Getting into the habit
Actress Margaret Qualley on her convent-set film ‘Novitiate’
An understanding of obsession was the key which helped actress Margaret Qualley unlock the mystery of her character in “Novitiate,” an acclaimed drama about a young woman who, in 1964, decides to become a nun.
While Qualley, whose mother is actress Andie MacDowell, might not seem to have much in common with a 17-year-old who opts to become a Bride of Christ, Qualley says she felt a kinship with her character’s single-minded focus.
“I actually related to her in a lot of ways,” says Qualley, 22. “I grew up dancing and was really serious about ballet. The ballet world isn’t entirely dissimilar from the life of a novice, in that there’s a lot of discipline and focus and overwhelming desire to be perfect.
“So, I think I related to that feeling of wanting to have certain steps that I could follow in order to make myself better. And I think that that’s something that my character in the movie really desired, too.”
Written and directed by Margaret Betts, “Novitiate” revolves around Cathleen (Qualley), a teenager training to become a nun under an unyielding Mother Superior (Melissa Leo). The backdrop is the early 1960s when the Vatican’s reform of the Catholic Church sent shockwaves through many convents and parishes.
When the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, it netted rave reviews and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, losing to “I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore.”
Betts spent four years researching nuns and their changing roles in the 1950s and 1960s. But despite the wealth of knowledge she accumulated about religion, the filmmaker sees the movie more as a means of exploring feminism in the years when the movement was just taking shape.
“It’s like my father used to always say to me when I was growing up: ‘Your principles or your beliefs only really matter when they’re challenged.’
“For example, for me as a feminist, it’s easy for me to be like, ‘Yay, Gloria Steinem!’ But this [Mother Superior] actually has a school that she’s running which is basically the most backward, 1950s, sexist training for these young girls to be in a subservient role to their husband Jesus.
“There couldn’t be anything more anti-feminist than what the Reverend Mother is doing. But, at the same time, that’s where
your principles are most challenged because nevertheless, nobody should be making a paternalistic decision for her about what she should do with her life.
“So, it was the conflation of those two things which made [the story] more interesting than if the woman was a rah-rah feminist, fighting the good fight.”
“Novitiate” was shot on the Vanderbilt College campus in Nashville at an independent facility called the Scarritt Bennett Center, which was once the site of a woman’s college in the 1920s.
In an effort to get into their roles, the actresses, including Leo, Qualley, “Glee’s” Dianne Agron and newcomer Morgan Saylor, often bunked at Vanderbilt.
The “novices” were awoken every morning at 5 a.m. by Leo and, during the day, they tried to maintain silence just as their characters were required to do.
“Most of the [actresses playing] novices, we all stayed in the convent [set] and we just lived by the rules that our characters would have had to,” recalls Qualley. “[We observed] the grand silence, refraining from any human touch, things like that.
“To spend time together while doing that was really special because [you experience life differently] when you remove all the extra stimulation like cell phones and television and music and you become aware of different things.
“It was a fun experiment to sit together and eat dinner in complete silence. Little things became massive. Morgan Saylor, I remember, peeled a Clementine and passed out Clementine pieces to everybody and that was the most exciting thing that happened that night.
“All the tiny nuances in life that aren’t usually brought to our attention became big deals.”
No one took their work more seriously than Melissa Leo, best known for her Oscar-winning turn in “The Fighter” and her Oscarnominated performance in “Frozen River.”
Before shooting her most dramatic scene, Leo asked Betts how intensely Betts wanted her to portray the Mother Superior’s emotions. Betts advised the actress to go as big as she could go.
“When I was sitting behind the monitor, I almost ran home, I was so scared,” says the filmmaker with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Wow, that was really big.’
“I loved it … [She] was amazing but I remember being scared. I can remember wanting to go in the bathroom because I was so scared at Melissa’s ferocity].”