Kate Winslet & Zoe Saldaña | Actors on Actors

(upbeat music) - Acting lifts us and gives us something.

- Oh, wait, wait, wait, you're not Mexican.

Oh, wait, wait, wait, you can't sing, you can't dance, you can't do it. - Yes!

(Zoe laughing) She's done a musical! (laughs)

(upbeat music continues) - Hi. - Hi.

- Hi. - Hi.

- So, when I was told that I was gonna be speaking with you today, my heart just jumped for joy.

- (laughs) Mine too.

- But not only because I'm so excited to talk to you about your movie, but because you are just radiance and light, and it's such a joy to spend time, proper time with you, which we probably will never get to have again quite like this. - I know! (laughs)

Unless we find ourselves in the same city.

I feel the same about you.

This is the first time that I'm having a conversation like this and what better person than to do it with you for the very first time?

I have to say, I saw "Lee."

I was deeply moved. I was very emotional.

(artillery firing) - [Soldier] God dammit, get outta there!

Move, what? (artillery fires)

Hey, we have to move.

- There's something really rewarding about discovering women, that throughout history, have affected the fabric of life for the better, and Lee Miller is someone that I was asking myself, "How is it that I don't know?"

I didn't know who she was, and she's so paramount when it comes to entertainment and art and photography and journalism.

So thank you for Lee Miller, for telling her story.

But how did this all come together?

- Okay, so we're starting with me.

- Yes. - (laughs) Okay.

So, but thank you for saying that, because the reason I wanted to tell Lee's story was precisely because of what you just identified, is that you didn't know who she was.

So many people don't know that, that image, those photographs they may have seen connected to the conflict of World War II and the Nazi regime and the truth behind the atrocities, so many people have never connected the dots and realized that actually it was a middle-aged woman who took those images.

And also Lee, because she was a creative, she had been a model in her life for a brief period in her twenties, somehow she had been defined that way, defined through the male gaze, often described alongside her love life.

And it just drove me crazy, because her life was so much beyond that, and she became so much beyond her past relationships.

And this thing of separating a woman from the male gaze and putting her at the head of the table amongst the men, walking into those male-dominated spaces and knowing that she had every right to be there, and it's so true to now.

It's everything that we live by, I know. - Absolutely.

I know. - Absolutely.

- You know, we're trying to live our lives as women, redefining femininity to mean resilience and power and courage and compassion. - Absolutely.

- And that to me is who Lee was, and that was why I wanted to make the film.

But it came to me because I knew who she was.

I'd been to an exhibition of hers in the early 2000s in Edinburgh.

And then some years later, some friends of mine called me and they said, "Oh," they work in an auction house and they said, "Oh, this extraordinary table has come up for sale," and they know how much I love to cook and appreciate family meal times.

And they said, "This table was the kitchen table "in the home of the Penrose family," Lee's husband, later husband, played by Alex Skarsgård in our film.

And Lee was a great cook, and she would cook all these wonderful meals, and their surrealist creative artist friends and poets would sit and share this food that she had likely created, and they would have these wonderful times around this table.

And I bought this table. - Oh, wow.

- I mean, I've never bid on anything in my life.

(Zoe laughs) And I found myself buying this table, and it came into my home, and I sat down at it, and I just thought, why hasn't anyone made a movie about Lee Miller?

And so that was how it began. - How long ago was that?

- That was in 2015. - Wow.

- And so this was the first time- - It's almost 10 years ago. - It's almost 10 years.

So this was the first time for me that I have actively really produced something right from the very beginning, from finding the writers, from really crafting the story, because Lee lived so many lives throughout her life, but this particular decade when she went to war, as a flawed, middle-aged woman and paid a huge emotional price for the things that she witnessed.

- Oh, yes, that price, the way that you guys weaved her relationship with her son and that big reveal in the third act, it just floored me, it absolutely floored me.

And I wonder if that was a creative choice of yours as a producer on the project, or was this a creative choice of the director?

- You know, I have to say, I was the person sometimes pushing this thing, that often felt like a boulder, up a mountain, (Zoe laughing) often single-handedly.

And I would have many moments when I would think, I can't, I can't, I can't do it.

How can I possibly keep going?

Then I would think, no, I'm doing it for Anthony, and that is Lee's son.

Anthony Penrose is still alive. He is in his seventies now.

He was a hugely important part of the creative process for everybody, but particularly, for me.

And I had full and complete access to the archive, which is vast, and all of her work, her camera kit, her clothes. - Oh, wow.

- All of her photographs, 60,000- - They preserved everything.

- They've preserved everything.

But he didn't know what his mother had done during the war until after her death in '77.

He had just had his first baby, and his wife said to him, "I wonder if the baby looks anything like you did "when you were a baby.

"Go and find some baby pictures.

"Go up into the attic in all those boxes," and so he did, and he discovered everything.

- His mother, he discovered his mother.

- He discovered his mother.

So yes, adding that element, that conversation that Lee has with her younger son, Tony, throughout the film, that was something that Liz Hannah, one of our writers who came on a little bit later, she and I created that device, I suppose, for want of a better word, so that we were given a degree of perspective,

and also, so that we had access to the impact that what Lee had done in terms of bearing witness, the impact that that had, not only on her, but on that relationship she had with her son, and also, bringing them to a place of making peace with one another.

- So important. (laughs) - But let me ask you, if I may now, about this extraordinary movie, "Emilia Pérez," in which you play Rita.

The story just took me.

I mean, I really did not know what to expect.

I really didn't know.

I had deliberately not read anything, knowing I was coming to speak to you.

And so the second you opened your mouth and your beautiful singing voice comes out, I'm like, "Yes! She's done a musical!"

(Zoe laughing) (Zoe singing in Spanish) I just was so excited, because of course, I've heard you sing on set, on "Avatar."

It's one of the things you do, hovering around the dressing room block.

- That's true. - And I've heard you singing and I'm like, "Wow."

And so, knowing what I was going to be treated to in this experience was incredibly exciting, but the twists and the turns of the story and just how rich and full and real, and yet, harsh it is at times.

And Selena Gomez, I mean, but all of the performances are utterly exquisite.

And as I'm watching it and having been on stage myself when I was younger and done musicals when I was much, much younger- - Oh, wow. - so, much younger, like nothing important about it, but the technical skill and the rehearsal process.

I just sat there thinking, God dammit, they did all the hard graft happened before they went in front of the camera.

- Yes, we needed to do that for sure.

- How did the project come to you? I really wanna know.

- I wish I could say that it was through a table that I bought on auction. - No, no, you don't, because then you'd be telling the table story over and over again. (Zoe laughing)

Tell me. - No,

it was through my agents, but I have to say that it's through the power of manifestation.

I really do believe it, and I never did.

And I've always been a little bit cynical about the relationship that we have with the universe.

And yet, the universe has always been talking to me directly whenever I've seeked direct advice and guidance.

And these films, I would say "Avatar," "Star Trek," "Guardians," they gave me so much.

But as they became super successful and became machines and worldwide phenomenons, that time was also, the time that we needed to put in to invest into those films is quite abundant.

And all that was happening while I was also getting married and starting my family, so there was very little time for me to- - Be an artist. - start stretching my muscles again, and challenge myself.

And then as a consequence, you find yourself just full of frustration, and you don't know where to put it, 'cause you have all this energy, and you don't know where to put it.

So I remember I had a conversation with my agents, and we wrote down a list of just great directors, and it was a very small list, 'cause, not that I'm particular, I just don't know that much about cinema.

I felt really, like even my curiosity to learn and grow and discover new things about what we do had stopped a bit, and I was reconnecting with that.

They called me up and they said, "Jacques Audiard is casting for his next movie, "and it's going to be in Spanish, and it's an opera, "and it takes place in Mexico, and we really do believe "there's a part that is just perfect for you."

- You must have been like tick and tick and tick and tick and tick. - Absolutely.

- All the other boxes I didn't even know existed.

- And while you're hearing that, your self-sabotage comes up immediately.

It's like, oh, wait, wait, wait, you're not Mexican.

Oh, wait, wait, wait, you can't sing, you can't dance.

You can't do, you can't do this.

And I was like, well, but I wanna meet him, I just wanna have a conversation with him, and we had a Zoom.

It was such a great connection that I had with Jacques.

He's such an approachable individual.

- He's a brilliant director, oh my God.

- And I love having that kind of synergy with human beings, and I've loved his projects.

I love the characters that he's always just created.

They're so challenged, and they challenge you to love them.

- Well, he's fascinated in the human condition.

- Yes, he is, and human behavior and human interactions.

And I feel like cinema is his way of connecting with other people, otherwise, he would be home just reading books and learning.

- But what was so brilliant about your movie is that exactly as you say, that connection he has with people, knowing that there's always other layers to be had- - So many. - the deeper you dig and the more layers of the onion that you peel away.

- Absolutely. - And to turn that into opera, it was extraordinary to me. - It was beautiful.

It was brilliant, and those are words that I don't like to use that much in what we do.

But I do believe that Jacques' decision to make this a musical, to make this operatic, was brilliant in the sense that these women needed to have these breadths of song and dance in order for you to really get to feel them and get to know them.

I love the fact that he just wasn't afraid of how complex they were, and these are women with really damaged lives, very fragile, very desperate. - But the courage.

- And yet, they were deserving of love.

- This is it.

- They were de deserving of freedom of their journey, and I hadn't seen that in a long time.

(Zoe speaking Spanish) (crowd speaking Spanish) (Zoe speaking Spanish) - The combination as well of fragility and vulnerability in the face of fear and phenomenal courage, that kind of, okay, fuck you world, I can do this, and I can do it by myself,

you know, that sense of keeping going.

And it kind of made me think, okay, hang on a second, Rita and Lee, quite similar in that sense of, I'm just gonna keep going.

I'm not gonna be deterred by that thing or that thing or that thing.

You send me a box full of fingers, I'm not gonna be deterred by that.

I'm gonna go after the thing I believe in, and it's so true to now. - Yes.

- I mean, but all framed in this fantastic, almost at times, heist-style opera.

I loved it so much.

Did you love the technical side of- - I do. I do. - the singing, learning, rehearsing, digging in with other dancers and performers.

I imagine you having such a good time.

- I love it, that's the part about what we do that I don't like to share, that's for me.

Once you're done, your wrap day, from then on, that story takes a life of its own, and it doesn't belong to you.

It's almost like having a child.

You have a child and they came through you, but they don't belong to you, for their thoughts are their own, and they have to make their own decisions and follow their own heart.

I feel like a story is like that.

You give your all, and the process that the artist takes with them is the creation of it.

But once that's done, then you begin the process of preparing it for the public, that belongs to the public.

- Yes, it's so true.

And letting it go. - Letting it go is so hard.

- Letting it go, t's so hard. It's that thing.

It is, it's like waving goodbye to your child, first day of school, and you watch them go through the school gates, and they flick that look back at you, and you think, there's nothing I can do now.

- Nothing, nothing.

- Yeah, it's a very similar feeling, isn't it?

Especially when you've treasured something and appreciated it, and it's lifted you up, which I know for you, it's the same for me, that these jobs, in the midst of raising a family and the juggle of life, the job of acting, it lifts us and gives us something that, as you say, it is special and private.

And I would even go so far as to say it's a little bit sacred. - It's very sacred.

But the process of preparation and rehearsal and execution is the most incredible experience, to let what you're doing, all the information that you're taking in to let it flow through your body, invade your spirit, haunt your thoughts, and then you put it all out there, it's fun.

I grow so much, I heal. It's almost medicinal.

And I always feel like it propels me and makes me sort of like, reach a milestone, and I can't explain.

Sometimes these milestones don't have titles.

They don't have purpose, so I think, but they really do, and they're very big, and "Emilia" was a very big milestone.

I wanna go back to something you said about Lee and Rita, maybe having just similarities.

And the one thing that popped up to me and how you played Lee, or maybe it was throughout the research and conversations that you had about Lee, for "Lee," is that she also felt very contained.

She was a woman that was very free, but very, very contained as well, and I love that about her.

- Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

They're a historical record. - Well, who cares?

Nobody saw them. You didn't print them.

- Lee was somebody who...

She was remarkably brave. - Yes.

- She had suffered an unimaginable trauma as a 7-year-old child, and that could have damaged her for life.

It could have made her hate men and feel huge malice and that sense of vengeance, which remarkably, she didn't feel, and she refused to allow that thing to define her.

But she did have to work through that to achieve a sense of self, to achieve a sense of composure.

Part of the research, of which there was so much, and I had access to so much, but I found one day, tucked in the back of a tiny, tiny box, some small diaries, journals that she had kept.

They couldn't really be described as journals in a way, because they were almost like tiny accounts of her physical and mental state, but as a teenager.

She'd kept these when she was 15, 16 years old.

And she talks about she's getting ready to leave her apartment one day.

She's living in New York City at the time.

And she says, "Can't bring myself to even dress and make up, "tears, tears, too many tears."

So this was someone whose sense of femininity, sense of self, sense of freedom and composure was so hard won. - Yes.

- And I have been the most inspired by a character ever in playing Lee, how she was free with her emotion and her affection, how she would stop at nothing, how she would not take no for an answer.

- Yes. - And the courage to look someone in the eye, a male figure who was telling her, "Well, you can't come in here.

"No, no, no access for women."

She'd roll her eyes, but she'd find her way in there, because she knew she had a right to access to the same information- - Absolutely.

- as her male counterparts.

But the gaze that she saw, the atrocities of war, the voiceless victims of conflict, how she captured it with a camera that doesn't come up to the eye.

It sits in front of the heart.

That enabled her to look down into her image.

It has a very wide lens.

There are no filters. There are no other lenses.

So she couldn't stand back if she wanted to be close.

If she wanted to be close, she was close.

So some of the images that she has taken when she's truly staring up into the face of a young girl who had been a part of a suicide pact along with her father, who was the mayor of Leipzig, this is after the liberation, she was literally in that young girl's face, and the marks and the scars that that left on her soul

and the courage with which she had to just keep going.

- There was one scene when you go into the tent, and you're witnessing an amputation, and there's that choice.

I see you make that choice where you look away and then you have that moment with yourself, like, you can do this, you need to do this, and and you face it, and you gather your strength and you do it.

That's when, I just...

That was when I just marveled at your performance, but I also marveled at Lee's strength and bravery.

- Well, I think we're so lucky that we are living in a time where perhaps things are changing in terms of the culture shifting towards our industry and audiences wanting to hear female stories more than ever before, and I think that you and I have both benefited tremendously from that shift

in our culture. - Absolutely.

- And I think lot of it is to do with me too, opening ears and giving us all, as women, a shared space in which we can come together and hear one another, but really in a different way, in a new way.

- Absolutely. - And I think that in turn is impacting on how writers are writing their stories for us.

I think it's impacting on how audiences are craving these kinds of stories.

- Absolutely. - And we are given permission and positions within which to perform, tell those stories, use our voices on the behalf of so many. - Absolutely.

- I wanna ask you about one moment.

(Zoe laughs) when you got on that table in the gala scene, that incredible musical number in the gala...

(Zoe singing in Spanish) How were your knees?

Because that was all I kept thinking was, oh, her knees.

I mean, you do a whole dance number almost entirely on your kneecap on that table.

- Yes, yes. - It's so fantastic.

And I just kept thinking, yeah, there was the skill, the technicality, the rehearsal.

Also, there's just the timing.

You know, that blonde woman whose hair you just pluck a little piece off like that.

- That was a wonderful, creative idea that I had on one of the rehearsals when Jacques attended, and he's like, "I don't know.

"I want Rita to be a little more unhinged, "and she's the devil right now, "and she's casting judgment upon everyone, "and this is her opportunity "to really, really say what she's been suppressing."

And I'm like, "Well, there's that woman," because Rita, what kept coming up for me was this desperation to be visible.

She always felt so invisible.

She was really smart, and she knew that.

So she's confident in the sense that she just knew her worth in terms of the education she acquired for herself, the sacrifices maybe her family made for her to have it and everything.

But she didn't have the strength to stand up to the patriarchy, to the environment and sort of go, "Here I am."

And only through song and dance, it was when she felt completely expressive and open.

And so you're asking me how were my knees?

They were fine. - Oh, you lucky thing.

- They were fine, but it's not...

They were fine because of the extensive rehearsal we had.

- Yeah. - And also, I danced for so long, for so many years.

- Exactly, so your body knows, your body- - That reconnection, and we had seven weeks of rehearsing (indistinct) before we shot it.

So everything about where she was internally and where she was physically, those were just natural extensions.

I needed to do that, so that I can be completely available for Jacques for whenever he wanted to improvise a last minute thing, like that moment with the woman.

He was like, "Well, what else?"

And I'm like, "Well, I'm obsessed with her.

"I want to be like her.

"And now that she's here, can I touch her?"

And I remember the actress was there, the background actress, and she was like, "Of course you can touch me."

And then you have the ADs and the producers, "No, no, we may need her to fill out a form."

And I'm like, "But she says I can touch her."

- Oh my God, that's insane.

- They said, "Well, you can touch your hair."

And I mean, it was a comedy, it was very comedic, 'cause you had Americans and then you had French people, and then you had some people from all over Europe.

And we were all trying to make this experience and have this experiment that we call "Emilia Pérez," and it was just wonderful every day discovering all the nuances that we were going to discover for this movie.

But at one point, we realized, I'm like, "Well, these women, sometimes they're imposters "and they're fake and their boobs are fake "and their hair is fake, and girls like me have no idea.

"We think that they wake up every day, "and they look this way." - Look this way.

- And he goes, "Then what do you want to do?"

I'm like, "I wanna take her hair out."

And we all sort of like, got goosebumps, like, "Yeah, let's just do that."

So on that table, the actress was so complicit on everything.

And we organized it all in a way, and I came over, and there's a thing about containments, like even though Rita goes there, she's always so contained.

So she just settles for just grabbing that hair and just flipping it and putting it all over her body.

- [Kate] It's brilliant.

- And I just remember feeling so grateful that I was allowed once again, with a director, to allow a character to flow in and out of me, however way this character sees fit, and I don't get in her way, and nobody gets in her way.

It just felt great, and I remember I kept thinking so much about Jim, 'cause Jim does that, James Cameron.

- Cameron, Jim Cameron. - You get the impression, you get the impression that, you know, 'cause he's so tough, and everybody has this image about him.

But collaborating intimately with him is the most- - (gasps) Incredibly rewarding.

- It's just the most interactive and rewarding experience where there's no such thing as no.

It's like, "We'll try it, kiddo. You wanna try this?"

And we would try all kinds of things, and then we came up with the magic that ended up being "Avatar."

I was after that high again. I was after that experience.

And I'm so grateful that Jacques Audiard gave me that experience.

Now that we're talking about Mr. James Cameron, I was always meaning to ask you that, but I was just getting to know you, and we were shooting in 2017, "Avatar: The Way of Water," but how was it to reconnect and work with him again?

- Well, it was extraordinary, honestly, and so lovely to be able to talk about Jim actually in the context of the technicality of both of these roles that we're sitting here now speaking about with Rita and with Lee, because we had the technicality we both had to apply to be able to play those parts, me learning how to use the camera, et cetera, you learning how to really use your voice,

pull back into your body, reignite with that physical self.

I feel that I learned so much about the work of the mechanics of immersing oneself in playing a role truly from Jim.

And I can also see with "Avatar," with the first movie, how he had expanded on his own self and his own curiosity and his own integrity in all of those years since "Titanic," resulting in the nature of the works that he does now.

And so, I palpably felt, when I walked into that rehearsal room the first time when I came to shoot "Avatar" with all of you, that sense of collaboration and willingness to share and listen and to invite ideas.

It was so almost music to my ears to learn that this is the way he now works with actors, bringing everybody in, creating that environment that feels very, very equal, and that's so important to me- - That's so important - in the workspace, in this world that we live in, in how we're raising our families.

And to see Jim bring all of that together and use it in his creative self to inspire and encourage others, especially with those children, it just made me feel so excited and honored to be a part of a world that you all created.

And I think that's something that often, I wonder if people really know that.

Do people know that the way that Neytiri speaks, the way the whole language, the Naʼvi language was something that you created with Carla Meyer, our dialect coach, who I have also known actually for many years.

I worked with her in 2001 when my daughter was one.

She's an incredible coach, but again, that technicality and the time given and the attention taken to really finding the beats and the words that become the heart.

- It's so beautiful how he totally gave us free agency to build this Naʼvi people from scratch with him.

And that was a marvelous thing.

And then you come in and with Cliff, and you guys then create the Iknimaya, it was just amazing.

You have to be in the room every time he talks about you.

(Kate laughs) He's always like, "Well, Kate can hold her breath "for seven minutes." - Oh, I mean it was just- - And he goes, "Sigourney came in second "with almost six minutes.

"Zoe allegedly says that she did it for five."

And I'm like, "I did it for five." (laughs)

- I mean, this is the thing, we all did these huge punchy breath holes because we were taught how to do it, and being people who really wanna max it out.

And if you're learning something new, you might as well learn really how to do it really well.

And my God, the admiration I had though for everyone in terms of the time taken and the work put in, I mean, it's a thing, you have to change your body, you change your muscles, you change how you oxygenate yourself.

It's very, very involved, but I loved it though, I loved it.

- I loved the experience.

It's crazy what you can do when you're given an unlimited amount of resources to put a character together.

It's the most rewarding process.

It's the most rewarding process, but you have to have accessibility to those resources.

If you need the training, if you have your questions, if you wanna create a background history, you have to have somebody on the other end that's receiving all of that information with you and bouncing back with you in order for you to know that you're knocking on the right doors.

- Yeah, that's it.

I mean, I feel that that's bang on about Jim, that when you knock on that door, he will always open it and say, "And you're welcome to come into this space and bring whatever you have.

- I mean, he would do the funniest thing, he would have the camera on like this.

And if you go, "Jim, I have a question," I would hear the background, like all the crew going, "Oh, here we go," and he would go, "What is it, kiddo?"

Every time they would see Jim put down that camera to answer one of my questions, everybody knew it was gonna be like an hour and a half.

- An hour and a half, exactly. - And we're not gonna shoot.

But that was always me, I was always, "Question."

Things would pop up. He would give me a direction.

All of a sudden, something else would brew up, and I'm like, "Well what is this? I'm curious about this."

And I love that he's always catered to everybody's curiosity in that sense.

- That's it, exactly. - Jacques was no different.

- He's so great.

- There was just this unlimited amount of time that he would give us in his rehearsals, and while we were improvising, learning all the technical stuff, he would come to the recording studio.

And even though everybody spoke different languages, it really felt like babble. - That's so- - In a way, it challenges you to still try to connect on a human level. - Exactly.

- And that's the one thing that I love the most about Jacques Audiard is that this is not his first different languaged film.

He's done a film called "Dheepon," where half of the characters were from Sri Lanka, "A Prophet," where the main character spoke Arabic, and in this one, it was all Spanish.

He doesn't speak either of those languages.

He only speaks specifically and beautifully French.

And yet, sometimes we didn't know where Jacques ended and I began.

And the same, I know that Karla, if she were here, Selena, Adriana, we would all say the same.

It was a really magical experience, and I feel like maybe that's why "Emilia" worked.

"Emilia" worked because we were given complete permission to tap into our lives personally, to bring these women to life.

And we were encouraged to search for our most authentic self, which is what these women are doing regardless.

- That's exactly it, that's what these women are doing, and that sense of self being so paramount to absolutely everything, because it is the thing that leads these stories right through.

We had a female director on "Lee," Ellen Kuras, who has been a much revered cinematographer her whole life.

I did "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" with her.

And when it came to the point of the script is ready, let's go out to directors, I just suddenly realized, it can't be a man, it can't be a man.

I was so immersed in Lee's world having really finely tuned and constructed this story in terms of the screenplay, the structure, that 10 years that we cover.

And so I spoke to Ellen.

I knew that she had moved into directing television, but I also knew that she hadn't directed her first feature yet, and I thought, okay, girly, it's time, come with me.

And seeing her really jump in and use also that visual skill that she carries that has been her whole life.

It's the fabric of who she is.

Using that to tell Lee's story, standing back sometimes, just observing, letting the actors play, that also takes a huge amount of courage.

- Absolutely. - And trust, and that's the thing that I also feel Jim probably gave to both of us, is trusting one another, really listening, trusting, giving someone an opportunity to try making sure that first time director feels utterly supported with a steady hand at their back right the way through.

- Oh my God, you're skin and bones.

You're freezing, yes. (kissing)

- It was a phenomenal experience, actually.

All of us, we have nine weeks to make the film across- - You made it in nine weeks?

- Nine weeks across three countries, Croatia, Hungary, and London, which we only had for two days because we could only afford two days in London, because London is expensive to film in.

- Oh my God.

- So those other locations doubled up as the south of France, Saint-Malo.

- How did you create those sets? Were those sound stages?

- No, they were all sets. We had a couple of interiors.

We had a small sound stage in Hungary where we built the room at Saint-Malo in the hotel when Lee sees the two spotters lying on the bed when she photographs the cloud of napalm outta the window, that was a set build.

And the room where she has that flash forward conversation with- - [Zoe] Her son.

- with her son, that was also a set build, but it is an exact replica of Lee's front room that I have spent hours and hours in, pouring over all of her research in that room.

We totally recreated that space, because we wanted it to be authentic.

- I got sense of it because in the end, you're highlighting certain spots of that environment, and they lingered a lot after the film was over.

- Well, they had to and they lingered in me.

You know, sometimes, as you well know, you play a character and much as you might wanna just walk away and go home and sling yourself in bed and do stories with your children, these characters, sometimes, they do stick to the sides, don't they?

And I very much felt with Lee, there are bits of her that are still stuck, but that I will really treasure.

- I hope so. - Yeah.

- I hope so, she seems like the kind of woman that I think it's safe to have her beside you.

- Yeah, oh my gosh. - I feel her.

I feel her so close, and I'm so grateful.

I'm so grateful for your movie.

- So talking of having people in one's corner, the idea of being in your corner and you hopefully being in mine is the greatest privilege and honor of my life, so thanks, baby.

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