Jessica Chastain is really, really happy for her friends. They’ve made a great movie, and she’s made it with them.
The friends are writer-director Ned Benson and producer Cassandra Kulukundis. The movie is The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby, a two-part drama that examines a New York couple’s disintegration after a tragic loss.
In the segment called Him, we follow Conor Ludlow (James McAvoy) as he tries to put his life back together after his wife Eleanor (Chastain) leaves him; in Her, we follow Eleanor as she tries to figure out who she is and where she’s going.
“Yesterday was the first time we showed it to anyone,” Chastain says of the movie’s world premiere on Monday at the Elgin, perched between Benson and Kulukundis on a couch at the Templar Hotel. “The first time James [McAvoy], Ciáran [Hinds] and Jess [Weixler] saw it. And also I burst into tears at the Q&A,” she laughs.
“It’s overwhelming,” says Kulukundis. “And our audience was amazing yesterday. They laughed, they were emotionally involved, you could feel the energy in the room … when Jessica saw it last, it was on a 50” plasma [screen], so you just don’t have that same experience.”
Chastain is still clearly processing the response. She’s been developing Eleanor Rigby with Benson and Kulukundis for a decade, working through various concepts and script drafts to arrive at the two-part structure the film has now.
“We played a lot of Rock Band,” Kulukundis admits.
“We would go to the Aero Theatre and watch the Hitchcocks,” Chastain says.
“All three of us would run up there,” says Benson, “or to the Lincoln Plaza when I was at Columbia and she was at Julliard.”
“Watching Isabelle Huppert movies,” laughs Chastain with a sort of disbelief; Huppert plays her character’s mother in Eleanor Rigby.
“We’ve all been together for a long time, and we’ve all been kind of on the outskirts,” Chastain continues. “My movies have all come out in [the past] two years – in 2011, I was here for Take Shelter and Coriolanus.
“So it hasn’t been that long that I’ve had movies in the movie theatre, but a lot has happened for me in those two years. A whole life of wanting to do this has come to fruition. And yesterday, being there and seeing it happen to people that I love, where I’m actually witnessing their moment, it sometimes means more than when it’s happening to you.”
Chastain’s tearing up. Both Kulukundis and Benson turn toward her supportively.
“What’s happened to you, I think you’ve always deflected it,” Kulukundis starts to say.
“It’s so impossible,” Chastain laughs, sniffling back tears, and I feel suddenly like an intruder in the room. But it passes in a second, as Kulukundis tries to bring us back on message.
“You never feel like you deserve it, you always feel like there’s something more, something different that you could have done. That’s why we’re all in this industry, to keep creating something new and keep trying something else, and I feel the exact same way. Right now I don’t feel like I know what’s going on here.”
“I just am so grateful for what this core group was able to pull together,” Benson says, still delighted by the audience response at the previous evening’s Q&A.
“I just remember talking about day one [of production], what that was like. Because everybody’s like, ‘Oh, what was your Day One like? You must have been so nervous!’ And that was the most freeing day of my life. It was eight years waiting to get to the point where, ‘We can shoot now! Let’s go!’”
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How do you react to success in your life or when others reach success? Do you feel like you deserved it or does it make you want to work harder?
![JessicaJames]( "JessicaJames")
How do you react to success in your life or when others reach success? Do you feel like you deserved it or does it make you want to work harder?
