UTG INTERVIEW: Director Ned Benson Discusses ‘The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby’

To cast both Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy in your first feature film you’ve got to be a pretty special director, and after seeing The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby: Them, I can vouch for the fact that Ned Benson has some pretty special traits to him as a filmmaker.

His first feature film, The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby, is split into three parts – HimHer, and Them – each exploring different viewpoints and perspectives as to why the relationship between Conor Ludlow (McAvoy) and Eleanor Rigby (Chastain) failed. It portrays their relationship in both a raw and a sensitive manner, making for a certain type of realism that we often don’t see in romantic dramas.

As you can imagine, the Them cut examines Conor and Eleanor’s relationship from a level, in-between ground as compared to the other two, and actually never even existed until both the Him and Her cut premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. We sat down with Benson to discuss the differences between each of the versions, the significance of the name Eleanor Rigby, and a little bit about a great actress named Jessica Chastain and a great director she once acted under in Terrance Malick. 

UTG: As you probably know, I saw the Them cut of The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby. Was your primary motivation in making the Him and Her cuts to examine the different perspectives of males and females upon the end of a relationship?

Ned Benson: 100% – that was the initial concept that I wanted to play with because I wanted to make a love story or a film about a relationship, and I thought there’s no better way to do that than to show each side of the relationship. 

UTG: It seemed specifically, between (James) McAvoy and (Jessica) Chastain, that Jessica’s Eleanor character’s actions changed more throughout the movie than McAvoy’s Connor character’s. Was this because she was changing more than anyone else seemingly?

Ned Benson: Are you talking the Him or Her cut?

UTG: The Them cut.

Ned Benson: Well, I tried to look at it from this omnipotent viewpoint of an outsider’s perspective of the relationship, but in terms of Connor – he sort of knew that he wanted to go after her from the beginning. I think he just always wanted her back and wasn’t willing to let go of that until later in the film. 

He has sort of a moment that was sort of about letting go. For her, though, her grieving process was this necessity to run away from her life and to disappear in a sense – not only in a real sense but in a sense of identity – and I think that internal process creates more of a complex architecture that she went through as compared to his. It wasn’t oh-so overtly designed that way; it was more of a performance thing.

UTG: So, for reference, do the Him and Her cuts follow the same basic storyline as the Them  cut.

Ned Benson: Yes, the same basic storyline – they take place in the same time period and same context, but they’re more character studies. You follow Conor’s life and there’s a subplot with his father, a subplot with Alexis the bartender, and there’s more with Bill Hader. I think a lot of those things are flushed out in the Them. In the Her version, it explores Eleanor’s relationships with her sister, her father, her mother – those things expand in her version of events and become very different experiences in terms of the fact that you can see the disparate color palates as well as the different costumes and production design change that creates these separate perspectives.  

UTG: I felt like Them  specifically lead to both characters trying to search for their identity; is that where Him and Her go as well? 

Ned Benson: Definitely, although I think I play more with memory as a theme in the Her film, but identity is something I’m really interested in as a filmmaker, and I wanted it to be a central theme in all three of these films. 

UTG: What was the significance of the name Eleanor Rigby to you? Obviously, it rings a bell for anybody that’s heard two or three Beatles songs…

Ned Benson: It was initially an abstract idea because when I started writing I was listening to that song, and I think it helped infuse the idea because there’s that famous line, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” – but also my family, too. I’m a child of Baby Boomers and my music education came from my parents, and my dad got kicked out of high school for stealing a TV in order to watch The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. 

All of that infused me and I sort of wanted to use my parents’ relationship in these films as both these children being reflections and reactions to them, which mirrors my experience with my family, but not in any autobiographical way. 

UTG: So, there’s random bits and pieces of Eleanor’s and Conor’s respective families that you drew from your own family experiences? 

Ned Benson: Yes, little bits and pieces, but I wanted to show that Eleanor and Conor are both looking to their parents’ successes and mistakes in their relationships to examine them themselves within their relationship. 

UTG: Do you have any special relationship with the New York restaurant scene? 

Ned Benson: I have some friends who are in the restaurant business, but I wanted my own specific version of New York City to play a character in the film. I think in my dreams or in another life I wish I could have had a restaurant in New York, so, in a way, it was like a vicarious experience for me. I had two friends who actually gave me their locations to shoot in. It’s just such a difficult but also interesting life, and it’s just something that I was interested in for that specific character for it to be part of that story.

UTG: It definitely says something in terms of identity too – I’ve had friends who’ve gone out and thought that their identity was to own a restaurant, but restaurants fail more than 90% of the time, so it’s hard to find any kind of identity there. Was that conscious?

Ned Benson: It was 100% conscious. I mean, you’re looking at two people – especially in Conor’s case, who had an expectation of what his life would turn out to be. Part of what I was confronting in myself and in this story was the fact that life doesn’t behave the way you want it to, and life doesn’t ever turn out the way you want it to be, so how do you confront those expectations? How do you evolve from those expectations if they’re not met? Especially in love and relationships, too, just as William Hurt’s character says in the film, “We all start off thinking, ‘This is forever,’ but how do you endure?”

UTG: So did you ever consider making the Them cut before the Him or Her cut? Was it ever even a thought? 

Ned Benson: People ask me that question a lot, whether it was in the script stage or the pre-production stage or the production stage or the post-production stage – every part of the process. Until Toronto, when these films premiered for the first time, I hadn’t thought about it at all. However, when we talked about how to distribute this film, it became a serious question. Getting an audience to sit through a three-hour and ten minute, two-part film is a trick, you know? 

There are some people who’d be really interested in that, and that’s really exciting to me, but there are also people out there who would rather watch a two-hour combined version. Some would see all three, too. It’s all about the subjective experience of what an audience would do, so I wanted to give the audience another choice. Essentially, I sat in an editing room to see if it was possible, and the result was the Them version that got into Cannes, which was really exciting for me as a first-time filmmaker – so here we are with three options for the audience to choose from.

UTG: Do you think that there’s any specific order that audiences should watch these films in – age-based, sex-based, or something else?

Ned Benson: I think you can watch them in any way. I don’t want to dictate how they’re seen. If you watch Him before Her and “Them,” that will dictate a certain type of experience, and same if you started with Them and then Her and Him. However, my personal preference is probably to watch Them first and then when you see Him and Her or Her and Him, the story will expand for you, and you are able to learn more about these characters like Conor’s father Spencer or Alexis the bartender or any of the other characters. I think if you’re going to see all three, that’s probably the best way to see it. 

UTG: How would you coach the actors and actresses into acting specifically for the Him or the Her versions?

Aside from Jessica and James, there wasn’t much overlap. There was a bit with Isabelle Huppert and a bit with Viola Davis, and then once with Bill Hader, but aside from those instances, most of the characters stayed within their separate perspectives of Him and “Her.” It was Jessica and James who did the hardest work, and I think that it’s a real testament to them as actors because they were not only playing the character they were playing, they were also playing the perception of the character that they were playing. They were playing two parts, essentially. It’s just a beautiful job that they did. 

In terms of coaching them, we knew exactly what we were doing with his version of the scene and her version of the scene. The setups would change, the costume designs would change, the camera would change, the blocking would change… Then, I’d talk with each of them every day as we rehearsed before each scene, and we would talk about what their intention as for each of these scenes. There were conversations between Jessica, James and myself where if something was working great, we would let it go and adjust it or what not. But, ultimately, I can only take so much credit because it’s their performances that made this thing work because you can actually see the subtle nuances between the two in the overlapping scenes. They acted in a way that shows the beautiful subtlety of how people remember things.

The thing that I was interested in making this movie was, for example, you and I are sitting here having this conversation right now, and I’m going to remember that you were wearing blue jeans and you’re going to remember that I was wearing a coat; I’m going to remember certain things you asked me and you’re going to remember certain things that I told you. The point is that the sum of the two of those things is the truth, but you and I are going to remember two completely different things that is sort of going to be a version of the same moment. I wanted to get into those subtleties as opposed to drastic differences – it’s more about the emotional things that resonated within each of these characters in their experience of the moment. 

UTG: Did you feel that the Them cut really got the truth out there about those two characters?

Ned Benson: Emotionally, yes because we’re looking as an outsider at this relationship. In terms of the other two films, you’re getting each character’s version of it. I think the cumulative effect of it gives a three-dimensional experience of it.

In terms of Jessica Chastain’s performance – I mean, I’ve been watching her since I saw The Tree Of Life, which I’ll get back to – but she’s just blown me away even in the bad movies that she’s in as an actress. She’s one of very few people in Hollywood that can dictate exactly what she’s thinking solely with her own facial expressions. How did she come about to be a part of this project? 

Ned Benson: I agree with you. I met Jess eleven years ago. She had just graduated Juilliard and had won tickets to a short film festival where my first short was playing. There were, like, twelve people in the audience, but after the screening, it was just all the filmmakers – it wasn’t really an audience. But, she had won tickets to it and came to my screening, and she came running up to me after to ask, “Did you write and direct that short?” and I was like, “Yeah,” and she said, “I want to work with you one day.”

From there, we became close friends, and we were in a relationship while I wrote the script. But, ultimately, she read the first part of the script which became Him and then I wrote Her for her because she started asking questions about where Eleanor went, who she was, and she inspired me to think that if I’m going to create a relationship movie, I’m going to show both sides, and that’s so much more interesting than a one-sided script. So, we created a 223-page script in two parts, and along with my producing partner, the three of us tried to make it. Ultimately, though, it was James McAvoy who locked our financing two months before we shot. It was a pretty amazing process. Jess got an Executive Producing credit for it.

UTG: I read that you actually had a chance to spend time on the sets of two of Terry Malick’s movies – The Tree Of Life and The Thin Red Line – were you able to learn anything as a filmmaker from him? 

I wasn’t on the set of The Thin Red Line, I was an intern during the production of the film at their office in Los Angeles, which is when I was 17. I was actually with Jess on the set of The Tree Of Life writing The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby, and that was incredible. 

Terry’s sets are incredibly collaborative. You watch what he does and it’s like watching a symphony or something because he has this way of allowing life to infiltrate his frame. He loves accidents. He loves finding things and allowing the chaos of life to exist within what he’s shooting, and I can’t do what he does, but I can try to add a little bit of that into what I’m doing. My homage to Terry was the scene where they have the flashback in the car and they start dancing in the headlights. That was my ode to Badlands, to Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen.

That scene, I shot it in a way where I sort of let Jessica and James do what they were doing. There was a script there, but they were improvising, and anywhere where I had the chance to do that I tried to infuse that ideology. That’s just my perception of Terry, though, because no one can make films like he makes films. 

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