Competition Section “What Maisie Knew” Press Conference: Notes & Quotes
Date & Time：
October 26th (Friday), from 15:30 @TIFF movie café
Appearance：
Scott McGehee (Director), David Siegel (Director)
Here are some note and quotes:
Scott McGehee (SMG) lived in Shiga, Japan for one year when he was in high school. He warmed up the atmosphere by greeting the crowd in Japanese.
SMG: Excuse me if my Japanese is a bit rusty. It was such a long time ago that I lived here!
David Siegel (DS): We are honored and happy to be here. It’s been nice to come to Tokyo again—it’s been a long time for both Scott and me. We received lovely hospitality and we’re happy to be showing our movie.
Q:Why did you decide to make a film on a story written in 1897?
DS: We did not adapt the book; we were shown the script. As filmmakers, the idea of telling a story from a child’s perspective was interesting, and that’s what we attempted to do with this movie. We thought the story itself had themes universal enough for many people to identify with their own experiences. This movie is very different in the sense that it’s less about a particular subject, and more about experience of someone going through a particular kind of moment in his/her life, which in this case is the child.
SMG: We heard an interesting story about the origin of Henry James’ story. Apparently he was at a dinner party and he heard about split custody for the first time. Back then, it was unusual for parents to get divorced and share custody which he thought was a terrible disaster for the kid. With that inspiration, he wrote this book. Culturally, things have changed dramatically since then and split custody is very common, that is, it is the common way of handling childcare when a couple separates and divorce is common as well. But Henry James is so smart about human relationships that a lot of what was happening in his novel was still relevant to what we’re doing with our movie.
Q:Can you tell us about Onata Apile who played the role of Maisie?
DS: Onata was six years old when we made the film, she is seven now. She didn’t have much experience as an actress. What most surprising about Onata is her naturalness you see in the movie. It’s very much her, and not as if we had to teach her how to act. She came up by herself with the kind of poise and naturalness that you see in the movie which was very surprising to everyone. Alexander Skarsgård said that “grown-up actors spend years trying to do the thing that Onata does so naturally.” We found Onata through our casting director. Her father’s mother is Japanese, so she is one quarter Japanese.
SMG: The shooting took seven weeks and Onata was in every single scene so she barely had a shot off. She had the spirit and goodwill and she also had a very positive attitude every day. She just made everyone smile. We couldn’t have made the film without finding a girl like her. She was a gift that we were given.
Q:Susanna and Margo wore different clothes and nice clothes. But why was Lincoln was always wearing a blue T-shirt?
SMG: Actually, Lincoln wore a red T-shirt, white T-shirt, or even a hoodie in other scenes! It was a little bit of Alexander’s own idea, to be very simple with Lincoln in order to make him appear like someone Susanna would never marry. We agreed to Alexander’s idea which allowed his character to interact with Maisie in a natural way.
Q:How was Julianne Moore on the set?
SMG: She was a delight and she was good to work with. She approaches her role very systematically. Actually, her work started one month after we began the shoot when the crew and the cast were already comfortable with each other, which could normally be an awkward transition. But with her openness and friendliness and that she’d already known Onata, it went very well.
