“After living far away from New York City, which is where I was raised, coming back here, I found it really extremely inspiring and exciting just to be around people, and to be walking around and hearing people’s stories, and how they were connecting and not connecting with each other. “I also suddenly found myself with the prospect of losing my parents, which had always been something that I feared but felt far away, (now) was suddenly something very, very close and very conceivable… I also saw a window before I would really be shifting into much more of a caretaker. “Those things together allowed me to try to take advantage of this window in time that I had to do something that I love, and hopefully address some of the fears and hopes I’ve had about losing my folks.” Pre-empting grief is a theme “worthy of exploring”, says 43-year-old Coon, who plays Katie – a controlling Brooklyn mother with a teenage daughter who is going somewhat off the rails. “Everyone’s going to go through it, yourself or with people you love, I mean, both things will happen to everyone…” she says. “I always find that invitations into art often ask for that kind of exercise of living. And I think that’s always probably healthier than not exploring something like dying.” HisThree Daughters is very much a character study,plunging viewers into the sisters’ states of mind with long stream-of- consciousness monologues that provide a deep dive into their personalities. Olsen, 35, portrays new mother Christina, a free spirit who is experiencing being separated from her child for the first time as she tends to her dying father,and she says she“loved” delving into her character with these exposing monologues. “I loved opening with this vulnerability of knowing that we won’t have much editing to help us, and that we get to understand what their cases are, in a way, or how they’re approaching this from the get-go, without even really acknowledging the other person at all or taking them in,” says the actress. “And we’re just kind of showing up, I think, as we do sometimes when we haven’t seen family for a while and you just kind of show up presenting like: ‘This is how I’m experiencing this’… “I think it’s a great introduction to a dynamic that we can, as an audience, make assumptions about and then as the film continues, we get to join each other’s literal frame within space, we get to understand, we get to contextualise… and it becomes a bit more complicated as it goes.”
Over the course of three days, Jacobs’ film astutely explores the waxing and waning of sisterhood as grief looms on the horizon and love seeps through the fractures of their relationships. Having three central female characters who are all well- drawn, complete and individual was “very satisfying”, says Lyonne, who cherished the rawness of the women’s experiences. “It’s like, when it’s – I don’t know – Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk and John Cassavetes in Husbands… it feels like they’re together at the peak of their powers, just making a movie for no reason, whether people see it or not! It’s like that for us…” she says.
“We’re allowed to be distinct and in sync and sort of raw, and also just sort of:Women are a whole thing!”
All three of the film’s leads also served as executive producers on the film, a decision which Jacobs describes as a meaningful process that was nailed on from the get-go. “Once I got to a draft that I was happy with, I reached out to them… sent a hard copy of it, and it went out to nobody else except them…” he explains. “I just wrote them a letter saying: ‘Hey, this is gonna be us, like, I’m starting with you guys. I’m sending this to Carrie, I’m sending this to Natasha, to Lizzie, whoever it was, I’m sending this to Jovan, and if you respond, that’s how it’s gonna be. We’re gonna build it as us, the baseline. We’ll be the team here.’ “And… these are the things that I promise: Shooting on location, shooting on film, trying to shoot as much in order, and that I would have final cut…
“They could hand over their trust… that was the whole foundation.”
His Three Daughters is released in select cinemas from Friday, September 6, and comes to Netflix on Friday, September 20.
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