STILLWATER
STILLWATER | Matt Damon teams up with Oscar-winning filmmaker Tom McCarthy for an unpredictable genre-bender
Matt Damon teams with Spotlight’s Tom McCarthy.
Stillwater is writer/director Tom McCarthy’s return to drama following his critically adored 2015 film Spotlight that bagged him a Best Picture Oscar. It tells the story of Matt Damon’s Bill, a working-class man from Stillwater, Oklahoma whose daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) has been convicted of murdering her lover Lena while studying in Marseille.
On a trip to visit her in prison, Bill comes to believes he can find the evidence to exonerate her. With the help of his new friend Virginie (Camille Cottin), a French actress with a delightful daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud), Bill tries to track down Lena’s real killer.
There are thrills to be had: Damon’s Bourne-honed skills as a fighter are utilised and it contains scenes with such suspenseful intensity that it is only when they end that you remember to breathe. But this is no simple thriller. There is romance, comedy and politics along with difficult questions about the burden of parenthood. McCarthy is in total agreement, telling Teasers, “It’s without question my most complicated film.”
McCarthy started work on Stillwater a decade ago but abandoned the project when it began to underwhelm him. Seven years and one gleaming Oscar later, McCarthy approached French writers Noé Debré and Thomas Bidegain to see if they could breathe new life into it, particularly in a very different political climate. “Trump was just elected and suddenly I had a prism with which I wanted to see the movie and talk about this fading American vision,” he explains. While America felt more divided than ever, McCarthy sought to understand the mindset behind far-right populism. “I tried
to understand how these people were feeling left behind and the shame, guilt and anger that was bubbling up in America.”
There are obvious parallels between Allison and Amanda Knox, who was convicted and subsequently exonerated of the murder of Meredith Kercher in 2007. For Abigail Breslin, the toxicity of the media became pivotal to Allison’s story. “She’s not a perfect human, but anytime that media gets involved in a trial like this, it can convolute things to the point where a person is guilty until proven innocent.” True crime has boomed in popularity in the past decade, and Breslin counts herself as a “true-crime fan beyond belief”, confessing “I go to bed watching Dateline!” But over the years Stillwater got further away from its reality roots. While Amanda Knox was “certainly there” in McCarthy’s first version of this story, by the time he returned to the script with Debré and Bidegain they “barely referenced it.”
McCarthy knew there were very few actors capable of bringing a complicated character like Bill to life. “Matt was very central to the idea,” he says. “We talked about introverting the American hero and that worked with what Matt brings to the role as a person and as an actor.” Bill’s relationship with Allison is, to put it mildly, strained and their inability to connect makes their scenes, confined within a tiny prison visitation room, uncomfortable viewing. For Breslin this disconnection is one of the film’s greatest heartbreaks. “He wasn’t a very present father and I think what’s so tragic about their relationship is that they’ve both been through so much pain and it hasn’t brought them together,” she explains. Bill seems to sincerely try with Allison but her walls remain up to him, as Breslin sees it: “He is her only lifeline, but not the lifeline that she really wants to have.”
The dysfunction of their relationship is contrasted with the warm and loving bond Bill forms with Maya, a little girl who he meets in the corridor of his hotel when her mother Virginie is late home from work. It is Bill’s relationship with Maya that McCarthy says is “the heart of the film,” and “the real love story”. Bill then forms a bond with Virginie, with her friends joking that he is her next “project”, but actress Camille Cottin sees something much deeper. “She’s a single mum and Bill is a father who want to be responsible and to be the father he should have been. That’s something that really moves her.”
Maya represents a new start for Bill and a chance to be the father he never was to Allison. “I wouldn’t call this a redemption story,” McCarthy says carefully. “Perhaps it’s a bit more of a liberation story. In Maya, he finds the liberation to be a better version of himself.”
McCarthy was keen for Stillwater to avoid the fish-out-of-water clichés (“I don’t like that term”). Part of that came down to having French collaborators and part was down to his own intimate knowledge of the city. “By the time we finished the draft with the French writers I had been to Marseille a lot more than they had!” McCarthy laughs. “I started going 10 years ago and fell in love with it. They understand what Marseille is culturally in a way that I don’t, but I probably know the city better.”
The whole production felt very French to Cottin. “Half of the team was French and most importantly the canteen was French!” she jokes, but beyond that Cottin felt that McCarthy’s affinity for Marseille made its portrayal on screen all the better. “Sometimes people write for actors but I feel like Tom wrote for Marseille,” she nods. Even to the discerning French eye he taps into the exact character of the city. “I was discussing with a French friend, and he said that even with a Japanese-American DP [Masanobu Takayanagi], and an American director the South of France has never been so well exposed!”
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