When US filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal walked through the main lobby of the Admiral Hotel in the Croatian resort of Slano this month, she noticed all the top industry guests attending the Slano Film Days in earnest discussion with the younger filmmakers attending the event.
“I saw Ruben Östlund, Pawel Pawlikowski, Michel Franco, Peter [Sarsgaard] my husband, Liam Cunningham and Ruben’s producer Erik Hemmendorff,” she notes.
Gyllenhaal herself had just met a group of younger filmmakers. During her time in the tiny Croatian resort, she also gave a masterclass, introduced an open-air screening of her latest film as a director, The Bride!, and had her own “really long interesting conversations with directors I admire and am curious about,” Östlund and Pawlikowski among them.
“I’ve never been in a festival like this. I really didn’t know what I was coming to. It is just so loving and human and warm. I’ve just loved being here It has been really inspiring,” she says.
“I wasn’t cool enough to know about Agnes Varda”
Gyllenhaal explained what has lured her away from acting after a career that has encompassed indie hits such as Secretary to superhero film The Dark Knight.
“I just hit a wall. I came to the edge of what acting allowed me in terms of my artistic expression,” she says.
Gyllenhaal has now directed two very different features: Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter (2021), produced through US outfit Fifth Season (formerly known as Endeavour Content), and The Bride!,for Warner Bros.
At the start of her career, she says, directing simply was not an option.
“I just didn’t see any women directing. It wasn’t that there weren’t any. There were. But I wasn’t cool enough to know about Agnes Varda,” she says. “I did see a lot of examples around me of interesting, intelligent, wild, curious women who were acting.
“When I look back on it now, it’s almost like in the 19th century, you were a woman interested in medicine, you became a nurse. Growing up when I did, if you loved film and you were a storyteller and you were a woman, you became an actress.”
She re-invented herself as a writer-director on the adaptation of Ferrante’s novella The Lost Daughter.
“I tried to get the rights at first to [Ferrante’s] ’The Days Of Abandonment’ which I think is a perfect book, but they said the rights are really complicated and tied up. But Ferrante thinks you would be a good collaborator and would you look at ’The Lost Daughter’?,” she recalls.
Gyllenhaal never met the Italian author, who has always preserved her anonymity, but Ferrante was happy to have a woman adapting her work. She wrote in her Guardian newspaper column that she “loved” Gyllenhaal as an actor and that it was important for her to support her as a fellow woman artist.
She made The Lost Daughter in Greece with a budget of around $5m. Her second film,The Bride!, had a budget of about $100m.
“There is something about that European film community that I was reminded being here in Slano that has a fundamentally different sensibility to the one I have been living in for the past few years,” Gyllenhaal acknowledges. “I am very attracted to the smaller scope and total freedom of doing things independently.”
Nonetheless, she is heartened she could make something as offbeat and formally bold as The Bride! within the Hollywood studio system. Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale star in the film about the love affair between the bride of Frankenstein’s monster, who has been brought back from the dead and the monster, known as ‘Frank’.
“It’s an expressionistic depiction, a kind of a dreamscape, a combination of 1980s punk New York mixed with 1936, mixed with right now,” says Gyllenhaal. “It’s a complicated, grown-up love story that is very flawed as much as it is soaring and beautiful. You will have had to have lived a little to relate to that love story.
Gyllenhaal is now attached to direct an adaptation of Rachel Kushner’s novel, ’Creation Lake’, about a secret agent trying to infiltrate a group of eco-activists in rural France, again for Warner Bros. “[Warner Group CEOs] Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca are artists themselves,” says the filmmaker.
She won’t act in Creation Lake. “Writing and directing is a much better fit for me. I see people who are able to do both simultaneously. But I don’t think I am one of them.”
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