Elizabeth Olsen, Natasha Lyonne & Carrie Coon Want Filmmakers To Stop Making Them Do This One Thing

what's going on here well I'm trying to apologize to her but as you can see your apology for real hi first of all congratulations this is truly one of my favorite movies of the year um and one thing I really love about it is how much talking there is which I feel like sounds a little bit silly but more and more I feel like we've seen directors sort of abandon that in favor of just visuals and while the visuals in this movie are really gorgeous too I'm curious what you find intriguing about azazel's more dialogue heavy approach to storytelling in character god it feels like a gift we're all very chatty women and we also I think I think we do really uh love the challenge of of what of how he presented these characters from this page and a half dialogue uh that's on the page for Katie and we he's also explaining to us while like in within the script that we're not going to be seeing anything that she is who she on the other side of the camera we're only going to be looking at her against a blank wall and she's going to be and then you you create these ideas of people so quickly uh within the first few pages um that Katie is trying to control things Christina is overly sensitive like she always is and Rachel doesn't care and would rather like take a walk and smoke some weed and so we all have these judgments immediately and then that becomes complicated throughout um and the the language becomes more overlapping and complicated and the shots we start to over we start to take over each other's frames and and that story is told all within the page and um and it was delicious to get to to get to participate in that way mhm yeah really challenging yeah absolutely it's just such a joy to watch as well as as act apparently and um Elizabeth and Carrie your character's relationships with their own daughters happen entirely offscreen and through these phone calls that we only hear one side of can you talk about sort of the acting challenges and the sort of unique PR work that I'm sure probably goes into something like that I hate phone calls I hate phone calls I hate doing them I have to do them in every job it seems like and um I actually got to re-shoot one of those because something with the light which I was grateful for but um it's hard I think phone calls are really hard and I will say to all the filmmakers watching and I asked oza for this also to write the other side of the phone call there's no reason for me to make up the other side of the phone call just write it you know what you what the other person is saying so just tell me what the other person is saying a a great gift of moving behind the scenes and becoming like a writer person is figuring out what is inside those ellipses like once upon a time you know I used to think that somebody some magical third party actually knew the answer but then I would discover oh no we just kind of ran out of time in the writer's room so it's true that somebody should be writing and I genuinely don't know what to say next like I'll memorize my lines backwards and forwards I but I need someone to yeah say something I don't with lip I don't with the lips it's like you know Chris Walkin crosses out all of his punctuations I'm like I don't like this game what's the end of the sentence pal right just say it just write it anything else that's all fair I don't even like phone calls in real life so I can't imag first of all text it yeah text it yeah we hate to see it um So Divine Joy Randolph famously said her most difficult Co co-star in the holdovers was the Fig cigarettes that she had to constantly be smoking Natasha I'm wondering if you feel similarly about this movie with the amount of hot scenes that you had to be doing I love divine I've worked with her actually as a director on um High Fidelity and uh but uh yeah you know it's just well somebody like me is very seasoned in smoking and you know Divine of I uh I am um a very elderly old man and uh so for me uh the smoking is so organic um it's almost uh a challenge not to do it sometimes I see and scenes uh where I'm not smoking that I'm just holding myself here for no apparent reason and I'm not giving a p sign uh I do hate smoking fake I've now quit smoking uh but I hate uh smoking fake cigarettes they have a honeysuckle quality to them that is literally like if somebody came up with the most disgusting non-cigarette thing you could ever do um but it's an interesting uh you know it's a terrible thing for your health um I always worry about the kids but it's a cinematically there's a punctuation to it because it does sort of say hey I needed to take uh a piece of private time I needed a breath or something and I guess as somebody who plays so many smokers uh I um on this one really sort of asked myself the question of like what is behind the self-destruction of the cigarette where other people in this world seem to be able to take breath what distinguishes those personality types and uh really tried to sort of drop that kind of you know uh Lil Reed smokes a cigarette in favor of like somebody who deeply needed uh some space from this claustrophobic family situation uh so you know there's a lot of different ways to smoke uh I'll I'll call theine later and go through this with her um but yeah I love that thank you guys so much talking to you and I'm just really excited for people to see the movie thank you so much [Music]