PIECES OF A WOMAN
THE TALE OF A MOTHER EXPERIENCING A TERRIBLE LOSS, PIECES OF A WOMAN CAN BE HARROWING TO WATCH. BUT, AS ITS CREATORS AND STAR EXPLAIN, IT’S REALLY ABOUT HOPE
Vanessa Kirby on the extraordinary drama that might just snag her a Best Actress Oscar.
IF YOU WERE relying on Bond to deliver the most bracing pre-title sequence of 2021, prepare to be blindsided by Pieces Of A Woman. No sooner will you have settled in your seat than Martha — a blonde, heavily pregnant woman played with career-topping commitment by Vanessa Kirby — starts to scrunch up her face in pain and pace her elegantly-lit Boston apartment.
An uncut 24-minute birth scene unspools from here. In that time, Martha’s eyes roll in and out of focus. She swears and apologises and asks if the bin has been taken out, while her partner Sean (Shia Labeouf ) tries desperately to be helpful. Most of all, though, Martha burps. “A lot of women have thanked me for the burping, which I really wasn’t expecting,” says Kirby from her home in London. “It’s just so nice that it’s
not an edited version of what the female experience is.”
It’s a bold choice to take on a film this dark and demanding, especially when this is Kirby’s first leading feature role. After the back-arching intensity of the birth, Martha’s pregnancy ends in paralysing heartbreak and forces her into a fugue state over a bitter, solitary winter. Yet the actress — who won the Volpi Cup at Venice International Film Festival for her performance — was ravenous for a story like Martha’s.
“I just thought, ‘I really have to do this,’” Kirby remembers. “I’d never seen the process of giving birth and this reaction to trauma on screen in this way before. I felt this responsibility and duty to women and families who have lost in that way.”
Director Kornél Mundruczó had told Martha’s story once before, in a Polish stage play written by his longstanding collaborator and partner, Kata Wéber. The character first came to life, however, in a few scraps of dialogue that Wéber had scribbled down after she had terminated a pregnancy. “It was a very different experience to what’s seen in the film, but it was still a loss for me,” she explains. “As a couple we could hardly deal with it, and we never talked about it. It made me interested in the taboos that exist around grieving and motherhood and death around the world.”
Mundruczó found those fragments of dialogue and saw in them a chance to dismantle the silence that had overshadowed their experience and address those taboos face on. He asked Wéber to write the play, which proved enough of a success in Poland to convince them to adapt Pieces Of A Woman into their first English-language film.
While working on the screenplay, which significantly expanded on the play, Wéber spoke with psychiatrists and women who had lost babies, but she was nervous: the dark and confronting corners that her story went to seemed risky to people that she spoke to. She questioned if Hollywood was ready for this challenging new female perspective. “I believe there’s a certain way that we want to see a mother’s grief after a tragedy,” she speculates. “We want to see them move on and go back to their previous lives. But some people don’t want to move on, because that’s how they stay connected to what’s happened. That’s how they feel more alive.”
Fortunately, Wéber and Mundruczó found someone who was up to the challenge: Arrival producer Aaron Ryder, who passed the script along to co-producers Ashley Levinson and Kevin Turen, who then optioned the film. Labeouf came on board first as Sean, a bluecollar recovering alcoholic who describes himself as “boorish” in the film. Kirby joined shortly after, having been passed the script by Levinson’s husband and Euphoria creator, Sam. “I’d met with them both and told them that I was really looking to do something like A Woman Under The Influence,” she explains. “Gena Rowlands is my biggest inspiration.”
Kirby’s career kickstarted after portraying glamorous rule-breaker Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of The Crown, before splintering off into lucrative action franchises. She’d held her own against wardrobe-sized co-stars like Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham in Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw, and committed to not one but three Mission: Impossible movies as the skilled and elusive White Widow. Stepping into Martha’s shoes presented her with her biggest challenge yet: to convincingly portray childbirth as someone who had never done it herself. Kirby shadowed an obstetrician on a labour ward and a birthing coach was flown over from Portland for the shoot, but she was still daunted by the task. “I’d done tons of research,” she says, “but I had no idea if we could pull it off, and we only had two days to shoot it.”
As if the stakes weren’t high enough, Mundruczó — keen to capture the early energy of his cast — made the ambitious call to film the birthing scene on the first two days of the shoot. Ahead of their first day on set — an apartment in Montreal that subbed for Boston — nerves were fraying. “I don’t think that Shia and I got much sleep the night before, honestly,” Kirby admits. “Then on the morning of the shoot we were so jittery. It was like doing the first night of a play.”
The mechanics of the sequence were planned out vigorously, but rehearsals were purposefully kept on the light side. For one, Labeouf — a known Method actor — wanted to save as much energy as he could for the shoot itself. For Mundruczó, less rehearsal time meant more room for small errors, something he insists is a good thing. “We always tried to include uncertainties or little mistakes,” he says. “For example, in the last take of the first day, Shia forgot his phone and had to run out of the room, and some of the composition is delayed. The next day the takes were more perfect, but the same spirit wasn’t there.”
The scene’s emotional foundation was laid by Wéber, who clocked up around 25 pages of the script on the sequence. “I wanted to write down the raw experience of giving birth; the sheer beauty and terror of it.” A lot of what makes it onto the screen, however, was improvised by the cast: Kirby, Labeouf and Molly Parker, who plays the midwife. “We had a map of where to be, and then we’d freefall and see what happened,” says Kirby. “Shia is the best improviser that I’ve ever worked with. There’s a joke that he makes about a salad bar in the film that makes me laugh even thinking about it now.”
Behind the camera, things weren’t quite as off-the-cuff. A limited space meant limited crew for filming: just two boom operators and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, who upon Mundruczó’s insistence also acted as the camera operator. The director wanted the camerawork to bring a “spiritual” element to the sequence, and so he and Loeb opted for a gimbal — a lightweight Steadicam alternative that created a less jarring effect than a handheld camera — to work with. “Mundruczó was worried about how the subject matter would be received, as it’s so rarely seen on screen, so he consciously set out to make a film that wasn’t painful to watch digitally,” says Loeb. “He wanted the realism of a Richard Bresson movie, but with the classic actor melodrama of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.”
Across those two testing days, only six takes were filmed: four on the first day, two on the second. Mundruczó describes the experience as extremely emotional. Wéber adopted the role of an expectant father on set; supportive but helpless while her husband was tasked with doing all the work. In between takes, Kirby says that she would sit with her headphones on and listen to a playlist she’d made, packed with songs about expectancy and birth, to help bottle the energy that she needed for the remaining takes. “I couldn’t even access that playlist in my head now. It would be too painful.”
Regardless, she considers those days to be among the most exhilarating of her life; a chance to step into a world that she describes as “supernatural”, without interruption, and live through a vivid experience. “I hadn’t literally given birth,” she says, “but in some parts of my psyche I had.”
Pieces Of A Woman continued to defy the odds by receiving its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2020. Mundruczó still considers this to be a miracle, given that large parts of the world were still in lockdown. “It was a little island in the ocean that’s been this pandemic,” he recalls.
There have been rave reviews, and Oscar predictions are already swirling around Kirby’s dedicated performance, but it’s the film’s ripple effect that has touched the cast and crew most. On the morning of Empire’s interview with Kirby, a message had been forwarded to her via her sister from a family friend, who had watched the film’s trailer the day before. “It said: ‘I lost a baby two years ago, and I’ve never spoken about it. I’m so grateful that the film is representing that part of life.’”
For Mundruczó and Wéber, this bold feat of storytelling born from personal anguish has done exactly what they’d hoped it would: changed the conversation around women who have undergone unspeakable loss. “We took a huge risk making this film, because to do it right you have to go to a place which is very dark and very dangerous,” says Wéber. “But all of the stories that we’re hearing back is a sign to me that we managed to do it.”
As you subconsciously curl your fists up during that traumatic first chapter of Martha’s story and the turmoil that follows, you may struggle to call Pieces Of A Woman a hopeful film, but Mundruczó has no doubt in his mind that it is.
“Even to tell a story like this feels like hope,” he says. “When you’re able to crush the silence, that’s hope. In my opinion, this can’t be anything but an optimistic movie.” Through the efforts of this band of first-timers and chancers, this bold, radical and yes, hopeful, film is already one of the most talked-about of the year. As long as it’s for the right reasons, that’s okay with them.
PIECES OF A WOMAN IS IN CINEMAS FROM 30 DECEMBER AND ON NETFLIX FROM 7 JANUARY