After doing what any sensible writer-director would do for the 10 years leading up to his first feature (which is make a series of solid short films), Ned Benson decided to become one of the most ambitious first-time feature directors in recent history by making not one, but two films about the fractured marriage of two people (James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain). It’s been said before that the only people who truly know what happens in a marriage are the couple themselves, but what the two films, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELEANOR RIGBY: HIM and HER give us are both sides of the story, including slightly varying moments of times when the couple are together.
In other words, one film follows the husband during this difficult time in their lives and relays to the audience the way he remembers their encounters (as well as many other moments where they weren’t together) and the wife’s version of things exits in its own movie. After the two ELEANOR RIGBY films premiered at Toronto in 2013, they were purchased by the Weinstein Company, and Benson was asked to cut together a third version that was something of a reduction of the two other films to be released first, with the promise that the HIM and HER films would be released in a small number of theaters in October. And believe it or not, Benson seemed okay with the idea (as he’ll explain) of creating a third version of the movie subtitled THEM.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELEANOR RIGBY is a remarkably bold, brash and emotionally tangled project however you slice it, and talking to Benson about it reveals that he’s keenly aware of what he was going for with his primary collaborator Chastain. And hopefully after I’ve watched the HIM and HER films, I’ll have a separate conversation with him about those as well. Until then, please enjoy this lively chat I had with Ned Benson recently…
Ned Benson: Hi, Steve.
Capone: Hi, Ned. How are you, sir?
NB: Good. How are you doing?
Capone: Good. Are you in New York right now?
NB: I am in New York right now.
Capone: The scene of the crime.
NB: [Laughs] Scene of the crime.
Capone: For the record, I’ve only seen the one film so far, but they have informed me they are going to send me links to the other two immediately. And what I’m hoping for, and I will certainly push for it, is that we can have a separate conversation once I have seen those two, because I have a feeling it’s going to be a very different conversation.
NB: Let’s do it, and I will make myself available.
Capone: Yeah, I bet you haven’t done too many of those with people who have seen all three films.
NB: It’s starting to happen. Yeah, the binge watching.
Capone: Believe me, I would have loved to have done it. But let’s talk about this film first. I didn’t realize that two films had premiered almost a year ago at Toronto and wasn’t really seen again until, was it Cannes eight months later. What are your thoughts about the fact that the THEM version of this is going to most likely be people’s first exposure to this material?
NB: I think it’s good for a couple of reasons: If you go see HIM and HER after THEM it’s an expansion of the experience. But if you go see THEM after HIM and HER, it’s more—“reduction” is the wrong word—you’re not expanding the experience. You’re just seeing things more reduced into a two-hour space. So what happens when you see THEM first and then go see HIM and HER, and there are all these new characters, and there are all these plot lines that didn’t exist in the THEM movie. So you’re opened up to new chapters and a new world and new experiences, because THEM is a combined love story about these two people, but HIM and HER are their subjective experiences of this time in the relationship. So they’re very separate character studies, whereas THEM is a much more traditional two-hour movie-going experience.
So I think that’s the way to see it if you’re going to see all three. In terms of most people seeing THEM first, I want everyone to see HIM and HER because that’s what I set out to do, and I set out to create a film about subjectivity and love and relationships, but at the same time getting people to sit down and watch a three-hour-and-10 minute film in theater, it’s tricky. And I want them to go do that, but I also realize certain audiences won’t do that, so creating this two-hour THEM version for that purpose alone is for me as a filmmaker to reach as broad an audience that I can possibly get to.
And if they see THEM and they like THEM, and they are interested in finding out more about these characters and this group of people, then they can go do that. And for those people who don’t want to see THEM and want to go see HIM and HER, they can do that too. I’m lucky enough that my distributer, the Weinstein Company, has decided to release all three. So I feel really lucky in that sense. In a way, I’ve really hit the lottery as a first-time filmmaker, because I get to have my original intention out there and this other film all out at once trying to reach as many people as I possibly can. The point is for these to get out there and hopefully try and learn from them and make another movie.
Capone: Did you, in the back of your head as you were piecing the two films together, think there was even a chance you might have to do something like this once it was sold?
NB: It’s funny because I think in order to get this done, in order to do the two-part film, in order to make it, we had to be completely steadfast and somewhat delusional, like “This is the only way this going to be made and this is the only way it’s going to happen.” And when you’re having people come in, like friends come in, to watch a four-whatever-hour early cut of the movie, they are like, “Oh, my!” I remember one of my best friends who’s a filmmaker came in and watched the first cut that we felt really good about of the two-part film. And he was like, “You did it.” And I was like, “What?” And he was like, “Yeah. This works.” To hear that, I was like, “Oh my god.” That was one moment a year and a half ago.
I didn’t think from that moment that we were going to play at Toronto and get bought by the Weinstein Company and have three films coming out at that point. I just thought, “Can I make this work?” We were really steadfast in terms of Jessica [Chastain], Cassandra [Kulukundis ], my producer, myself, the editor [Kristina Boden], and my fellow filmmakers and crew in what we were doing. We had to do it this way because if we doubted it, or if we like let any crack open, of course people were going to tell us, “You should make a combined version.” I can’t tell you how many times people were like, “Well, is there a combined version? Maybe you should combine it. Maybe you should make a two-hour version.” Whether it was like agents or potential buyers.
Capone: So other people had the idea, but it never really crossed your mind.
NB: Yeah. And by the way, this movie, aside from a few people, aside from some really wonderful supporters, until that first screening in Toronto, this movie didn’t work. People were like, “Nope. Good luck.” And I remember the summer before Toronto I was like, “Oh my god what have I done? Is this ever going to see the light of day? Are we dead in the water?” I had so many conversations with my producer. You just have no idea. Then that first screening in Toronto happened, and we got bought, and we were like, “Wait. What? That’s crazy.”
Capone: The last question I wanted to ask you specifically about the thought process of making two films into one is, how did you approach it from an editing standpoint making this third cut? Did you have to sit down and see the film completely anew, or did you have an idea of how you would approach it?
NB: You have to find a whole new movie. It can’t have the same themes, it can’t have the same rhythm. As an editorial experience, it was phenomenal. As a leaning experience, it was phenomenal to take this thing that you’ve already done, revisit it, and then make it into something else. And in a weird way, it’s like you’re sculpting away at this thing to find a new thing within it.
What we did was we start with this huge slab of movie, and we combined it chronologically. And then work backwards to finding what the heart of this combined movie would be, and what the scenes are that worked, and what the rhythm was, and what the feeling was—how that changed, how themes changed. The idea of subjectivity goes out the window. The idea of memory becomes lessened. Where her film is a lot about memory, his film is a mystery. These things become less and less apparent in the combined version that you saw, and it becomes more about two people who love each other, who stop speaking the same language, or at least forgot how to speak the the same language and live in these disparate spaces, and we don’t necessarily know what happened and ultimately trying to find that language again. Trying to find that synthesis with each other. Trying to find that way to communicate and understand how much they love each other beyond this thing that happened to them.
I feel like if you look at the film, you’ll see the separate color spaces they begin with, and ultimately I synthesize those things using the separate visual rhythms that they each have. So it becomes more of a two-handed love story about people finding each other again and trying to understand each other.
Capone: As much as this is about this tragic love story, really what the characters are going though is losing a sense of identity. They became different people as a result of this life-altering experience.
NB: One-hundred percent.
Capone: You mentioned that the HIM and HER films are about memory and subjectivity, but THEM comes down to identity. They both at different points in the film ask, “Do I seem like a different person?”
NB: Yeah. I think you’ve hit the nail exactly on the head, because if there’s one thing I made this project about it is identity. Identity within relationships, identity within the people we love in our lives and the people that surround us in our lives. You’re looking at two people who had identity with each other, and now this is a woman who cuts her hair off and looks in the mirror and doesn’t necessarily recognize herself. We are ultimately all struggling with identity. Viola Davis’ character, she’s teaching sociology and identity theory. It’s a huge theme, and I’m glad that that’s what you see from it, because that’s what I was trying to do.
Capone: When you’re shooting a film that has scenes where we’re seeing it from two different perspectives, as much as you want to make sure that the two versions appear slightly different from each other, do you also have to make careful not to make them too different?
NB: One-hundred percent. Yeah, the point is in the subtlety of it. You and I are having this conversation right now, and we’re going to get off the phone, and I’m going to remember a version of this conversation, and you’re going to remember a version of this conversation, and ultimately both of our memories of it are probably the cumulative truth of what the conversation was. And I think that’s the point of those scenes that differ—there’s what he got from it, what he heard from her, what he said to her, and what he remembered saying and seeing and doing and feeling within his version, and the same goes for her.
Ultimately, somewhere in the middle is the truth, is the reality, and that was the point of the project—we all are in relationships, we each have our own separate experiences. Each is different in a very subtle way, but when you combine those two things, you do get the reality of the situation. All we really understand is our own subjective experience of it. All we really remember is that.
Capone: I know you worked on various versions of this script in getting ready for this film over the course of about 10 years. By the time you actually started the cameras rolling, you must have felt like the most over-prepared, first-time director ever. You must have had every scene perfectly in mind. Is that pretty much how it came out, or did you also have to discover things on the fly?
NB: I think I was over prepared, and I remember that first day of shooting, you spend all these years being neurotic about getting the thing made, and that first day you shoot, all your neurosis goes away, because you’re completely creatively overwhelmed. You don’t have time to be neurotic, which is great. You prepare as much as you can, but you walk into a scene with that preparation and you realize that you need to do something completely different sometimes. And I think that preparation acts as a blueprint, which you can jump off from.
Especially shooting in New York, you don’t know what you’re going to get everyday. You don’t know what situation you’re going to walk into, what a location is going to do to you, when a scene on paper seems like it’s going to work, and all of a sudden being there and rehearsing it and realizing that it doesn't, having to find it. But that’s what’s exciting about filmmaking is, you just don’t know anytime you walk into a scene. When you have those movements where everything synthesizes and the camerawork is just gorgeous, and everybody is on the set, and you’re all exhausted and stressed out, and all of a sudden this beautiful scene starts to happen, and these two actors get to this emotional place.
Those scenes in the apartment between Jess and James were breaking all of our hearts, because you’re watching two people just do this amazing thing. James is doing his version of the scene and playing his character, and then we have to re-setup later, and Jessica has to play her version of that scene, and James has to play her perception of him and vice versa. It’s two actors doing an incredible thing of not only playing their character but playing the perception of their character in the person that they love’s eyes. These things are so hard to get made, so when you’re doing them it’s so special in a wonderfully exhausting and gorgeous way. So yeah, you can pretend that you’re prepared and have all this stuff written down, but you also have to be willing to let go of it too.
Capone: And having Jessica be a part of this process for so long, even before she had six movies come out in one year, must have been great. Tell me about having her in your corner at both an actor, and then also as a part of getting movies made. She’s also credited as a producer here. Tell me about having her in your corner both artistically and financially.
NB: I met Jess 11 years ago now, and the cool thing about this project, including my producer as well, is we were all struggling. We were all struggling filmmaker/writer, struggling actor, struggling producer. So as we built this thing together, we really didn’t have a leg to stand on. I started writing the second script around the time that Jess was doing TREE OF LIFE. But even after that, TREE OF LIFE didn’t come out for three years after she made it, so the creative relationship was wonderful, because she was helping with the script, and we were all working on this thing together, and we really believed in the project.
But at the end of the day, once her career started to take off, it definitely became a more exciting project. It definitely attracted people to want to work on the project, and it was James McAvoy joining about a month and a half, two months before we stated shooting that bought our financing. So it was a last-second thing after all these years of working to try and get it together.
She was so steadfast in her support and her belief in me. I’m so incredibly grateful for that, for her friendship, for her partnership. We had a really good group, because her best friend, Jess Weixler, plays her sister, and my best friend is the producer of the film. So it’s a pretty cool group of friends who, if you look at the scale of this thing and the time that we’ve put in this thing, we’ve all grown so much, and it puts into perspective your life in a way too.
Capone: Having Isabelle Huppert as Jessica’s mother is inspired. They really do seem sort of cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways.
NB: Yeah, definitely. Jessica’s favorite actress in the world is Isabelle Huppert. That’s her idol. And she was like, “Why didn’t you write it for Isabelle Huppert?” because I was writing her as a French woman. And I was like, “Yeah. Okay, sure. Where are we going to get Isabelle Huppert?” And we get her, and it was this amazing thing of Jess getting to work with one of her gods and just be all together, and there is a familiarity between the two of them. It was really cool. That first day when you’re shooting and you’re looking at your cast, and you’re a first-time director, and you’re like, “Wait. What is happening right now?”
Capone: Speaking of French cinema, I love that in her family’s apartment there is a A MAN AND A WOMAN poster, which people sometimes get caught starring at in the film. That’s also a film about dealing with loss. That seems very deliberate, that poster.
NB: Well I started writing the second script while I was living in Paris. I was with Jess, actually, and we were in Paris. I basically took all of these influences, and you look at the Francophile side of that script, that’s where all of those influences came from, and I wanted to just impose them in the film and have a wink and a nudge, but also be influenced by them, and have them exist in the space. It just felt appropriate for the story for me.
Capone: When you’re combining these films, did you discover something about your story druing that process that you were surprised by? Maybe something you didn’t realize was there?
NB: I think what the great learning experience for me was the editorial process of taking these two films and realizing that every film has its own rhythm, every film has its own feel and difference. And this film, coming from these two other films, had to have its own rhythm. There were only certain scenes that could exist in it, because others wouldn’t work, and you could feel that eventually, and I think that as a lesson was an incredible thing to know, that on paper maybe all of these things worked in two separate films, but when you’re creating this third thing, that even though they seem like they make sense on paper and, they make sense as a scene themselves, you fit them into this piece, and it doesn’t fit within the organism of what the film is. And that to me was so illuminating, especially from a filmmaking and editorial standpoint.
I just learned so much: you write one film, you shoot one film, you cut one film, and then you go cut another film, and they can all be such completely different experiences, especially in the making of them. So I think that was the most illuminating thing to me, or mind-blowing thing to me, as I was creating the third film, looking at how delicate a film can be. And what can actually work and not work in it, and how you can enhance it, or how you have to re-find the themes in the story and the rhythms of these things, because they are so delicate.
Capone: Well, mission accomplished on THEM inspiring me to want to see the others. Hopefully, we can do this again soon.
NB: I would love that. And I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the others. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.
