exercise that is all the more sophisticated because of how you got there. Stewart: I’ve never prepped a movie like this in my life, and I’ve also never felt freer or more unbound. It might have been counterintuitive for me as a younger actor, but actually, oddly, it’s the way to really act. It’s the fucking way to fly through something. We chipped away at it. It felt like one little foot in front of the other every single day. I like shooting out of order, especially in a movie like this where it wasn’t like I had to contend with a huge age gap. In this sense, I enjoyed days where there would be a scene from the beginning of the movie and a scene from towards the end, because it made everything feel very close. Larraín: And possible. Because it takes so much weight out of you. If you’re doing the whole movie scene by scene, you only see what’s still to come. By shooting out of order, it’s just this little moment. Just this idea. Just focus on the little thing, and then the next one, and then the next one. Stewart: Who knows how different the movie would have wound up if we had shuffled a different deck of cards in the schedule. Had we just had a different reason to do it like we did. You learn certain things and then you take those things into the next day, and you build upon the scene that might come before or after. You don’t know how, if you shuffle the deck differently, it would have been informed.
Were there ever moments of wanting to go back to something you’d done earlier because of what you’d later learned? Stewart: Not really. To be completely honest, maybe a couple moments, but my immediate reaction to you asking is no. Perhaps there were one
or two things where I would have been overthinking because I really wanted them to land and be good, but there was nothing I was ever like, “Hey, do you think that we could go back?” Because if we had needed to do that, we were usually in a position where we could have gone back and done it. Larraín: It is so amazing when you work so hard around something and then it actually happens and it’s so short. That moment of capture is so short and fleeting. Stewart: I know. Sometimes we would get it and you were like, “Should we do it again? We might as well, because we’re here.” But oftentimes it would be the first or second take that probably wound up in the movie, and it became, “Let’s just taste it one more time because after that, that’s it. This is the last meal.” Larraín: The thing is, this is just like music. Sometimes you hear a song you like, and you imagine that person maybe only played it once. You can spend years of your life listening to that song, and it took them three minutes to record it. It’s incredible. Stewart: Yeah, it doesn’t matter if it was played a million times since, because that recording was just once. I always have visual flashes of them writing the song or recording it. I imagine myself there. Larraín: I just saw the trailer for Peter Jackson’s Beatles doc, and they were preparing the song “I’ve Got a Feeling”. That song will last forever, and how they created it is fucking cosmic. It’s incredible how time is just this weird perception. Sometimes on set you feel like you’re flirting with things you don’t fully understand, but the capture of that is short, and it’s nice that it’s short. I don’t like to do 50 takes. At most, maybe, we did 12, but the regular amount was three or four.
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Princess Diana with her boys; cradling Prince Harry (Freddie Spry) as Prince William (Jack Nielen) looks on.