Cast of ‘Eileen’ opens up about complexities of plot

• Eileen is an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed book.
• The film will premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
• Film-maker Anne Hathaway says the material isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

The cinematic adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed first book is now available, and it has a talented cast both in front of and behind the camera.

Eileen’s main character, a young woman who lives in Boston in the 1960s, is played by Thomasin McKenzie. Eileen’s life is pretty bleak; she either stays home with her inebriated and unemployed father (Shea Whigham) or works at a nearby prison with coworkers who want to avoid her. But when Rebecca, played by Anne Hathaway, joins the prison staff, everything is different. Eileen is immediately taken by Rebecca’s beauty and ecstatic at the chance to work with Rebecca to break out of her shell a little. But as Eileen grows more assured, things take an unexpectedly grim turn.

Along with McKenzie, Hathaway, and Whigham, the Eileen cast also included Richard Reed Parry, Ari Wegner, a BAFTA-nominated cinematographer, and William Oldroyd, a BAFTA-nominated director.

Hathaway, McKenzie, Whigham, Oldroyd, Moshfegh, and Luke Goebel who co-wrote the screenplay with Moshfegh attended the Collider Studio presented by Saratoga Spring Water to talk about their experiences filming the movie Eileen, which will premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

To start, Moshfegh identified one of the crucial steps in the book-to-film adaptation process:

“Collaboration is key. It’s vital. As the author of a novel you need to see it through a very specific lens, and when you’re adapting it into film that lens is the camera and you have to think like a cinematographer and a director, and you have to think like the character, and you have to think like the character 10 years ago, and you have to think like a writer. So collaborating with people who can help melt away the limits of your singular perspective and offer other ways of seeing your project is crucial.”

Having the right team is always vital, but it might be more important than ever when working on material deemed risky. In his director’s statement, Oldroyd noted, “We’ve taken a risk with the storytelling, the music, the performances, the cut, the tone.” Here’s what he said when asked what felt like the greatest risk in bringing Eileen to screen:

“The material’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I think it’s my cup of tea. I think it’s exactly the sort of stories that I’m drawn to read in books and watch on screen. It’s dark. It’s, at times, strange because Eileen has this vivid inner life. We wanted to represent that visually. It’s risky territory because there’s a tendency to want to play it safe, oftentimes, especially in a very difficult market for cinema at the moment. And so that is why it’s important that we can make this film independently because it gave us the freedom to do that. I also think when I mention risk, what I enjoy seeing very much is actors taking risks on screen, and you have to create an environment where that can happen and the only way you can do that is if you build trust. And I like to think that the environment we had was trustful and it allowed them to take a risk. And ultimately, when actors take a risk on screen, they put themselves in your hands and the hands of the editor because they’re handing over something and they will trust you to make it work. So I’m just grateful that these guys did that.”

Hathaway knew she had the perfect helmer at her back, so she had no trouble taking such chances with her character. She clarified:

“I think sometimes when you meet someone who’s really nice, you kind of brace yourself and you wait for, well, when’s the other shoe gonna drop? Who are they really? And I can say with a certain degree of independent low budget cinema authority, the shoe never dropped. Will was the same person throughout no matter how much stress was coming at us, no matter how much pressure, and very, very real pressure to move on through a shot. He somehow body blocked all of it and created a completely safe environment for us to have as much time as we needed to be able to feel safe to take those risks. So the longer that went on, the more I trusted him, but I trusted him from what I saw on Lady Macbeth. You just used the word ‘humanity,’ there’s such a deep sort of throb of humanity that runs through it and in some very complicated characters. And to be able to hold someone, in particular a young woman in her glory and her complication and her ugliness, it made me feel very switched on and I was very excited to see what happened next with this one.”

The content required the cast to be made up of actors who could excel in both their individual parts and serve as effective scene partners for one another, in addition to having an ideal leader on set. In McKenzie, Whigham discovered that. He clarified:

“You take these characters on because they scare you a lot of times and you don’t know if you’re gonna be able to figure them out, or if you do, actually. And that’s what they were saying about Will is that when I would get lost, he would be able to bring some clarity to the character. Same with Thomasin. She possesses, and this is very difficult thing to do in acting, is to be in the moment at all times in a scene. Because everyone thinks when they call ‘action’ you can action between ‘action’ and ‘cut,’ but she’s always present in giving you — no matter if I dropped the mic, she doesn’t act like it didn’t drop. She picks it up, you know what I mean? And so I felt there were many times — one time we had a scene by the fire that was a tricky five-page two-hander and she was just so present in that.”

McKenzie picked on where Whigham left off and identified a particular scene in the movie where Hathaway gave her access to a part of her own character that she might not have been able to reach on her own.

“I think one of those scenes is a scene in the bar. And I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s kind of a pivotal scene in this film for our relationship. I think a lot of what I brought to Eileen and Rebecca’s relationship was true to the real life relationship. I’ve kind of mentioned a bit before, but I’ve always been a bit of a shy mover and dancer and Annie had to get onto the dance floor and do these incredible moves that were true of the 60s and look like she was having a good time, which she was, and she was kind of drawing me in, drawing this shy kind of odd awkwardness out of me, which only came out because she was there.”

Inspired by McKenzie’s answer, Hathaway jumped in to examine what Eileen means to Rebecca:

“You just helped me remember something. This is gonna be weird, but I’d like to contradict an answer I gave in another interview where I was asked what Eileen means for Rebecca and I said I wasn’t sure Eileen necessarily means that much to Rebecca because Rebecca’s like a serial monologuer and she’s always thinking about herself. But, I remember in that scene your vulnerability actually was one of the first times Eileen becomes real for Rebecca. And that is one of their first real moments where Rebecca’s fully present and she’s not just performing in front of someone.”

Interested in learning more from McKenzie, Hathaway, and the Eileen group? Check watch the video interview at the top of this article to see our entire talk!

We would like to express our gratitude to all of our Sundance 2023 partners, especially our presenting partner Saratoga Spring Water and our supporting partners Marbl Toronto, EMFACE, Sommsation, Hendrick’s Gin, Stella Artois, mou, and the Fisker Ocean electric car.

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