Fans of Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter might have realized that Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s film adaptation takes place in a different European country than the book does. But Gyllenhaal, who wrote and directed the film, says her iteration of The Lost Daughter was originally supposed to be set in the United States, before many roadblocks led the production team to take it to Greece.
“Originally, I adapted the film to take place in the States, and that’s what I sold Ferrante,” Gyllenhaal tells THR Presents, powered by Vision Media. “I said, I want to adapt it to take place here. It was kind of like an eastern seaboard, unnamed but kind of watercolor Gothic town, maybe in Maine — you know, boardwalks, and cotton candy and lobster rolls, stuff like that. And it works well.”
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But when she realized that Maine has a 5 percent tax incentive, she knew that it wouldn’t be possible for a low-budget movie like the one they were making. They then pivoted to New Jersey and started shooting there, but soon realized it didn’t work for the plot, either. The pandemic hit, and the production had gone through half of its budget, so Gyllenhaal and her producers looked at other North American locations, like Nova Scotia, and other places all over the world due to the internationality of the crew.
“One day, out of nowhere, I said, ‘What about Greece?’ In Greece, I can be an outsider looking in and the way [Leda] is an outsider looking in. And even if I don’t understand what the groceries look like in the supermarket there, she doesn’t either, and so it’s OK,” says Gyllenhaal. “And as soon as I said, Greece, we couldn’t be stopped. We were in Greece three weeks later.” That was August 2020.
The Lost Daughter, nominated for three Oscars including best adapted screenplay, stars Olivia Colman (Oscar nominee for best actress), Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris, Jessie Buckley (Oscar nominee for best supporting actress) and Peter Sarsgaard and follows Leda (Colman), a woman who must confront her dark past during her beach vacation.
Gyllenhaal says they were one of the first American productions to head back into production during the pandemic, before vaccines were available and while SAG was still figuring out protocols to return to set.
“I remember someone saying to me, you need to write down every time any actor will touch another actor, and any time they will touch a prop,” she explains. “And I was like, let’s not make the movie because that’s never going to work on my movie. People are gonna have to be free to touch each other. Like, truly, let’s not make the movie. And then everyone goes back to the drawing board, and they say, ‘OK, right. That’s too much.'”
Gyllenhaal says she was drawn to Ferrante’s novel because she felt the author was so “stunningly honest about the experience of being a woman in the world.”
“I never heard some of the things that she was writing about articulated before, and I found it really kind of stunning and shocking,” she says. “I thought, what if instead of just sitting alone in our rooms with these books, hearing these truths said out loud, what if I could put it into a context that was communal? Like a movie theater, where you’re actually hearing these things out loud, then, you know, the cat’s really out of the bag. There’s no going back from there in terms of these things that are taboo about about our experience in the world.”
When she was writing the screenplay for the film, Gyllenhaal says she didn’t have specific actors in mind for the roles, but actually had fantastical ideas of her characters become clearer as she kept writing, but who actually joined the cast was very different from what she had envisioned, “which is a real gift.”
“Olivia was cast first, and I was really curious who she thought would be interesting to play her young and we talked about a handful of actresses,” says Gyllenhaal. “It was Olivia who introduced me to the idea of Jessie Buckley, whose work I didn’t know, and the same weekend that she and I had lunch to talk about her doing the film, Wild Rose came out [in which] Jessie plays a Scottish singer who wants to be a country western singer. … I think that there are many, many good actors, and I think there are only a handful of really, really brilliant ones. And I think Jessie is one of them. And then Ed, Dakota, I think, and my husband was always gonna be in it. I did kind of write every man in the movie for Peter [Sarsgaard] in a way, and then of course, he played the one that was actually appropriate.”
From the get go, Gyllenhaal knew she was going to direct the film, as well.
“Looking back on it now, I always probably was in some way a director or that that was in some ways always what I was working toward, I just didn’t even let myself think about it or consider it, I didn’t even let myself feel how hungry I was for more, which is dangerous,” explains Gyllenhaal. “I love acting, and I miss it. But I think I thought, since I was always butting up against the edge of something when I was acting, you know, I thought, well, that’s just part of an artistic experience, you know, that’s just how it is, you use the obstacles that you come up against to create more need. And now that I’ve become a director, I see it very differently, that it’s totally expansive. You can create, you must create, boundaries for yourself, but they’re my boundaries.”
This edition of THR Presents was brought to you by Netflix.
