What fascinates you about mother-daughter stories? Are there mother-daughter stories either on the stage or on-screen that you really love, that really frustrate you, any that you have big emotions about?
Annie Baker: I wouldn’t describe myself as interested in mother-daughter stories, per se. I am the daughter of a mother and the mother of a daughter, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I started writing this movie after I had a daughter, but also it wasn’t a conscious choice. I’m trying to think of my favorite mother-daughter story. No one’s asked me that. That’s such an interesting question. I really liked Furiosa. I can’t say it was an influence on Janet Planet since I saw it last weekend, but I’m a big fan. I’m a big fan. Furiosa, retrospectively influential on Janet Planet.
There’s a way Bergman photographs and thinks about motherhood and relationships just between female relatives, period, between sisters, too. And there’s a kind of sensuality, there’s a kind of eroticism to the closeness between mothers and daughters and between sisters and between friends that I think he gets at that I definitely talked about with my DP [Maria von Hausswolff].
What conversations did you have with Zoe about Lacy’s relationship to place and to her mother, if any?
I learned very quickly to not try to describe the character too much to Zoe, which is not to say she’s the same person or even that similar to this character, but I realized very quickly that she understood the material in a bordering on telepathic way. If I got overly psychological about it or overly analytical, I would ruin her performance. So we did not talk about the character at all; if I tried to, I saw it go wrong very quickly. She learned the lines. She showed up, she listened—which is everything—obviously she reacted…
There was a lot of choreography. She’d never been in front of a camera before. In terms of her body and her head movements and how many times she blinked, we really had to figure a lot of the technicalities of that out. But psychology-wise, she was in her own private psychological universe, which was, looking back, as it should be, for that character.
