I promise you, the first time I put them in a room together
and got them looking at each other
and I started taking photographs of their profiles,
I almost could see them morph.
One of the things that really caught me about the film
was the father-daughter relationship
between Javier Bardem and Elle Fanning.
It's so believable and they have such a tight on-screen connection.
How did you work with them to create such a real relationship,
and were they the actors you always had in mind to play the role?
It's a very good question.
Working with actors to create a connection,
well, when you've got two actors who are so different
and so interesting and have such different trajectories,
Elle Fanning is still, unbelievably, only 21,
but incredibly experienced and has done so much,
and Javier Bardem who has this extraordinary trajectory
and has done so many amazing roles,
some villains, some other areas where he's explored illness,
he's done a lot of different things and has a very strong presence.
But you put two people in a room together
after you've already explored things a lot with them individually
and they start to mirror each other, they start to resonate.
They even strangely start to look like each other,
even though you think, Elle Fanning, Javier, but how-,
I promise you, the first time I put them in a room together
and got them looking at each other
and I started taking photographs of their profiles,
I almost could see them morph.
They started to take on each other's facial expressions and things.
So that's part of it, but then also we did a lot of talking.
I worked first of all individually with them,
as I usually do with actors, and we talked.
What does it mean to be a father in this sense?
What does it mean to be a daughter
when you see your father going through such difficulties
and you feel protective of him, and so on?
But they have to be able to use their imagination to go right into it
and find the truth and authenticity, and that's what they both did.
I have to leave flowers.
- Leo. - Ya estuvo.
Dad! No. (horns beeping)
Dad, Dad!
It must be really challenging to work with actors
portraying an illness in such a vivid way.
How much research had to go into the film
from both you and Javier Bardem to get the result that you wanted?
Well, the research that I did, first of all,
was that my younger brother very sadly got an illness
that's somewhat similar to some of the things
that are portrayed in the film,
although he was a very different kind of person
and it was a different set of symptoms and so on.
But I witnessed close up and I talked to many of the neurologists,
the doctors and the carers and so on who worked with him
and asked tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of questions,
just because I felt so protective of him
as my dearly beloved younger brother.
I wanted to do everything I could to protect him
and help him survive the thing.
Sadly, he passed away.
Javier, he also did his own research.
He went to a frontotemporal dementia,
which is the variety that we're sort of dealing with in the film,
unit in Spain, and he talked to neurologists and others
and met people with the condition, different varieties of the condition,
so he did his own independent research as well.
And between the script and my experience and his researches,
I think we arrived finally at this performance.
Okay.
I really thought that the whole look and feel of the film
was so absorbing.
The camerawork made it feel as if you were trapped in Leo's head,
especially in sequences when they were in the taxi together,
and the sound design made memories bleed into each other effortlessly.
How did you use visuals and sound to represent Leo's mental state
in such an authentic way?
I love that question.
- (laughter) Thank you.
Really good, because that is exactly how I discussed it
with Robbie Ryan, the cinematographer,
who's an absolutely brilliant Irish cinematographer.
We said everything we're going to look at
is from Leo's, Javier Bardem's character called Leo,
from his point of view.
Not necessarily exactly what he sees,
but how he feels it or experiences it at every moment,
so there was no so-called objective camerawork.
It was all experiential camerawork.
You know, is he feeling panicky here?
Does the world seem large and he feels lost in it,
or does he feel trapped in his head somewhere?
And then we would work with the image to always follow that and echo that.
With the sound design, which is incredibly important,
in this film, as in several others,
I composed the music as well as writing it.
Oh, really?
The sound design for me always felt like
an extension of, or very close to, the music.
So a car horn or a guitar note,
the way that a violin sort of soars
into a certain kind of harmonic sphere
or a bass note holds things, growling,
this low feeling of menace or whatever,
all of those sounds, a train passing by, whatever,
became part of this inner landscape of this man,
and of the daughter who's looking at him and trying to hear
and see and understand things that he's going through.
Néstor! Néstor!
Is he getting agitated?
We can give him something to calm him down.
Why does everyone continue to refer to Dad as 'he',
as if he's not here?
Well, is he?
Speaking of which, this is the second time
you've worked with Elle Fanning.
What is it about her that makes her so versatile as an actress?
It almost seems like she is one of the actresses
that everyone wants to work with.
Well, I first met her and she auditioned
for my film Ginger & Rosa when she was thirteen.
She was going to play a sixteen- year-old and she did, brilliantly,
and she'd already been in, I don't know,
a dozen films or more when she was thirteen.
She's just done a huge amount of work, huge amount of work,
and she loves to work,
and she loves to work in a kind of joyful way.
She's a very joyful person to collaborate with.
So she'll go very deeply into the character
and into the script, into the ideas, she listens very, very carefully,
and then she'll just take it on and go for it.
She's very courageous and very skilful.
She always knows where the camera is, she knows how to move,
she knows what kind of things will pick up in the sound.
She's got just tonnes of experience behind her already
and great intuition, but she's also really a good laugh.
I mean, she's one of the actors that I work with
where we just have the most fun.
It's very, very-, I feel very close to her.
I love her, I think she's astonishing.
I love working with her and I look forward to working with her again.
She can do kind of anything.
This film is, as the name suggests, about the lives we haven't lived,
as shown by our main character Leo.
How did you personally find the process of making the film?
Did you become at all reflective on your own life
or your life as a filmmaker?
Yeah, yes. (laughter)
I think that once I started getting into this idea of, you know,
we all have these crossroads moments where we make choices,
we go one way or we go the other way,
and then, well, what if I'd gone that way?
And as you go through life,
more and more of these crossroads moments appear,
and so you become the consequence of the choices
that you've made accumulatively.
But I always think that we are more than one thing
and we tend to trap ourselves, in a way, in one version of ourselves,
so I think it's always interesting to explore
other parts of who we could be.
Brilliant, thank you very much.
That was amazing.
It's been a real pleasure to meet you
and I really look forward to seeing what you make next.
You're a truly remarkable filmmaker, thank you.
Thank you very much, Joe, thank you.