Thread by @thetimes

“Nobody ever asks if Robert De Niro was likeable in Taxi Driver”

Interview 🎙️| Maggie Gyllenhaal on The Lost Daughter, awards, motherhood and “unlikeable women” thetimes.co.uk/article/maggie…

Gyllenhaal has made her directorial debut with the kind of power, splash and swagger you would expect to see from a film-making wunderkind, writes @KevinTMaher

The Lost Daughter, her adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel, is “ridiculously accomplished, from its visual style to its gut-wrenching narrative to the searing turns from Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley and Dakota Johnson”

The film is already an awards season heavyweight, winning Gyllenhaal best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival and a nomination for best director at the forthcoming Golden Globe awards. 🏆

It is almost guaranteed to be a frontline presence at the Oscars and the Baftas

Gyllenhaal is unapologetically delighted about the awards buzz The Lost Daughter has generated. “I love the dresses and I like the champagne,” she says, chuckling.

“Although if you try to talk to Olivia Colman about awards she just says, ‘No, no, no! It’s terrible luck. We can’t talk about this. Bad luck! Bad luck!’”

The shoot took place took place over 28 sun-kissed days on the island of Spetses in September 2020.

“We were one of the very first American films to get going again, at the very beginning of Covid protocols”

“There were no cases on the island. So we’d follow all the protocols on set and then, at the end of the day, all go and have dinner together and drink wine. So we were really expressing ourselves, all of us, alone on this Greek island”

Colman’s Leda is shown in flashback to have been a flawed parent, swearing and snapping at her children in scenes that would never survive a traditional “Hollywood” edit

“Of course men have made many interesting movies about women, often ones that deeply influenced this film,” says Gyllenhaal.

“But the real private inner workings of our minds? How could a man be expected to know that?”

Gyllenhaal says that she bristles when the movie is described as the “bad mother” film, or when audiences reject Leda because of her ambivalence to motherhood.

“The truth is, I’m a mother of two and we all know that ambivalence is part of the deal,” she says.

“I mean, I love my children deeply. Here I am, allowed to make a movie about anything I want in the world, and a huge part of it is about mothering. My identity as a mother is a huge part of who I am, and I love it”

“But I also have a lot of other feelings about it, and how could I not? It’s the most intense thing that you could possibly do. So it’s true that we don’t give the audience an easy challenge”

She expands on “unlikeable women” characters and the double standards of the movie industry.

“Nobody ever asks if Robert De Niro was likeable in Taxi Driver,” she says. “It’s just not a question that’s asked of men in movies.”

Read the full interview: thetimes.co.uk/article/maggie…