Franny Civitano as Julie
Some pre-shoot / actor prep thoughts from Franny Civitano:
To understand acceptance is to understand all the horrifying, painful things that come first. The road to acceptance is never easy, and hardly ever quick, but it is a necessary and almost inevitable part of the grieving process. I’m familiar with grief. I’ve experienced it in a variety of ways, and a variety of circumstances. Some ways were more major than others, but there’s a moment during each period of mourning when you realize, “Oh my god, this isn’t the worst day of my life.”
My most major period of grief came after my father passed away. He was sick (cancer) and it was a slow process. When someone is sick for a long time, there’s always someone who will say, “At least you knew. At least it wasn’t a surprise.” Well, the thing is, it’s always surprising, even when you’ve got a head’s up. Death is never something you can fully prepare for, especially if you’re on the outside of it.
My dad wasn’t a big talk-about-my-feelings type of guy. He made jokes, sure, but he never sat down and said, “I realize I’m dying and this is what I want to say to you.” For a while I regretted that he never had “that conversation” with me, because I wanted closure and I wanted to talk about it. Then someone told me, “The best thing you can do is let them die the way that they lived.” I’m not sure if my father ever really reached a state of “acceptance” about his diagnosis or death, I’m not sure if accepting your own death is truly possible. Or maybe it is. But I’m still sure that he wasn’t “prepared” for it.
When I think about Julie, who has cancer, I think about that part in the grieving process when you mourn the future that you saw for yourself. We’ve all experienced it; we put so much effort (sometimes unintentionally) in building a fictional (hopeful, what-if, possible) future for ourselves that relies on our current circumstances. It takes very little to make that come crashing down. This could be anything--a breakup, a lay-off, a test result--so imagine what a cancer diagnosis could mean. Even if it doesn’t mean sure death, there are hospital bills, energy loss, and a lifetime of check-ups and tests.
The following is an excerpt from an email exchange between Franny and me:
I see this interaction as happening at the precise moment Julie achieves “acceptance” in the 5 stages of grief. As in….literally…the exact moment where she goes from depression to acceptance and starts to feel better… “as I live and breathe”. I don’t see this as a particularly dramatic situation for Julie because of this. Rather, this is the first true moment of Zen she gets to feel—her tears have all been wept, her screams have all evaporated into the atmosphere, her fists have pounded all they need to pound—and at this moment she is truly free. If Liz didn’t freak out and cut and run, I could easily see Julie saying “so how are YOU, Liz”…
As a general rule, I don’t like to mutz around too much with your “acting computer” as I believe (as an actor, myself) that an actor’s process is proprietary and personal and honestly a little magic so as a director I don’t monkey too much with the machine as to how you approach your packing (I’m assuming I can use ‘packing’ as you are a UNCG alum and have therefore been in many a Gulley class!). I want to give you the freedom to make choices and come up with discoveries.
With that in mind, I’m going to answer your questions with my thoughts but please feel free to use what you can and discard anything that doesn’t help.
Do you see Julie as "sick and tired" or does she look relatively normal, just thinner, than usual? I think it’s important that Julie not look “sick” in the sense that something is obviously wrong. The reason I want to make this short is to explore our society’s fascination with thinness and how we always…always…perceive that significant weight loss is positive and we often equate sickness with beauty. So what I’d like (easier said than done, but trust that you are a genius) is to have any to the weariness that Julie feels to be reflected through her eyes and her physicality; her pace and rhythm not her external appearance. Because, to Liz, her external appearance has “never looked better”. And on a side note, I think something you might think about is the irony that when you and Liz were friends and you were heavier, you probably fantasized about losing weight to the point where she praised you and finally at this moment, she does. There might be some mileage in that for us to play with.
Is she thinner because she's going through chemo or just changing her diet to be healthier? The way I see things is that Julie had a period of fatigue and rapid weight loss, which, let’s face it, she probably loved at first—finally the diet is working—and then it just kept going on and she kept feeling terrible so she finally decides to go in and it is one of those situations where it’s too late. I can let you fill in details or I can extrapolate more but it’s imperative for the truth of this scene that it was the cancer that caused her weight loss. This sickness finally did the thing she struggled to do her whole life and finally at the end, she gets the validation of “you’re beautiful” when it means the least. I don’t mind you’re expanding this however you like for your process but the critical thing to the film is that Julie sheds no tears here…she is truly at peace. In fact, I’m hoping that somewhere in there…she’s gonna find this funny as hell!
Is she accepting her diagnosis, or is she accepting her death? I shall leave that choice up to you; I think you know…
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