The filmmakers behind heart-shattering Netflix hit Pieces of a Woman give Ella Kemp a glimpse into the mechanics of their most talked-about scene, the physicality of grief and the magic smell of apples.
When Martin Scorsese first watched Pieces of a Woman, he described it as more of an experience than a movie. It’s hard to disagree: the film’s visceral 22-minute opening scene, a one-take shot of Vanessa Kirby’s character Martha giving birth, quietly knocks the wind out of you.
Made by husband and wife Kornél Mundruczó (on directing duties) and Kata Wéber (on script), Pieces of a Woman offers unrelenting emotion as Martha processes an unspeakable loss and tries to piece herself back together. Kirby is impossibly good: raw and aching, unpredictable and tender all at once.
Following the recent allegations of sexual and domestic violence against her co-star Shia LaBeouf from his former romantic partner FKA Twigs, fraught scenes between the pair—LaBeouf plays Martha’s partner, Sean—are supremely difficult to watch. Netflix has since removed all mentions of LaBeouf from their website and awards campaigns, and a legal case is ongoing. Cast members worthy of mention include Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn as Martha’s mother, Elizabeth, comedian Iliza Shlesinger as her sister, Anita, and Uncut Gems director Benny Safdie as her brother-in-law.
Kornél Mundruczó and Vanessa Kirby on the set of ‘Pieces of a Woman’.
I wonder what it must be like to see Pieces of a Woman on the big screen, or on the stage for that matter (it began life as a play, also written by Wéber and directed by Mundruczó, who are well-known in their native Hungary for their theatrical and film work). The film premiered, miraculously, at the 2020 Venice International Film Festival, where Kirby won the award for Best Actress. Subsequent screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival (where it was one of our top picks) took place virtually, and now with a Netflix release and yet more pandemic-enforced lockdowns around the world, few cinemas will be projecting this volcanic drama.
Still, Pieces of a Woman envelops you in Martha’s headspace wherever you’re watching. There is hope that by finding it on Netflix, the film will reach a broad, worldwide audience, who will see themselves in the love and loss that propels the film, and recognize the hope and heartbreak of their own lives.
Why did you start the film with a shot of Sean, not Martha?
Kornél Mundruczó: It was important to start on the bridge with Sean, as we later finish on the bridge with Martha. It creates a sense of curiosity and suspense. Who is Martha? And I love the sentence there that Sean says when he goes, “Martha is always fine”.
Kata Wéber: I really wanted to start with that line in the script, because then you’ll see that Martha isn’t actually always fine. It’s asking what she has to live up to, the picture of perfect Martha. Later on, you understand why it’s so important what she has to go through.
Iliza Shlesinger, Ellen Burstyn and Sarah Snook in ‘Pieces of a Woman’.
Martha has to go through so much in that incredible 22-minute take of her giving birth. How did that scene come to be, and which of you came up with the idea first?
KM: It was my idea, but it was not a quick idea. When you read 35 pages about birth—an experience which is amazingly personal and shows a variety of emotions—you wonder how you can do that. The main thing was wondering about using a handheld camera because it gives a lot of opportunity, but at the same time I found it to be too personal, and it’s very much like dogma filmmaking. And then a distant camera felt too manipulative and cold, so we found a tool called a gimbal, which is not really a filmmaking tool. It’s used more for sports and music videos. But we felt it was very spiritual, which helped us represent the spirit which needed to be there. Like an unseen spirit, which is always inside births.
I have real problems with cutting, and telling the time of a fourteen-hour story. It didn’t feel like the right choice, because we’re not a documentary, but it didn’t feel like you had Martha’s physical presence if you were cutting it. So, how could we grow her physical presence? So we expanded the film time, and we compressed into that expanded film time a compressed real time. And then it works. It felt like a manifesto for me, like a monolith. It represents Martha’s inner journey but also every single person can feel connected to that. It was a long research process to find the perfect form, but then we shot it on the first day.
Was there anything you were worried about for the viewer, when deciding to begin the film with that scene?
KM: I decided to start the film with that scene because I was worried about the whole movie! I felt that you can’t play it without this kind of experience. I never really felt that I wanted to do a movie, I was trying to say without words that I wanted to create more of an experience, an emotional journey. And later, when Martin Scorsese became a producer, he was the one who called me after watching it for the first time and said, “This is not a movie, it’s an experience”. I’d never named it before then, but had always wanted to do that. So it was important to just jump into the deepest point of the emotional journey.
Vanessa Kirby as Martha in ‘Pieces of a Woman’.
Vanessa Kirby has said the film responds to the fact that we’re so used to seeing death in cinema, and yet we capture birth on film so little. Was that something you were conscious about when making the film, or was your story always more personal?
KW: Because it was first a play, there was already the question about how you’d do a birth scene on stage, which is even trickier than on film. But if you don’t do it, the whole story doesn’t make sense because you don’t establish this loving relationship—not just within the couple, but towards the baby. So I really wanted to stand for this scene. I wrote it long, because when you give birth there is this huge beauty and grace and love, and a certain kind of horror too. It’s uncontrolled and so spiritual.
KM: When I read the script it was shockingly personal, but also I thought that this really isn’t an academic movie. The structure is very special, it’s really not a dogmatic arthouse approach, which I did quite a few of! It’s not commercial either, so we thought, what is this? I didn’t know, but knew that I wanted to tell this story. Am I able to create a birth scene, which is kind of a taboo? Am I able to create a very emotional movie in a realistic sense? Which also feels like a form of taboo. I like the experience of exploring new fields and giving an audience something that is not just a movie.
What were your different reference points for Martha’s different chapters in the film? Her journey is so unconventional and Vanessa’s performance feels like it taps into so many different emotions.
KW: It’s about the inner journey of someone, so you want to make sure she knows all the aspects of this state of mind. We talked about bereavement processes where grief doesn’t go through the typical five stages, but it’s just stuck somewhere. What is grieving? If you talk to a psychiatrist they could often say that there is no recipe. It could be you waking up at four in the morning wanting to bake a cake. That’s grieving. We tried to establish it as authentic as possible.
KM: There’s a hundred layers to Martha. Even in the birth, there’s thirty stages that she has to go through.
KW: And she had to understand how physical it is. Giving birth is so physical, but also grieving is not intellectual. You cannot figure out how to do it.
KM: It’s also our personal experience, as we had a miscarriage. But when I read the script, I still didn’t know grief was so physical. It’s such a special perspective, because if you are not in it, you have the pain but you don’t have this kind of physical longing. That’s why we talked to Vanessa so much about her silence and her body as being way more important than any acting skills. The most important thing was to feel it. In her nail polish, her body language, her walking, how she smokes. That was so much more important for me as a director than the big speech. And of course the big speech matters, but all the other details are the character.
I want to talk about the significance of the apples. Martha says it’s the way baby Yvette smells when she was born, and there’s a lot of symbolism in the idea of a growing seed. But does that fruit in particular have any significance for you?
KW: I was trying to find something expressing her longing and love to her baby. I didn’t know what it could be at first, but when my baby was born, she smelled like an apple and it was so surprising. It’s so weird and beautiful and nice, and I’ll never forget it. It’s so hard to express the inner journey and the longing and the love without words—I really wanted to try and convey that.
Benny Safdie as Chris in ‘Pieces of a Woman’.
What do you think Letterboxd members should watch after Pieces of a Woman?
KM: I’m a fan of early Michelangelo Antonioni movies, like Red Desert or La Notte. I think those intellectual melodramas are very healing.
What is a film that always breaks your heart?
KM: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
KW: A Woman Under the Influence for me. It’s close to something we’re trying to understand here.
And what about when you want to piece it back together?
KM: For me it’s Late Spring by Yasujirō Ozu.
KW: I was just thinking the same! Someone peels an apple in that movie…
Finally, what films made you want to be filmmakers?
KM: I grew up in the Soviet area watching a lot of movies in my childhood by Elem Klimov, Aleksey German, Andrei Tarkovsky. These movies are socially reflective but also very emotional and spiritual, very transcendental. And those transcendental acts feel almost forgotten now, and that’s a bit painful. Even contemporary Russian movies are not so deeply transcendental. The images from those movies really stayed with me—I mean, I’m from the East!
KW: For me it’s The Graduate. It’s just so much about life. It’s funny and witty, I just love it. I could watch it 100 times and I would never get bored.
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Screenwriter Kata Wéber crafts an insular script where [Vanessa Kirby]’s internal struggle and grief manifests the actions and stories of the people surrounding her in ways to reverberate the tragedy she experiences. It’s a staggering portrait of grief, but Pieces of a Woman falls apart after the intimate first act (somewhat purposely) yet how Mundruczó frames the couple's drama through a punishing Boston winter makes the film particularly emotional.
There is little time for set up or establishing shots in Kornel Mundruczo’s Pieces of a Woman. After a few quick glances over a Boston, and a title card displaying the date, he quickly plunges the viewer into an arduous, thirty minute labour scene with the films two leads. It’s unswerving in its intensity and perhaps – unfortunately – sets the film up to be something it’s not.
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