By Nicole Winfield
VENICE, Italy (AP) --Jessica Chastain has been friends with Oscar Isaac since their Julliard days but says it was "a blessing and a curse" to play his wife in a remake of Ingmar Bergman's classic "Scenes From a Marriage," which premiered Saturday at the Venice Film Festival.
It was a blessing because they didn't need to get to know one another and could be brutally honest with one another. But it was also a curse because they couldn't take a break from their togetherness and got to the point "where we were reading each others minds!"
"So I was like 'Get out of my head!'" Chastain told reporters ahead of the premiere. "I felt on this job that there was no quiet time."
The project was an intense one, reimagining in a contemporary American context the unravelling of a marriage depicted in Bergman's 1973 Swedish television miniseries that starred Bergman's longtime partner, Liv Ullmann. In this five-episode HBO series directed by Hagai Levi, the gender roles are essentially flipped and the circumstances brought up-to-date.
Isaac, who has two other movies showing at Venice, agreed that their close friendship posed "its own challenges" when filming such an inherently fraught project since "you care about the person so much."
The two, who starred together in the 2014 "A Most Violent Year,"' used an intimacy coordinator and lots of talking to map out the bedroom scenes to make sure both were comfortable.
Isaac, who noted that their children are together in the same play group, said he and Chastain also watched films together try to figure out how to represent the sexual side of their relationship to make it seem truthful without going overboard.
"There are so many times you don't buy it, and then it can get too gratuitous and you don't really buy that either," Isaac said.
Chastain said she appreciated talking through the characters and mapping out their relationship ahead of time.
"I would still get embarrassed, so bourbon helped a lot," Chastain said, giggling. "But the level of trust was high."
Local school staple “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” from 1939 hits the big screen nationwide
Most Maine schoolchildren know about the boy lost for more than a week in 1939 after climbing the state's tallest mountain. Now the rest of the U.S. is getting in on the story.
Opening in 650 movie theaters on Friday, "Lost on a Mountain in Maine" tells the harrowing tale of 12-year-old Donn Fendler, who spent nine days on Mount Katahdin and the surrounding wilderness before being rescued. The gripping story of survival commanded the nation's attention in the days before World War II and the boy's grit earned an award from the president.
For decades, Fendler and Joseph B. Egan's book, published the same year as the rescue, has been required reading in many Maine classrooms, like third-grade teacher Kimberly Nielsen's.
"I love that the overarching theme is that Donn never gave up. He just never quits. He goes and goes," said Nielsen, a teacher at Crooked River Elementary School in Casco, who also read the book multiple times with her own kids.
Separated from his hiking group in bad weather atop Mount Katahdin, Fendler used techniques learned as a Boy Scout to survive. He made his way through the woods to the east branch of the Penobscot River, where he was found more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) from where he started. Bruised and cut, starved and without pants or shoes, he survived nine days by eating berries and lost 15 pounds (7 kilograms).
The boy's peril sparked a massive search and was the focus of newspaper headlines and nightly radio broadcasts. Hundreds of volunteers streamed into the region to help.
The movie builds on the children's book, as told by Fendler to Egan, by drawing upon additional interviews and archival footage to reinforce the importance of family, faith and community during difficult times,... Read More