I make no secret about the fact that after three films as star and co-writer, Chicago-native Brit Marling is one of my favorite people making movies right now. Since her double-shot debut at Sundance 2011 with ANOTHER EARTH and SOUND OF MY VOICE (both of which she co-wrote and starred), she's done a handful of solid supporting acting gigs in films like ARBITRAGE and THE COMPANY YOU KEEP, but it's her self-generated work that continues to earn her much-deserved attention.
In 2013, Marling starred and co-wrote THE EAST, directed and co-written by SOUND OF MY VOICE director and co-writer Zal Batmangliq, which cast Marling as an operative for a private intelligence firm who goes undercover with a eco-terrorist group. Last year, she made another film with director Mike Cahill (who directed and co-wrote ANOTHER EARTH), called I ORIGINS, a beautiful consideration of reincarnation that looked at it from a scientific perspective. Also in 2014, she co-starred in THE BETTER ANGELS, the story of Abraham Lincoln’s formative childhood years, in which Marling plays Lincoln mother Nancy.
Late last year, Marling also starred opposite James Nesbitt in the fantastic BBC mini-series “Babylong” as an American public relations expert working in the highly charged environment of the British police force to help improve its image. Heading back to the 1800s, Marling’s latest work—and the one that brings us together this time—is THE KEEPING ROOM, a stark, violent, haunting film about three Southern women (two sisters—Marling and Hailee Steinfeld—and their former slave, Muna Otaru) in the period immediately after the Civil War, protecting their property from two rogue Union Army soldiers (Sam Worthington and Kyle Soller) bent on destruction and worse.
Marling is in the middle of shooting her next mysterious project—an eight-episode Netflix series with frequent collaborator Batmanglij called “The OA.” And that’s literally all that’s known about it so far, but look for it to debut sometimes in 2016. With that, please enjoy my chat with the always-interesting Brit Marling…
Capone: Hi, Brit. How are you?
Brit Marling: Hey, Steve. How’s it going?
Capone: Great. It’s good to talk to you again. We’ve got to check in at least once a year.
BM: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Once a year, we have a summit.
Capone: Otherwise, it doesn’t feel right.
BM: You’re right, it doesn't.
Capone: First of all, a belated congratulations on “Babylon,” which I thought was a terrific show. I’m so used to seeing you play fairly laid-back characters, and that show was like watching you on “The West Wing”—rapid-fire dialogue, always moving. It was so great.
BM: That’s such a lovely thing to say. I’m so moved you said that, because it was really a challenge doing that show. It was a very fish-out-of-water experience, and it was amazing to work with Daniel [Kaluuya], with Bertie Carvel and Jim [Nesbitt], all of these really talented actors, and the pace of shooting was so frantic. It was just constant, like two takes at most, and the dialogue was just like, you’ve got to keep up, and you’re learning lines in the makeup chair in the morning, because they’d just been written two days before. It was pretty wild, but it was an awesome experience. I’m so glad you got to see it.
Capone: Is there going to be another season, or was one and done?
BM: That was it. It was a one-and-done miniseries. It was really fun to do.
Capone: With this film and THE BETTER ANGELS, I don’t know if you shot them in close proximity to each other, but I saw them not far apart in the last year. Was there something about playing women of the 1800s that you were digging a couple of years ago?
BM: That’s so odd. I did not fully think about that. When you experience it, they happened far apart, and then you talk about them even farther apart, so I tend to not even make the connection, but I’m glad you’re making them [laughs]. I was really drawn to the idea of playing something in a different time period, because all of the early stuff that I had done was contemporary, and I love the idea of doing something where, you know, it’s not like you can watch footage, or that there’s someway to directly download what it would be like to be a young woman trying to survive the end of the Civil War in the American South.
There’s actually very little documentation on that, so you have to lean a lot into your imagination about what that is, and I found that experience really exciting. And also staying in it, not letting any modern mannerisms slip in. I find it really fascinating, the actors who can convince me that they’re in another time, because there are ones who you feel like you’re watching a bit of a performance and you’re not fully with them. So yeah, I felt a little bit nervous. “Can I really be believable? And will the accent sound authentically of that time?”
Capone: I know this script [from Julia Hart] was on the black list a couple of years ago, and I think it makes sense in a way that it takes a director [London-based Daniel Barber] who’s not from this country to bring that outsider eye, and tell a story about America the likes of which I’ve never seen before. I’ve never read a story like this before. And it’s only his second film. What did you like about his vision for this story?
BM: What was really exciting about Daniel Barber doing this project—and I felt it when I watched HARRY BROWN—is that he really takes violence seriously. The violence in his movies never feels slick or sexy. It feels honest and terrifying and shocking. In particular in this film, because you’re seeing women act in this way, it really makes violence visible to you again. I think we’ve all been desensitized, and it’s hard to even see violence anymore, because it’s so commonplace, and we’re so saturated with images of it.
But I think when you see young women behaving in a way that’s really possible and really trying to defend themselves, I think it’s shocking. The invisible is made visible again. You can actually see the violence. And when you do, it carries its proper weight, which is it’s devastating and destructive and awful, and not sexy. I think the feeling you have at the end of this film is the sentiment the film begins with, which is that war is a cruel and awful endeavor. There’s really no way to get through it with your humanity fully intact.
Capone: That being said, I love that the primary image for the film is you looking like a badass with that rifle or musket or whatever it is. What was that like to make yourself look competent working that thing?
BM: [laughs] Oh my goodness. I went to a shooting range in Los Angeles with this guy who was an expert in Civil War-era rifles, and we would just go and shoot. And the truth is that it reminds me of archery from summer camp as a kid. There’s something about target practice that’s very exhilarating. It’s the intense focus of trying to hit something. And the other thing that’s so interesting is it’s a really complex process to load. You have to pour this black powder in, then push the ball in, then there’s a copper cap that goes in—all these things. Another thing I thought was cool is Daniel took the time in the film to really show how complicated that is, and that you can’t just like shoot and shoot again. The movie was very true to how difficult it is to pull the trigger, and what it then means in terms of this moment of vulnerability in which you can’t defend yourself until you reload. I definitely became very familiar with that.
Capone: For that very reason, the film’s pacing is very different than a lot of action films. When you were shooting, did it serve the male-female adversarial dynamic better that the female actors and male actors kept separate? Did that make more sense?
BM: That like because it was even separated even in the shooting? Like scenes between them and…
Capone: I was just wondering if during the shooting the women kept to themselves and the men kept to themselves just to preserve the dynamic?
BM: Muna, Hailee and I started shooting first, and we shot quite a bit alone, so I think everyone was very relived for the men to come to set. We were relieved because three women being emotional in like a hot keeping room together for days on end is intense and overwhelming. Everybody was very excited for Sam and Kyle to show up, and we became very good friends very quickly, and then that whole sequence with the harrowing night that they all get through was really…I think everybody was really generous with each other. Night shoots are really hard. You’re finishing your day when the sun goes up. Everyone’s exhausted and emotional, and everybody really took care of each other in a way that was really beautiful.
Capone: Why do you think this story is important to tell to a contemporary audience? Are there messages or themes that we can modernize?
BM: Definitely. We’re really struggling in this country. I think we’re at a total crisis point in terms of institutionalized racism and mass incarceration of black men in this country. I think a film coming along that, in a very direct way, looks at this part of American history, the Civil War, slavery, and that being the foundation of how this country was built, it’s a very important story in that regard. And then also in terms of being a film with young women as the action heroes of this action movie in which everything they’re doing is possible. There’s no tricks or green screens; everything that happens in this film is really just a group of young women defending themselves. I just think that’s an image that you don’t see very often.
Capone: A lot of visual cues that seem to be taken from horror films, the home invasion variety in particular, and I remember back to our first conversation ever where you mentioned that one of the reasons you started writing for yourself was that the only things you were being offered were victim roles in horror movies, and you wanted to try something different. Did you acknowledge and recognize those element in THE KEEPING ROOM?
BM: Yeah, I think you’re used to the idea of women as victims, and the third act of a horror film being about which of these women will survive and which will die? It’s really different to have it be about women holding their own and being the perpetrators of violence, or meeting violence with violence, and ultimately succeeding. I think it totally turns what you’re used to on it’s head. That’s why so arresting for the audience. I remember when we saw it in Toronto with a big crowd for the first time, you could hear a pin drop. People were in it, because it’s not something that you’ve seen before.
Capone: You’re right, it’s not about women trying to escape; it’s about women holding their ground, which it seems like a small shift, but it’s actually a huge thing in these type of movies.
BM: Oh my god, you just worded that so well. I’m going to use that. You’re right, it’s not about trying to run. It’s about women being like, “No, this is my home. I’m not going. I’m going to protect my sisters.” Yeah, it’s a totally different energy. It’s one of action and resistance instead of flight in fears.
Capone: This might be the most feminist movie you’ve ever made, and you didn’t even realize it maybe.
[Both laugh]
BM: Thank you for pointing that out to me!
Capone: I heard a vicious rumor that you and Zal are making something for Netflix.
BM: What a vicious rumor!
Capone: Is that what you’re doing right now?
BM: Yeah, yeah. We’re neck deep in it. It’s really an awesome challenge to think about telling a story over eight hours rather than one-and-a-half or two. I think when Zal and I have collaborated on something in the past, we tended to be really interested in high-concept ideas and worlds, and I think it’s really exciting to finally get the proper space to explore it. It’s really hard in a feature-length film to set up the rules of a new world or a genre blend or a high-concept situation, and then you don’t have much time to play with it, because you just set it all up, and then you’ve got to end it.
It really was an interesting challenge to chart something over more space and to think about throwing out the rules of how we think about long-format storytelling. The truth is, you’re not making TV, you’re not making a feature; you’re making an internet streaming series, and nobody knows what that is yet, because it’s just starting for the first time. It’s exciting to get to be a part of telling a story like that, and we have such exciting partners in Netflix. They’re really so open to understanding each creative person’s process that they work with, and are open to how best to support and sustain that. I think that maybe comes from the ethos of the tech world, which is about being risky, about being interested in innovation, about pushing boundaries, and about that being where the exciting part of growth and change come from, which is just really cool, really different.
Capone: When you talk about inventing worlds, you’re make it sound like what you’re working on is sort of science fiction-based in nature. Is that a fair assessment? I know you guys are big on secrets now.
BM: [laughs] Somebody was saying to me the other day,“I’ve never heard there be an announcement of a series where there is no information about it.” It’s called the “OA.” What does that even mean? I consider it a mind bender and a mystery series, and that’s why we’re staying so quiet about it. It will be a lot more fun just to just let it unfold.
Capone: I can’t wait. Brit, it’s always great to talk to you, and hopefully we’ll do it again next year.
BM: Really great to talk to you too. Thank you for your good words about “Babylon.” That means a lot to me. And thank you for supporting this movie and just having a great conversation about it.
Capone: Best of luck with this, and the TV series and everything.
BM: Thank you. I’ll talk to you at the next summit.
