Brit Marling on the Violent World of The Keeping Room
Talent and beauty are important things to have if you want to make it as an actress in Hollywood, but somehow, Brit Marling has been blessed with an abundance of both, especially when you realize she’s co-written and produced three movies in the last five years on top of having a healthy acting career.
In the Civil War-set The Keeping Room, directed by Daniel Barber, Marling plays Augusta, one of three women, along with her younger sister Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) and their slave (Muna Otaru), who are holed up in their home as the war comes to an end. When a group of drunken Yankee soldiers show up ready to terrorize them, they’re forced to fight back by any means necessary to defend their home and themselves.
ComingSoon.net got on the phone with Marling earlier this week for the following interview, in which we got absolutely nowhere trying to find out anything more about her third collaboration with The East director Zal Batmanglij, a mysterious show for Netflix with the intriguing title of “The OA.”
ComingSoon.net: I feel like this is the first time I’m talking to you for a movie you didn’t write or produce. You obviously spend a lot of time working on your own movies, so I imagine that a part or script has to really speak to you to want to act in someone else’s movie. Can you talk about that?
Brit Marling: Yeah, it was really exciting. Actually, a friend of mine from college sent me a script and was like, “Someone I went to high school with wrote this.” I was kind of like, “Oh okay.” You know, an unsolicited script. I was like, “I’ll just read the first 10 pages.” Then I read the first 10 pages and I was like, “Who is this woman that wrote this script?” It had been on the Blacklist, it was I think the second thing Julia Hart wrote. I don’t know, it was just like a breath of fresh air. I’d never read anything where three women were working together to survive something. I think we’re seeing more single female protagonist stories, where it’s the lone woman in the male world, like Clarice Starling at the FBI or Sigourney Weaver on a spaceship with aliens. But it was exciting to think about a female ensemble movie in which the women are action heroes and there’s no green screens or stunt doubles or high heels. It’s all just very sort of stripped bare and real. I got to work with Hailee Steinfeld and Muna Otaru, who are just breathtaking actresses, so it was a really exciting thing to be a part of, and awesome to not be writing or producing, but to just come and do my job as an actor and focus on that.
Marling: Although I haven’t seen it, I was aware of it. I think it is an interesting thing, that you’re seeing a lot of movies that are in the Western, which is just classically like “man walks into a saloon,” and now you’re watching a version, which is like a woman walks into the saloon. Okay, what happens here? It’s exciting to see something different. I think when you’re in the world of making it as an actor, you’re not really thinking about it in terms of its place in the canon of filmmaking. You’re sort of just like, “Well, this is a story about human beings, and how do I best tell this story?” You kind of let go of gender politics and all these things for a moment. You’re just sort of dropped radically in trying to play the part and make it feel real. Then of course, later, once it comes out and enters the world and there’s a dialogue that comes in about it, then suddenly, it sort of gets all these different names, if that makes sense.
CS: No, I totally agree. I think before I saw the movie, they were having trouble selling it to me. It’s a Western, but it’s a drama, but it’s got some revenge thriller aspects to it. But I definitely think selling it as a Western would be selling it short, because it’s very much a drama about these women and what they have to deal with to survive in some ways.
Marling: Yeah, I think you’re so right about that. I mean, I guess you look for the way to make something simple enough to talk about it. We come up with all these different names, like, “Oh, it’s a period piece or it’s a drama or it’s a home invasion genre movie.” The truth is, it’s a lot of things braided together at once, so I think people find it so refreshing because it’s just not like anything that you’ve seen before.
CS: When you think of Civil War films, you think of “Gone with the Wind,” which almost glamorizes the era. It was very glamorous in some ways, and this is the complete opposite, I guess.
Marling: (laughs) Totally unglamorous, unless you consider a woman on horseback with dirt under her fingernails and sweat all over her face, unless you consider that glamorous, which I kinda do, but I don’t think most people do. (laughs)
CS: Considering that you have to deal with a lot of that stuff, I don’t know if you had any kind of experiences with horseback riding or guns or anything like that. Did you have to do a lot of preparation for this, more than usual?
Marling: Yeah, I mean, definitely more physical preparation than usual. I wanted to do all the stuff myself, because that’s an important part of making it feel real to you. I had done some horseback riding growing up, but nothing serious, not like what it ends up being when you’re doing it on set, which is like, you’re spending all day on a horse and that’s really hard work like galloping, not just once across the field, but like 10 times to get the take right. Because obviously this is 1865, it’s towards the end of the war and these women have really been struggling, and (director Daniel Barber) was like, “I think you should lose a bit of weight for the part. That’s just appropriate to the experience that you’ve been in.” Already I had lost some weight, and then just being on set and doing all these things and training, I lost a lot more. Suddenly, then, it was quite dramatic. A lot of that, I think, was helpful in terms of finding the character though, that Augusta just feels like a thin wire of a girl who has so much expectation and weight on her shoulders to survive and to defend her family and all this stuff, but she’s a young woman in a dress still. So but something about all of that is really useful, I think, in terms of finding and holding onto the character and to a time period that’s so foreign.
CS: I was curious about getting into that kind of time period, because it is so different and foreign. I assume Julia’s script was very evocative and could get you into that head, but how do you get yourself into the head of that kind of thing, where you’re in that mode where you have to protect your house because you have these men who were kind of breaking in and all hell is breaking loose pretty much?
Marling: I feel like you just try to concentrate on the pieces in front of you to make it feel real. I think your body really does begin to believe it’s real after enough days on set pretending that somebody’s breaking into your house and you’re trying to protect your sister and all these things. I think eventually you convince yourself it’s real, and then it’s really easy to slip into it. Also, I think where we were in the middle of the mountains in the middle of nowhere in this house that had been constructed, everything about the space felt of that time. There were no indicators that it wasn’t 1865. There’s no shopping mall to disappear to. So I think you kind of do stay locked in that bubble, and then the more you pretend, the more it feels real. Then the more it feels real in your body, the sort of easier it is to play pretend. By the end of the shoot, what’s really hard is actually returning to the real world because you’ve kind of convinced yourself you’re in this life or death situation and that the stakes are that high. Then like, 24 hours later, you’re in Los Angeles at the grocery store, and you just like, can’t even remember what you ate for breakfast anymore or who you even are. So I think that that sort of re-entry period is really hard. People don’t talk about that very much. I think it’s sometimes harder even than getting into character is getting out of it.
CS: I know you can’t speak for Daniel as a director, but he’s British and his last movie “Harry Brown” was very British, so it’s interesting to see him capturing the period as well as he did. What were you impressions of him when working with him? Had he done a lot of research to get into that head?
Marling: I think the thing that Daniel really found in this film that was so important, and why, you know, coming off of “Harry Brown,” in particular, which is also a film that’s really sensitive about its portrayal of violence, and doesn’t do it in a sort of glitzy or glamorous way, but gives it its actual weight and terror. I think that that was how Daniel really found his way into the story. I think he gave a lot of space to it. I mean, as actors, I think all of us felt like, “Oh, thank goodness the thing that he saw in it was that these girls are very afraid and it is terrifying.” If we’re going to tell the truth of what it’s like when the violence from the battlefront comes to the home front, the truth is you’re just totally unprepared, that these soldiers have survived literally a no man’s land, and that these three women have no experience with that. It all comes slamming into their house in the night, and I think the terror of that and the difficulty of pulling the trigger, even when you’re defending yourself, how hard it is to take a life, I think he gave everything a proper weight in the film, in a way that I don’t think you often see in films. I think we’ve just sort of become so desensitized to violence, it’s hard to even notice it anymore. This film definitely makes you notice it.
CS: I know you weren’t in this scene, but I was pretty bothered when Hailee is attacked later in the movie although we know there’s stakes going into this and that it’s a possibility. I was wondering how you felt about that when you first read about it or saw it.
Marling: Well, I think that Julia, the writer felt, and I think Hailee, and I think everybody felt like the truth is is that this is what happened. It happened all the time in that war. It was the sort of purpose of Sherman’s March, was to break the spirit of the spouse by coming in this civilian space and robbing and burning houses and raping women, and that that was the military’s strategy, was to break basically the children that sit at home. That happens all the time and it happens all over the world. I think in a lot of movies, things approach that place of violence against women, and then they cut out and they’re saved by a man or they’re saved by somebody. I think in this movie it’s just like, well, the truth is, is that in more instances than not, that woman isn’t spared that violence. I think everybody tries to be really sensitive about it and create a space that felt psychologically safe on set for that to happen and to be honest about it. But yeah, it’s really hard to watch. I think it was very hard to perform and I think, yeah, it’s difficult to see in the movie, but it’s honest.
CS: We see docs about wars in foreign countries and hear about all the atrocities there and we tend to forget about the fact we had a war here and it was just as bad in some ways. We have a selective memory in some ways about that stuff.
Marling: Totally. Yeah, I think the fact that the country’s sort of founded on the genocide of Native Americans and on slavery and the Civil War that happened. There’s a lot of violence in this country’s origin, and it definitely sort of gets the real nature of it, I think, is definitely brushed under the rug.
CS: You talked briefly about the other actresses, and I wanted to talk about working with them. Hailee, I know she’s very young, but she’s done a lot for someone her age. Muna, I think she’s been doing a lot also, but we aren’t familiar with her. So what was it like working with them? Did Daniel have you read together or do any kind of chemistry read before casting everyone?
Marling: No, you know, we didn’t, so it was kind of just really lucky that we all arrived on set and loved each other so much and so instantly, and that everybody in that group was such a generous performer. You can tell a lot about an actor by how much they give when the camera’s not on them, like what they’re willing to give their fellow performers. A lot of times, you see actors just be like, “Well, the camera’s not on me. I’ve got to conserve my energy.” These are people in which everybody was just all the time giving everything they had. That spirit is so amazing on set, because it means that you care about the work and the story as a whole and not about yourself. You know, this is Muna’s first film. She’s never done anything before. She came in and cold read for the part. She’d come in to read for another part in the film. It was I think a woman at the beginning of the film who you see. The director was just like, “Do you want to cold read this monologue?” She did and it was stunning. So she was cast and she’s miraculous in it. So that’s really exciting, too, to just see a film in which new talent is being discovered and to just get a chance to keep doing work because she’s an amazing artist.
CS: I want to ask about your next project with your frequent collaborator Zal Batmanglij, because you’re doing a Netflix show with him now. How far along are you on that? What can you say about that at this point?
Marling: I can’t say much. We’ve been deliberately very quiet about it. I can say that it is a mindbender mystery, so the less you know about going into it, the better. But yeah, we’re in the middle of writing it right now and it’s been awesome. Netflix has been an incredible partner. I think it’s a company, they really believe in artists and the creative process and in doing everything they can to support and to understand everyone’s different way of making it work, and that it doesn’t have to be one size fits all storytelling and that’s really awesome and refreshing and exciting to be around. Yeah, so we’re in the middle of writing it now, and hopefully we’ll get to it, hopefully we’ll shoot it in the new year.
CS: Is it weird to be shooting essentially a 12-hour movie and doing something more expanded? You have a lot of fans from what you’ve done in the movies you’ve done so far, but we haven’t had a chance to see you do something more expanded like this.
Marling: I think we tend to be more interested in the high-concept ideas. Usually, in the feature landscape, it’s like you just set up this high-concept world or space and then you only have a half hour to play around in it before you’ve got to wrap it up. It was definitely cool, like you’re saying, about long format is that you can kind of set up the rules of the new world and then really explore what can be done with them over eight hours, or even if you’re lucky, over a season. I think that we just haven’t seen yet what can be done in that space. I think we’re just starting to see it with Cary Fukunaga and Nic Pizzolatto doing “True Detective” together, and Cary directing all of those episodes and Nic writing all of it. I think we’re just starting to see what that looks like for the first time, which is very exciting.
The Keeping Room open in select cities on Friday, September 25.
(Photo Credit: GG/FameFlynet Pictures)
