting to always be on the upside, and then we could choose some few places where either the camera shows loneliness or she can have her outbursts.

Anne Sewitsky, Ine Wilmann
Simon J. Berger and Ine Marie Wilmann in Homesick. Photo by Erik Aavatsmark.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘It was almost like you had me right on the edge of crying throughout the whole film.’ – Wilmann” quote=”‘It was almost like you had me right on the edge of crying throughout the whole film.’ – Ine Wilmann”]

7R: When you have scenes with other characters, there’s often so much restraint sometimes, just keeping these emotions in, but because there are closeups, we can see what’s going on. How do you develop that sort of restraint but still make sure that it’s clear what’s going on? What is the process?

IMW: I think you [Anne] have so many pictures of me almost crying. It was almost like you had me right on the edge throughout the whole film. Many of the scenes, we took a lot of emotion, and then just packed it up. As an actor, I like people trying to hide, because that’s what we do in real life. Even when she has this outburst in the toilet, after the scene with her mother, even then she tries to control her anxiety. She’s trying to stop crying. It’s very rare that you just give yourself over to the emotion. You’re often trying to hold back or struggle against it. That’s often what I find interesting to watch.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘It’s very rare that you just give yourself over to emotion. You’re often trying to hold back.'” quote=”‘It’s very rare that you just give yourself over to emotion. You’re often trying to hold back.'”]

AS: We went through the script and said, “How many times does this character cry?” This is a character that is imposing on other people, but we have to love her. If she’s going around crying the whole time, we’re going to get annoyed. So it was about getting attached to the character.

IMW: It was in a way easy to act, because all of the situations were very clear. You always had some mutual tension. We didn’t have to, like, go to the bathroom and pump it up before we came on, or try to force things. It was just natural in the situation.

[clickToTweet tweet=”She’s really bad at articulating her feelings, and her brother is, too. It’s emotionally immature.” quote=”She’s really bad at articulating her feelings, and her brother is, too. It’s emotionally immature.”]

7R: The romantic relationship with her half-brother, I wondered, at the end, if one of the reasons for that was to try to blow up her relationship with her boyfriend and to detach from that family. Is that something that you’re consciously thinking about when you’re doing those scenes?

AS: Not so consciously, but we knew that the character was self-destructive. In that way all the things that she was doing, she kind of consciously went into, eyes open. She knew that it was going to drive him away.

IMW: But it wasn’t like a conscious thought, because it’s better that the character isn’t that conscious about what choices that she does, to be more emotionally driven or to be more impulsive and destructive at the same time. If I were to focus on that thought, it would be too conscious, and I don’t think she is. The first time I read it, I was like, she’s really bad at articulating her feelings, and her brother is, too. That’s part of why it goes wrong, because it’s emotionally immature.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘We wanted it to be in a sensual film. We didn’t want it to be a hard, super-realistic film.'” quote=”We wanted it to be in a sensual film. We didn’t want it to be a hard, super-realistic film.”]

TSR: There are so many romantic images in the film, especially the wide two-shots. How did you approach creating those images?

AS: We wanted it to be in a sensual film. We didn’t want it to be a hard, super-realistic film. We wanted it to be in a dream world when they go up to the hotel in the swimming pool. We tried to find locations that gave that, and then just park the camera there, trying to find angles that are more like paintings. It was a mix: finding the realistic scenes and finding the painted scenes that are more art.

Read our review of Homesick here.

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Frederick Wiseman on his new film National Gallery

In this interview, Frederick Wiseman discusses capturing the paintings in National Gallery on film, his editing process, directing theatre, and how to familiarize yourself with his oeuvre. This is an excerpt from the ebook In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1, purchase a copy here. The book also features interviews with Wiseman on In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris.

[Read more…] about Frederick Wiseman on his new film National Gallery

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Eddie Redmayne on Stephen Hawking and shooting out of order

Eddie Redmayne, Theory of Everything
Eddie Redmayne stars in The Theory of Everything. Photo Credit: Liam Daniel / Focus Features

In The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn and Les Misérables) gives an impressively detailed performance as cosmologist Stephen Hawking. The biopic chronicles several decades in Hawking’s life – and his relationship with his wife Jane (Felicity Jones) – from his time as a Physics Ph.D. student at Cambridge, where they met and he was diagnosed with motor neuron disease (ALS), up until the the publication of his best-selling book, A Brief History of Time, decades later, when he was wheelchair-bound.

Redmayne’s performance very precisely charts the decline in Hawking’s physique, while still finding a way to express deep emotion, even when he’s only able to move his eyebrows almost imperceptibly. I sat down with Redmayne to talk about how he prepared for the role, how he kept track of all the physical complexities and found a way to stay in the moment — all while shooting out of order.

The Seventh Row (TSR): Throughout the film, you have to show this very precise decline in Hawking’s physical mobility. Did you shoot in order? And even if you did, how did you track that?

Eddie Redmayne (ER): I wish we shot in order. It was something that I dreamt of and that James [Marsh], the director, sweetly tried to pursue. It became completely financially unviable. But he warned me of that very early.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I wish we shot in order. It was something that I dreamt of.’ – Eddie Redmayne” quote=”I wish we shot in order. It was something that I dreamt of.”]

I spent four months going to a motor neuron clinic in London, a neurology clinic, and with a doctor called Dr Katie Sidle and a nurse called Jan Clarke. She would have the clinic each week, and people suffering from motor neuron disease would come in. At the end of their session, she’d say, “Look, there’s an actor here playing Stephen Hawking, would you be interested in meeting?” More often than not, they were incredibly generous. Often, they’d be with their families, so you’d get a sense of their lives and the emotional complications of the disease but also the physical [ones].

The extraordinary thing was seeing how different it is in different people. With motor neuron, you have these upper neurons and lower neurons. When the lower neurons go, there’s a sort of wilting, like a softness. When the upper neurons go, it’s a rigidity, like a kind of plasticity. ALS is a mix of those two things, but which part of you has what is different for every person.

Because there’s only documentary material of Stephen from the early ‘80s, when he’s wheelchair bound, what I did was find as much photography as I could, and then take that to Dr Sidle who, by looking at it, would go “OK, so in that wedding photo, when Stephen’s leaning into Jane, like here, you can see that this finger is wilting, so that would be lower neuron, and that probably went around so and so…”

There’s a great YouTube video of Stephen in zero gravity. You see him for the first time out of the chair, moving in the air. You can see there what is rigid and what is soft. Through these photos, with the help of this doctor, I charted what the decline was, [and I] took that back to the writer, Anthony [McCarten], who wove that specific decline into the film.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I worked with a choreographer. She helped find that physicality in my body.’ – Eddie Redmayne” quote=”I worked with a choreographer. She helped find that physicality in my body.”]

Then, I worked with a choreographer, an amazing dancer called Alex Reynolds, who did World War Z, the film — the zombies in that, she helped. She’s an amazing dancer, and she helped find that physicality in my body. Other than that, it was an iPad with Hawking on documentary, in front of a mirror, learning to use muscles that I hadn’t done before. I wish there was a more glamorous way, but it was just quite a slow burn, but quite rigorous.

7R: If you’re shooting out of order, how do you keep track of the physicality for each age you’re depicting in the film?

ER: James Marsh, the director, gave me time, like four months. I tried to look at it almost like putting on a play.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I tried to look at it almost like putting on a play.’ – Eddie Redmayne” quote=”I tried to look at it almost like putting on a play.”]

When you meet Stephen, the disease is so secondary to him. He has no interest in it. It’s a thing he was given when he was 21. He doesn’t enjoy seeing doctors. He’s someone that lives forward. Similarly, I wanted to make sure that this wasn’t a film about a disease, that the disease, that the physicality, would be secondary, so that when I was playing opposite Felicity, or Charlie Cox, or Maxine, that you were just playing the human element of the story.

[clickToTweet tweet=”I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a film about a disease, that the physicality would be secondary,” quote=”I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a film about a disease, that the physicality would be secondary,”]

I try to do all the work early, so that it was so embedded that when you would arrive on set, you would just do what we [as actors] do, which is just listen. But I ended up charting, as well — all the vocal [and] physical things. Because in one day, in our first day of filming, we started with that scene there [points at poster], so, healthy, and at lunchtime, I was on two walking sticks, and in the afternoon, [I was] in the third chair. So I had to be able to find a way of jumping in quickly.

7R: By the time you get to the point where there’s not much movement, the scenes are still deeply emotional. How do you do that, when some of your tools that you’re most used to using as an actor, just the subtleties of facial expressions, are, to some degree, limited because of the character’s mobility restrictions?

ER: What’s interesting is that the mobility restrictions sound passive, but actually it was reactive. The most exhausting part of the filming process was at the most physically immobile, because you’re not just sitting inactively. You’re pulling in. All of these muscles [points to face] are sort of tense. You’re activating muscles that you don’t normally use — things like breath, how quickly you’re breathing, how quickly you’re blinking [become very important]. So actually it becomes much more…

Because the camera is so close, all of that energy is coming out to here. On film, you’re always taught, when you’re starting out, do nothing — the camera sees. But if you actually take any of those shots, when he’s at his most immobile, you’ll see that it’s more physically extreme: more is happening than you’ll ever normally see on screen.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘When he’s at his most immobile, you’ll see that it’s more physically extreme.’ -Redmayne” quote=”When he’s at his most immobile, you’ll see that it’s more physically extreme.”]

It looks sort of still, but actually, it’s the most…What it took me was really looking at Stephen in documentary, and in the mirror, and having, I suppose, the confidence to go, “No, you’ve got to go further here.” It’s not about pulling back. It’s about pushing forward.

7R: When you’re playing a role where it’s so inherently physical, does that change how you approach it? Does that get into an outside-in approach? To what degree does the performance of the physicality become the performance of the identity?

ER: Oh, wow, that’s a good question. I didn’t go to drama school, and really, I wish I could say I had a process — I don’t know whether drama school gives you a process or not, but it’s been a neurosis of mine that it does. So each job I take, I just try to fit myself to whatever that is. That’s something to do with circumstance and the time you have to prep. All I knew on this one was that I needed time, and James was generous enough to give me that.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I don’t know whether drama school gives you a process, but it’s a neurosis of mine that it does.'” quote=”I don’t know whether drama school gives you a process, but it’s a neurosis of mine that it does.”]

I wish it was as linear as that, as outside-in or inside-out; it was a bit of everything at the same time. It was doing all the ALS research, whilst doing the astronomy research, whilst at the same time reading all of Jane’s books, meeting Jane, meeting people that knew Stephen, meeting Stephen’s kids, trying to get an emotional sense of him, and then, finally, meeting Stephen. I’ve never been able to have something, or to work out a method, that is as specific as that. For me, it’s always about, like, throwing all these different bits of clay at a wall and, generally, trying to then, sort of, mould them together.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘It’s like throwing all these different bits of clay at a wall and trying to mould them together.'” quote=”It’s like throwing all these different bits of clay at a wall and trying to mould them together.”]

The interesting thing about theatre is you go, and you have those four or five weeks, and it’s the director who will create the process. Of course, actors have their own process within that, but they all get “this is how I’m working” [from the director]. If it’s Max Stafford-Clark, you’re working with intentions, each line: “What are you doing to that person? How are you affecting them?” Versus other directors, Michael Grandage, who I worked with, wants you to get up very early, so that you use all your instincts, and you save those instincts.

[clickToTweet tweet=”‘The interesting thing about theatre is it’s the director who will create the process.'” quote=”The interesting thing about theatre is it’s the director who will create the process.”]

But on the screen, actors will often come in at the last minute – some actors will come in for two days. Time is valuable and expensive, and so the [director] will fit to how an actor works. It’s a real shift. You have to be one of those really strong, powerful directors to be able to really place your process on it.

[clickToTweet tweet=”In film, ‘actors often come in at the last minute, so the director will fit to how an actor works.'” quote=”In film, actors often come in at the last minute, so the director will fit to how an actor works.”]

Top 5 film performances of 2016 that deserve a closer look

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Director Sebastián Silva on his psychological thriller Magic Magic

Magic Magic, Sebastian Silva, Sebastián Silva
Photo by Pamela Gentile, courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

For the last two weeks, Chilean writer-director Sebastián Silva has been in San Francisco as the Winter 2014 Artist in Residence with the San Francisco Film Society, talking about his craft with high school and college students, as well as other filmmakers. He also gave a Q&A at a special screening of his most recent film, Magic Magic, a psychological thriller about a young woman, Alicia (Juno Temple), who goes to visit her cousin in Chile, and finds herself surrounded by her cousin’s unwelcoming boyfriend (Sebastian’s real-life brother, Agustin Silva), his sister, and his closeted friend (Michael Cera). The Seventh Row sat down with Silva earlier this week to discuss making “Magic Magic”, his body of work, and what he’s got coming up on the horizon.

Seventh Row (7R): Where did the idea for Magic Magic come from?

Sebastián Silva): It’s more disturbing than horrifying. I thought about movies that had disturbed me. There is a very exquisite disturbance that early Polanski movies produced in me, like Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant. I wanted to rescue that tone, the sense of really awful tragedy together with a grotesque sense of humour.

What is really terrifying to me is losing my mental abilities, that my mind would take over and would control me and not the other way around. A clinical case of paranoid schizophrenia is something I’m pretty scared of. Everyone tapped into paranoiac episodes when making the film. Like, what if you smoked a joint when it wasn’t the right time to smoke it? Or, you’re at a party where you don’t know anybody, and you feel very intimidated and insecure. Now imagine that growing exponentially and how scary that could be. For me, Magic Magic is really a fable. I’m not trying to make people believe it’s reality.

7R: How did you decide how the film would begin?

Sebastián Silva: I feel like movies can really start anywhere: you’re always starting in the middle of something. We needed Alicia (Juno Temple) to arrive in Santiago and to know that she is coming from the US to visit her cousin [Emily Browning]. We wanted to see her arriving with bags, to make it very visual, so people really understand, even though it’s a really short beginning, that she’s coming from somewhere else. To start with Michael [Cera] dancing like a creep in slow motion was an idea that came up on the spot, to just make it a little more interesting and not just have Alicia in the car with the bags arriving.

7R: But we don’t see Brink’s face, only his shoes and then the rest of his body. And the first thing we see of the other characters are their feet and legs.

Sebastián Silva: That was an idea that the DP, Christopher Doyle, and I built together. We wanted Alicia’s face to be the first face you see, to be as visual as possible, and as direct as possible, that this is our main character: this is who the movie is going to be about. They’re waiting for her. She shows up. We haven’t seen anybody’s face, and then we see Alicia’s.

7R: How did you think about whose perspective you were shooting from? It’s very eerie.

Sebastián Silva: The film switches back and forth between Alicia’s and Brink’s [Michael Cera] perspective. That was something we really thought about. It was really important that there would be this ambiguity about whether Alicia is losing her mind, or the people around her are being really sadistic to her. The point of view switches from the character of Brink to the character of Alicia, so you’re not really sure what is the story that is being told.

That helps create a place that is not really safe for an audience. They don’t know whether it’s a comedy, a drama, a psychological thriller, or a horror film. We were also playing with Alicia’s perception, that she would see stuff that wasn’t there. When she thinks that Barbara [Catalina Sandino Moreno] was staring at her, the audience could also think that Barbara was doing that — it makes sense that she would be doing that — but then she wasn’t actually. The point of view is sort of unclear, to me, in this movie, and it was purposely made that way so the audience would never feel really safe.

Sebastian Silva, Magic Magic
Juno Temple stars in Sebastian Silva’s MAGIC MAGIC. Photo by Andres Gachon, courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

7R: How do you approach building characters with actors?

Sebastián Silva: It depends on the movie. Sometimes I have a very clear idea of what I want the characters to be. In Magic Magic, Brink is a very particularly constructed character, almost like a cartoon character. But for most of my other films, like Crystal Fairy and The Maid, I have picked actors that already somewhat resemble the characters they will be playing. So I let them sort of be themselves. And then I give them broad directions physically, like move a little faster.

I feel like Jamie [Michael Cera], in Crystal Fairy, moves a little faster than Michael Cera. I told him to use his voice and speak faster; everything, do it faster, as if you were more anxious. He moves very similarly to Michael, but somehow faster. But there wasn’t much to construct, I feel. My brothers were playing themselves. Gaby Hoffman was playing Crystal Fairy, but at the same time Gaby has a lot of Crystal Fairy-ish qualities.

7R: You decided to use a score in Magic Magic.

Sebastián Silva: Magic Magic and Life Kills Me are my only movies that have a score. So far, I’ve been really purist about what movies need a score and what movies don’t and why. If this is a very realistic movie, it shouldn’t have score. Old Cats and The Maid had no score, only incidental music coming from a source. That started changing with Crystal Fairy, which has a lot of incidental music, both coming from a source in the film and not.

7R: Why were you such a purist about it?

Sebastián Silva: Music really enters people’s bodies and affects their emotions differently than visual stuff and narrative. It’s an element you have to be really careful with because it’s so strong. You really need to know what you’re doing with it. It’s there to be used, and I think it takes a lot of balls to risk how you use it.

A movie with no music at all, if it has good performances, it’s safe. But if you decide to add music, you are risking over-doing stuff or underestimating your audience’s understanding of the emotions that you’re portraying. They might think that you’re helping them too much or that you’re leading them somewhere they were not going. But I think it’s a risk worth taking. It’s one more element to use to create emotions.

7R: What are you working on now?

Sebastián Silva: I’m finishing up a film called Nasty Baby right now. It’s improvised like Crystal Fairy, but the outline was a little longer: 25 pages instead of 12. But all the dialogue is improvised. We shot it in Brooklyn with two hand-held cameras, and I worked with the DP I worked with for The Maid, Old Cats, and my first movie. I’m also acting in it, and directing from within the scenes, which was a new experience and really gratifying.

7R: This is your first film made outside of Chile.

Sebastián Silva: I’d been living in the US for 10 years when I made Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy. I went to Chile to make them, but I was living in the States already. I made this HBO thing that I shot in New York called The Boring Life of Jacqueline, and it’s all in English — no subtitles, nothing to do with Chile. Crystal Fairy and Magic Magic are some kind of a blend: location-wise, they’re in Chile, but language-wise, they’re 80-90% in English. 

I’m in Nasty Baby, and I have an accent, and so is my brother: we speak Spanish to each other in it. So there is a tiny sprinkle of my nationality in it, but i think this is probably the last one I’ll do that in. I don’t think Chile will be in any of my movies anymore. I just feel like it’s been enough.

Listen to our review of Sebastian Silva’s new film, Rotting in the Sun, which premiered at Sundance 2023. >>