Sharing hard truths about motherhood
Maggie Gyllenhaal adapts frank novel ‘Lost Daughter’ into complex debut film
In an early scene in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, “The Lost Daughter,” Olivia Colman’s character Leda, a literature professor on a solo vacation in Greece, tells a massively pregnant woman she meets on the beach, “You’ll see, children are a crushing responsibility.”
It’s an unsentimental, even prickly, thing to say to a woman (played by Dagmara Dominczyk of “Succession”) expecting her first baby. Colman says it with a knowing look on her face that leaves the audience unsure why she’s so testy and ambivalent about motherhood — until more is revealed later in the film.
Gyllenhaal, a mother of two daughters herself with actor Peter Sarsgaard, who plays Leda’s lover in flashback scenes in “The Lost Daughter,” recently spoke with The Chronicle by phone from New York about feeling mesmerized when she first read the 2006 novel by Elena Ferrante. (The Italian author writes under the pseudonym and her publishers keep her true identity secret.)
“It felt like she was telling the truth about things in the feminine experience of the world that really hadn’t been talked about as honestly,” said Gyllenhaal.
“The Lost Daughter,” onscreen as well as on the page, is an unusually frank portrait of a woman who admits to feeling suffocated by the roundthe-clock burden of caring for young children.
“I’m an unnatural mother,” Leda says at one point in the film.
In flashback scenes, with Jessie Buckley (FX’s “Fargo”) playing the younger Leda, she cuddles and cares for her girls but also snaps at them in anger, wishing they’d just be quiet, stop touching her, let her write in peace.
Gyllenhaal recalls thinking, “Is there anything more transgressive than a mother admitting to feeling, even for a passing spell, unmaternal?” She described first falling in love with Ferrante’s writing in her popular Neopolitan quartet of novels. “They were a phenomenon among my friends in New York when they
came out; we’d rush to the bookstore for the translations.”
When Gyllenhaal then read “The Lost Daughter,” she remembers thinking, “Oh, my God, this character (Leda) is so f—ed up. And then within 10 seconds thinking, ‘Uh-oh, I actually really relate to her. So, does that mean I’m so f—ed up? Or does that mean something universal is being said in her novels that I just hadn’t heard before?’
“I mean, I’m never going to walk out the door and leave my kids, but I’d be a real outlier to say I’ve never ever had thoughts like (Leda) does. I think most people I know can relate to that in some way.”
Gyllenhaal, who was honored at SFFilm Awards Night this month for her film, said she learned a great deal about what makes a good movie as an actor in more than 40 movies. She was nominated for an Oscar for “Crazy Heart” in 2009 and most recently spent three seasons playing a porn director on David Simon’s HBO series “The Deuce,” which she also produced. She said that experience of playing someone in control behind the camera helped her switch gears to directing.
“I just didn’t allow myself to consider the possibility before,” she reflected. “I didn’t feel entitled to it. Now, I think (directing) might actually be a better job for me.”
Gyllenhaal spent weeks crafting a
letter to Ferrante asking for the rights to adapt “The Lost Daughter.” In her response through her publishers, Ferrante told Gyllenhaal she could have the rights — but that their contract was void if she didn’t direct it herself.
“It was this really powerful vote of confidence,” Gyllenhaal said.
To her surprise, while Gyllenhaal was deep into writing her screenplay, Ferrante also published a column in the Guardian newspaper not only giving Gyllenhaal her public blessing, but also telling her it was important “for all women” that she feel free to make “The Lost Daughter” according to her own vision.
“She offered me this incredible freedom,” Gyllenhaal said, “and I took it.”
While she kept her adaptation true to the heart of Ferrante’s novel, she noted the endings are strikingly different in each. “I definitely think the movie and the book are inextricably tied together and vibrating off each other, but they are two different expressions for sure,” she added.
Most importantly, Gyllenhaal said it was crucial that Leda “not be seen as crazy, so we don’t just write her off as this mad woman who’s doing these awful things. It’s important that this is not about mental illness. In fact, it’s about a kind of normal spectrum of feelings of being a woman and a human being in the world.”
Early audiences and critics have overwhelmingly agreed that Gyllenhaal’s complex portrait of a woman at odds with society’s expectations, who is more caustic than most onscreen “good mothers,” strikes a
“The Lost Daughter” (R) is in theaters now and begins streaming on Netflix on Friday, Dec. 31.
powerful chord. Gyllenhaal took home the best screenplay award at the prestigious Venice Film Festival, and “The Lost Daughter” picked up four trophies at the Gotham Awards. She and Colman are both nominated for Golden Globes.
Dakota Johnson, who plays Nina, the young American mother Leda obsessively observes on the beach in Greece, said she felt a strong, immediate connection to the material when she read the script.
“Nina is so thirsty for anyone to see her, she’s hungry to just be herself, the way Leda is, but she’s not allowed to because of where she’s from and what she looks like,” Johnson said during a Q&A onstage at the Telluride Film Festival following the movie’s U.S. premiere in September.
“She’s seen as the hot girl on the beach, but she really wants to be seen as so much more.”