Hard Labour
THE WORLD TO COME I Mona Fastvold finds love and loss in frontier America…
When Mona Fastvold read the script for The World To Come, she was immediately sold. “It was so compelling to me,” she tells Teasers. “The language was so exciting and beautiful. And then I saw this potential for how I wanted to tell the story. I think sometimes, when you see that really clearly, then you just know that you have to do it.
All of a sudden, I had these very clear images that I wanted to film.”
After directing 2014’s The Sleepwalker and co-scripting her partner Brady Corbet’s The Childhood Of A Leader and Vox Lux, Fastvold’s latest spins back to 19th Century rural America, telling the story of two farmer’s wives, Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby). With the former griefstricken over the loss of a child, they find friendship and more across the most gruelling of winters.
Fastvold took her cast and crew to a mountainous region near Transylvania. “I wanted it to feel as harsh and challenging as it would have been at the time period. The exciting thing about the Romanian mountains… in that particular area they don’t use hardly any machinery at all for the farming.”
It meant the actors (Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott, respectively, play Abigail and Tallie’s husbands) attended farm workshops. “Katherine spent a lot of time learning to milk cows. She was up early in the morning, milking our farmer neighbour’s cow. Everyone worked, cooking and cleaning, carrying equipment, because sometimes it was just too muddy for us to bring something with a car.”
Fastvold was determined to find the right level of sensitivity. “It’s hard to do love scenes in films. We’re trained to shoot nudity and the female body. So when I was tasked with that, I wanted to shoot a love scene that would be heartbreaking rather than titillating.” So how does she feel now the film is drawing comparisons to Ang Lee’s same-sex love story, Brokeback Mountain? “I’ll take it!” JM
ETA | 5 MARCH / THE WORLD TO COME OPENS NEXT MONTH.