00:00Can we go frame by frame on Jessie's face as she winds up?
00:10Hi, I'm Jessie Buckley.
00:11I'm Chloe Zhao.
00:12I'm Paul Maskell.
00:13And this is Notes on a Scene.
00:27Have a sandwired onions.
00:29And sandwired.
00:31To whom?
00:32To you.
00:34This is after Hamnet died. Spoiler alert.
00:38And Agnes is in her full expression of her grief, which is very different than how Will expresses his grief.
00:44He couldn't really handle the weight of it, so he decided to leave very soon after Hamnet died.
00:50What I learned was that I shall sandwired when I reach London.
00:53London?
00:56I must leave.
00:59We can take this opportunity, someone's peeling eggs, to talk about the beautiful production design Fiona, our production designer, has done.
01:06For her, it was really important that the space, the house, can contain the story of a full range of human emotions a person can go through.
01:16So there's emptiness, joy and grief.
01:18It's so much about what plays on the table.
01:21I don't think it was in the scene written in that I was peeling eggs.
01:26And while we were shooting, I would send Chloe these, like, fever writings every night, which were kind of abstract writings around the scene.
01:35And a load of eggs.
01:38Peeling, peeling eggs came into my mind.
01:42And those are all the eggs.
01:43But now I have this, like, book of this moment in my life that I wasn't even kind of aware what I was making at the time.
01:50But now I have a full kind of memory book of this time.
01:54And then, you know, just to shout out, like, that beam is like an old beam that were shipped from France.
02:02It was so important for the team to have everything feels extremely lived in and every little piece of details is there purposefully.
02:10Fiona's design was so amazing.
02:12It had a smell that you felt like you were entering into a world.
02:17And even the, like, room where Hamnet dies, it smelled like an underworld in some way.
02:24And every tiny detail, like the candle holders were really, like, made out of this amazing corrugated iron that she bought in Italy by a man who was making candle holders the same way as they did back in the 1500s.
02:39And you felt like, as an actor, you could go to any corner of the set and you could interact with it.
02:44Yeah.
02:45Like, it felt practical, I think, that sometimes for actors, a difficult thing when you're confronted with artifice.
02:50If you go over to a place that you're not supposed to go and then suddenly the whole illusion crumbles.
02:55I have to go now.
02:58Now?
03:00There's a traveling party leaving today and they have a spare horse.
03:03So, yeah.
03:04Look after the girls and I will return.
03:09So.
03:10Okay, I'm pausing.
03:11Can we go frame by frame on Jessie's face as she winds up?
03:14No, no, no, no, no, no.
03:15So, so...
03:16Oh my God.
03:17I didn't... I see.
03:18Look...
03:19You know, this is everyone's reaction behind the monitor.
03:24I mean, it's quite a shock if somebody takes a swing at somebody.
03:27I think that's the only take you did do a swing.
03:29Yeah, I didn't do it again.
03:30But also me and Lucas should look at it like, this is the one.
03:33I thought you hated the take.
03:34I thought you hated it.
03:35Me too.
03:36Well, I was in a like, I hate life mode that day.
03:40As you know, the idea of in moments like this, when the emotions are so charged, the camera
03:46will restrain itself from pushing for emotions.
03:50Because the space is like a bomb about to explode.
03:53Yeah.
03:54And we actually want to stand back.
03:56Because we want the audience to feel the impact of the shock wave.
04:02Because when you go in there for some reason, it actually does the opposite.
04:06So we stayed wide, but what we didn't...
04:08It also feels theatrical.
04:09Like it feels like in the world of Shakespeare that like you're watching, like kind of in
04:13a meta sense, like you're watching actors in a frame that like you're not...
04:16Not that you don't see wide shots in films, but I feel like some of the more emotionally charged
04:21moments that you would see people jump in on in different films.
04:25You don't.
04:26Yeah, exactly.
04:27And also the unpredictability, because the camera isn't there.
04:31They have all this space and the wild animals come out of them.
04:36And that's what happened here.
04:37Let's look at frame by frame of her expression.
04:39That's how close it is.
04:41I felt it across my face.
04:42I was so thrilled when that happened.
04:44Like, just like...
04:45I didn't...
04:46Nobody...
04:47Firstly, nobody knew that that was going to happen at all.
04:50It wasn't scripted.
04:51It wasn't...
04:52I didn't even know what was going to happen.
04:54And you get a shock when these...
04:55Yeah.
04:56When these things come up.
04:57Yeah.
04:58But the fact that you dodged that.
04:59Well, I just think it means that we were very much in our bodies, like...
05:02Yeah.
05:03Makes me scared watching it now.
05:04Go.
05:05Đ”ŃĐ° dire hospitals.
05:07No!
05:08No!
05:09Ah!
05:10Mmm!
05:11No!
05:12No!
05:13Oh!
05:14No!
05:15No!
05:16skills!
05:17No!
05:18No!
05:19Ah!
05:20No!
05:21Oh!
05:22Oh!
05:23Ah!
05:24Oh, ë.
05:25I love my love.
05:27On the day, I think all of us have come into this with our own heart- it, and you, youĆ
05:34with our own you know really intense ones and and that does reflects into the
05:39story and I was definitely going through a really intense heart heartache right
05:43around the time we're shooting this that mirrored exactly what's happening in
05:47this scene so I was not really together that day but at the same time the
05:52emotions I was feeling I think was we were all linked together we didn't do
05:56much rehearsal but we did some physical rehearsal and we used this scene because
06:01we knew this was gonna be a big physical scene and so we did a a tantric
06:05polarity workshop because I've trained as a tantric practitioner and and what it
06:09does is do you wanna a good scene has to have polarity even if it's people just
06:17looking at nothing happens there needs to be polarizing energy happening for any
06:21kind of chemistry that's just physics so I wanted Paul and Jesse to feel safe to be
06:28in their most extreme polarity of their gender so the most extreme of masculine
06:34and the most extreme of feminine and that is actually really beautiful it happens
06:38in nature a lot so you have the masculine being the container and the banks on a
06:44river and then the feminine full expression all chaos all emotions no
06:51feeling is restrained full expression anything she feels grief shame pain
06:58whatever it is is supposed to really make him come alive turn him off the more he
07:04contains unconditionally holding that presence the more she has the
07:09permission to surrender even more to her emotions it's too much so it's so hurts my
07:23heart yes but I'm so happy I love it oh keep your heart open that's a good hair there was a
07:34moment then she relaxes and then the there's a beautiful kind of surrender
07:40from her and that allows him to also soften and then nobody is has any kind of
07:47pretense and they're both are in their most vulnerable state and we planted the
07:52seed that day so even though on this day I wasn't really functional but I I was so
07:59happy to see that you went there
08:07go I think we all know fathers sons grandfathers friends uncles lovers men
08:22who come who are in pain they can't express themselves they're so afraid of
08:27their feeling functions and he's not running away from her he's running away
08:33from himself yeah she realized that in the end so and the only place he feels
08:37safe to express himself his creativity is through his his art and just quickly on
08:42the costume is also you know you when we first meet the two of them their colors
08:46even though different but really beautiful together vibrant vibrant together and
08:51she you know my gosh is there has our costume designer has a lot of details
08:55because not only Agnes is not fully dressed and she also like there's all these little stitches
09:01that are down almost like absently onto the it's actually coming apart while he is wearing more layers
09:07there's a more of a dissonance between them and oh this thing breaks my heart I
09:11think that's that's the eternal struggle and the masking to run from themselves
09:15because they can't feel they're too afraid to feel and then for the feminine to then have to what do you mean by that too afraid to feel
09:22I know you know I don't think like to express it openly in front of people
09:28I don't think you know life doesn't imitate art you two are nothing like these two people
09:32also what was amazing is like there was an on everybody was in their unspoken imaginations
09:42and that's also because of the world that Fiona and Malgoja created once we entered into that house
09:47and entered into that scene we were already cooking like we were already in the scene
09:52and we all just got about being in it as much as we could and didn't ask kind of permission for anything
10:01but we did that I feel like in the weeks that preceded the shoot like we did it in the in the workshop
10:05yeah we didn't go say the the thing about the workshop of the male sexual organ well here's
10:11I'll just say you use it or not to build the polarity he's job is to embody a physically embody a penis
10:20and her job is to physically embody a vagina yeah and they and they was making movements and making
10:28sound to embody those two things and then forever just looking at each other until one of the lowest moments
10:34much less of my career I would say embodying a penis just leave that to everybody's imagination
10:42lots of rigidity on that now it's no time to see no but but truly like I didn't know who these characters were
10:52I had Maggie's book I had this idea archetypally who they were so very much that these two other than being
11:00brilliant actors but they were also so open and and brave to give themselves in into these characters
11:08so they who they are sort of melted with who these characters are and so a moment like this for a
11:14director is you know for me it's just such a treat because this is why I come to work for moments like
11:19that to happen half of that is well Agnes the other half is Paul and Jesse
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