No, okay, hold on.

What does that mean?

Oh, God, I hated this line.

I hated this line.

Variety, it's the spice of life.

♪♪

Will they kill me, do you think?

I know what that's from.

I have a visceral memory of this.

I say that at some point in Spencer.

Will they kill me, do you think?

Primarily, it was about kind of absorbing her feeling.

I know that sounds so obvious, but I had to focus on how she made me feel and just kind of internalize that, take it on physically somehow.

I had a really brilliant coach that helped me kind of source my inclinations toward her and kind of the ways that we were similar were what I wanted to focus on versus the things that made us dissimilar.

The things that I felt tied to her with were really palpable to me, so I just sort of kind of thought if I could focus on those things and distract people from the things that were not the same and then kind of forget all of that and take the ride, which was pretty surreal and not very factual.

It was like a weird, fevery, poemy experience.

I had to kind of trust fall into it.

Thank you.

Okay, how long have you been 17?

I still feel 17 sometimes, or at least in contexts such as these.

Oh, this is from Twilight.

The first one.

How long have you been 17?

I started when I was 17.

We finished up when I was like around, yeah, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21.

I'm really good at math, five years.

To stick with something for that long, it's not like a very actor-y thing to do.

We all have this like embedded, flitty nature.

I want to try on all the shoes, and they were the same shoes for so long.

It was a trippy experience to create something that was entirely your own, but then in the service of something that people love so much.

The guttural nature of the word belt.

I can't hear belt, the word name, Bella.

That has really, all I can hear right now when I'm trying to just press rewind is just, Bella.

Bella.

Everyone just referring constantly to her, even if she's not in the scene, or yeah.

I was just like, enough.

Bella needs to go to bed.

Bella needs to just go chill for a while.

No, guys, I want to start an all-girl rock band.

That's from The Runways.

No, guys, I want to start an all-girl rock band.

I was so scared to play her.

I was so obsessed with Joan, and the movie itself was such a kind of, just a droplet in such a larger life that I did feel like an immense pressure to kind of get all of it in, even though it was just a glimpse in sort of the formative years of like, really just the band that made her want to be in a band for the rest of her life, which is a pretty revolutionary thing for a girl at that time to want to do.

The whole time I was just like, turning myself inside out, wondering if she was down with how it was all coming out.

It was such a nice opportunity to kind of go in a mosh pit and get out some energy and be able to come back to everything else like, lighter.

Did you know that it takes men an additional seven seconds to perceive, this was a mouthful at the time, a woman as a threat compared to a man.

Did you know that it takes men an additional seven seconds to perceive a woman as a threat compared to a man?

Yeah, I remember saying that.

That was from a little film called The Charlie's Angels.

It takes men an additional seven seconds to perceive a woman as a threat compared to a man.

We wanted a strong opener, you know?

We wanted to really like, broadcast what the movie was about.

It was a good idea at the time.

I hated making that movie.

I don't know what else to say to you.

Honestly, the three, you can't touch, like Cameron, Lucy and Drew.

I love that movie.

If that says anything.

It's not about owning her, it's about building a life with her.

Is this like a Twilight movie?

No, okay, hold on.

I'm gonna do a Kristen Stewart impression to get it.

It's not about owning her, it's about building a life, happy season.

It's not about owning her, it's about building a life with her.

It's a gay Christmas movie.

All Christmas movies are pretty gay.

I think it's just sort of like, the most straightforward one.

I really love little tiny movies.

I love ones that you don't always know how you feel about them.

Those don't sell as easily.

And so it was nice to be a part of something that you just know exactly how you feel about it.

And it was nice to not feel like we were doing human impressions, but to actually be the humans that we are in a context that felt easy.

And like, in a time where we're kind of finally starting to broaden perspective, it was kind of the most fun.

It was kind of the most rebellious thing we could do is acknowledge that it hadn't been done before.

And then we could go do the wild, bloody, you know, edgy, in your face stuff because we were also like, also we're just wanna have a good time.

Thank you for bringing this back to my memory.

It was a good one.

Surgery is the new sex.

Yeah, what does that mean?

I don't know if anyone on the movie actually knows.

Yeah, so that's from Crimes of the Future.

It's a David Cronenberg movie.

Surgery is the new sex.

It's a part of David's like utter genius is that you go, this made me feel a lot.

And it put me in my body and it kickstarted a thought process that nobody can untangle, but nobody can stop talking about.

I loved making that movie.

Also, Viggo's like a legend.

He's the hottest guy I've ever seen in my life.

I was like, I can't believe I'm allowed to do this.

I was there for two weeks.

We were in Athens.

It was like so fucking hot the entire time.

I can't believe I got to be in that movie.

Like so lucky.

You know, a little reefer would take the edge off him.

When, what year is it?

A little ree, you know, a little reefer would take the, you know, a little ree, American Ultra?

No.

Oh, okay.

That makes sense.

Oh yeah.

Oh God, I hated this line.

I hated this line.

I felt like it was like a faux.

In fact, I have the same response to it right now.

I'm like, what is this?

Like 1970?

Like I just, yeah, a little reefer.

You know, a little reefer would take the edge off him.

There's not like tons and tons of information about this person.

She was like such a suppressed person.

She was an activist in a time where her government really had villainized her to the extent that she was like a dangerous reject.

The end of her life is tragically cut short.

She's an actress that I think was like very present and honest and wanted to work for the kind of similar reasons that I do, which is you want to get closer to people and yourself versus tell other people's stories and kind of be a puppet or a mouthpiece.

But I had to fill in a lot of the blanks.

So actually, it was a personal endeavor more so than it was getting her right.

So we made this oath.

Whoever died first would send the other a sign.

That's from Personal Shopper.

Whoever died first would send the other a sign.

It's an Olivier Assayas movie.

It's the second one we did together.

And while making this movie, we were like so tired and like so scared.

It was the weirdest existential spiral

I've ever had on a movie that was not fake at all.

Like I wasn't generating that.

I think that movie is probably different for everyone.

So I don't want to like lead the witness.

But you don't have to believe in ghosts for them to be real.

There are present feelings that are more legitimate than alive things.

And there are dead things that are more present than alive things.

I'm definitely scared of ghosts, but I don't know if they're real.

I don't think we have words for this.

I think that we definitely have goosebumps for a reason.

I think that there are through lines and coincidences.

And I think there's an internal life that is inarticulatable.

Do you drink to drown your sorrows or your conscience?

This is in an accent.

And yeah, it was early.

It's Snow White.

Yeah.

Do you drink to drown your sorrows or your conscience?

It's a tough one.

It deals with some real present female issues.

Charlize is one of the most stunning and truly powerful people to stand in a room with that you can encounter in life.

And I was kind of in a time in my life where I really was like vulnerable and small and like insecure, but then also like kind of raging quietly.

You know, Charlize is like a really, really fun scene partner.

And so the whole time I was just like,

I feel so bad for the queen.

Actually, she's not bad.

She's been dealt a rough set of cards.

Anytime there are castles involved, like women are being locked somewhere.

It just felt like kind of a really cool way to tell that story that was fun and like take a fairy tale and turn it on its head a bit.

That's nice.

Well, that's nice of you.

This is my movie.

You're getting water in my mouth.

Oh, it's called Come Swim.

Yeah.

You're getting water in my mouth.

This was really cool because I put the two actors that I worked with, which were two of my really great friends into a pool.

And I just told them to kind of play around.

It really, even if you took all the pictures out of that movie, it was a soundscape that I thought was still pretty experiential.

Even though the movie does sort of relate to a heartbreak element, it kind of does supersede that.

So I put this like couple in a pool and was like, just try and make them float.

And they were like playing around and he kept pushing her off.

And she kept going like, oh, stop, you're getting water in my mouth.

And I was like, oh wow.

If we just like pull that through the rest of the movie, you can take a memory that was really happy, but then it's sort of transmuted by time and your memory starts to sort of morph it into something else.

And if you're sad about someone, something that was fun once is now really painful.

So it sort of started out as like,

LOL, you're getting water in my mouth.

And it was like, you're getting water.

You're getting water in my mouth.

And then it was just sort of about this kid like drowning in his memories.

I haven't been to Sundance in a minute.

The last time I was there,

I was with my short film.

I feel so at home there.

I feel obviously like, you know, that festival was designed for people like me.

I love that place.

The two movies that I'm there with this year are called Love Lies Bleeding by an English director, actually about a really particular slice of the US of A, kind of an odd imagining of an 80s fever dream in which I think Rose was kind of encouraged to tell a strong female story.

And then the other one is called Love Me.

It is a very touching story about all of us.

It takes place in a time where we have become extinct and the internet is still kind of our last footprint.

I wanna go watch more movies.

I know everyone says that about festivals when they're there with a film, but I would love to stay and watch the shorts program.

It's not the same as it was when everyone was wearing UGG boots when I was there in the early 2000s.

What am I saying?

Like, yeah, I bet that's exactly what it's gonna be.

And then I'm gonna be like, you know, when I first came to Sundance,

I got my first parka.

♪♪ ♪♪