Sophie Hyde Interview

Sophie Hyde, the director of films including Good Luck to You, Leo Grande with Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack, Animals with Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat, and Berlinale award-winning 52 Tuesdays, discusses her approach to the directing craft. "You've got to let go of showing that you're a good director to be a good director."

Introductions: 00:07
Pre-production:  02:01
Production: 17:18
Post-production: 38:54

A link to the Youtube version of this interview can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nUBihEr-74

Chapters

• 0:07 Introductions
• 2:07 Pre-production
• 17:18 Production
• 38:54 Post-production

Transcript

The Film Director’s Craft

Transcription of Sophie Hyde Interview 

Rachel Carey: Welcome to The Film Director's Craft. I'm Rachel Carey. I'm a filmmaker and I also host a discussion with current filmmakers about the specifics of how they make their films. The purpose of this is to capture some hands-on techniques that current filmmakers use and also talk about how those inform the films they make and why those are useful for the kind of films that they're putting together. Today, I'm really excited because I'm talking to Sophie Hyde, who is a brilliant filmmaker. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Sophie Hyde: Oh, thanks. It's my pleasure.

Rachel: If anyone is not aware of Sophie's work, it is fantastic. I will give a little bit of background. She's the director of films including the recent Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, starring Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack, and Animals starring Alia Shawkat and Holliday Grainger, which is wonderful and also the coming-of-age film 52 Tuesdays, which was shot over the course of a year and explored a teenager dealing with her sexuality and a parent's gender transition as well. Sophie Hyde has also worked in television and documentary, including creating the TV series Fucking Adelaide, which is a lot of fun.

Her work tends to be really visually beautiful and really visceral and honest and it often centers around themes around sexuality and gender and people's conflicted relationship to social norms. You can find Good Luck to You, Leo Grande on Hulu streaming and most of her other work on major streaming platforms. It is brilliant. I'm so excited to talk to her about it today and I want to encourage people to check it out. Thank you again for being willing to talk about how you put some of your films together a little bit.

Sophie: That's great. I love listening to someone else explain my work because it's like, "Oh, is that what my work's about?" I love this. 

Rachel: That's what I do. Yes, exactly. I'm going to jump right in. We're talking about directing but some of your projects you've worked on the script, you've helped develop them, but I want to zero in first on just pre-production once a project's been green-lit and you know it's going to happen, what are some of the tools that you find useful for just getting into that directing head space? Are you doing research? Are you watching other films for a reference? Are you doing readings of the script? What are some of the things you like to do to get into that mentality?

Sophie: It's hard for me to separate the parts of it from the development into the pre-production and being green lit, except to say that, once you know a film is going to be made at whichever stage that is, it's so much better in terms of how you develop. For me, it's a much richer and more exciting way to develop because there's a certainty about whatever we do now, we get in the mud and work, and it's going to come out as something rather than a scarcity feeling, which is like, if we get this wrong, we might not get this financed which I don't love.

I do like research. I came from documentary and I often use material that exists or things. I like to have a handle on things from real-world experiences, whatever that might be. That could be that for on Leo Grande, for instance, we were talking to a lot of sex workers to ground that film and think about that character of Leo. On other things that might be-- for Animals, for instance, it was written by an author who-- it was very much based on her own experience, so research becomes different, which is that you're trying to tap in and understand that experience as well as bring your own feelings to it.

On something like Animals, it becomes much more about understanding the place that we were filming and researching that place, so it's different on each movie. I do like research. I like a lot of visualization. I spend a lot of time bringing together images. I don't just use to pitch. We think of mood boards and stuff as a pitching tool, but for me, it really is discovering and finding a combination of images that help me understand character as well as visual style. Those two things combine and those images might include words and ideas as well. I do a lot of that.

I work with my partner, Bryan who's cinematographer and editor of the films. That's quite an unusual thing. We spend a lot of time talking about things. He likes very much to find more precise references. He's like this scene from this film feels like this. Much more than I probably do. When I think about references of films, it tends to be a kind of feeling or something that I'm looking for in that insight, that work. Call Me by Your Name, for instance, was a very strong reference for Leo Grande but at very specific one because it was all about the balance between subject and object.

I have this feeling that in Call Me by Your Name, they do something really beautiful with the character of Elio, Timothée Chalamet's character, which is that we watch him and he feels like he oftentimes would be the object of a movie because we look at his body a lot, but he always feels like the subject of the film. He always feels like we're understanding things from his point of view. I have found that really a thrilling position to be in as an audience, that those two things melded instead of being separated.

That's something that I look for quite a lot in a movie, to be able to explore both of those things. I think that's how I come at it. I realize I don't have a like very specific technique that's drawn from any one person or whatever, but it changes each film and we'll talk about it later, but that includes my rehearsal process and everything is made up.

Rachel: That makes a lot of sense though. It is actually specific, I think that idea of observer and observed and so on comes out in the films as well. How about casting? I love to ask people what they do when they're in the casting room because I think it varies. I know there's been a lot of Zoom casting and so on over the last couple of years, but do you have anything in that process that you like to do, either just working with actors or if you're having a conversation with an actor about a role? Are there things that you come back to in that process?

Sophie: It's always been really important to me to talk to actors more than just see them do things. That's easier when you hit people that you already know their material. You don't really need all of those actors to necessarily read for you, but even when on my earliest films like my first short film that I did, I remember not really wanting to get the actors to read, but wanting to have a proper conversation with them because, for me, I need to find a place where we meet.

A huge part of working with an actor for me is investigating and discovering how they work or what the best approach with them is because it's different for everyone, and I don't want to come in and just put my take on it. Some actors are very intellectual, they want to talk a lot, like I do, and some actors don't want that. You have to find that in your process of like, "How do they work the best and come at them that way?" I guess I always get really uncomfortable when I watch casting tapes.

I've learned to become better at it, but I remember that-- because I didn't start like that. I mostly started meeting people or having to get on the same page with somebody and not necessarily auditioning them or auditioning for 52 Tuesdays was more like a workshop where we talked about a lot of things, played around with scenes. It was more about getting a feel for if we could do this whole thing together. When they started to-- [crosstalk]

Rachel: They had to be in for the whole journey of that film, right?

Sophie: They had to be in for the whole year. We had to know that they were adaptable with us, that they would bring what they needed, that they would be upfront, a whole lot of things, and that continues now. I still need to know that an actor is ready to do what I would like them to do and also will voice up to me if they're uncomfortable about something. These things are really important to me in the process. I started to get tapes and I would be like, "Ooh, I feel so nervous and uncomfortable for them." I just hate watching them.

Rachel: They're very vulnerable. I think that's part of it is they're very vulnerable.

Sophie: They are. I remember getting tapes in and I'd start watching and I'd have to get up and stop for a second and come back to it, and like it's really difficult. I feel for actors and the truth is that some actors are really good at tapes and it doesn't always reflect somewhat how someone is to work with. I think a lot about that. I've done a mix of it now but I tend not to rely on tapes as much as a conversation with somebody.

Rachel: This varies based on budget and a whole bunch of things, but how do you feel about rehearsal before the shoot, because watching Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this observation, but it is structured like a play. It's a very contained piece and it's a limited number of actors and so on. I was curious. I was like, you could rehearse this like a play but you could also just shoot it like a movie and have them come in fresh. I was curious, just in general, how you felt about rehearsal but also, in that case, how you made that decision and how you thought about that process with them.

Sophie: No, I'm absolutely all for rehearsals. I wouldn't make anything without rehearsing. I appreciate that there are some actors in particular who like to just come in, but for me, there's a period of time where us getting onto the same page as each other, us creating a shared history together as director and actor, and also for them to create something together is really important. When I think of rehearsals, it's not always straight rehearsing. It's like I create a lot of tasks which will be different with different actors depending on their relationships, what kind of relationship I want them to discover or build.

A huge amount of that yet is that I want to walk onto the set with my actors feeling like we are already united as a team in the film that we want to make. That is a shared purpose and a shared vision rather than coming on and just seeing what everyone brings, and guiding on set. For me, that's very, very important. Oftentimes, I've rehearsed in a way where there will only be very few things that we would actually do as scenes, something with heavy dialogue, or lots of people in it, with comedy, for instance. I definitely would want to rehearse that scene.

Mostly, I want to work with cast to feel like they've got the right physical relationship together or emotional connection to build what they need, rather than running scenes so much. On Leo Grande, that was different, though. Emma and I talked a lot about that process that I have which is not so much rehearsing. We came into it like that. We're going to use this time to really explore our bodies and our feeling about the film and what we want to say and to build the relationship and to find the physicality in particular.

Actually, we ended up realizing no, we do actually need to. Not too much rehearse the scenes but certainly block out the scenes became really important because we were shooting in 19 days, which is really small, and the dialogue is incredibly heavy. To shoot in that way, we needed to do very long takes. They needed to know where they were at any one point. They needed to learn lines which was a massive job at that time. They had to go over that material over and over. There was no way of making that film without them, reciting, learning, learning, learning.

To know where they had to be in space became very important. We did actually block it out very precisely in our rehearsal room and we would block it on set as well with our DP on our off days to make sure that he could then block the camera moves. It became much more like a conventional rehearsal. Although more of our rehearsal was spent looking at physicality and our purpose than that probably.

Rachel: Do you ever give actors assignments like, "I want the two of you to hang out," or build relationships even just like, "Go out and get a drink," kind of things?

Sophie: Oh, very much. No, I very much do that. My rehearsal weeks are intensive for me. I need to use everybody in every way. With  Leo Grande, that's easy, because you are with just the two people that you have. Those two people, in that case, they were doing a lot of work on their own anyway because of the material and having to recite lines. That was spending a lot of time together outside of that room even. On something like Animals or Fucking Adelaide, yes, my process is like, "You two go off and do this very specific task. Go and buy us all lunch and make us all lunch for later."

"You two will be with me doing a physical exploration and you guys--" On Fucking Adelaide, it was like, everyone had to do a family Christmas performance. Through the week of rehearsals, we were doing other tasks but they also knew they had to do family Christmas performance with various combinations of them. For them building and creating that material becomes part of how they get to know each other. On Animals, for sure, they had to go and have drinks at certain bars or take each other on tours, depending on their roles.

Certainly, I wouldn't give that to people that were fresher in terms of their relationship on screen. The two sisters in that, for instance, they had very specific tasks that were about getting to know each other as humans as well.

Rachel: I would imagine also, your films often have these very intense family dynamics of super-close siblings and things like that. I would imagine that's really useful for making that stuff feel lived in as well.

Sophie: Yes, it is. I think actors need to-- it's great for them to, of course, they bring that ability to do that anyway. Most actors that you work with can just create that, but to give it that extra bit, to know that they've had this really in-depth conversation before they had to sit there and do this role where they're super close, it's all about creating an environment, a process that allows them to sink into that in the strongest way.

Because I've worked over my career with a range of non-actors or new actors and then more established actors, I come at it from that place of wanting to guide and help people that are new to acting. That, even more, feeds into that.

Rachel: This gets a little bit into moving into on set. One thing I wanted to call out is, specifically, you mentioned physicality and watching your films, an awful lot of them strike me as being about having a body, whether it's drugs and alcohol use, or sexuality, or just comfort with the body or gender. It feels like the characters are really inhabiting their bodies or figuring out how to do that.

I was wondering if you had any things you did on set with actors to just get them grounded in that way because some of them, whether they have to play a scene high… it feels like there's a really specific physical quality that they achieve really nicely in the films. I was like, "How did you pull this up?"

Sophie: I definitely have an obsession with the body and the experience of having a body and how strange that is and our front face of bodyness, and then the truth and reality of everyone does poops. I'm pretty interested in how disconnected those ideas can sometimes be. One of the things I always loved about Animals and the book, the original book was her conversation about having a body that is in that book. For sure, I'm interested as well in-- I don't want to see the surface of things.

We can see the surface all the time of how we present the world but the truth of all of us is that we don't always hold ourselves. We don't always present when we're on our own or with people that we're intimate with. I find it very disturbing when I see a film where people are private but they still seem public. That's very disconcerting to me. The idea of privacy and who we are there becomes important. I do in everything a fair bit of work on releasing something about the heldness. For me, Emma was an interesting person though because Emma is so skilled already, Emma Thompson. Her sense of a character so much of that character is about being held. That's who that character is but like anybody, there's got to be moments where that drops and so finding that is the thing. In the case of Nancy and Leo Grande, that really only happens very late in the story. We see glimpses at other times, but you can see it for Leo, for instance, the other character in that very early on, as soon as Nancy leaves the room that he becomes different.

I don't exactly know how I do it because it will be different with each actor. Holliday Grainger, we spent a little bit of time just trying to hone into the idea of relaxing and releasing all those things that we hold. Particularly, actors are so used to being seen and being in the public eye. Holli does that naturally, but even that was to really release her from that perfection and that feeling of holding her body in a certain way was really fun to do.

That was just a one-on-one experience, but honestly, it just depends on the actor and who they are and what we need for the role. I don't have any-- [crosstalk]

Rachel: That's very interesting though. The way that sexuality is depicted and explored, it's awkward too. It's stuff that people want to hide. What they want, they may not even be sure of, but it's also something they want to hide sometimes from people closest to them.

Sophie: Totally.

Rachel: Just that act of acknowledging desire, it seems very vulnerable a lot of times.

Sophie: People are always like, "Your uncomfortable sex scenes," and I'm like, "Oh, are they uncomfortable?" Yes, because it's the only way that you can be there is to try and find some-- it's a bad word, but – truth. I need to reveal myself to my cast. Part of what I do is that there is a vulnerability and a shared humanity that we are trying to find. That means things that you feel a bit uncomfortable about, or where you hold a little bit of shame yourself is like opening them up as being normal in the conversation and recognizing that we all feel those uncomfortabilities.

We all carry these kinds of shames in different ways which allows us to put ourselves out there, all of us in a certain way, I think, because as a director, you play a fool sometimes. You can't be cool. You can't sit there and be like, "I'm so cool." You are having to go, “I'm asking a whole lot of you, I better also front up and reveal something of myself.” That's part of what we do. It's not like you sit there and talk about your deeper shame. It's like, how do I express that this is normal, that this is what we all feel somehow?

Rachel: It also gives them a purpose to revealing yourself. I think for the actors, I assume that they're doing this vulnerable stuff because the audience needs to recognize that, and maybe it's a nice way of thinking about it, too.

Sophie: It's not like I'm saying the actors are all showing themselves exactly on screen, but somehow you find something in yourself to allow the specifics of that character to come out, I think.

Rachel: You started in documentary, and I'm wondering-- 52 Tuesdays struck me as using some elements of documentary in the way that you shot it because there was a little bit of finding where it was going to go as you went, I'm sure. I'm wondering just, do you think that your background in documentary affected how you shoot narrative? Do you look for certain things or do you think about covering scenes in different ways because of that background?

Sophie: I certainly am looking for the surprise, like the thing that I wasn't expecting when I shoot. It's like I don't want to create the situation where everything is exactly as I envision it in my head. In fact, that's not my goal at all. I really rate directors who can do that, but for me, I'm no Wes Anderson. I'm like, I want to set the parameters and discover something all the time. Something will shift, it's like what I bring to it, what the cast brings to it, the camera, everything becomes this new thing that I can't foretell.

I think that comes from that documentary background. Those things have always crossed over for me, like the telling of a story is there in a documentary very strongly for me. It's not just like you find a story, it's like sucking in and learning about people and all of those things and then presenting that as something for an audience – is how I always thought of documentary. That's how I think of making fiction as well. All those ideas and what you want to say and how you’re still constructing a story, but you're trying to find truth and reality and moments of familiarity inside that and moments of surprise, I suppose.

They all meld together for me. 52 Tuesdays is a great example of that, which is, there is nothing about the story that we are drawing on any of our actors or our lives exactly. None of us had that experience, but we were all inside the experience of shooting every Tuesday and growing older over that time and the world changing. The feelings that we were experiencing or our cast was experiencing would sometimes come into the work. For instance, Tilda who plays the teenager, she started to get very interested in the idea that she didn't have any control over her life.

There were too many people controlling her, but she also wanted to be told what to do, and so that struggle that she started to have informed the character and the story even though it wasn't about a girl shooting a movie. That's how we take from our actors.

Rachel: That probably gives it more authenticity, too, whatever you're doing with them if you have that. How about just set design? I think about Animals and the way the production design was done felt very grounded, real, and specific. Are you working with the same person on that? How do you convey those little specific details, because it was really beautifully done in that case?

Sophie: We've actually always worked with different production designers on almost everything we've done. There's only one repeat, I think. No, I'm always working with different production designs, but some great ones. I loved doing the design on Animals so much and Louise who was our production designer just really went there with us. The story of the book is very much more street and a bit ordinary or something that – like its style – but I always really want to, especially meeting Dublin, especially finding Dublin as a location, the shift that happened of this slightly glamorous but dirty thing that went down was so fun. It informed the characters, the girls and they became a little bit glamorous with their eye makeup, but a bit grotty and gross. That had to be reflected in the production design as well, and the streets of Dublin led to that, but also Louise, I wanted the palette to be quite clear in that film. She had to build things like their apartment in places. It's quite unusual. It's not what you expect for a film about two girlfriends who were taking a lot of drugs, but it came out of Dublin and a desire for something about the nightlife, something about the feeling of being at the party, the feeling more than how it truly looks on the outside.

Rachel: It has to be appealing and romantic in some way.

Sophie: Exactly, romantic, but also a bit gross. I really loved doing the production design on that, and then Leo was a completely different thing, which was like, I wanted a neutral room, but seductive in some ways or central in some ways, but neutral. That was really, really different and building that with Miren, our production designer, that was all remote mostly. I think we did almost all of it remotely, but that was just having to understand and think about all our shots in advance and knowing the style that we wanted, and therefore, building the actual set to function for us, our camera. The biggest thing about that was the huge window and I wanted there to be light. Daylight mostly, but any kind of light in almost every frame. That became what drove our design, actually. I think Bryan, the cinematographer, and Miren, the production designer would've wanted there to be colored walls or something. Something would make it a bit easier, like these – I didn't want to go white to white because that's very hard to manage for a whole film but to find something that still felt neutral, that didn't feel overdesigned.

Rachel: I felt like the quality of the light was doing a lot of the work for shifting the mood in different scenes like you used-

Sophie: That's right.

Rachel: -that light quality to indicate different things which maybe in a less neutral space wouldn't have come across as well.

Sophie: I think that's right. That's true about the quality of the light. Bryan's very good at natural light as in like using sunlight in a really beautiful way. I had really wanted that rather than dark or night, which was the first or most obvious choice for something about sex work, I suppose. I guess Animals had been set a lot at night, so I was like, "Let's do it more in the day."

Rachel: It's good though. I think that counterintuitive – it gave you a lot of interesting places to go, so that's really neat. Do you have any… you've gotten at this, I think a little bit already, but in terms of just working with the crew, do you have a sense of establishing a rapport with them or how you think about that? I think you talked about vulnerability with the actors, but I'm wondering how you think about that as a leadership role, which it kind of is, and getting everyone moving in the same direction. Obviously, if you're really close with the DP there, you already have a team working but do you have any approaches that you think about for that?

Sophie: Yes, it's good to have the same DP because you are leading the culture of a film from that relationship first. It's an experiment for me. We've always had a small team previously and we've always worked with a lot of the same people, originally we did anyway. The culture of a set is very important, that people feel like they're heard and safe and all of those things. As I started to move into places where I were work was working with crew that I didn't know so well, I had to establish that much quicker. I've tried different things.

One of the things that I always do is as we build up into pre-production and on our early meetings, is to try and bring something to the team that comes from more what we would do with the actors. I ask everybody to say something in a meeting about what they did on the weekend or talk a little bit about why they came to the movie. Those ideas. It's really important to me and feels like the bare minimum of setting up a crew to feel they're part of a purpose as well.

Funnily enough, those things seem real anomalies in the industry, even though they seem, I wish I could go further and over time, I hope to go much further in terms of bringing the crew into the feeling of the creation. I do a little bit of like, "Here are my parameters." I try and tell everybody, “I don't want any assholes on set. I don't believe in bullying,” try and set the scene of how much the actors require in terms of looking after and not in a pandering or silly way but to do what they need to do. They need us to create a feeling and an atmosphere.

We try and talk about that. There's a lot of people on set who really respond very well to that shift but there's always a few people on set who feel a little odd about that request. That's because the culture of film sets isn't as much like that normally. It's a shift and a change in terms of vulnerability, for sure. I'm like, there's a balance, of course. When I started, I hated the feeling of having to show my professional self, of having to show that I was strong, powerful, and I always knew the right choices.

When I started, I always felt crews looked to directors. They wanted them to-- it was like a good director always knows the answer. That's what a crew feels a good director is, that they know the answer instantly. It's very hard to realize sometimes for this crew that would create a certainty, but for the work to be what I want it to be, that's not necessarily the best path for me. That actually my questioning and collaborative nature, I have to become uncomfortable sometimes with the feeling that people are thinking a whole lot of things about whether I'm good or not and let go of that.

Be like, "No, I actually, I want to know from some other people what that means," or I want to think about that for a second” or “I don't have an answer” or, "Fuck, I'm really struggling with this today," or “I feel weird” or whatever that is. That's something that over time, I feel like I've got better at doing but it's certainly something that you come up against at the beginning. For me, it was and occasionally it will come up still.

Rachel: I think one reason-- [crosstalk] I got interested in asking people about how they work is because I had the same perception. I remember I was checking in with my crew on a shoot and somebody was like, "You did directing by consensus." They were very dismissive. Then years later, I read about, I think it was Robert Altman, how he worked and I was like, "Oh, he did exactly the same thing I did yet it wasn't--" I was never taught that some directors seek collaboration.

I think that's actually one of the things that set me off on this was that feeling that there are so many different ways to do this. Yet, there is that of model of having all the answers that isn't typical.

Sophie: There is. I know a lot about what I want something to be, but I do want to hear from people and I want to consider it and I want to be able to change that vision sometimes but that doesn't mean it's just like, well, if 6 people in the room like it and 10 don't, we won't do it. There is different ways to lead and there's different ways to create your vision.

I think it is about finding which one you do and letting go of the fake professionalism that exists or the fake idea of leadership that only exists in one way because what we know of that is that if we have the same leaders, we have the same movies. We want more different ones.

Rachel: Also, you're not actually a good leader if somebody else in the room has a better idea and you didn't hear it.

Sophie: Totally.

Rachel: Sometimes, it's also getting the best out of everyone you're working with, you’re required to listen to that.

Sophie: That can be really confronting when you have to lead a bunch of people, but you do have to do what's best for the film and the audience, too. Not just what makes you feel good, efficient, that you've got the best ideas, you have to let go of that.

Rachel: Have you ever on set had a moment where you did have to make a right turn, and you don't have to be specific but where you were like, "Oh, I have to redo this," or, "I have to take a different approach here," and made turns like that?

Sophie: Yes, for sure. I hope I get better at actually stopping things when things are not working because I think sometimes you plow through. It always works better if an actor, for instance, seems like they've got their elbows out and you're like, "Why are they being combative with me here?" You can keep going and trying to make it work but occasionally, it's better to just be like, "Hey, let's stop. What's happening?"

That's really hard to do when there's the production of a film crew around you and you're on the treadmill of getting things done to or when the DP is like, you look at the shot and you're like, "I do not like this. It's not right." You don't just want to be someone's like, "No, Do it again." It's unhelpful but you've got to be able to go, "Oh, this isn't what I thought. I know we're behind," or you've got to make a choice because sometimes you can't do that. Sometimes you have to move and you do just go, "We do need this."

The rest of the day is more important but sometimes you've got to go, "I'll never use this as it is. We need to stop and redo this." Those things are hard to do. There's pivoting all the time, changing all the time like, "Oh, how will I get this to change? How will I help them find their place in this?" Every second of it is like that.

Rachel: Let me ask about post-production then, how much have you found that you also have to pivot during that process? There's usually a little bit of finding the movie afterward and I'm curious how much-- if you've done documentary, there's an awful lot of that sometimes, but I'm curious how much you've experienced it. I would think more with maybe Animals and 52 Tuesdays. I feel Good Luck to You, Leo Grande feels a more script-set film but how much discovery do you feel you're doing in post?

Sophie: Personally, I feel I'm doing a lot of discovery in post and I want to be doing that. I think when we-- our early movies, we were really finding things in post. I think we had this idea that as we got better, we would be doing that less. That was because we are inexperienced and in part, that's true. In part, there is a lot of the material that we would have done in post that we did in the scripting process of Leo Grande and really, really worked through because we knew that, but in part, I want to be discovering the whole time I'm making something.

For me, if I've solved the problem, just achieving the result isn't interesting enough. I want to be solving the problem right to the end and that's when I'll lose interest, I don't want to watch it anymore, or do it anymore. I'm not someone who's just there to-- I don't get off on the just getting it done thing. I come from documentaries that are very much a discovery process inside the edit suite. I came up through an era where nonlinear editing was what I was trained in straightaway, but it was the beginning of that.

I can't imagine how different our films would be if we'd been 10 years even before that, but for me, the process of capturing and then discovering and trying to present to an audience, the thing that we're just finding is part of it. That's in the documentaries, and certainly in 52 Tuesdays which, even though that film had very strict rules like every Tuesday had to be in the film in consecutive order, it still took like a year of post-production to put that film together because it was such an unusual rhythm compared to another film.

In Animals, for instance, I was like, mostly it's going to be composed music, but then as I started to edit, it was like, "Oh, no, this really needs score, soundtrack," which seems obvious now when you watch the film, but nothing's ever obvious when you set out to make a film. I think back to when I was writing essays at uni, and essays felt like that to me too, It’s like, the hill is so big to climb, and you're piecing things together and trying to work out, “What do I think about that?” This is what making a movie is like for me like putting a meal together, but it's not quite going right.

What do I add here or take away or whatever, to come up with something and keep going until it feels right? Once you've done it, you could do it again so easily. You could write an essay again, but for me, that's not the joy of it. I don't want to rewrite that essay, I don't want to remake that same meal exactly the way it was done because there's no joy for me. That's the bit that is pleasurable and hard.

Rachel: I think music is a particularly tricky thing. I'm always curious how people pick their composers, because for me, that's such a very-- it's hard to imagine the music in a movie, and how it will translate to a particular project. How do you think about just composing and music in general, is there something you're looking for?

Sophie: I think it actually is probably one of the things that I find the hardest in the whole thing. I have a great deal of respect and love for musicians and composers in my own life but it's not something that is very natural to me. I don't have any language for it, that language, I haven't got better at that language. I have worked with some such great people and some of them continue to work with a few times. It's always a process of discovery and finding, and it's never exactly what I set out to do at the beginning in truth.

It's always a conversation and exploring different music and ideas and sound with 52 Tuesdays. There was one song that our composer had written, that was the reason I remember wanting to work with him, this really particular song. Then, we thought that would make it into the movie, but it never made it into the movie. It never worked for the film, layers of it did, but it didn't function.

I have often worked with composers in a very layered hands-on way, which some of them love and some of them hate, which is really experimenting with tiny bits and them doing passes and us putting it in the edit suite and taking away strands. Again, it's a strong collaboration and some of our composers have been have relished that. Yes, let's back and forth between this and that works really well. It certainly not easy and it's time-consuming. Some have struggled with that where it's they want to be more in control of that musical arrangement. I've never found music easy, ever.

Rachel: It's really interesting. I find the same thing and I know what you mean about composers, some of them are like, "But I wrote the song for the scene." Then, it's hard to see it treated almost like another shot, where you might move it and do things with it different than anticipated.

Sophie: Yes, or drop out things. To me, it's all very handmade and so inevitably, it has to be a little bit like that. On Leo, the composer that we worked with, we were working very fast and very late in the process. I would give detailed, detailed notes, but he was in Ireland and I was in Australia. We didn't talk very much actually. He was really offering a lot and we were taking things out and moving things and he would look at it. It actually was a quite a smooth process in the end.

Rachel: That's so interesting. Let me ask a couple of final questions. First of all, you touched upon this already, but is there anything you feel like you had to unlearn about directing, like something you thought the job was that you realize that it was not? I know, you talked a little bit about feeling like you needed to be in charge, which I think is one-- [crosstalk]

Sophie: I think that is the main thing is, it's actually just that you've got to let go of showing that you're a good director to be a good director, I think. As soon as I feel like I'm trying to show somebody or I'm trying to prove it, then I'm not focused on what my job is. My job is on set, it's almost entirely like, presence, it's almost entirely being there and watching and seeing what's being captured and helping to steer towards what you need.

A lot of it is letting go of all of the planning and all of the thinking and whatever and being right there in that moment. As soon as I'm having to show somebody like that I am in control, that's when I know it's not working, that will be the main thing.

Rachel: Is there anything we didn't touch upon that you feel like you do that a lot of folks don't do?

Sophie: I work a lot with writers, whether I'm writing on a film or not, to make sure that the script is in a place that I feel really good about. Knowing that I may change it again, in the edit suite. I guess that really unique relationship that I have with Bryan, which is that he's shooting and editing. That means that we're constantly trying to solve and rediscover the things that we wanted to do right through the process. We try very hard not to find any blame in what happens, that everyone's there to create the film. I don't know what else.

Rachel: No, that's interesting. It occurred to me with that relationship that a lot of script supervisors, the early editors, were also script supervisors on set and so they were figuring out the coverage, and then also cutting the film back in like silent Hollywood way back in LA.

Sophie: That makes so much sense. If you had the right writer that could script supervise and edit, that would be also a path you could imagine because having other people that are helping to look after the story, and to-- your job as a director is always to steer towards what you think it is, or to find what it is. Then, you do need these other people with you to do that as well to catch the balls or to notice things oftentimes alongside your vision, or to know what thing you want. For me, it's whoever they are, you find them on every film and they can be in different roles.

It's like you find those people who are helping you to do that and it doesn't matter what role they're in. They're working with you to get there and it changes every movie for me.

Rachel: That's really interesting. Just to make sure you didn't miss anything too, which is also wonderful. Thank you so much. That was amazing. I really appreciate all the detail you went into and it was completely fascinating to hear about it. Thanks so much for sharing.