Maggie Gyllenhaal: Hi. What a conversation we’re having!

Jessie Buckley: I know, I know. I feel slightly naked, but not…How are you doing? 

MG: I’m good, I’m just actually just about to finish our movie (The Lost Daughter) We’re going to mix next week, then we’re done.

JB: God, oh my god, that’s exciting.

MG: So, I watched Romeo and Juliet last night with the girls.

JB: Oooh.

MG: Gloria (Maggie’s daughter) got a little like: “OK, this is enough!”

(Laughter)

JB: I don’t want to see Jessie kissing a boy.

MG: As soon as you came on with your kiss at the beginning they were like, we love her!

JB: We love them.

MG: Yelling at Romeo not to drink the poison.

(Laughter)

MG: Yelling at the screen.

JB: And did he listen? No. He never does.

MG: So, have you just been doing tons of press, is that what you’ve been doing – press for this? Are you in London? Where are you?

JB: No, no, I’m filming in Gloucestershire, so I just wrapped half an hour ago and I’ve done most of my pressers.

MG: I am actually serious about knowing how you worked and I’m sure you’ve told it a million times but, did they film your rehearsals? Did you quarantine? How did you do it?

JB: Well our cinematographer was with us from day one of rehearsals so we had four weeks of rehearsals like we were doing a play in the National. Got tested every two weeks. Some people stayed in accommodation who lived kind of outside of London or who had more vulnerable people they were living with. But I just was cycling in and out from home, and, yeah, we rehearsed for four weeks.

MG: So he wasn’t filming you rehearsing?

JB: He wasn’t, but also, Simon [Godwin] the director had never directed a film before and had never really wanted to direct a film a film before. He is a theatre guy. Do you know Simon? He actually lives in Washington now. He’s running a Shakespeare company in Washington, but he’s gloriously theatrical.

(Laughter)

JB: And he’s so gorgeous but had literally never picked up a camera, though I think he’d shadowed directors. Tim Sidell, our cinematographer had to literally teach Simon what a close-up was, what a you know, long shot was – all the basic things. And it was really beautiful, in a way everybody was on ground zero, like the National had never used this theatre as a studio before and how we had to re-adapt it had to be – well we had an opportunity, basically because of the reality of the situation to tell the reality of the situation and use that as a virtue rather than a vice. Then we just shot it over seventeen days.

MG: Was it like a regular movie where you would shoot a scene through? Or because you had rehearsed for four weeks you could have done the whole play start to finish every day?

JB: We didn’t shoot it in sequence, I don’t know why.

MG: You didn’t shoot it in sequence but you would shoot like a whole scene, like three scenes a day or something or like doing a film?

JB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MG: Interesting. You had done the play many times, in a way.

JB: I know. Lighting was such a part of how they were going to paint this thing that it felt like that was huge, and we only had lighting really to give a sense of change in the environment because we were just inside the kind of bones of the theatre. Everything else was our imagination that was bringing the story to life so lighting and little additions of sets and props and costumes which were moving towards a more realised imaginative world from where we were beginning at the beginning, which was: how do we create this story that we’re about to live?

MG: And so, did you feel like there was something you knew about Juliet going in, where you were: OK at least this I know is generally the road I want to be on, or did you go in just totally curious and open?

JB: I didn’t know. No, I mean you never know…you kind of…you try and find out where the core of it is. I guess where I came into the play was I really wanted to be in love. Like I really wanted to do like something hot like love. I guess something that I realized is she’s super strong which I actually didn’t know before; I think Juliet a fighter and I they’re both fighting for the need to love instead of the need to hate and she’s grown up in a world, that’s where everybody around her is so afraid to love because in a world that’s dying, it’s scarier to lose somebody that you love than lose somebody that you hate. And this girl, this woman, finds love that is bigger than the hate that everybody has settled for in their life and from that it’s like litmus paper. I really believe, even to the point when they kill themselves that she needs love to win over death and that’s the kind of torch-bearer for the play.

MG: Sometimes I feel, like, when I go into something, I know there’s just something that’s kind of going to pull me through, like just don’t fall off that cliff, like even if all sorts of things surprise you and you learn obviously all sorts of things. Was there something that you were like, ok, I know this is true about my Juliet. I mean that she’s a lover, of course, like she is.

JB: I don’t think I’m as precise as that. I like working abstractly. I think that’s how I get into somebody, and so I pull lots of different strands – like, Francesca Woodman as a reference, or Peter Gregson, the composer who became a motif for Josh and me throughout filming it. It was something that we shared early on with each other and I think I don’t like putting something on top of something until I’ve discovered something. That’s just me.

MG: Interesting...

JB: And figuring out what it is with Josh, you know, with my Romeo and with my mum, and, I guess, you know, the adaptation meant that Lady Capulet, that mother/matriarch work role is much more present and a much more intense relationship when you have that relationship. And maybe I was also coming from our film where we really dug our heels into the mother/daughter relationship and the lessons that we pass on to each other because of a system that we’ve grown up in or things that we choose not to live outside of and all of the shadows of where you’ve come from.

MG: Did you go straight after The Last Daughter and do this? Or did you have a little break?

JB: I think I did. I think I had two weeks, and then went in.

MG: Two weeks? That’s, like, really nothing. Because ours was pretty intense.

JB: Yeah. I know. Like a full-on train ride into Christmas. I had two months off afterwards.

MG: So I saw Tamsin Greig as Malvolio with Ramona (Maggie’s daughter) a few years ago when we were in London. How did you find working with her?

JB: Oh she’s such a beautiful woman. And it was interesting she’s very sensitive and fragile and yet has this rod of iron and power in her and like you’re just like, phwoar, but I think, and she said it herself, she found it very hard, rehearsals, found it quite scary, because of the virus. And a lot of people in the theatre did because they haven’t been working. You know, like film sets have been working – they’ve adapted – whereas theatre people it’s the first time ever since the National’s opened that it had been closed for this amount of time, and entering that building it was a lot scarier on that set than it was on other sets that I have been just because people hadn’t kind of, you know, been there for a while or had an opportunity to adapt.

MG: One of the first. Had you worked on something else since the pandemic?

JB: I’d done Fargo for four weeks.

MG: That’s right, that’s right, that’s right.

JB: We were also in a little bubble on a beautiful island off Greece for our film.

MG: When you watch Romeo and Juliet, it feels like you guys are locked in a theatre together only seeing each other which is why you can touch each other like that. I can’t imagine what’s going on in theatre but for us when we were rehearsing we would have to wear masks.

JB: Yeah, yeah. So did we. If we had the balcony scene rehearsal, we’d have the test and if the test came back negative they were like you’ve got a three-hour window where you can touch each other. And then one day Josh hadn’t got tested. It was our first day of the balcony scene and I was like – free snog, here we go. And he hadn’t got tested and they were like so sorry you can’t touch. I was like: “you’re joking!”, and then we basically couldn’t touch which actually was interesting. It was annoying. It was what it was.

MG: That creates a kind of need, you know.

JB: Yeah, even for Tamsin. Like Tamsin was so scared, she was terrified to touch anybody, anything, and that became part of our relationship in the play, so Juliet was just so desperate for touch. When she says to Romeo, ‘good pilgrim you do wrong your hand too much’. She’s so thirsty for any kind of physical touch. It explodes her world because this world lives in fear of actually being intimate with somebody, and I guess because of the virus that really helped. It made it more intense.

MG: I mean, of course, that’s how you and Juliet and everybody else is feeling like that right now.

JB: We’re all going to be rampant come summer. You know, June 25th or something we’ll be partying.

MG: So I feel like in a way watching you guys do that felt like, I don’t know…

JB: Naughty!

MG: I feel like your guys’ desire, like the hunger that’s all over the play. Not only you guys but also I can’t remember the names of the men who are kissing behind the flat.

JB: Mercutio and Malvolio, yeah.

MG: Like everyone’s just kind of like dying for some love.

JB: Yeah, yeah. Have you ever done Shakespeare?

MG: I played Prospero in college.

JB: Did you?

MG: Yes. I went to RADA for a summer. You went to RADA proper?

JB: Yeah.

MG: I went to their Shakespeare programme for a summer. I would like to play Isabella in Measure for Measure.

JB: You would be a great Isabella.

MG: You make me really want to act. So funny but since I’ve been directing I’m like: this is so much fucking better! Don’t have to ask for anybody’s permission, get to have all these intimate experiences. Just been in heaven this whole time. Maybe I wanted a free snog too.

(Laughter)

JB: I mean it’s the great perk of our job. Let’s just call a spade a spade. It is. It’s great.

MG: I was thinking about watching this. A great love story obviously. I remember somebody saying to me, somebody who I really think is wise. I was acting in something and I was trying to create a real intimacy between me and this guy I was supposed to be in love with and it just didn’t work unless we had it. I did not want to sleep with them and I didn’t want to break any boundaries, not interested at all, but I wanted there to be real love and desire between us, and I was freaking him out. And I was thinking about this and OK I don’t want to freak him out because, of course, if you trust the person you’re working with, there’s an opportunity to actually create love, actually create desire and some stories only work if there’s actual love and actual desire between the people working on them.

JB: Hmmmm!

MG: But there’s all different ways of working, there’s some people who don’t feel that way at all. There’s some people that think that’s too dangerous and there has to be a kind of artifice and obviously I completely understand. But I have a feeling that you’re like me so wondering how, how, it’s a very difficult question, in fact. You started to answer it, like you guys are sending music back and forth, starting to create a relationship, I mean how do you create a relationship like that?

JB: Well, Josh and I have known each other for about thirteen years. I met him through a friend. He was doing a play. He lived quite close to me at one point. We always really got on. At one point, we were like: let’s go move by the sea and set up a hippy commune with all these artist people and I’ve just always, always loved him in the core – one of those people you go: I get it, I get you, I love you, you’re my brother, you’re my friend.

MG: I thought he was so, so good.

JB: Isn’t he amazing?

MG: I really did. I thought he was wonderful.

JB: He’s such a beautiful man and he’s a really…I don’t know, he’s a rare man. He’s just a beautiful, beautiful man, and so, I don’t know, I guess you were quite lucky that a lot of that intimacy was already there. I know because of the kind of actor that he is and he knows, because of knowing me, it’s like let’s go for it, like let’s just jump off the cliff.

MG: This is what separates the women from the girls.

(Laughter)

MG: Just have to say, look, everyone does it their own way but in my way, let’s jump off the cliff.

JB: Yeah.

MG: Like, I’m safe, don’t worry, I’m safe.

JB: Oh yeah and I totally think you can. Like you said, love is lots of different shapes. You can hate somebody and love them or you can try to pick out all the little things in it. For me, I would feel cheated. I would feel I’d cheated myself, I’d have cheated him with me or lack of me and it’s fun. Like you know your boundaries. It’s what we do, like what’s the point if you don’t. If you’re trying to tell a story about love, fall in love. Leave yourself outside, it’s not you it’s the story that’s the most important thing.

MG: But then again and this is a sort of topic change in a way, but after I watched Romeo and Juliet I was thinking about you and The Lost Daughter and I was sort of thinking it’s all you, you know, I mean it is, it’s YOU, at least I certainly feel like for me often roles that come to me, things that I call to me are because there’s something in them I need to work out.

MG: There’s something in there that got me. So, in a way, it is all you, I think, when I watch it I relate to that. And I was thinking about, like, Leda (Jessie’s character in The Lost Daughter) and Juliet had a party together.

JB: (Laughing) 

MG: I don’t know, they’re so different. I’ve been watching you every day. And Juliet really seems young to me, she was, like, fourteen or something, you know, even though she seems much younger than Leda.

JB: Maybe that’s love. I didn’t play her young. I didn’t even bother myself with that whole thing. It wasn’t important to me.

MG: But she does seem young, she does.

JB: Yeah.

MG: For Leda, for example, I feel like there’s forty different things going in opposite directions, and so it’s hard to move like really clearly in one direction, you know? With Juliet it’s like she’s on that path…like on a tidal wave, just riding it. That’s a littler younger. Isn’t it??

JB: Well, I guess, with Juliet she’s been sheltered in a way, like that film, what’s it called? Yorgos Lanthimos film, Dogma?

MG: Oh, right.

JB: Dogtooth, Dogtooth, Dogtooth! Have you seen it?

MG: I have a really strong sense of the flavour, but, no, I haven’t seen it.

(Laughter)

JB: In that film, their father is kind of cocooning them at a certain age of their life and I thought, actually that’s much more interesting for Juliet. What happened? What if the story became that, like, she’s my age, thirty-one, but at fourteen her life was stopped and it retains the potential of life from fourteen and what kind of tension contained in her up until thirty-one and how is that then lived once that is lanced out of her?

MG: That’s interesting. No, I don’t think there’s any real reason to focus on like a linear kind of age. I’ve definitely played people and told myself, like, she’s ninety-eight in the scene and…

JB: How?

MG: How? And that’s not the circumstances at all but I just think it’s fine. I don’t mean it in a literal way but I felt she was younger. I felt, she was like I said, focused in a way. All the different diverging branches of other ideas. She’s super smart and you can follow her complicated mind but she’s so driven in one direction. It did remind me of Ramona, who’s fourteen.

JB: Yeah, good. How did Ramona feel watching it?

MG: I mean truly she and I were yelling at the screen. Don’t take it! I mean I’d read the play, seen it before, I obviously knew what was going to happen. I think it was amazing for her to see it. She’s fourteen – she’s just entering into this part of her life.

JB: My sister is fourteen as well and even went for a walk the other day just out of the hotel I’m staying and I thought… you’re tiny! It’s such an unusual age. You’re tiny and yet all of a sudden there’s this sexual-ness kind of activated within you and everything becomes tinged by that in some way. Even if you’re scared of it, you’re aware of it for the first time in your life, I think, around that age. Some kids, obviously different times, but I think I was way later. I didn’t even have a chance to be honest at fourteen. I looked like Hagrid’s love child and was too busy doing uncool things.  

MG: What are you doing now?

JB: I’m doing this film called Men.

MG: Men.

JB: Men that Alex Garland is directing. He did Ex Machina. Kind of a horror.

JB: Why did Lost Daughter come to you at this point? And do you feel like in a way with things that you feel intimate with or personal with that you’re trying to take a layer off? I feel more and more like the characters that I love I want to take something off on this, not hide.

MG: As a director, as a writer, as an actress, it feels very similar to me that there’s the edge of what I understand about myself and kind of, oh, what’s this new territory I’m getting into. Usually that territory is a little bit scary and dark, just in that it’s not clear. Wait, what’s happening here, oh, what’s this part of myself I haven’t wanted to look at yet? I’ve found pretty much the things that come to me offer an opportunity to check out that part of myself. Or maybe those are the things where I’m like oh, what’s that? Maybe I can work it out there. And I also agree I’m not interested ever in the kind of literal. It’s some kind of unconscious exploration.

JB: Yeah.

MG: But sometimes – this is what I was trying to ask you in the beginning – sometimes I look at something and I’m like, OK, I know if I start moving in this direction it’s a dead end. Just avoid that. I feel life ‘here’. I feel if I go this way every time I start moving over here, there’s life. And if I go ‘here’, I’m dead or something. I sometimes find, for me, this character lives…HERE. And I can totally be wrong and find that this person, this amazing other actor is pushing me over to somewhere I never even imagined and, of course, that’s what you want.

JB: Yeah.

MG: I do sort of feel like I like to go into, and it can be different with a play because you have four weeks of rehearsal to just explore, with film I feel like sometimes I like to go into, I like to know something and I like to make it really hard. Training for something, working for something that’s sometimes a little at odds with the text.

JB: Yeah, definitely. I guess we had four weeks to discover. And it was a complete blank canvas for Romeo and Juliet because everybody was discovering. The cinematographer had never worked in a theatre before. This director had never filmed before, the script supervisor had never worked with a theatre company before, the lighting company had never worked on a film before, so everybody was discovering, and we had to find this story through discovery. In a way we all had to just let go of our preconceptions. They were useful but ultimately what was the most alive was what we were creating with each other in that. Our cinematographer was as much going, ‘Oh this scene reminds me of Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas’. And so in the back of our minds we went to shoot this scene that was just something that he very gently kind of sold. I’ve never had a relationship as involved with the cinematographer creatively like that where you were finding new narration with each other, and in a sense the whole team.

MG: I have a question for you: based on what you’re saying, I found working with you that you really, really work like pretty much not at all concerned with even a general kind of continuity. And it’s interesting because the way we worked, the way we shot was absolutely fine and I had the script supervisor coming to me saying she’s done this differently and she’s done that differently and her hair’s over here and this is over here and I would think about it and almost always think that it was fine. It doesn’t matter, it actually doesn’t matter. One time where you actually picked up the phone with the other…

JB: …hand?

MG: And even then I think I may have said you have to pick up the phone with the right hand so that I can cut in between these scenes, but I don’t even know if I did. Actually really don’t know if I did. But that’s very unusual. I mean most of the time really free, brilliant actors make themselves adhere to a kind of continuity. I think it’s pretty amazing – I was constantly saying, no you can’t tell her they can’t look over her lines. It’s fine. But I wonder if people tell you, Jessie, you have to stand here, you actually have to do this the way you did it before. When we were working, what you were doing and what my actors were doing was pretty much the most important thing and then our DP adjusted to you and let it move and that’s how I wanted to work, you know, and that can’t always be the case.

JB: I’m probably an absolute nightmare!

MG: Do people come and tell you, Jessie you have to do this or that? Does it piss you off?

JB: No, no, no. It doesn’t piss me off. I feel, I want to do it. I’m not being like, fuck off. It’s not like that at all. I really want to. I guess I forget and I guess there’s so much potential of something new happening in this scene that I sometimes think that something I did on the first take how, from what you’re saying, how can that be just it? And I get that there’s loads of life always going on in everybody. It’s important.

MG: That’s the way of working. It doesn’t have to be important. It doesn’t have to be important and that wasn’t what was important on our set. That didn’t really matter. I know, because I’ve been on a lot of sets, that’s not always the way it is. And when people say, like, the kids are so amazing in our movie, well that’s because we let them be free. It’s the same with grownups. Even if you tell a grownup, I think, yeah you walked out of a movie theatre with your purse on your right arm and this time you did it on your left arm? Ok, fine, brilliant actress, it’s Vanessa Redgrave. I believe, still, just a little bit when she gets to the door she’s going to go, oh, oh, my purse. What side her purse was on…

JB: Yeah, yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more, Maggie.

MG: Every once in a while, there’s something, for instance, like the scenes with Alba, those dinner scenes with. You guys, where people stop and go, you have to refill their wine glasses so they’re exactly the same. But I’ve been on so many sets and know it doesn’t usually work like that, and I just imagine it must be difficult for you. I’ve caved way more than you have.

JB: [laughing]

MG: I’m like, I’m fine, fine, I’ll do my purse on the right.

JB: No, no I do want to do it. I do want to do it.

MG: I don’t believe you!

JB: If you give me the option not to, I’m probably going to take it.

MG: Right, I’ve never made you have to try. I could just imagine you being like, what?!

JB: [laughing] Yeah, but I think when we were doing Lost Daughter, like those scenes were so alive because of the kids, and I mean kids don’t give a fuck, man.

MG: It’s the same with you and Jack.

[laughter]

JB: Jessie, you cannot get out of this one. I own it.

MG: I just think that it’s rare for me, I’m going to make a movie where my actors are free, and on stage you would be totally free but I just can imagine that you would have a script supervisor saying you’ve got your purse on the wrong side.

JB: Yeah, yeah. That does happen. Yes, I’m trying. With all the scripts. You’re providing, it doesn’t come without care.

MG: What were you listening to while you were making Romeo and Juliet?

JB: Well, the main dude, the main one was Peter Gregson. Do you know Peter Gregson? He’s brilliant. And, actually, I sent Josh a song called ‘Movies’ by this singer called Weyes Blood. And he sent me back as a response this Peter Gregson piece called ‘Sequence (Four)’. The minute I heard it I thought this is love, this is just their love, and for a lot of the takes we used music a lot during the take. So for that scene that breaks out of their first meeting where we’re running around the rehearsal room, we put that on and we just did it in one take. And we put it on really loudly and ran around the whole place. And, then, when they have sex later, we put it on. So that was one, then Sigur Rós – ‘Hoppípolla’. What else was I listening to? Nina Simone, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’. I can’t listen to them now, though. Do you have a playlist from…

MG: The Lost Daughter?

JB: Can you listen to it now, the one you made while you were shooting it?

MG: Yeah, I still love all the songs. But I’m still deep in it.

JB: You are?

MG: But it’s funny because a lot of those songs ended up in our temp track when we were cutting, and some of them stayed. Astonishing, I can’t believe some of that music made it into the movie, but also things have started to shed now. Now that we have a composer – like, Oooh I think I’ll start to let go of this one. I actually sent you that Greek song today. Did you hear that?

JB: I loved it. It reminded me of that Testigo one that you sent me, yeah.

MG: That was part of my Lost Daughter soundtrack. Yeah, no, I still can listen to them. There are songs from things I’ve acted in, you know, where I’m like, oh that’s just so attached to the movie I can’t even listen to it anymore.

JB: Like what?

MG: This is so literal, so strange, but the Iggy Pop song about Candy, you know, is it just called ‘Candy’? [sings] “Candy, candy, candy, I can’t let you go”, you know?

JB: Yeah, yeah.

MG: Also, The Velvet Underground, ‘Candy Says’. I was playing a character called Candy and they like somehow came into my mind and I played her for a long time and I don’t really like to listen to them anymore. There’s this Cat Power song that I was listening to when I was doing The Honorable Woman and now I’m like, eh.

JB: It’s so weird. It’s funny that they become part of that whole thing. Not that I don’t like them anymore but they don’t mean what they meant then.

MG: ‘Candy’, it’s called, yeah. The one thing I can’t do is take the clothes of my character, of course. Sometimes I think, oh that’s quite nice, and take my jacket home and then I get it home and I’m like I cannot wear this, it is not me.

JB: I’ve done that. I think at the beginning of every job I’d be like, oh yeah I’ll have that, and oh, that’s lovely. Sometimes I have taken things. I took my boots from I’m Thinking of Ending Things but I’ve never once worn them. I’ve given them to charity now, for a charity thing. But, yeah, you’re right I’ve never worn anything I’ve ever brought back.

MG: I had all these beautiful clothes from The Honorable Woman. Also, they gave me the clothes from Stranger than Fiction and I was such a cool character in that, played it so cool, and they just sat in my closet. You had this great purple dress that I remember seeing you on the island in Greece. It was a kind of forties style dress…?

JB: Oh, yeah, yeah.

MG: Because of the way the island was, I remember when they’d see you come along I was like, I think that’s Jessie – in your bright, purple, beautiful dress. And it reminded me of your Juliet clothes a little bit.

JB: The Juliet clothes, our rehearsal clothes, were basically what we, what I was rehearsing in so they dressed us like what you would come in wearing every day. Though it was quite nice to not feel so prim as Juliet. I didn’t want to be too, like, virginal.

(Laughter)

MG: All of that desire.

JB: Yeah.

MG: She’s totally a hungry woman. That’s what I like about Isabella, you know. Saying, oh, my god, I could not ever sleep with you, how could you possibly ask me, but, then again, she started the play by saying, I must go to a nunnery. The strictest one you could possibly think of. But I think she’s also like you’re saying about Juliet, full of desire.

JB: Have you ever read The Yellow Wallpaper? Have you ever read that book?

MG: No.

JB: I can’t remember the writer. It’s beautiful – they’re all short stories. The first chapter’s called ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ about this woman who basically is kind of going mad but she starts imagining she’s inside the wallpaper but she’s a housewife. It’s about feminism, it’s a feminist book. There is this one chapter in it which I kind of brought with me into Juliet which is called ‘An Extinct Angel’, and it, basically, was about the kind of imprisonment that we put on the idea of an angel and actually angels want to fall to earth. No angel wants to live on a pedestal all her life. She wants to crack and she wants to fall to earth and it’s unfair of us to put that onto something, whatever it is, whether it’s an object, or a human, or a woman or a man or a child or whatever. I remember reading it and it really resonated with me for her. The idea of somebody being entombed, at the point of her life where she was just about to live, and at fourteen she’s entombed by a set of systems, patriarchal systems, structures, or political structures which don’t enable her to live but just entomb her in a kind of fake existence which is what everybody, within her family, it’s kind of steering things towards.

MG: Right.

JB: Because it offers them a certain amount of power, I guess.

MG: I thought when I watched it that that was what the play was about. I thought it was so interesting – I have read the play before and I have seen it a few times – but I was so hit by that line, um, “Never was there such a tale of woe as Juliet and her Romeo”. I’m not sure that’s exactly right but something like that.

JB: Yep.

MG: I was talking to Ramona about it because she’s in this Shakespeare class and they do monologues and her teacher was suggesting a couple of monologues for her to do and, I was like, what about Juliet? Why don’t you do Juliet? She said, well the way that Jessie did it that’s different, that was amazing, and I said. Yes, she was amazing but I think that’s the play. I don’t think Juliet is prim and proper, I think she’s a powerhouse, and, in fact, I said to her, it’s her play. And, in effect, that’s true sometimes. I think Three Sisters is Masha’s play.

JB: Yeah.

MG: In the play it’s her heart that you follow through the play and this is Juliet’s play. And I do think it’s a tragedy, and I did think it was about exactly what you said: this woman who fights against being entombed and she can’t win.

JB: It’s what we all have to fight against.

MG: That’s what The Lost Daughter is about too.

JB: It is! It is. They are beautiful gifts, and the beautiful lessons that we get to figure out when we do things like that. Ramona would be brilliant and she could do whatever way she wanted, it would just come from her heart and she would be gorgeous.

MG: Her teacher suggested Ophelia. And I was like, you know Mona, it’s so interesting, Ophelia is so hard. I’ve never played Ophelia but I’ve seen a lot of people do it in a way that did not compel me. And I’ve watched Peter [Sarsgaard] play Hamlet so I saw it like many, many times and I kept thinking about Ophelia and I was like, god could I do it? And I don’t know how I would do it. You probably could. Anyway, I was thinking, that monologue of hers she’s already been destroyed, she’s already lost.

JB: Juliet has agency. Ophelia doesn’t necessarily in that world

MG: I’m sure you could do it, but, I thought you know, she’s already cracked, in that monologue as opposed to someone who’s fighting every step of the way for clarity and truth. And, I mean, that’s the thing that’s so beautiful about you and why I love your work so much and I love your work in Romeo and Juliet, and I love your work in our movie, is you are totally interested in the truth. You’re not interested, I don’t think, in anything else and I’m not either. When I see that in your work, I feel it’s so hard to do that. It goes upstream. That’s what I mean in a way where I’m like you must have script supervisors coming all the time.

JB: [Laughing]

MG: It’s hard to do. It’s hard to do.

JB: But you always don’t know what the truth is ever, fully. There is a line from this poem called ‘Silentium!’ [by Tyutchev] which goes “A thought once uttered, is untrue” because the next thought is your true thought and, so, it’s a thing that’s constantly evolving. So that’s why continuity is a problem for me because it lives in the past.

MG: Or, I mean, I have a different way of thinking about it. I’m always trying to make it as hard as possible. So you’re trying for something I mean that is truly a fight for the truth.

JB: I think, in a way, that Romeo and Juliet as characters catch something that is true that people have turned away from. At the moment with her mum she wants them to see the truth of what life is possible from more. And Leda does too, she’s not doing it selfishly, she’s like, let’s live, let’s just live, and what’s there to lose? There’s nothing to lose by living.

MG: You’re going to die slowly if you don’t, if you don’t put one foot in front of the other after what’s true.

JB: Oh I miss you!

MG: I really hope we can drink some champagne soon together. I think it’s getting closer to being able to be together. I’m kind of curious, what is your greatest extravagance?

JB: Well, my current, biggest extravagance which is also an accomplishment, is buying my first home, which I love. That’s my biggest extravagance at the moment. What I love is having a facial, I love it so much I’d go all the time, I just love it. My cheeky extravagance is sitting outside my favourite restaurant in London called Brawn, which is on Columbia Road, on my own at about 3.30 maybe 4 pm, going in to have a glass of rosé and sitting on the bench, reading my book and I have just about an hour and a half all to myself, and I love that.

MG: With me, it would be champagne.

JB: Of course.

MG: That is something, you asked me about the music but, you know, all I could drink when we were shooting was champagne. And then we got home, and then for my birthday, which was right after we finished, everybody sent me champagne. It was almost like you haven’t been pregnant but when you’re pregnant, there are things you crave and you eat a lot of them, and them right after you have the baby, you’re like ooh, gross. I liked ice cream bars covered in dark chocolate and as soon as Ramona was born, I was like, disgusting.

(Laughter)

JB: You’ve taught me how to drink champagne. Greece is like champagne land which I had never really gone to before as fully and as joyfully and it’s a thing I can do with you. And it was so great. We’d finish a day’s shoot, we’d have a swim, then, we were like, shall we have chips and a glass of champagne?

MG: Ok, I’m going to change it a little bit. Who is the literary or filmic love of your life? No, wait, more like…what fictional character is doing it for you right now?

JB: Well, I just finished a really good book called Vegetarian by Han Kang, which I think you’d love. Have you read that? It’s about North Korea and her husband marries his wife because she’s basically translucent and he doesn’t have to entertain her in any way and she is just there. And one night he wakes up at 4 am and she isn’t in her bed and he walks down into the kitchen and she’s standing in front of the fridge, and he’s like, what are you doing, and she turns and says I had a dream and goes back to bed and the next morning he comes down and all the meat is out of the fridge and she decides she’s going to become vegetarian. Anyway, it’s a really beautiful, beautiful book.

MG: I mean something slightly different!

JB: What do you mean?

MG: Like a character in a book, movie or a play you have a little thing for…

JB: Like a dude, or a dudette?

MG: It doesn’t even have to be sexually, you know. Who you’re like: they caught me, they caught me.

JB: Someone who’s caught me for the rest of my life is Giulietta Masina who was Fellini’s wife, and she’s just…life.

MG: I think I must have told you this but I was so inspired by Nights of Cabiria for The Lost Daughter. The whole end to the movie I actually thought about painting a black tear on Olivia’s face. I realised we didn’t need to do that but I actually did think about it.

JB: Oh, it’s such a beautiful film. It’s amazing. Yeah, she’s the love of my literary life. She is, actually, yeah, she’s amazing.

MG: Yeah, she is amazing. I agree. And how about a particular character of hers like, she is an incredible actress, but like, is there a character?

JB: Well, my favourite film of hers is La Strada and the clown woman.

MG: Have you seen In the Mood for Love? The Wong Kar-Wai movie?

JB: No, but I remember you mentioned it when we were shooting on the stairs.

MG: That’s so funny because I hadn’t seen it for so long and I didn’t totally know what I meant by that, but I was watching that movie again because the music is incredible and I was looking for some musical inspiration at one point and I think that love story of these two people, all that happens on the stairs in in that movie, is that they walk by each other. She‘s going up and he’s going down.

JB: Oh, my god.

MG: And it’s just incredibly romantic and erotic. They’re on my mind right now. Well, that’s that, I think.

JB: You’ve been a wonderful interviewer. I think you should get a…

MG: Second job?

JB: Yeah . Become one of those talk show hosts. I mean, don’t! Because you’re really good at what you do.

MG: A talk show host? That sounds like hell to me. I would be so bad at that, I would be so nervous. You know when you have to go on talk shows?

JB: Oh, my god, awful.

MG: The whole time, I have a massive amount of respect for them. And I often think about those people and like you’re not nervous because you do this every day, and you just came to work and put on your suit and you’re totally used to it, but I would be terrible. But I really enjoyed interviewing you.

JB: Thank you. We had a lovely time.

MG: We’ll drink some champagne together soon.

JB: Give everyone my love.

MG: You too. Bye!

JB: Bye!

Gucci Epilogue