On Friday, September 5, Sydney Sweeney will arrive at the Toronto International Film Festival, making her first major public appearance since the controversy surrounding her new American Eagle campaign captivated the internet (and Donald Trump). She hasn’t spoken about the divisive ads yet—and tells Vanity Fair that she doesn’t plan to start now. “I am there to support my movie and the people involved in making it, and I’m not there to talk about jeans,” she says. “The movie’s about Christy, and that’s what I’ll be there to talk about.”
That would be Christy Martin, a groundbreaking professional boxer who rose to prominence in the ’90s. The Euphoria star plays Martin, nicknamed “the Coal Miner’s Daughter,” in Christy, which tracks the athlete from her humble beginnings in West Virginia to her ascent as the biggest star female boxer in the world. “I was blown away that her story wasn’t more known on a universal, global level because it’s just one of the most harrowing and inspiring women that I’ve ever met in my entire life,” Sweeney tells Vanity Fair exclusively.
For this career-best performance, Sweeney underwent an intense physical transformation, gaining more than 30 pounds and weathering concussions during her months-long training. She also delivers a knock-out emotional performance as the story takes an unexpected turn after Martin’s relationship with her husband turns violent. Directed by David Michôd,Christy is more than a boxing story—it’s a tale of survival. “One of the things that drew me to this story was the idea of being able to make a movie that starts, in a way, as a beautiful, wild, underdog sports movie,” says Michôd, “but then starts to shift into something that’s really harrowing and, ultimately, deeply moving.”
Foster and Sweeney both transformed to play these real-life characters in Christy.
Michôd, known for The Rover, War Machine, and The King, had made a few movies centering on what he calls “deluded men coming to realize that they’ve been wrong about everything.” He found himself looking to do something different next, ideally about “a woman with a big personality.”
Then he watched a 2021 Netflix documentary about Martin, Untold: Deal With the Devil. He met Martin and realized that her big personality masked hidden layers. “What the world saw was this combative figure,” says Michôd. “But the more we spoke to her, the more we started to realize that there is a really beautiful human there.”
Michôd teamed with Mirrah Foulkes, an actor, writer, and director who is also his partner, to cowrite the script. They researched both boxing and the sort of coercive relationships that stymied Martin. Martin, who had to hide her queer identity for most of her life, married her trainer, James Martin (played by Ben Foster), who controlled both her career and her life.
“I realized that this movie presented an opportunity for me to try and understand how these particular kinds of coercive relationships work. They’ve always been baffling to me,” says Michôd. “It’s true all over the world that these relationships exist in epidemic proportions, and they too often frighteningly end up in partner homicide situations. It’s a global emergency.”
Train Dreams, the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, had a profound effect on both Clint Bentley and Joel Edgerton. The story, about a logger named Robert Grainier who helps build railroads at the turn of the 20th century, is a moving meditation on grief, change, and one’s place in the world. “I found myself thinking about things from it years after reading it,” says Bentley. “It gets in people’s bones and just sticks to them.”
That’s true of Edgerton as well, though he and Bentley didn’t know each other when they each first encountered the novel. Bentley read it some 14 years ago; Edgerton first stumbled upon the book a few years later. He immediately started looking into acquiring the rights to make an adaptation, but at the time, they’d already been snatched up.
Edgerton now sees that as a good thing. By the time Bentley reached out to him about Train Dreams, both Bentley and Edgerton had become fathers, and had been through more highs and lows in their own lives. Those big life moments would weave their way into their version of Train Dreams, directed by Bentley and starring Edgerton, and adapted by Bentley and his Sing Sing cowriter Greg Kwedar. Their movie is delicate and deeply existential, with breathtaking imagery and a moving, heartbreaking performance at its center.
“The story tells me that life is really worth living, despite some of the hardships,” says Edgerton. “Through Robert, there was this sense that human beings are incredibly durable and incredibly resilient.”
“I was 50 when I shot the film, and a large part of the aspects of Robert in the book felt like they were experiences that I had thought about and had,” says Edgerton.
Train Dreams, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will next play the Toronto Film Festival on September 9, follows Grainier (Edgerton) as he comes of age in the Pacific Northwest and falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones). They build a home and have a daughter, but Grainier’s work often forces him to travel far from his family. He then suffers a devastating loss that upends his entire way of life, leaving him searching for meaning and reflecting on the rapidly changing American landscape.
Bentley began working on his script for Train Dreams just as he had his first son, which was also around the time he lost both his parents in quick succession. “I wanted to express that aspect of grief that happens right away,” he says. “But then there’s an aspect that stays with you—the filter that it puts over the rest of your life.”
Bentley was looking for a lead who could relay the wide range of emotions Grainier experiences without using many words. “I come from a working-class background. My uncle was a logger and my grandfather was a rancher,” says Bentley. “They’re these men who on the surface don’t seem to be thinking much because they’re not saying much, and yet they say three words and it’s something very deep and resonant and beautiful.”
Bentley reached out to Edgerton—not only because the actor had played similarly internal characters in films like Loving and Midnight Special, but also because he had another side to him. “He plays a lot of hard and tough characters,” the director says of Edgerton. At the same time, he has “this very sweet quality to him, a boyishness that I think we haven’t seen in a lot of his roles.”
“Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable.”
This line is whispered by Julia Roberts in After the Hunt—but it easily could have been said by filmmaker Luca Guadagnino. The Italian auteur has never shied away from unsettling storytelling: cannibalistic romances (Bones and All), sweaty love triangles (Challengers), and an age-gap gay love story (Call Me by Your Name).
For his latest film, he’s bringing that discomfort to the hallowed halls of Yale. Guadagnino’s twisty psychological thriller After the Hunt is centered on power and privilege, truth and secrets, and ambition and disgrace. It grapples with timely contradictions, and the things that people think but are too afraid to express.
“For me, our role as storytellers, filmmakers, or artists, must always be the one of pushing the envelope, of being able to say everything. It depends on how you say it,” Guadagnino tells Vanity Fair.
“Some people who watched the movie who were at Yale, they couldn’t believe we didn’t shoot in Yale, which is for me a great compliment,” says Guadagnino of recreating the Ivy league school in London.
Yannis Drakoulidis/Amazon MGM Studios.
The story follows Alma Imhoff (Roberts), an ambitious philosophy professor on the verge of tenure. But when Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), one of her top students, accuses Alma’s close colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) of assault, Alma’s secret history and future success both come under threat.
After the Hunt combines Guadagnino’s affinity for complicated storytelling with his focus on craft, as well as intricate, nuanced performances by Roberts, Edebiri, Garfield, and supporting actors Chloë Sevigny and Michael Stuhlbarg. With its August 28 Venice Film Festival world premiere just one day away, After the Hunt aims to ask hard questions, and let audiences grapple with their answers. “The idea that something cannot be said, an idea cannot be used, a reference cannot be brought to light because there is a sort of unspoken impossibility of doing so and a self-censorship—it’s so upsetting to me,” says Guadagnino. “In a movie about dynamics of power and control, it was very important that we felt the joy of our expression, without being mindless, but actually being very thoughtful.”
Emmy winner Edebri plays a Yale student who admires her philosophy professor until she comes to her in a time of need.
Yannis Drakoulidis/Amazon MGM Studios.
After the Hunt could have been inspired by any number of true stories. But first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett says she didn’t base her script on a specific case. Instead, she was more curious about how the culture has explored moments of reckoning like the #MeToo movement. “We were missing a sense of gray area,” she says. “But also, we were missing a sense of how power obfuscates, how those within power are insulated from consequences, and those without it are often naked to consequences.”
Garrett felt as though the cloistered world of academia—a closed community marked by infighting and a very clear hierarchy—would be the perfect setting to explore these weighty issues. She wrote the first draft of the script during a 12-week writers workshop.
Garrett spent years as a struggling actor; when her script was making the rounds, she was also working as a data analyst for Meta to make ends meet. “I’ve always been really fascinated by power and power structures and successful people within those power structures,” she says. “Partially because I was outside of success for so long. I was like, ‘What does one do? What happens to your mentality? What happens to the way you tell stories about yourself when you start getting power, when you start having success?’”
Stuhlbarg previously worked with Guadagnino on Call Me By Your Name and Bones and All.
Yannis Drakoulidis/Amazon MGM Studios.
The script found its way to the production company Imagine Entertainment, and eventually to Guadagnino, who worked with Garrett to push its more challenging and uncomfortable explorations to the forefront. They beefed up the screenplay’s focus on the divide between generations, with Alma and her colleagues struggling to understand the culture of Gen Z. (“I believe her, but whatever happened to stuffing everything down like the rest of us?” says Sevigny’s character in the trailer.)
“He really wanted to make it so that neither generation felt like the right generation, or they had the right ideas,” says Garrett of Guadagnino. “He wanted it to feel like all of these people are products of the society in which they were born into, in which they grew up in. They’re all acting out of that sort of primordial soup, as opposed to acting out of righteousness.”
Alma is the center of the story, and all the other characters pivot around her—from Maggie and Hank, who adore and worship her, to her husband (Stuhlbarg), who cares for and challenges her. Guadagnino says Roberts was the first actor to see the script. “We started talking and became instant friends,” the director says. He cast the Bear star Edebiri because of her “wit and spirited intelligence,” and had wanted to work with Garfield for years—since he saw Garfield in his 2007 feature film debut, Lions for Lambs.
Sevigny, who plays another Yale professor, worked with Guadagnino on the HBO series We Are Who We Are and Bones and All.
Yannis Drakoulidis/Amazon MGM Studios.
Each character is layered and full of contradictions. But Garfield’s Hank, the man accused of assault, required an incredible amount of agility and intensity. “There were a lot of discussions about the ambition of this man, his capacity of being so mindless about his vanity,” says Guadagnino. “And we discussed the idea of being dispossessed in his own truth. How does he deal with that? What that triggers: rage, fury. At the same time, what is behind his own truth? Because if he has his own truth, that doesn’t mean that that’s the truth.”
Ann Lee, whose father was a blacksmith by day and a tailor by night, grew up poor and illiterate in Manchester, England. She immigrated to New York in 1774, bringing along just six followers—including her loyal brother, William (played by Lewis Pullman), and lowly husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott). By the time of her death a decade later, she’d created one of the largest utopian societies in American history. The group was collectively convinced she’d emerged as the female incarnation of Christ. Fastvold concedes that the Shaker experiment had its faults—“celibacy is a complicated solution,” she says—but found great inspiration in Lee’s vision.
“She took this horrible trauma and turned that suffering into compassion, into community, into how she could mother the world,” Fastvold says. “It’s all about worship through labor, creating something of beauty and of meaning and giving everything you have to it. As someone who wishes to try and create impossible things, that really spoke to me.”
A veteran of big-screen musicals including Les Misérables and Mamma Mia!, Seyfried has been friendly with both Fastvold and Corbet (who also produced Ann Lee) for years. “When you trust somebody as much as I trust Mona, you can’t help but go into the light,” she says. “But I just didn’t believe that I could embody someone who led this type of charge, in this time period.” Seyfried had already taken on a very different kind of cult-adjacent leader in The Dropout, winning an Emmy for her portrayal of scammer entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes—but Ann Lee’s demands were especially daunting. “This felt further from me than anything that I can remember.”
Seyfried worried most about pulling off Ann’s 18th-century Manchester accent, which she devised—effectively, made up—alongside Fastvold and a dialect coach. “The ecstatic dancing and thumping and pounding, the frenzy that the Shakers lived in—I love that. It makes me feel alive,” Seyfried says. “That’s not the thing that intimidates me.” About five months before filming, she started recording songs at Fastvold and Corbet’s apartment with composer Daniel Blumberg (who won an Oscar for The Brutalist and made his feature-film debut on The World to Come). “I was amazed by how she was singing, dancing, getting water thrown over her face,” Blumberg says of Seyfried. “It was such an extreme job.”
Blumberg developed what Fastvold calls a “radical score” based on mostly existing Shaker hymns before composing an original song that plays as the end credits roll. The pair introduced the cast to improvisational singing via vocalists like Shelley Hirsch and Maggie Nicols, honing Ann Lee’s soundscape to feel as primal as possible.
“It’s prayer—it’s not entertainment. So it was important to find strong intent in the way you were using your voice, in the way you were moving your body,” Fastvold says. “It was definitely the most experimental project that I’ve ever worked on,” Blumberg agrees. He was constantly adding and subtracting, finessing tones and rhythms. One day while in New York, Blumberg walked by a music shop and came across a “little bell” from the 1700s. “Suddenly, the bell was all over the film,” he says.
The sound mix we hear in the final film uses those pre-shoot recordings, live singing from Seyfried et al. on set, and studio sessions that took place mere months ago. Seyfried kept reaching deeper and deeper into Ann’s internal life, with Hirsch and Nicols’s exercises encouraging her to run wild. “So much of it was screaming and doing weird takes. I had these crazy moments of complete freedom—the weirder, the better,” Seyfried says. “I was, like, ‘So, basically, we can do whatever the fuck we want.’ But it’s got to come from somewhere—it’s got to be grounded in something. You could ruin your fucking voice, I’ll tell you that.”
William Shakespeare’s name isn’t spoken for quite a while in Hamnet. Instead, we get to know the man that Agnes falls in love with: a gentle if stoic artist who’s grown up with a hard father, who feels deeply but struggles to express himself. Zhao and Mescal felt aligned from the jump in how to present the Bard, about whom so much remains unknown. “Paul’s performance may be more restrained, but you feel that, without him, there’s no her,” Zhao says. “Jessie and Paul as two actors were extremely giving to each other in that way.”
“It’s no mean feat to step into the shoes of Shakespeare and to bring so much humanity to him, and that’s what Paul, as a person, threads,” Buckley adds. “He has this greatness about him in an old-school way, like Richard Burton had. He’s got a weight that is bigger than his years, and you can really lean on it. Working with him, I was like, ‘Oh, I want to meet you so many times in my life in different ways and work together.’ It felt so alive. Anything was possible.”
After Hamnet’s death, Agnes and William lead parallel lives—Agnes continuing to hold down the home front with their two daughters, and William processing their collective loss through his writing back in London. He is, in a sense, containing their emotional wreckage and figuring out how to make sense of it all. Hamnet absorbs this idea as its own. Zhao found that this version of Hamlet’s creation was not dissimilar from how she should make her own movie. Things got meta.
“We created a working environment where our own lives and what we were dealing with as human beings—not just artists—were allowed to be projected onto the art we were making,” Zhao says. “That is the whole point of this story: how these things we experience in life that are sometimes impossible to deal with can be alchemized and transformed through art and storytelling.”
Which brings us back to the ending, and what the Hamnet team discovered together on those last days. One small gesture inside the Globe transforms the tenor of the play, and in turn, of Hamnet. “We were all waiting for this moment,” Zhao says. “Did Hamlet actually have this moment in the original production? Maybe, maybe not—we don’t know…. But by the time we got there, the veil between past and future, real life and fiction, was very, very thin.”
Hamnet will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival before it’s released in US theaters on November 27. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.
Every actor knows Hedda Gabler. The protagonist in Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play is considered one of the great dramatic roles in theater. Elusive and complex, Hedda is a newlywed who, already bored with her marriage and the life she’s chosen, manipulates and terrorizes those around her—leading to deadly consequences.
Maggie Smith, Isabelle Huppert,Annette Bening, Rosamund Pike, Mary-Louise Parker, and Cate Blanchett are just a few of the actors who have taken a stab at the role onstage. There have also been several screen adaptations of the play, including the BBC’s 1962 version, starring Ingrid Bergman; a 1981 movie with Diana Rigg; and a 1975 film, which earned Glenda Jackson an Oscar nomination for best actress.
Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss, and Imogen Poots in Hedda.
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.
But there has never been a version of the main character quite like filmmaker Nia DaCosta’s Hedda Gabler. Hedda, which will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, is a voluptuous cinematic reinvention of the text, with a towering performance by Tessa Thompson in its lead role. “Hedda is an inscrutable character,” says DaCosta. “And since the beginning, for the past hundred years, people have been like, ‘What the fuck is her deal?’”
DaCosta’s adaptation digs deep into that question. Hedda is often characterized as just a bored, moody society wife, but DaCosta builds a character who has a lot more. In the film, Hedda is hosting a party at her new home with her husband, George (Tom Bateman), and over the span of a single night, she struggles with unfulfilled yearnings for a past lover while wreaking havoc on those who come into her orbit. “Hedda is someone who wants people’s animals to come out,” says DaCosta. “She just feels like everyone is cowardly, everyone’s lying. She has this deepening emptiness inside of her that makes her do things she doesn’t understand—and she is living in a world that she doesn’t get.”
The film, which Amazon MGM Studios will release in select theaters on October 22 and globally on Prime Video on October 29, is set around 1954, but told through DaCosta’s modern sense and singular vision, showcasing Thompson’s agile work as a troublemaking woman for whom audiences can’t help but fall. “She’s mad and bad, but she’s still a person, and you kind of love her because she’s so ridiculous,” says DaCosta.
Hedda filmed in England at Flintham Hall, a stunning estate featuring a 40-foot high conservatory in stone and glass .
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.
DaCosta discovered Ibsen’s work while studying at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. “I thought that this character was terrifying, but also how brave to write a character like this, who is—to me, at least—unredeemable and does horrible things, but you’re telling it from her perspective and have huge empathy for her,” she says. She spent hours watching Hedda Gabler stage adaptations at theater libraries, but much of what she saw didn’t quite capture everything she thought the text could be. “I liked it, but I thought, This is not as funny or dark or sexy as what I read or what I felt when I was reading it,” she says. “So I was like, Wouldn’t it be cool to do a movie where I make all the subtext text?”
When DaCosta wrote the first draft of the script a few years ago (around the time she was working on her 2021 Candyman sequel), she made one major change: Eilert Lövborg, a man competing with George for a teaching position and who was also once in love with Hedda, would be a woman. “My initial instinct was this character should be female because it helps themes about power and autonomy, about choice, about self-regulation,” says DaCosta. “I think Hedda is someone who imprisons herself a lot as well, as much as society does.”
Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss) is openly in a relationship with another woman, Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots), when she arrives at Hedda’s home, on the verge of social redemption after a drinking problem. She is a threat to Hedda’s carefully crafted life in several ways: She is up for the position that Hedda’s husband hopes to get, which would provide financial stability, and she is Hedda’s former lover. The love triangle helps to show the contrast between the choices Hedda has made and those of Eileen. “You do have this extra layer of another thing that these women are fighting against to just feel like they’re people who matter in the eyes of the men that tell them what they should and shouldn’t be doing,” says DaCosta. “This made it more potent, more powerful, and also more unfortunately tragic.”
“Nia and I were really interested in this idea of what happens when we’re pretending to be something that we’re not, trying to fit into a world, a life, a marriage, a house, a place that doesn’t suit us,” says Thompson. “How that perverts our fundamental nature.”
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.
Thompson and DaCosta first met at the Sundance Directors Lab before working together on DaCosta’s 2018 feature directorial debut, Little Woods. The pair stayed in touch over the years, and DaCosta brought Hedda to her first. “She’s so brilliant at playing characters who have a roiling ocean inside of them but have to keep a façade,” says DaCosta. “She’s just really great at that tension.”
Thompson was aware of the character of Hedda Gabler, as every actor is. “I had always just been really fascinated by the work of Ibsen, the questions that he asks, particularly about female personhood and how hemmed in or boxed in we can be by societal expectations,” she says, adding that she studied every adaptation of the play on which she was able to get her hands. “Obviously, he was writing so, so long ago, but how resonant some of those ideas continue to be.”
Tom Bateman with Thompson.
Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.
The world of Hedda is built through lush production design, a provocative score by Oscar winner Hildur Guðnadóttir, and bold cinematography by Sean Bobbitt, who worked with DaCosta on The Marvels and is best known as Steve McQueen’s longtime collaborator. When it comes to the costumes, Hedda’s looks are inspired by the Dior silhouette of the time—and its impossibly small waist. Thompson liked the connection to the “idea of being hemmed in emotionally. You’re literally really hemmed in inside of those garments because of the construction and the boning. There is a kind of suffocation that I found really helpful in character.”
As the tragedy unfolds into the late hours of the night, Hedda’s self-imprisonment and desire for acceptance become even more obvious, even as she leaves a trail of destruction in her wake. “The tragedy isn’t that like, ‘Oh no, she’s sad, her marriage sucks,’” says DaCosta. “The tragedy is that she herself will never know herself and she herself doesn’t understand why she does the things she does. And these people around her suffer because of it.”
Hedda will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival before being released in US theaters on October 22. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.
“I’ve always been interested in that space on the fringes,” says DaCosta (pictured with Thompson). “Not just literally in Little Woods, but also mentally where she exists inside of her head is such a foreign land even to herself.”
So RaMell, how did you set up the filming between the actors to create this visual approach?
Ross: The film is conceived as all one-ers. In one scene, we shot everything from Elwood’s perspective, and then everything from Turner’s—one from the first hour, and then the other for the second. Very rarely did we shoot both perspectives on a scene, though, because of the way it was written and scripted. We don’t always go back and forth. So it’s shot like a traditional film, except the other character is not there. They’re just asked to look at a specific point in the camera.
Typically, the other actor is behind the camera, reading the lines and being the support to make the other person feel like they’re actually engaged with something relatively real. Because they’re all one-ers, though, the choreography is quite difficult. The challenging part was nailing the movement of the camera to feign what it would be like for a person to look, but not to overemphasize the concept of looking. If you try too hard to be POV, it’s impossible. That becomes the focus of interest to the audience, then you lose their connection. It’s why we shot entirely on long-lenses, 50mm and 80mm; this is not a GoPro thing.
Herisse: We’re being asked to do something that you’ve always been told not to do.
Ellis-Taylor: “Don’t look at the camera!” [Group laughs]
Herisse: And it is intrusive, so to kind of unlearn that and make it become the person that you are talking to—Turner, usually—was new and a challenge. But I found it exciting because of that. With time, it got easier. You can still be free in that, it just looks a little different.
Wilson: It felt physically restrictive. I didn’t realize until I was allowed to move—like when I was walking on the beds—like, I haven’t been moving!
Ellis-Taylor: RaMell was really good about saying it, but not saying it. I think about the scene where young Elwood is looking in a storefront, and it took us forever to get that, because the shot had to align. I can only say you have to lean into it and be like, Okay, this is going to take a long time, but I’m going to trust the process. In the scene where I visit Elwood, we were talking about where she was at that point. I was a little more disheveled and RaMell, you’re like, I don’t feel it. It felt like a technical thing, but I never felt inhibited by it, oddly. I should have felt, like, What the fuck? [Group laughs] Oddly I didn’t.
You continue the approach you’d introduced in Hale County in a lot of ways, this time by also visually honoring the book’s POV structure. How did it come to you with Nickel Boys?
Ross: It is the way I shot Hale County. There are three scenes in that movie where the camera is used the same way, and that was unconscious proof-of-concept to myself…. I’ve long had a POV film in mind, an art film, and then Dede [Gardner] comes along with this book. I thought, “At one point did Elwood realize that he was Black?” That’s a visual thing to me: Looking around the world, people are this; something isn’t weird then, but it’s weird in hindsight. That was the first mode of making the movie that I thought of. But I didn’t think that anyone would make the movie. I made the treatment. I asked [Joslyn Barnes] to cowrite. We built it out. When we finished the script, we weren’t like, “We’re going to make this movie!” We were like, Yo, I really love this script. What do you want do next? Because there’s no way that MGM/Amazon are going to make a POV film with these archival images built out. And it was greenlit.
Callas is not, of course, quite as famous as Jackie or Spencer, and the movie takes care to introduce her to less informed viewers. Born in New York to Greek immigrants, Callas grew up in poverty and sang at her mother’s behest for money, before her singular skills as a soprano launched her career in Italy. She battled mental and physical health struggles all her life while pushing opera forward in the popular imagination, amid its turn toward elitist circles. (As the movie demonstrates, at least in ’70s Paris, she was very famous.) Shot on film by Edward Lachman (Oscar-nominated earlier this year for Larraín’s El Conde), Maria cuts between striking color photography in the present, as our struggling heroine returns to voice lessons amid rumors of a comeback, and cool black-and-white flashbacks that showcase Callas at the height of her powers while deep into her love affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer)—the shipping magnate who, in a nice bit of full-circle storytelling from Larraín, eventually left Callas to marry Jackie Kennedy.
Jolie’s approach to her character is simultaneously heartbreaking, erratic, and imposing, displaying a cellular kind of understanding of Callas’s desperation to reclaim herself before it’s too late. “This is the greatest diva of the 20th century, and who could play that?” Larraín says. “I didn’t want to work with someone that didn’t have that already. I needed an actress who would naturally and organically be that diva, carry that weight, be that presence. Angelina was there.” He describes her preparation as “very long, very particular, very difficult.” She worked on posture. She studied breathing. She developed an accent befitting a woman of both the world and another plane of fame. Then came the voice lessons.
Yes, that really is Angelina Jolie singing, although not just her. Larraín and his star worked closely with Oscar winner John Warhurst (Bohemian Rhapsody, the upcoming Michael), who as Larraín puts it has “dedicated his life to actors who sing in movies,” to create innovative, synthesized recordings.
Over months, Jolie learned her subject’s cadence and her signatures. Eventually, she got to the point where she’d hear the operas in an earpiece while singing them herself. Larraín and Warhurst would record Jolie’s performance, then mix it with Callas’s. “You always listen to Angelina and you always listen to Maria Callas,” as Larraín puts it. “When we listen to Maria Callas in her prime, most of the sound is Callas—90%, 95%—and when we listen to Callas older and in the present, almost all of it is Angelina.” Worth noting: The bulk of the film takes place in the present.
Larraín describes seemingly contradictory tasks. One: “How can you make a movie about Maria Callas without using her voice? You can’t.” And two: “You can’t make a movie like this with an actress that is not actually singing it.” It’s not karaoke, he stresses. “This is the real thing—it was very scary for her, but she did it.” When they finally got to filming, Larraín noticed just how deep his star had gone—appropriate, maybe, given the rawness of the material and the extent of training Jolie completed before actually being able to attack it.
A few weeks in, Larraín stopped giving Jolie instructions. The best direction was silence; the best note was no note. “It was so truthful, we just kept rolling and let her do her thing,” he says. “She can let you in when she wants, and she can create a distance where she wants. It’s a dance of vulnerability.”
Larraín takes an unusual hands-on approach to his sets: He acts as his own camera operator. So even as he gave Jolie her space, they were connected. “It’s very intimate because this is a film where the camera is often very close to her—so we were together all the time,” Larraín says. “Sometimes she would feel me. We would complete a take and she would look at me, just by the way I would look at her.” He calls their dynamic “sensorial.”
Capping Larraín’s makeshift trilogy, Maria is the most deeply felt and wholly realized of the films. Credit certainly goes to Jolie’s searing turn and the movie’s immaculate craft—you’ll remember while watching that Lachman, best known for lensing Todd Haynes’s Carol and Far From Heaven, is a master of period cinematography—and the score being driven by an opera legend imbues Maria with tremendous emotion. Yet it ultimately comes down to the director’s vision. Larraín’s exacting approach to these biopics has drawn critical acclaim, but the actors at their center tend to, inevitably, gobble up the attention (and awards recognition). That ought to change here. This may be the most personal film Larraín has ever made.
His initial way into Maria was rooted in a longstanding desire to make a movie about an artist. “As she was singing, she was living everything she had been through on the stage,” Larraín says. “That’s why she was also very respected, not only because of the quality and the color and the specificity of her voice, but also the way she performed.” He says capturing that on film felt exposing. How? “I connected through how the crafting of your work can sometimes be devastating,” he says. “Even though this is the story of a woman that lived from the ’20s to the ’70s and had a completely different life from me, there is a fragility that is unavoidable. It’s impossible to hide yourself.” He continues, “She burned her voice, her life, by doing her work—and I think that I burned myself a little bit doing this.”
Maria will premiere this Thursday at the Venice Film Festival and is seeking U.S. distribution. This feature is part ofAwards Insider’s exclusive fall film coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.
During rehearsal, Miller also brought in a movement coach, a key figure in McGregor’s delicate but rigorous physical performance. “We did these extreme exercises of being very, very old and then very young, and thinking about our characters in different stages of their life,” he says. “I spent a lot of time, in his countly days at the beginning, being very upright in his amazing clothes and the way he moves. As I get older, all of that drops away and it becomes more loose—and so in a way, he de-ages physically.” Being able to shoot roughly chronologically allowed McGregor to sink deeper and deeper into the part. He didn’t initially realize the root of his profound investment in both the role and the story’s unique portrait of fatherhood. “In a loose way, he adopts somebody—and I am close to that,” he says. “I have an adopted daughter, and I almost didn’t notice the similarities until we were shooting it…. I felt very, very connected to the count.”
Another development deeper into filming: the romantic arc between the count and Anna, played by McGregor and Winstead—who are married in real life. In one early scene, Anna chides the count for tidying her room without permission—and snubs him for literal years. “To be in love and married to somebody, and then to get to play all those cold shoulder scenes, was just hilarious,” McGregor says. Near the shoot’s end, as the relationship took a tragic turn, the pair found the emotional intensity of their scenes following them home. “You just have to see what she’s done with this role—she’s such a brilliant actor, and the way Anna ages is absolutely heartbreaking at the end,” McGregor says. “We have a scene where we have to part, and we just were an absolute mess [after filming].”
Since turning 80 a little more than five years ago, Anthony Hopkins has gone on perhaps the most remarkable run of his remarkable career, from towering lead performances in The Two Popes and The Father to wrenching scene-stealers in Armageddon Time and The Son. Inevitably, these elder roles have provoked head-on confrontations with mortality, and Hopkins hasn’t shied away from the theme in his work. Yet none of those dramas can quite prepare viewers for what he brings to Freud’s Last Session, a film explicitly about preparing for the end of one’s life—and reflecting on all that came before it. Portraying the iconic psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Hopkins shines in another rich, witty, heartbreaking turn—one buoyed by a deep engagement with the material, bubbling to the surface.
Director Matthew Brown spoke with Hopkins for almost a year before filming Freud’s Last Session, gearing up for the stimulating and challenging project. “Hopkins is looking back on things, and he was drawing from a lifetime of experience for this role,” Brown says in his first interview about the movie. “We went back and forth about his seeing this in more personal terms. It was more of a larger encompassing personal journey that was remarkable to watch.”
If that sounds a bit like a therapy session, you’re on the right track. Adapted by Mark St. Germain from his 2009 play, Freud’s Last Session imagines the heavy day-long conversation that took place between Freud and author C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) in the former’s London home office, at the dawn of the Second World War. Freud calls in the devoutly religious thinker for reasons not immediately clear to either of them. But he is ill, sees the end approaching, and—as ever—finds himself asking big questions. What if there is an afterlife? What do we owe one another in our final days? For Freud, it proves best to bring in a man with a truly distinctive worldview to unpack such inquiries with as much rigor as possible.
And rigor may be the most apt word to use when describing Freud’s Last Session. The film embraces the imagined hefty intellectual debates between the two historical giants. It dives headfirst into the tough emotional territory opened up by Freud’s persistent curiosity. And it relies on committed embodiments from two great actors to find its cinematic spark.
Brown and I are speaking on a Wednesday. On Tuesday—that is, yesterday—he finished postproduction on Freud’s Last Session, which shot in the spring. On Friday—that is, two days from our interview—he’ll jet to the movie’s world premiere at the AFI Festival in Los Angeles. “It’s been a lot,” Brown says with a smile. The whirlwind week marks the climax of a fairly long development process for the director, who received the script seven years ago. He reluctantly signed on. For one thing, Last Session felt too similar to his previous feature, 2015’s The Man Who Knew Infinity—another exchange of ideas between two great actors, in its case Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons. For another, Brown grew up with a father who practiced as a psychiatrist. “I was like, I don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” Brown says. “But there was something about it—probably Freudian—that I couldn’t let go.”
His main challenge was to find the big-screen scope for a stage-originated story. “It was about trying to lean into the subconscious of these characters, and visually try to find a way to not only break the confines of the office—where most of the conversation takes place—but to understand where they’re both coming from,” Brown says. And so the two-hander between Lewis and Freud is interspersed with flashbacks to pivotal moments in their lives, surreal sequences intended to capture their deeper selves, and glimpses of the budding war happening just outside the home’s walls. Says Brown, “Hopkins and I talked a lot about that during the development period—leaning into the dream aspects of it.”
Accordingly, given the limited budget, Brown used his time wisely, essentially fitting two mini-movies into the schedule. The flashbacks and exteriors—which also include scenes focused on Freud’s equally brilliant daughter, Anna (Liv Lisa Fries)—were set aside until after weeks of intensive filming inside Freud’s office. All involved arrived fully prepared. Brown went to Freud’s home in Vienna as well as the museum in London; Hopkins spent a great deal of time on voicework, to capture the man’s accent as accurately as possible. Goode came in with what Brown cites as “an astounding ability to listen,” telling Lewis’s story through a quiet, almost seismic absorption of everything Freud presents before him.
The crux of the discussion, indeed, is Freud’s contemplation of mortality. “He’s looking at his life, and he’s gasping those last breaths—but Freud was intellectually curious, always second-guessing, always questioning his own theories,” Brown says. “I think if he was alive today, he would just pick up where he left off and say, ‘All those ideas were wrong that I came up with, and now I’m onto new ideas.’ He comes into this being open to whatever Lewis presents.” This doesn’t necessarily make for neat agreement, and it’s in that enduring, almost painful tension that Freud’s Last Session finds its dramatic power. Lewis’s faith pushes up against Freud’s logic; crumbling romantic and familial relationships go under the microscope. “You have the arc of the intellectual ideas, but then you also have the arc of the human emotional ideas,” Brown says. “Both characters wind up in their own therapy sessions, and by the end, they’re both having to confront their own demons.”
The film also resonates amid multiple, escalating international real-world conflicts—an “inflection point,” as Brown puts it, that resembles the one depicted in Last Session’s 1939. “The war is omnipresent in that we feel the urgency of what’s happening and that somehow that, in all these ideas, this discussion between the two of them could be what actually saves us—yet at the same time, we know it’s not going to save us,” he says. “But you hope that it could. You hope that meaningful dialogue could.”
While capturing those long, complex dialogue scenes between Hopkins and Goode, Brown tried to keep the set feeling spontaneous and comfortable. “This wasn’t method acting,” the director says with a laugh. “They were able to really turn it off and be who they are, then come right back in and focus. But we were so in it.” The close dynamic between the trio offered a level of collaboration far beyond what Brown had anticipated. This went especially for Hopkins’s immersion into the project, from the way he brought out Freud’s droll humor to the philosophical questions he’d ask Brown all through production.
“We were doing six, seven pages a day, and that’s a lot for any actor—I don’t know how he was able to do it,” Brown says. “I don’t know what other director’s experiences are like with Hopkins, but this was substantive.” Together, they settled on a story of what Brown calls “human frailty,” a portrait of a man bringing to bear “the gamut of everything you’re going through when you’re about to leave this world.”
Freud’s Last Session filmed partly at Ardmore Studios in Ireland—the same place where Hopkins shot his very first movie, The Lion in Winter, in 1968. “We were on the exact same stage that he shot that on, 50 years later,” Brown reveals. Understandably, some reflection came with that full-circle experience, according to Brown. In the five decades between his first and most recent films, Hopkins has won two Oscars, two Emmys, and four BAFTAs. He’s established himself as one of the finest screen actors of any generation. To see him grapple with that legacy throughout Freud’s Last Session is moving, tender—and fittingly, psychologically spellbinding.
Freud’s Last Session premieres Friday at the AFI Festival in Los Angeles, before hitting theaters on December 22 via Sony Pictures Classics. This feature is part ofAwards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.
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Every year since the Toronto International Film Festival’s Tribute Awards launched in 2019, at least one of the honorees has gone on to win an Oscar: Joaquin Phoenix, Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Chastain, Brendan Fraser—you get the idea. On Sunday night, Vicky Krieps will join TIFF’s illustrious class for her exceptional performance in Viggo Mortensen’s romantic 19th-century Western The Dead Don’t Hurt (currently seeking distribution). The Luxembourg-born star’s placement here makes all the sense in the world—she’s been steadily building her profile on the global cinema stage, from her breakout in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread to her celebrated lead turns in Bergman Island and Corsage, and she reaches new heights as a French-Canadian immigrant paving her own way on the American frontier in The Dead Don’t Hurt. But I’ve known Krieps for a few years now, and particularly learned about her aversion to the spotlight. Given this award’s history, when I saw TIFF announce her as this year’s recipient, my first thought boiled down to: Is she ready for this?
Over morning tea in her Toronto hotel, Krieps persuasively argues in the affirmative—mostly. There is a part of her, she tells me, that is ready to “jump off the boat,” hit the abort button before her star rises too high to reverse it. But bit by bit, she’s learning to navigate a public-facing, scrutiny-laden industry as her unapologetic self. It’s a confidence that is revealing itself in her performances too. Watch The Dead Don’t Hurt and you’ll see one of the great actors of her generation only getting better, more exciting, more alive. She’s done hiding.
Vanity Fair:I really liked this movie. It surprised me.
Vicky Krieps: Ah, yeah. Right? It’s so good you say that because I feel bad about thinking that way. You go , “Okay, another Western.” Viggo is a man and he’s been in these very classical Western-man stories. Even he’s said it; it’s not his fault. But in the movie, there’s very masculine thinking. Doing it, I was sometimes wondering: Is it strong enough for the woman? In the end, she’s still only a woman in a man’s world. Viggo and I were never fighting, but we can be very stubborn and very soft. I think we both have this duality. I always want to say what I think, and I always believe that no one can tell me what to do. Then when I saw the film, I got hit with this, I don’t know—a wave of love. I understood. Now, I have to say I’m happy it’s this way and not any other way. Because any other way would’ve been, I think, not honest. It would’ve been not his film.
Given that you had that initial feeling about it, what made you want to do it?
I was in Arizona shooting a movie the year before, and I would always drive around in the car to the set across this huge desert. Suddenly I started having these visions of blood in the ground. I was thinking a lot about how much blood has been shed into this same soil on both sides. The US is built on this terrible, heartbreaking chaos where everyone lost so much blood on every side. You can’t even start trying to understand. This followed to—and what I’m going to say is true, and I know it sounds crazy—me thinking, “What would I want to do next? The only thing I think I would want to do is a Western.” I’m not joking, I really thought that. I saw myself in this desert on a horse, and the same week I got an email from my agent: “Viggo Mortensen wants to talk to you.” I felt like I had to do it.
I read it and I really liked the craziness of the vision. It’s not conventional, and I always need something that has to be unconventional. [Laughs] Then again, even on the first reading, I had troubles with the more conventional, typical western side of the story, that the woman gets raped. A part of me is always like, “But why? Of course she can be stronger. Why doesn’t she get out?” I got these feelings when I was a child watching movies, every second, like, “Why is she not this?” Do you know what I mean? In the old movies, they were really bad. I would be so furious. But I went for this because I believed, if anything, that’s why the movie needed me. This might sound like I think I’m important but I don’t. I just know that I cannot be corrupted. That’s worth something.
Tell me if I’m off base here, but I thought of the character in some ways like a metaphor for your career a little bit. Last time we spoke, we talked about the aftermath ofPhantom Threadand your resisting a certain Hollywood trajectory. In this movie, we meet Vivienne in higher society with this man, and she’s just like, “No. That is not for me.”
Yeah, totally. It felt very personal. Also the suffering: There’s a lot of suffering alone. She only cries when Olsen is gone. That’s something I know a lot because as an actor you are not allowed to suffer. You can suffer in the roles, but everything outside, you come on set and it’s like, “Let’s go!” I bring the good energy no matter what happens—if the ship is sinking, I’m going to continue to play like the orchestra on the Titanic. That’s how I feel often. And this is not because people are mean. People are also mean, but let’s leave that aside. As an actor, you are the character. And then as yourself you have to carry everyone. And as the character, you have to carry the movie. There’s no space anymore for you to have real feelings of your own. And that’s something that I think is very much in the film.
I did think of my other movies. I did had one take where I stood there and I thought, “Wow, this is the first time I let myself show it.” I don’t think I’ve ever shown it. Rarely I get this outside view so I thought, “Wow, I’m really, really letting go. I’m really letting something show.”
Caste was a literary phenomenon in 2020, spending 55 weeks on the US bestseller lists and reportedly selling more than 1.5 million copies. Wilkerson, the Pulitzer –winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns, presents a bold and convincing premise, that racism in America is a caste system similar to those in India and Nazi Germany.
When DuVernay first reached out to Wilkerson, the author thought DuVernay wanted to make a documentary like she had with 13th, or perhaps a film focused on the history in the book, as she did in Selma. But DuVernay pitched her on the idea of centering the film on her own journey in actually writing the book, which would require that her personal life become a part of the story. “I explained that it would be important for folks to feel emotionally connected to someone in order to take us through the explanation of what Caste is,” she says. “It has to be personal.”
DuVernay says Wilkerson was quick to agree, and they would talk on the phone as DuVernay worked on the script. “I want the film to be a salute to the reverence that she has for life, the rigor that she has for her work, and to try to put that in this motion picture that would tell the story as I interpreted it through her sharing with me,” says DuVernay.
Shortly before she began work on the book, Wilkerson lost both her husband and her mother; DuVernay captures her grief onscreen in symbolic and tactile ways that make the film feel deeply personal. “Well, I could only tap into my own experiences with grief,” says DuVernay. “What I rendered was what it felt like to me, just using my own personal experiences.”
Jon Bernthal plays her husband, Brett Kelly Hamilton; the actor and DuVernay first met for a long dinner in Savannah, Georgia. She remembers after they closed down the restaurant that night, Bernthal suggested they walk back to their hotels. “It got us into a really interesting conversation about what it’s like to walk down the street in a city you don’t know as a white man, and what it’s like to walk down the street in a city you don’t know as a Black woman,” says DuVernay. She describes him as “a whole vibe. But he’s also insanely talented, and can do a lot more than I think the things that he’s usually thought up for.”
“In law enforcement circles, he is considered to be one of the greatest actors of his generation, so talented that he can perform on any stage and with any kind of script,” Hollandsworth writes in his article. He describes Johnson as a chameleon who is able to shift his characters based on the type of client he’s meeting. The sting was simple: Johnson would meet with a potential client and get the client to verbally confirm they were hiring Johnson to murder someone. Their entire conversation would be recorded, and used as evidence. After Johnson left the meeting, the client would be arrested.
For Powell, who cowrote the script with Linklater, the dark comedy, which is set in New Orleans, was an opportunity to play a character who was often playing a character. Sometimes “there was just a whole blurry line between Gary and Ron, which increased over time,” says Linklater.
In the film, “Ron” is one of Johnson’s personas that he uses when meeting a potential client. He’s Ron when he meets a beautiful woman (Adria Arjona) who wants her controlling husband killed. But Gary feels sympathetic toward her, and advises her to leave him rather than have him killed. From there, Gary—still pretending he’s Ron—is pulled into a complicated ruse when he continues to interact with the woman and their lives get more and more entangled.
Ron, a charismatic, confident man with a dark side, couldn’t be more different than Gary, a mild-mannered teacher in his real life, when he’s not moonlighting as a cold-blooded killer. “Glen, the thorough professional he is, was reading books on body language and he thought Ron would walk a little different than Gary, and he also had a lot of fun with the accents,” says Linklater. “Every movie needs something that’s kind of difficult to pull off or something that seems especially challenging.”
As research, Linklater and Powell listened to the recordings of Johnson’s sting operations, meeting a cast of unbelievable characters who felt almost too strange to be real—and perfect for film. “We could have done a lot more of those,” says Linklater of capturing the wide range of clients hoping to take out a hit. “There’s an alternate movie that’s just all these people at that moment. These rich society ladies, with their nice dresses, sitting down in a nice hotel room talking about how to kill their rich husband they’re sick of.”
Linklater found the conversations fascinating because the clients were having these life-and-death discussions “so matter of factly,” he says. “It’s almost like they’re all acting in their own little crime movie when someone’s suddenly working with a mobster. I thought it was all so dark and funny in the strangest way.”
The day before shooting commenced on Anatomy of a Fall, star Sandra Hüller posed the question to her director, Justine Triet, on which their entire film seemingly hinged: “Is she innocent or not?” Hüller had never stepped into the shoes of this kind of character, a grieving widow who may or may not also be the killer, but the veteran German actress was ready for the challenge. “The older I get, the more I know that it’s just a question of perspective sometimes,” she says. “When I was younger, I always made sure I was on the right side of the moral position—it doesn’t work anymore.” Still, old habits die hard. So when she pressed Triet for an answer, the filmmaker replied with what Hüller now calls the “famous sentence”: “I want you to play her like she’s innocent.”
Hüller took that directive, “panicked” as it initially made her, and out of it emerged one of the year’s richest, deepest, and most complex screen performances. Her work also anchors a film that takes the ambiguity around a woman’s credibility and ingeniously spins it into a suspenseful drama of ambition, power, and interrogation. Triet and Hüller debuted Anatomy of a Fall at Cannes in May, a festival of heavy hitters; the film was so rapturously received that it hardly seemed surprising when it was awarded the coveted Palme d’Or. “My answer is a bit of a Teletubby answer, but that was really quite magical and joyful,” the French-born Triet says through an interpreter. “Cannes tends to be a pretty violent place, so to have such a unanimous response was great.”
Over Zoom for their first interview since that triumphant debut, Triet and Hüller share a connection that both of them individually highlight for me—not that they need to. It’s obvious in how they keenly listen to one another as they speak and build on each other’s insights. The film also serves as ample evidence. Anatomy of a Fall is a star vehicle, one that allows Hüller—a celebrated European star poised for a major international breakthrough this year, also given her lauded turn in fellow Cannes prize–winner The Zone of Interest—to unleash her command of craft. Yet her tour de force performance is also central to the vision of Triet, who sculpts a film of fascinating inquiry and towering intensity. It’s why both are about to embark on a robust awards campaign, propelled by US distributor Neon—Anatomy of a Fall will make stops at festivals in Telluride, Toronto, and New York, positioning itself as an across-the-board contender.
Hüller inspired Triet to write Anatomy before she even knew of its existence. They’d previously worked together on Triet’s relatively comic 2019 movie, Sibyl. “I knew that her character [in Anatomy] would have something kind of ungraspable,” Triet says. She even named the protagonist Sandra a year or so before sending the actor the script. Triet devised a cunning moral drama disguised as a legal one, incited by Sandra’s husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) falling out of their house’s window to his death. Was he pushed? Did he trip? Out in the remote snowy French mountains, Sandra and her sight-impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) find the body and call the police in agonizing shock, but as the mechanics of the tragedy are outlined, more questions arise than answers. “I really wanted to stay away from all of the narrative reflexes of a whodunit kind of film,” Triet says. “Where something is unknown and will remain unknown, we have to compose with what is there in the meantime.”
That “meantime” provides Anatomy’s dramatic crux, with Sandra eventually forced to plead her innocence in court, represented by her old friend Vincent (Swann Arlaud). We learn about Sandra and Samuel’s history through competing narratives, between prosecution and defense, and within the malleability of memory. Sandra’s notoriety as a published author comes up in the courtroom; so too do her relatively fluid sexual preferences. She does not apologize for who she is. Hüller situated herself in a context in which everything she said and did informed the narrative. “It’s very much a film about the audience and what their perspective is on a woman: on a successful woman, on a bisexual woman, on all these things—and how the thoughts on her change with every information they get,” she says. It’s why Triet took so much time in the courtroom, even as the film is not particularly interested in the conventions of courtroom drama. “This space was going to be where a kind of rewriting occurred,” the director says. “A scripting of this woman’s life and a diving into her mind.”
That scripting turns especially thorny for Sandra, who’s required to defend herself—explain herself, really—in French, a language she does not speak so proficiently. This went for Hüller as well—the German actor is fluent in English, but needed to learn the Anatomy’s native tongue alongside the character. (The film flits between French and English throughout, but features enough of the former to qualify for France’s international feature Oscar contender, should the country select it.) “There are so many layers in it, and the language layer is one of them,” Hüller says. “To be in the position where you constantly have to explain yourself—there is a risk that people get things wrong that you say.”
A blushing Hüller offers to leave the Zoom room when I ask Triet what drew her back to the actor—what about Hüller, previously best known for leading Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, so compelled her to develop such a demanding, slippery character study around her. I ask Hüller to stick around—“Americans love this stuff,” I reason—and she does quietly, with a slightly embarrassed smile. Off the cuff, then, Triet offers a rather striking tribute to the actor. She talks about the way she first saw Hüller walk onto a French set and integrate herself seamlessly. She talks about Hüller’s “incredible” preparation, and how when action is called, her interpretation “transcends the script.” She talks about their bond: “We have a really incredible connection—we’re the same age, and there’s almost a kind of kinship between us.” One senses she could go on forever.
Triet moves into English at one point to add another detail, almost apologetic at the length of her answer. “But Americans love it!” Hüller says, now laughing. Triet concurs with a smirk, and so she concludes with a rather profound observation: “Despite being a wonderful technician, that’s not what Sandra is playing on. She’s playing with her soul.”
The film cannily, sparely flashes back to Sandra and Samuel’s life before the latter’s demise, diagnosing what appears to be the deterioration of a marriage. One scene captures an explosive argument between them, played with a searing specificity by both Hüller and Theis; my mind immediately went back to it when Triet mentioned her star performing with soul. The two-hander is a miraculous act of performance that feels, somehow, both expertly modulated and utterly spontaneous. “Actors really like to do really big things sometimes, and they love emotions, and they want to show it—but in my experience, and maybe I’m the only one, normally people try to avoid that in their lives because it’s really painful,” Hüller says. “It takes a long time until somebody says, ‘Okay, this is enough, and now I’m going to scream at you.’”
Vasarhelyi helmed Nyad alongside her husband and creative partner, Jimmy Chin, in what marks their narrative directorial debut. Oscar winners for 2018’s Free Solo, the documentarians had been looking to try their hand at fiction filmmaking and were presented with a story rather neatly matching their established cinematic interests. “We love telling these stories where somebody’s pushing the edge of the human experience,” says Chin, a professional mountain athlete. “We hope when audiences leave the theater, they feel like they’ve gotten an expanded perspective of the human experience.” Vasarhelyi says that Nyad’s story “defies the frontiers of what you can imagine”—a solid one-line descriptor for this duo’s filmography as a whole.
Nyad has been a noted athlete since the 1970s, when her swims around Manhattan, New York, and in the Caribbean brought her national attention. At the age of 28, she attempted to swim from Havana to Key West, in the aftermath of the Kennedy-era travel restrictions being lifted, but, in part due to inclement weather, could not complete the task. She went on to write books and launch motivational speaking tours, but her athletic career faded as she got into her 30s and 40s. Then in 2010, at age 60, she firmly decided to finish what she’d started decades ago—and though she didn’t make it to Florida over several more attempts, eventually she did. “This film asks: What do we give ourselves permission to do in our lives?” Bening says. “Diana said, ‘I’m actually going to ignore all of these norms about what women in their 60s do.’”
Yet Nyad is no glossy tale of heroism and triumph. The film embraces its eponymous character’s complexity, presenting her as determined if abrasive, as caustic as she is relentless, and of a bracing intelligence matched only by her ego. That’s evident both in Julia Cox’s screenplay, adapted from Nyad’s 2015 memoir Find a Way, and Bening’s bold portrayal. And it comes alive through the beating heart of the film—the tricky, rich, hard-earned bond between Diana and her best friend and eventual coach, Bonnie Stoll.
