When a couple’s joy turns to grief
She’s played a con woman, a radio DJ entangled with a hit man and the second wife of a Canadian literary icon (in Barney’s Version), but nothing prepared Oscar-nominee Minnie Driver for her latest role: that of a mother whose baby dies in utero just before her due date.
Based on the experience of writer/director Sean Hanish and his wife, Return to Zero features Driver and Paul Adelstein as a couple who are faced with the unthinkable.
“It was really hard. I am telling you, this is the hardest thing I have ever done,” Driver says of playing Maggie.
In addition to the challenging role, there was the pressure of doing it all in front of Hanish, whose family experienced the tragic loss.
“There is no way around it. It was appalling in the scene where we were re-enacting, basically, what happened to his wife.
“It was appalling thinking of him having to sit there watching it,” Driver says.
“And yet he managed to do it because of the idea he was memorializing his son and ... sharing the story in a way that is neither maudlin or morose or overly melodramatic.
“It showed such courage and such humanity. I was in such admiration of him.”
The naturalistic film features Alfred Molina, Kathy Baker and Connie Nielsen as family members who are also at a loss at how to deal with grief that consumes the couple.
It premiers on Lifetime on Saturday, the same day as it does in the U.S., the U.K., Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.
The independently produced movie, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, had an incredibly tight schedule, filming on location in Los Angeles over just 19 days.
“Shooting at that speed, it takes it out of you, but that is appropriate,” Adelstein says.
“These are people who have gotten pretty beat up. The more tired and frazzled and anxious (we got), all that stuff kind of ended up serving the work we were doing.
“Also, shooting a film in 19 days is a bit like being on a runaway train and that probably isn’t dissimilar to the way their lives were going.”
That “all hands on deck” ethos extended to the project’s soundtrack.
Driver, a singer-songwriter with two albums under her belt, and Adelstein co-wrote a song, Forget the Fall, over the course of an afternoon at the latter’s house.
One of the themes of Return to Zero is the myriad ways in which people express their grief.
Although stillbirth affects millions of people around the world (Canada’s rate is 7.1 per 1,000 births), it’s not a topic often discussed.
“It’s so interesting how human beings deal with the terrible things that happen in life. I think that was very interesting in telling this story to explore that.”