What attracted you to the role in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints?
I was really drawn to playing Ruth because she’s a mom and that’s not something I’ve ever done before. She’s in a very complicated situation. There are sort of two different love stories going on: she has her love story with Bob [Casey Affleck] and then she has the love story with her child and it’s very conflicting. She’s really torn.
It’s a very Malick-like movie, and you recently worked with Terrence Malick on his next, as-yet-untitled film. How do the two experiences compare?
There’s nothing similar whatsoever about the way [the different directors] work. They are both quite romantic and poetic and they have a similar aesthetic. David [Lowery] did say something that Terry always says, about how he’s more interested in the space between sentences and words. So I guess that’s a similarity.
It appears that a lot of the outdoor shots in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints were filmed during the ‘magic hour’, which is also a Malick trademark.
It’s a great hour to shoot. But it’s different because this movie was shot with a very set script. We did a lot of this movie during magic hour and that was definitely challenging. I remember being close to the wire on a bunch of things.
It’s set in a time when, as soon as you turned 18, you were considered an adult. Now people can postpone adulthood until their 30s. Where do you fit on the spectrum?
I don’t feel very adult but maybe I’m just slow.
Does starting your career in a big commercial film like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo set you up, in a way?
I don’t really know. I just want to do things that I find interesting or that are challenging to me that I can learn something new from.
