Conversations with leading cultural figures
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Following its screening at the London Film Festival, we speak to director Ned Benson about his mesmerising debut, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby
On meeting Jessica Chastain at a screening for his first short film…
“There were, like 12 people in the audience at this film festival in LA and most of them were the filmmakers. Afterwards I’m in the lobby and this girl comes running up to me saying, ‘did you write that film?’ I said yeah and she was like, I wanna work with you, and I was like – why?! She had just graduated from Juilliard – she happened to be Jessica – and she had done one episode of ER. My producer and I went to see her do a play in New York and we became friends, and have been trying to do movies together ever since.”
On writing the script…
“Ten years ago I started writing a script that became the Him version and then Jessica got involved and read that script and started asking questions about her character. So I thought, why don’t I write a whole other script to show the female perspective? I wanted to make a film about relationships so I thought, what better way to do that than to show the male and female perspectives? So we wound up with this 223-page script, with a first time director, essentially a first time producer and an actress, Jessica, who hadn’t really done much – so we were in really good shape right then. Then this really cool thing happened, Jessica’s career started to take off and people started to think that the concept was crazy enough to make.”
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