“Fiction is always a documentary of the actors”: Sebastián Lelio on Disobedience

The best films about London, such as Peeping Tom (1960), Performance (1970) or Nil by Mouth (1997), are often those that concentrate on a limited area and milieu. The Sebastián Lelio film as we have come to know it through the Chilean director’s international successes Gloria (2013) and A Fantastic Woman (2017), tends to offer sensitive, subjective, protagonist-centred portrayals of people pushing against their circumstances. So if you’re looking to make a good film set in London – a city that has often been better seen through foreign eyes – bringing Lelio in makes sense, for his new film Disobedience is mostly restricted to the world of north-west London’s Orthodox Jews, and is about the limits and tolerances of such a community and what happens when you try to escape it.

Ronit Krushka (Rachel Weisz) already knows what this is like. She’s a photographer, living and working in New York, who finds out that her father – the rabbi of an Orthodox London synagogue, whom we see in the opening scene giving a sermon about the meaning of free will – has just died. Ronit flies ‘home’ but soon finds she is not welcome. Though her former friend Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola), the prime candidate to replace her father, lets her into the rabbi’s house and is kind to her, almost every other grieving presence resents her. The exception is Esti (Rachel McAdams), Dovid’s wife and the centre of the mystery of Ronit’s disavowal of her community. The two women were teenage lovers and the reappearance of Ronit disturbs believer Esti’s pledge to put that transgression behind her.

Disobedience is interested, as Lelio suggests in our discussion below, in the contrast between the moralism of Orthodox religion and its sensuality. Many people in the Hendon Jewish community were helpful to the making of the film, based as it is on a novel by Naomi Alderman that they already knew. There’s a powerful feeling in the film of authority bearing down through sombre costume, detailed ritual and claustrophobic spaces, plus a quietness that allows Weisz (who originally optioned the novel and is an executive producer here), McAdams and Nivola to give terrific, nuanced performances within these limits. 

We know from Gloria and A Fantastic Woman how good Lelio is at getting his actors to reveal what’s under the skin of appearances, but what’s also at play here is the ability of a director from elsewhere to bring fresh eyes to the city. If you consider the likes of, say, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), Jerzy Skolimowski’s Moonlighting (1982) and Aki Kaurismäki’s I Hired a Contract Killer (1990), the one thing they have in common is that they don’t look like the run of British films. Nonetheless, as Lelio admits below, it’s not a city you can get to grips with quickly.

I met the persuasively modest and dapper director for this interview towards the end of summer, before his new film Gloria Bell, an English-language remake of Gloria starring Julianne Moore, had debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Nick James: London is said to be hard to film in because it’s so full of ‘uncinematic’ spaces. What was your experience of it? 

Sebastián Lelio: I spent two weeks in a van with a team doing an intensive immersion and it’s not an easy city to grasp. If you go further out from the centre, it’s all so similar: endless areas of 1930s or Victorian houses. I spent a long time in and around Hendon and found places that were similar to other places in London. It was winter and I was already suffering from the traffic and starting to feel how that was going to affect the shoot, but as soon as we began to find the locations, cinematographer Danny Cohen and I started to understand the visual identity we wanted. 

What was that look? 

Danny grew up not far away from Hendon – the same is true of Rachel Weisz – and he went a few times to the synagogue. The two were always talking about trees that they used to climb, so it had a very personal element for them. I was listening a lot to Danny and his memories and he talked about the austerity of this community and what he called “beautiful ugliness”. That was quite a crucial concept – let’s go for the fluorescent lights, put them into the frame and embrace that lack of texture, materially speaking, which is in direct contrast to a certain level of sensuality that that culture has. 

How did you research the culture? 

I am the ultimate foreigner here: I am not British, I am not Jewish, and English is not my native language. I didn’t know anyone in the team. At the beginning – I started writing myself and then later Rebecca Lenkiewicz came on board – I was paralysed, frozen. I couldn’t start because of my ignorance of this community, the traditions and rituals and manners and moral codes. Then I discovered a different way of accessing the story, from a more mythological perspective, or, if you like, taking it as a classical tragedy, because I understood that this is a princess living in exile who comes back to the realm from which she was expelled because the king has died and the throne is empty and in these days of mourning and funeral rituals, all hell will break loose [laughs].

You took the original novel to bits and put it back together again. 

Yes, of course. It’s a novel that has a lot of thinking and feeling to it, so it was great because you could learn a lot about the characters but it was also ideal for adaptation because there was not so much action. We had to find actions that could translate feelings into movement. We had four consultants from within the community during the writing process. I would call them for everything: how do they set a table or how does the Shabbat work? Is it true that you cannot button up your pants? Why? Etc, etc. And that lasted months. Later on we had 12 people from the community who were willing to help. 

It’s interesting that they were so willing. 

Yes. I thought we were going to meet more resistance. Naomi Alderman, the writer of the novel, was the bridge because there’s a big part of the community that really loves and respects her. She was telling me that someone went to see the local rabbi and mentioned to him about the film and his answer was, “We won’t stop them from doing it so we’d better help them so they can get it right.” That was a smart move because it was quite a revelation when we understood, during the writing process with Rebecca, that we didn’t want to make the community the villain. That would have been too easy. The antagonism was really coming from the characters themselves. I wanted to get the cultural texture of daily life right so that, later on, when we were shooting, we could forget about it and concentrate on the characters. 

As you’ve said, you were in a tricky position because you have to have an ear for how English is spoken here, and you’re working with people who are very familiar with the background and you’re not. 

I was very concerned because, in the films I’ve made, dialogue is very important as a texture, not as information, but almost as a colour. How am I going to be able to get to that level if I have limits because of my background? The way in which we worked helped. For me the script is a map, it’s never territory. While we were shooting [I made sure] there was room to explore [different options] in post-production. I was always telling them, “If anything sounds strange or funny, please let me know,” and they would do so – “This doesn’t sound right because we don’t say it like this.” “So how would you say it? Let’s do it like that. And then why don’t you do it completely differently and speak the words that you would say.” 

It’s all very convincing. 

Great. OK. I think it’s because I am very obsessed with actors. For me characters are like when you see rockets going up into space and part [of the rockets] are left behind. You need characters – I love to build them and get to know them – but once you’re shooting you have to forget about them. It’s mainly about the person who’s interpreting them and the intersection between [them] and whoever the character is, what the actors are bringing to the character because of their life story, of what their bodies show or hide. Fiction is always a documentary of the actors. 

There’s a lot of courageous things they do in this film, so you’re very persuasive to make them go the extra mile. Do you have an approach for that which you could describe? 

It comes out very naturally. I wouldn’t know how to make a film without counting on the actors’ total trust. For them it’s good to know that they have mine and they can get lost and be foolish if they want or dare to and I will take care of them and protect them and their characters’ dignity in the edit. In this case I was so happy to see that they were really willing to give everything they had. They really went for it, the three of them. They are actors in command of their specific tools, going through an entire emotional spectrum and navigating difficult scenes and situations with grace. 

One of the things I really enjoyed is how much quietude there is in the film. That’s quite a brave approach. 

Yeah, I wonder why. I have tendency for that. I’m just finishing Gloria Bell and in the last 23 minutes no one says a word, and it’s not that you’re bored – things are flying. But it’s like, “Wow, this is a serious tendency.” In these kinds of narrative, when you combine dialogue that is hopefully non-informative with passages that are just cinema movement, I enjoy it so much because I have space to get lost.

You’re talking about cinema and the classic thing that is always thrown at British filmmakers, especially if you’re making a film in London, is how difficult it is to be visually arresting. 

I’ve heard that before and I recognise what you’re saying. I have the feeling that things need to breathe. There are narratives where words are more central and essential, and other narratives where you can combine two different – if you want – registers. This is one of those. It’s a verbal film where the words are very important and the human voice is quite central because it opens with a speech and the climax is also a speech. The human voice is being used formally for the purpose of meaning. But then there is the sex scene. You have moaning, the human voice being used for proactive means. That was very important because of its subversive power, but I think then you can feel it more by contrast. If you’re coming from that long sequence, for example, before the sex scene, they’re waiting for the tube, they go into the tube, then they emerge into the street and they’re walking, they kiss and come out of an alley and then they finally get into the room and then, bam, and you can really hear their voices and at the very end you know her orgasm, you feel it. I don’t know if that kind of effect works by a slow-burn type of accumulation.

What made you choose The Cure’s ‘Lovesong’ for that central moment where the women are alone together? 

In the novel when they go to the house with the dead rats, etc, there’s this old radio. Rachel [Weisz] turns it on and some gangsta rap music comes out. I found that quite interesting so I left that in and in shooting the scene I put on something really badass, but later, when the tone of the film was there, it felt off. The editor Nathan Nugent and I started to think about what it could be. I grew up in Chile listening to British music and this is the moment to say thank you to this magnificent island. So much great music has come out of here. I love The Cure and Disintegration is one of the most important albums in my life so this is like a punk-rock beat, so why don’t we try ‘Lovesong’ and it fit and then it became the end title song. 

And it’s what those two women would have been listening to when they were teenagers. 

And it works to create more backstory in a film that doesn’t have any of the flashbacks that the novel has. 

You decided to leave them out. 

I just don’t like flashbacks. 

Not a film noir fan? 

Not in that sense, but in a certain way this film has not a few elements from noir. The fedora hats. There’s a kind of sombreness. I really liked the timelessness of the aesthetics of this community, especially in men’s garments. They look like 1940s characters. It could be The Third Man [1949] or something. But to come back to your question about quietness: yes, there is a tendency to quietness or passages without dialogue. The idea is to provide the audience with a very strong cinematic turn where, towards the end, they are completely taken by all these feelings. It’s quietness, but you can almost feel what they are thinking. It’s like a voiceover without a voiceover. Your connection becomes almost telepathic.