Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain and Tova Stewart, as their daughter, create such a believable family unit. Can you tell me about working with them to bring that level of authenticity to this trio?
Looking back on it, movies are miracles. Good movies are nearly impossible, and to have a movie that anybody even cares about considering or talking about fifteen years later is insane. Getting these three human beings together on a budget well under a million dollars for four six-day weeks, 24 days of shooting, man, the stars really aligned for us.
I’d worked with Mike on Shotgun Stories, although I did not write Take Shelter for him. I mainly wrote it for myself, and I wasn’t going to play that part. [Laughs] But it became very interesting, the idea of Mike playing it. I think he had become a father between Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, and that became an interesting element to him as a human being. He’s a great actor, I think he can do anything, but it made me feel more comfortable about walking into that situation with him having become a father.
Jessica, I didn’t know at all. I literally just took a flyer on some advice from Terrence Malick, because if Terrence Malick says it, then I’m good with it. At that point in my career, it was never a question of me judging her. I would just be lucky for anybody to say yes, and she had seen Shotgun Stories—that in and of itself was special. She knew Mike’s work, and she just wanted to be involved. This was before she was famous. She had done all of this work, but none of it had come out yet, and we just really hit it off. She was very dear and relatable and easy to talk to.
Now, you don’t realize before getting on set that you’re talking to one of the best actors of their generation. That started to appear once we were shooting. I remember the scene after Curtis has woken up from his seizure and the ambulance is coming, and he finally has to explain things. I remember being excited, because it was going to essentially be a Michael Shannon monologue. In fact, I looked at our boom operator and I was like, “You’ve never heard a Michael Shannon monologue, but get ready.” I knew that night was going to be special because usually Mike’s character speaks so little, and this was going to be this amazing time to hear Mike really lay some things out.
We didn’t have any trailers or anything on this movie; the holding for the actors was upstairs in some bedrooms. What I didn’t expect was, when we were getting ready for the scene, Jessica comes downstairs and has tears in her eyes, to the point where I was like, “Are you okay?” Then she just looked at me like I was a moron, because I was. [Laughs] She had just gotten herself into a place and then she sat down and, I mean, talk about a rare feat, where you have this exceptional Michael Shannon monologue going on, and it’s fantastic, and it’s every bit as exciting to cut away to Jessica who’s not saying anything. That’s when I was like, “Holy cow.”
When I was re-watching the movie, I wrote down while that scene was happening that what she’s doing is the pinnacle of what it means for an actor to be actively listening.
Yeah, and then you get into the editing room, and it’s not a case where you could shuffle shots around. I’ve been lucky enough to work with great actors like that since. Anytime you go into the edit and you’re looking for a reaction shot, when you’re working with a really great actor, you go to the thing that was real that they were listening to. Sure, you can take another part and put it in there and sometimes it works, but the really great ones, they’re in that moment. Everything that they talk about in acting class, they’re doing it. I think [Mike and Jessica] are two of our greatest actors, and they were doing some of their greatest work in front of us.