‘May December’ follows an actress who visits a small town to study the life of the character she’ll be playing for her next movie. “I read it and was like, ‘I'd love to do this, but only if it were Todd making it,’” Natalie Portman tells VF.
At first, she seems to be a good person doing right by what could be an inherently exploitative situation, but soon it becomes clear there’s more to her than that. Her independent film is based on the nationally notorious relationship between Gracie and a 13-year-old boy, who in the present day is still her husband and father of their three children. Visiting this unusual family, Elizabeth tries her best to study Gracie, who proves more elusive and contradictory than she may have expected.
Portman says she’s never had the experience of being able to study a real-life character who is still alive . But she has a lot of thoughts about the responsibility actors have when telling real-life people’s stories. “It is very, I think, dangerous,” she says. “As artists we have to be very aware of not being vampires on people’s lives, and being much more empathetic rather than blood-sucking in our trying to feel other people’s emotions.
Haynes and Portman compare her role in the first part of the movie to that of a journalist. “It’s the kind of question of, while you’re investigating, how much are you impacting the story?” says Portman. “How does your gaze alone change it? Not to mention if you start inserting yourself into people’s lives.”
Elizabeth’s involvement in her subjects’ lives deepens as the story goes on. She slowly starts to take on Gracie’s mannerisms, leading to an unsettling scene in which Portman, directly facing the camera, recites a monologue as Gracie. Because it was filmed as a single shot, Haynes gave Portman the room to do multiple takes. “The eight takes that Natalie did, someday need to be shared, because of just the most extraordinary performative exploration and nuance,” says Haynes.
In a weird turn of events, the take that Haynes chose to use includes a moment when a truck unexpectedly drove by the set in downtown Savannah, creating a low growl underneath her monologue. Like much about this project, Todd was sure it was a sign. “It was just like, Holy shit,” says Haynes. “It was just another little indicator that that was the one.”
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