Kelly Reilly: Sean Ellis was someone who I had crossed paths with before. There was a project that he had approached me with a few years before, and I wasn’t able to do it. Then he sort of called me up and said, “I’ve got this film that I’m writing, directing, and shooting in France in April. There’s this really beautiful but melancholic role of the mother.” And he gave me the pitch before I read the story.
I have a really lovely relationship with Sean. I really like him and admire him as an artist. Obviously, he’s come from photography, but he is such an artist in my mind. I’d seen Anthropoid in a movie theater in Prague, when I was filming, and it was so beautiful. I remember walking out of it and thinking that Sean was really moving into being a serious filmmaker. He’s vry grounded; he lives with his family in Cognac, France, where we shot the movie. He’s a very down-to-earth English lad, and I felt such a camaraderie with him.
I live in America, and I’ve been working for the past few years on a show called Yellowstone, where I play a very fierce character. As an actor, you really want to keep changing it up for yourself and dipping into different things to keep your own taste bud alive. Playing someone so utterly different from this character that I had been so immersed in for a few years, I was just like, “Yes, I’m in!”
And then, as an actor, you want to be in the hands of really great filmmakers. It’s not about me putting my stamp on anything. It was really about what Sean wants, and me serving the story. He’s so visual that I almost wanted her to hardly say anything. He kept writing lines for me, and I kept saying, “I don’t think she should say anything here.” Especially with how he shoots and how he’s telling the story through images, I almost felt like less was more.
In the character, there was constraint and silence and loneliness. And I just felt like she doesn’t really use her voice; she’s not able to. I didn’t want to overcomplicate it, and it was just a completely different box of colors to play with. I love period dramas, too, so it was good to get back into that. I didn’t hesitate, I just wanted to know more about the story and how I could root myself as an actor to help tell it.
