"American Woman" Film Interview With Cast and Crew

American Woman is Semi Chellas's directorial debut. No stranger to film, the writer/director is a primetime Emmy nominated writer and producer of Mad Men, The Romanoffs, and The Eleventh Hour, which won Best Drama in Canada twice.

It's 1975, and radicals in California have kidnapped a young woman, the daughter of one of the wealthiest, most influential families in America, whom converted her to their cause. In an isolated country manor in New York's Hudson Valley, Jenny (Hong Chau) is working as a housemaid, holding her tongue as her employer (Ellen Burstyn) comments scornfully on a live news report about the group.

But when a mysterious friend tempts Jenny with a risky proposal, we realize there's more to this than meets the eye. Jenny is, in fact, a fugitive, wanted for the bombing of a draft office in the '60s. Ironically, she's also a pacifist, whose principled rejection of the Vietnam War has brought her first to violent activism, and then into hiding, but now that the war is ending she's looking for a way to rejoin society.

Recruited to help the surviving radicals hide out in a secluded farmhouse upstate, Jenny is caught off-guard by the ethereal Pauline (Sarah Gadon), the kidnapped heiress reborn as a true believer. But the tension grows as Juan (John Gallagher Jr.) proves to be volatile, possibly violent, and Yvonne (Lola Kirke) to be calculating and unstable. As a tireless FBI agent (David Cubitt) closes in, and the truth of Pauline's circumstances become clear, Jenny will face a watershed choice.

Produced by Elevation Pictures, Killer Films and First Generation Films, and adapted from Susan Choi’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel, American Woman, is a reimagining of American history. Capturing the era’s politics, Semi Chellas explores the troubled ideology of the young radicals, conveying the intensity and isolation of their precarious situation as they both question their beliefs and alliances. Chau (Downsizing, Driveways) and Gadon (True Detective) star as the troubled, idealistic pair.

American Woman is part of the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival in its Spotlight Narrative Section April 25 – May 4 at various venues around New York City. Find more information here

We caught up with the film premiere and Q&A after, including: writer/director Semi Chellas and actors Hong Chau, Sarah Gadon, David Cubitt, John Gallagher Jr and Lola Kirke at the SVA Theater in NYC.

Did all the past projects, such as Mad Men, The Romanoffs, prepare you for directing American woman?

Chellas: I can't say that I learned a lot about storytelling from being on Mad Men, but I found that Matthew Weiner(Mad Men creator) had such an interesting take on the period, and really always got us to be in the moment of that period, not looking back on it. I tried to make this project with that spirit, not feeling remote or from the past. It was a time that was similar to this moment that we're in now, with a long non-ending war, without a clear outcome, with a president who’s being investigated, in a very divided country, and people felt that radical action was necessary, through ways that are often questionable, I guess. I learned also in Mad Men and The Romanoffs, that it's better to raise questions than to answer them. I wanted the movie to do that.

(To Hong Chau and Sarah Gadon): I was wondering how you went about creating these characters and if you specifically worked together to try to find a portrayed sense of intimacy in being those characters.

Gadon: I just did a lot of smoking.

Chau: It was very easy to deal with the intimacy aspect with Sarah. The script described her as a hero. I can't think of anyone else who embodies in theory that entire open forum.

I was wondering what drew you to this particular project, what spoke to you?

Gallagher:To be completely honest, the first thing I saw that caught my eye was that Lola, Hong, and Sarah were already attached. I saw that on the email, and was pretty much ready to sign on from that alone. Then I read it and of course fell in love with the script and once I met Semi, I was hooked.

Cubitt: I've known Semi for 25 years. When it was brought to my attention, I said yes immediately to play the role, then read the script and loved it.

Chau: I had just wrapped Downsizing and was struggling to find something interesting to work on. The script for American Woman came along. It was just so well written. I also read the novel quickly, before meeting Susan Choi, and it was awesome. I was a little bit frustrated that I never heard of Jenny Shimada, who is the Japanese American woman my character is based off of. Susan Choi did a lot of the research for me and wrote this really beautiful layered story. I didn't really have to do much historical research, because it was all there in the novel.

Gadon: I knew semi because we're both Canadians (laughs). I was a big fan of her work. I think she is just such an incredible storyteller, she always sees things from a really interesting angle. She took a story that is well known and approached it from a completely unknown place. It was fascinating for me, to look at two characters that probably never would have crossed paths, and to see what happens when they did.

Kirke: I loved the script and the novel as well. I was also really interested in the questions that the script raised, about being an activist, how to be radical–that can be a really flawed venture a lot of the time, but also necessary.

(To Semi Chellas): Can you talk about the journey of transforming the novel into a movie?

Chellas: I've adapted other books as well. One of the things that I always find is, that novels have a very internal story and a part of us human beings is to find the events. The events of this story are funny because nothing keeps happening, right? There is this beautiful line in the book about how much of fugitive time is waiting. What you're waiting for is to be caught; because you know that the only way it ends is you die, or you're caught. Everything else is just pretending to be someone you're not, and living this false life. I tried to make that into a movie, which is a weird journey.

Spivey’s story, which is not in the novel, also inspired me. There's a book called Anyone's Daughter that was a reporter covering the trial of Patricia Hearst, when she was captured and was put on trial for her own crimes. In the middle of covering this trial, the reporter’s own teenage daughter, ran away from boarding school. So she’s trying to hold on a job down in California, and her daughter in the East Coast goes missing. She has this epiphany about this is what this child is. We put our children on trial, because they're telling us off basically, and they're throwing off all the values that we tried to raise them with. It’s this really moving thing in her book. I wanted to bring that to this story.

by Lia F. (with additional content from the TFF programming Team and Falco Ink PR)