Tom Ford | ‘Nocturnal Animals’
“It’s the scene of the abduction on the highway. You get six actors and they’re all, ‘No, if she were my daughter I would come over here and I would stand in-between.’ ‘Yeah, but if you did that then I would come over here and I would go over there.’ It was absolute mayhem, so I finally just said, ‘Guys, you just all have to go away. Just go away.’ Then when we got there, set up the cars, blocked it out with them, we got it to a place where it felt natural for them. We also shot it handheld so it could be a lot looser, it’s meant to be visceral and raw and not so posed and so framed. It’s very long, and it was the most complex to shoot. It’s 17 1/2 minutes on screen.”
“It’s a sequence that starts with the boy [Lucas Jade Zumann] reading to his mom [Annette Bening] the essay ‘It Hurts to Be Alive and Obsolete’ by Zoe Moss. It’s from ‘The Sisterhood Is Powerful’ book that Greta Gerwig’s character gives him. It has a bunch of little elements that are kind of like the DNA of my favorite parts of my films. It’s this really kind of impossible attempt for this mother and son to understand each other across this particularly big generation gap. And the boy, the 15-year-old, is really trying to understand his middleaged mother who was born in the ’20s who went through the Depression and WW II and is now raising him in the ’70s. It does nothing but unnerve her, so it doesn’t work out, but I find it a really beautiful attempt from him to try and see her. Then there is a beautiful little montage of moments from her life and their life together while he’s reading.”