I'm going to start with you Fran, I mean, this is a real masterclass
of acting from your four leads in this. As a director, and writer
all you can ever hope for is that your actors
bring the story to life sort of emphatically on screen.
You must be stood behind the monitor watching this.
Just thinking. Yes. Yeah. No, I did. I did.
And I'll tell you,
when I first had that moment was we had a we had a two and a half day rehearsal.
There was sort of miraculous and how much was accomplished in such a short time.
No, sorry.
And it was it was also a camera test.
I had my cinematographer, Ryan Jackson-Healy, at the rehearsal
with... testing out lenses
because we wanted to switch lenses as a key moment in the film.
And he just sort of moved around the table kind of holding shots
and sort of we were figuring out how to do this.
Luckily, the movie takes place
for almost an hour, just with four people at a table.
So that's all we did.
We did table work, picking apart the script
and they would read the lines and Ryan was there.
So in the three weeks between the rehearsal and our time in Idaho,
I sat with this footage and thought, Oh my God, this is going to work.
This is going to be incredible.
I don't even remember that he was there. Yeah.
The footage is amazing.
You guys should watch it one day because it's so cool to see that
they were already there.
I mean, they're better, better actors than I am.
I was not going to say, I'm not going to tell them necessarily how to be emotional.
The best thing I could do is make sure the words were there
and they told me what they needed in that time.
So once we got to Idaho, you just kind of let them go.
And and I mean,
and your job here is to try and find some semblance of understanding.
And I say, because of compassion
for someone who committed one of the most kind of unspeakable acts
and in the only way a mother sort of could.
Yeah. How was that for you?
And has this project and has this getting into this
character's heads had a profound effect on you at all in real life?
It has taught me quite a bit actually about my own.
I was going to
say weaknesses, but that sounds
silly.
Just learning about.
Compassion and
and also being a mother myself,
I understood that the love of a child regardless can never leave.
It won't ever.
And what she went through?
Linda, what she had to overcome, so to speak or let go
of the need to defend the need to
expect any kind of forgiveness
to learn how a life that has shattered
begins to move forward.
It was a wonderful
experience coming to know her, and it did increase
my own awareness of my own fears, etc.
And there's that line,
which I said we mourn 11, I thought was quite a profound line.
Which one? When they said 'We mourn eleven'.
'You mourn ten, we mourn eleven.'
Yeah. Yes.
It makes me terribly sad.
I just there's I love about her character.
She has to love the monster.
Her her perspective in need is.
And I don't know.
I hate to speak for her as it plays a role. But it's
she's on this journey of
having to love this monster again and saying, That's OK, that's OK.
And I think there's sort of a maybe some lesson or message in there
that that's that's
that's sort of the journey that we might need to go on in
sort of embracing
the things
the people we disagree with, embracing the things that make us uncomfortable
if we're going to move forward
and sort of bridge these divides that I feel in my country,
we might need to come to the table and say,
I'm going to accept your humanity first.
Now let's work through our differences.
Yeah, I mean, it was such a delicate balance getting this film right.
How many iterations of the script and how much kind of feedback
to just to get just speaking to people there,
just to make sure that tonally that that balance was very sensitively struck
because I mean, you did a fantastic job on that front, but this explores dialogs
and conversations that a lot of people aren't willing to have yet.
I mean, I spent two years reading nothing about the subject
and sort of just absorbed consuming everything I could, and I didn't find
necessarily good or bad or monsters in the parents of these shooters.
So I wrote them.
I tried to write them as equals and write them with humanity and dignity.
It was really the actors that told me what they needed
when I had the script and that they got, they came to, they came on board.
The script was good enough for them to come on board.
But the next stage was saying where, where moments feel false to you.
Where are you not actively listening?
Where what are you confused by?
And we tried to rewrite it together to sort of
make this journey, this emotional journey effortless for them.
Yeah, my my final question
Ann, I was going to ask, I mean, of course, you're an experienced actress
and you've made some incredible projects in your career,
but there is awards buzz here.
There's already talk of an Oscar push
for this, for this performance and a deserved one.
Is that still quite exciting? You know, even.
I mean, obviously the most important thing is that showing what a great film is,
how good the film is and how good the performance is.
But is this the little part of you that goes, Yeah,
I mean, the Oscar run... It's excited for me to hear about.
Well, well, it's oh god, it's
I'll go accept it.
If you don't know, it's an honor to be even in the conversation.
But but also reminding myself as a full grown adult,
I know this sounds so boring, but
to keep the focus on the work, you know, and the gratitude
one feels for having been part of this , which
I feel profoundly grateful for this.
And if that should come, or
I mean, how does one get so fortunate and also?
Well, that's that's what I'm going to say.
You might be surprised if I see a better performance in the build up than yours.
It was incredible.
So thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Very good questions.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
You're watching.
HeyUGuys!