 Directors Notes
Germination of the story
It started with the idea that two of the characters from my first
film, “Angela,” were living together in a house in upstate
New York. It soon became something completely different - the father
and the daughter living on an abandoned commune on an island off
the East Coast of the United States. I was thinking about what it
feels like to know that someone you love very much is going to die
at some point, a parent in particular. You almost pre-mourn them
- you mourn them in advance. It's possible for someone to believe
they love someone so much that when that person dies, they're somehow
going to be erased, or they won't continue to exist in some way.
That was the emotional kernel that started the story for me.
Casting her husband, daniel day-lewis, as jack
I never thought he would do it. The character is that of a man with
not much time left to live. Daniel goes so deeply into everything
he does, and I knew this role would be such a quagmire of guilt
and deep, conflicted feelings for him. He would also have to lose
50-60 pounds, and he was already thin. After I got the money to
make this film with no cast, I'd said to him "You‘re
my first choice" and expected him not to do it. It took months
of him reading the script and thinking about it. But after a while
he could see himself as this character and he could hear the writing
in his head. Jack is an angry utopian with a craving for order on
the one hand, and on the other, an anarchist's need to destroy it.
He is monstrous and completely loveable at the same time. His need
to control every situation is probably what drove the other members
of his commune away. He also has high moral standards. They are
almost so high that he can't live in the real world, and he has
isolated his daughter so he can control her intake of the modern
world. He very purposefully keeps her out of the toxic exterior
world, so that when we meet her she's completely un-socialized and
has no perspective on relationships.
Casting camilla belle as rose
It was a very hard part to cast for many reasons. The actor must
hit many emotional notes. Mourning or "pre-mourning" is
a part of it, but there is also humor and a wonderful innocence
there. In the beginning, you meet a docile beauty who becomes a
passionate person dedicated to her own beliefs. In a funny way,
the crazy events with the "instant family," and her separation
from her father, enable her to step out of the mirror, so to speak,
and start to run the narrative. Camilla has a purity about her.
You believe she could have lived untouched by television, she's
untouched by the world around her. She's also very real as an actress
and yet has an old-fashioned movie star quality, there's something
about her beauty that hasn't existed in a long time and when in
close-up she just shimmers. I was interested in an idea that her
perfection contributes to [Jack's] ability to idealize her, maybe
in a narcissistic way, and for the audience to idealize Rose, too.
Casting catherine keener as kathleen
I cast Catherine Keener because I didn't want the character of Kathleen
to be looked down on in any way. In the hands of a different actress,
she could have been played trashier; her arrangement with Jack is,
after all, financial as well as emotional. But Jack wouldn't have
been with that kind of woman. Kathleen is a very complex character,
and a lot of it has to do with what Catherine brought to the role.
She has a certain elegance about her. What made us think she'd be
right for our film was her work in "Lovely and Amazing." She was hilarious in that film. Catherine often plays pissed off
urban women - she's very good at playing disgruntled. Here, I would
be asking her to be completely vulnerable, and I think she felt
vulnerable playing it. Her character desperately wants the love
she is not getting from this man. To say that [Jack] loves Kathleen
is stretching it. He likes her and he needs her, so there is an
economy of need and power. She'd like it to be about love, but in
reality it's a total power struggle.
From rose's story to jack's story
[Reviewing the footage], the power of Jack's character and Daniel's
performance became more and more evident - for example, when he
walks away from the scene in the tree house where he comes close
to kissing [Rose] for the first time. He has a crisis moment. That's
written into the script, but one reads over it easily. But when
you see it, and you see this man in this kind of conflict, you're
so inside of his experience - you're locked in. I had thought it
was primarily Rose's story, and while Rose's story is extremely
important and Camilla Belle's performance so beautiful, subtle and
true, there's something very compelling about watching a man in
this particular struggle and still being able to empathize with
him and care about him. I think that hidden in the screenplay was
more of his point of view than I realized. In making a film, you're
not so much creating it as uncovering what's really there. And sometimes
it's not what you think it is.
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