CL: It does.
Marling: You gotta go deep under the words, deep into the character, to make them feel real true. I felt that so much when Nick Jarecki came to me with “Arbitrage.” I was like, “Wow. This girl.” I haven’t seen this woman in cinema yet, but I know who she is. I know who this person is and I can do it. It’s not like me, but I know how to step into sides of myself and add other pieces and find it. But then there’s also something really beautiful about writing for myself sometimes. Like when there’s a facet of myself that is under-explored and I want to give myself permission to do it, but can’t in the real world. Like Maggie from “Sound of My Voice” was very intense and biting and cruel—sometimes just brutally cruel to people. And I’m not like that day to day, you know. [Laughs] But I definitely have those capacities inside me. And it sometimes feels delicious to get to explore that, those other instincts, within the safety of a fictitious story and set.
HL: With your recent Writers Guild of America nomination, I feel like it’s a good time for reflection on your career as a whole so far. And you have a very interesting story in that you were actually recruited by Goldman Sachs for investment banking early on. [Laughs] And then obviously you took this major detour into storytelling. You’ve told stories in different mediums in many different ways. What have you found to be the most important component of a good story?
Marling: Oh, wow. [Laughs] You know what’s so interesting? I’m going back to writing right now, and every time I go back to writing, I always get this, like, fluttery feeling in my heart where I’m like, “Oh my God, I don’t know how to write.” And I used to be so embarrassed by that. And then I read an interview once with Nicole Kidman, who I think is one of the world’s truly great actors, and she said, sometimes I come on set and even though I’ve done this thousands of times I’m like, “I don’t know how to do this. Like, how do I act?” I think there’s something about that that’s really incredible. If you can hold onto it—if you do not become jaded, if you always feel every time you’re entering a story or coming on set like it’s the first time—there’s a wilderness to it. You don’t know if you’re any good at it and you’ve gotta work hard to try to find it. And I feel that about writing. I’ve been tooling on a couple of different stories recently, and the same feeling comes when a narrative falls into place. It’s hard to explain. For a while you’re just feeling around in the dark, and there are different moods and feelings and characters and some snatches of dialogue come. Or there’s a little bit of a setting in a world or a place or some situation you want to explore. And they’re all just kind of fragments, you know? Then suddenly something will come and it will be whole. You asked what makes a great story. I think it’s this thing. It’s you finding something in the dark that has a beating heart that’s waiting to be born, and you’re still in the dark, but you can hear the heartbeat and your job is to just birth it, you know? Every time I’ve gone to start a new one, I’m like, “I don’t know what a story is.” Who knows? And then every time you find a beating heart in the dark you’re just like, okay, my job is just to be a humble servant to that story and to let it come through me. That’s such an abstract answer. [Laughs]
CL: It reminds me of when you described working with Clive Owen, how when you did the Zoom meetings and talked about the characters, he always knew how to get to what feels truthful and what doesn’t. Because at the end of the day, storytelling is truth telling, right? That’s like the beating heart you described. If you have that, everything else can be built around it.
Marling: Oh my gosh, yes. And that’s why when you get to work with truly extraordinary actors or directors of photography or production designers or costume designers, the truly extraordinary ones are all people who put their egos aside and can help find the beating heart to deliver that thing to the audience. And Clive is so wonderful at it, and Emma [Corrin,] and Harris [Dickinson], everybody in this cast. We got so lucky. And you know, as a writer-director, you’re not always right. But when you get really great collaborators, they’ll be like, “Oh, it’s over here,” or, “It’s a little bit this,” or, “It’s a little bit that.” And they help ensure that the pulse is robust all the time, and that you never drop the story’s rhythm, that you’re always being true to what that initial rhythm was. You’re all in tune listening for the same thing that you heard the very first time you heard the story. Oh, it’s such a lucky thing when you get to work with good people. There’s nothing like it.