Movies

Bruce Baillie, who personified the Bay Area experimental cinema of the 1960s as an independent filmmaker and consummate 16-millimeter craftsman whose most extraordinary movie is a single panning shot, died on Friday at his home on Camano Island, Wash. He was 88.His wife, Lorie Baillie, confirmed the death.A catalytic figure in the development of West Coast avant-garde film, Mr. Baillie became known in the mid-1960s for his lyrical landscape films — one of which, “Castro Street” (1966), was selected for the National Film Registry in 1992 — as well as for his anguished considerations of the landscape’s despoliation in films like “Mass” (1964) and “Quixote” (1965).Six of his movies, including those three, are regularly screened by Anthology Film Archives in New York as part of the institution’s “essential cinema.” Filmmakers as varied as George Lucas and the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul have cited Mr. Baillie’s work as an inspiration.A native Westerner, Mr. Baillie dedicated “Mass,” a grim montage of contemporary California, to the Dakota Sioux, and he cast himself as a cowboy in his quasi-autobiographical “Quick Billy” (1970). Anticipating attitudes popularized by the hippie counterculture, he could have been a character from Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”“Quixote,” a densely edited collage, was made while Mr. Baillie was living out of a Volkswagen bug, traveling from west to east during the same summer that Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters made a similar, if more drug-addled, journey, as recounted by Tom Wolfe in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). Mr. Baillie’s fellow avant-gardist filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who died last year, described “Quixote” in The Village Voice as “visionary.”Mr. Baillie was an apostle of meditation, not LSD. “Quixote” was edited while he was living in a shed at the Morning Star Ranch, a commune in Sonoma County, Calif., that Time magazine described as “perhaps the most hopeful development in the hippie philosophy to date.”“I want to discover true American themes, the images that lay closest to the hearts of our citizens,” Mr. Baillie told a reporter in 1962. But he also looked across the Pacific for inspiration. (“Bruce Baillie lives his Zen,” the poet and fellow West Coast filmmaker James Broughton once wrote.)The critic P. Adams Sitney, who wrote of Mr. Baillie at length in his study of American avant-garde cinema, “Visionary Film” (1974), noted that “the oriental ‘saint’ in a fusion of Zen, Tao and Confucian traditions is the first of the heroes proposed by Baillie’s cinema.” “Quick Billy,” which Mr. Baillie made after a near-fatal bout of hepatitis, was a mock western based in part on “The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”“The effect of Baillie’s films is to make the viewer feel that any moment of the viewing, any single image he is looking at, is a mere illusion that will soon vanish,” the critic Fred Camper wrote in “International Dictionary of Film and Filmmakers.”“The sensuousness of the light and colors only heighten one’s awareness of their unreality,” he added. “It is as if there is a void, a nothingness, that lies behind all things.”Mr. Baillie was born on Sept. 24, 1931, in Aberdeen, S.D., to Gladys and E. Kenneth Baillie. His father, a sculptor, taught art at Northern State Teachers College (now Northern State College). Mr. Baillie graduated from high school in 1949 and, after serving in the Navy during the Korean War, studied art at the University of Minnesota and the University of California at Berkeley. He went on to study filmmaking at the London School of Film Technique.On his return to California in 1960, Mr. Baillie began making short films while supporting himself as a longshoreman and living in Canyon, an unincorporated town in the Berkeley Hills. There he helped start the Canyon Cinema Co-op, a distribution center for avant-garde films that was born when Mr. Baillie began showing films, including his own, for friends and neighbors on a sheet hung between two trees in his backyard. The screenings, which offered free wine and popcorn, soon moved to Berkeley.“We’d show a cartoon, a newsreel, then slip in some experimental films,” Mr. Baillie’s partner in the cooperative, the filmmaker Chick Strand, recalled. The audience, which included the critic Pauline Kael among other local movie enthusiasts, was “all friends, artists, academics, crazies,” Ms. Strand wrote.“It was a party,” she added, “but very quiet, very joyful.”Children and pets were welcome. “It was not just a showing; it was also a little tribal assemblage,” according to the novelist Ernest Callenbach, a Canyon regular who founded and edited the journal Film Quarterly and who also hosted screenings in his backyard.By 1963, the Canyon Cinema shows were being held across the bay in the North beach area of San Francisco, where attendees included the young George Lucas. (Decades later, one of Mr. Lucas’s charitable foundations would help fund the digital transfer of Mr. Baillie’s films.)The North Beach screenings were the basis for what would become the San Francisco Cinematheque. Mr. Baillie had helped found a Canyon Cinema newsletter to further publicize the work that Canyon distributed. He later taught filmmaking at Rice University in Houston, Bard College in New York State and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.His last years were spent on Camano Island in a house that had belonged to his parents, with whom he remained close. “All the films and my life are thanks to my mother, Gladys, and my father, E. Kenneth Baillie,” Mr. Baillie told an interviewer in 1989.Mr. Baillie married Lorie Apit, a native of the Philippines, in 1986. In addition to her, he is survived by their two children, Wind Gwladys Baillie and Keith Kenneth Baillie.From the 1970s on, Mr. Baillie used video as well as film, working on a number of open-ended serial or multipart, often memoiristic films, including “Roslyn Romance,” “The Holy Scrolls” and “Les Memoires d’un Ange (Remembering Life).” For many critics, however, his finest films were his most concentrated, which often focused on a single location.“Castro Street,” which Mr. Baillie said was inspired by the composer Erik Satie, was filmed across the bay from San Francisco on a thoroughfare running through an industrial area of Richmond, Calif. The movie is a 10-minute technical tour de force, combining black-and-white and color film as well as positive and negative images, often superimposed, to transfigure a wasteland of oil refineries, factories and railroad yards into what Mr. Callenbach called “a flowing lyric poem.”Mr. Baillie created some of the effects in the camera and others at the editing table. The fluid visual rhythms are complemented by a soundtrack of abstracted industrial noises.Mr. Baillie’s gift for sound design was exemplified by the bright-hued and clamorous “Valentin de las Sierras” (1967), a 10-minute film shot in Jalisco, Mexico, with a hand-held 16-millimeter camera. A vivid succession of often extreme close-ups is structured around the well-known Mexican corrido, or ballad, for which the movie is named.Writing about “Valentin” in the magazine Cinema Scope, the critic Chuck Stephens called it “a sun-drenched hallucination” in which “a plaintively strummed rendition of the corrido fuses with the ambient burble and swell all around it; the camera alights on the carved, fish-headed cane of the blind and weathered singer; sunlight dances on the bare knee of a child. We hear what we see, though always slightly dis-aligned and carefully re-intertwined.”One of Mr. Baillie’s most beloved films was also among his simplest. “All My Life” (1966), characterized by Mr. Mekas as a “koan,” appears to be a two-and-a-half-minute lateral tracking shot along a worn straight picket fence overgrown with wildflowers and occasional rose bushes.“The shot — and the film — lasts as long as it takes for Ella Fitzgerald to sing the song of the film’s title,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times in 2011. The film, she added, “ends with a pan up to the sky, a gesture that is an ecstatic punctuation mark on a film revelation.”The fence is real, but the straightness of it is an optical illusion; at one point the camera pans by a right-angle corner of it concealed by a rose bush, though the viewer is unaware of the change in direction. As Mr. Sitney wrote after viewing the film more than 100 times, Mr. Baillie’s “genius consisted in realizing that there must be a single point in which to plant his tripod so that the panning movement would seem to keep the fence equidistant at all its moments.”Mr. Baillie lived his Zen.Julia Carmel contributed reporting. More

Bruce Baillie, who personified the Bay Area experimental cinema of the 1960s as an independent filmmaker and consummate 16-millimeter craftsman whose most extraordinary movie is a single panning shot, died on Friday at his home on Camano Island, Wash. He was 88.His wife, Lorie Baillie, confirmed the death.A catalytic figure in the development of West Coast avant-garde film, Mr. Baillie became known in the mid-1960s for his lyrical landscape films — one of which, “Castro Street” (1966), was selected for the National Film Registry in 1992 — as well as for his anguished considerations of the landscape’s despoliation in films like “Mass” (1964) and “Quixote” (1965).Six of his movies, including those three, are regularly screened by Anthology Film Archives in New York as part of the institution’s “essential cinema.” Filmmakers as varied as George Lucas and the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul have cited Mr. Baillie’s work as an inspiration.A native Westerner, Mr. Baillie dedicated “Mass,” a grim montage of contemporary California, to the Dakota Sioux, and he cast himself as a cowboy in his quasi-autobiographical “Quick Billy” (1970). Anticipating attitudes popularized by the hippie counterculture, he could have been a character from Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”“Quixote,” a densely edited collage, was made while Mr. Baillie was living out of a Volkswagen bug, traveling from west to east during the same summer that Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters made a similar, if more drug-addled, journey, as recounted by Tom Wolfe in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). Mr. Baillie’s fellow avant-gardist filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who died last year, described “Quixote” in The Village Voice as “visionary.”Mr. Baillie was an apostle of meditation, not LSD. “Quixote” was edited while he was living in a shed at the Morning Star Ranch, a commune in Sonoma County, Calif., that Time magazine described as “perhaps the most hopeful development in the hippie philosophy to date.”“I want to discover true American themes, the images that lay closest to the hearts of our citizens,” Mr. Baillie told a reporter in 1962. But he also looked across the Pacific for inspiration. (“Bruce Baillie lives his Zen,” the poet and fellow West Coast filmmaker James Broughton once wrote.)The critic P. Adams Sitney, who wrote of Mr. Baillie at length in his study of American avant-garde cinema, “Visionary Film” (1974), noted that “the oriental ‘saint’ in a fusion of Zen, Tao and Confucian traditions is the first of the heroes proposed by Baillie’s cinema.” “Quick Billy,” which Mr. Baillie made after a near-fatal bout of hepatitis, was a mock western based in part on “The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”“The effect of Baillie’s films is to make the viewer feel that any moment of the viewing, any single image he is looking at, is a mere illusion that will soon vanish,” the critic Fred Camper wrote in “International Dictionary of Film and Filmmakers.”“The sensuousness of the light and colors only heighten one’s awareness of their unreality,” he added. “It is as if there is a void, a nothingness, that lies behind all things.”Mr. Baillie was born on Sept. 24, 1931, in Aberdeen, S.D., to Gladys and E. Kenneth Baillie. His father, a sculptor, taught art at Northern State Teachers College (now Northern State College). Mr. Baillie graduated from high school in 1949 and, after serving in the Navy during the Korean War, studied art at the University of Minnesota and the University of California at Berkeley. He went on to study filmmaking at the London School of Film Technique.On his return to California in 1960, Mr. Baillie began making short films while supporting himself as a longshoreman and living in Canyon, an unincorporated town in the Berkeley Hills. There he helped start the Canyon Cinema Co-op, a distribution center for avant-garde films that was born when Mr. Baillie began showing films, including his own, for friends and neighbors on a sheet hung between two trees in his backyard. The screenings, which offered free wine and popcorn, soon moved to Berkeley.“We’d show a cartoon, a newsreel, then slip in some experimental films,” Mr. Baillie’s partner in the cooperative, the filmmaker Chick Strand, recalled. The audience, which included the critic Pauline Kael among other local movie enthusiasts, was “all friends, artists, academics, crazies,” Ms. Strand wrote.“It was a party,” she added, “but very quiet, very joyful.”Children and pets were welcome. “It was not just a showing; it was also a little tribal assemblage,” according to the novelist Ernest Callenbach, a Canyon regular who founded and edited the journal Film Quarterly and who also hosted screenings in his backyard.By 1963, the Canyon Cinema shows were being held across the bay in the North beach area of San Francisco, where attendees included the young George Lucas. (Decades later, one of Mr. Lucas’s charitable foundations would help fund the digital transfer of Mr. Baillie’s films.)The North Beach screenings were the basis for what would become the San Francisco Cinematheque. Mr. Baillie had helped found a Canyon Cinema newsletter to further publicize the work that Canyon distributed. He later taught filmmaking at Rice University in Houston, Bard College in New York State and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.His last years were spent on Camano Island in a house that had belonged to his parents, with whom he remained close. “All the films and my life are thanks to my mother, Gladys, and my father, E. Kenneth Baillie,” Mr. Baillie told an interviewer in 1989.Mr. Baillie married Lorie Apit, a native of the Philippines, in 1986. In addition to her, he is survived by their two children, Wind Gwladys Baillie and Keith Kenneth Baillie.From the 1970s on, Mr. Baillie used video as well as film, working on a number of open-ended serial or multipart, often memoiristic films, including “Roslyn Romance,” “The Holy Scrolls” and “Les Memoires d’un Ange (Remembering Life).” For many critics, however, his finest films were his most concentrated, which often focused on a single location.“Castro Street,” which Mr. Baillie said was inspired by the composer Erik Satie, was filmed across the bay from San Francisco on a thoroughfare running through an industrial area of Richmond, Calif. The movie is a 10-minute technical tour de force, combining black-and-white and color film as well as positive and negative images, often superimposed, to transfigure a wasteland of oil refineries, factories and railroad yards into what Mr. Callenbach called “a flowing lyric poem.”Mr. Baillie created some of the effects in the camera and others at the editing table. The fluid visual rhythms are complemented by a soundtrack of abstracted industrial noises.Mr. Baillie’s gift for sound design was exemplified by the bright-hued and clamorous “Valentin de las Sierras” (1967), a 10-minute film shot in Jalisco, Mexico, with a hand-held 16-millimeter camera. A vivid succession of often extreme close-ups is structured around the well-known Mexican corrido, or ballad, for which the movie is named.Writing about “Valentin” in the magazine Cinema Scope, the critic Chuck Stephens called it “a sun-drenched hallucination” in which “a plaintively strummed rendition of the corrido fuses with the ambient burble and swell all around it; the camera alights on the carved, fish-headed cane of the blind and weathered singer; sunlight dances on the bare knee of a child. We hear what we see, though always slightly dis-aligned and carefully re-intertwined.”One of Mr. Baillie’s most beloved films was also among his simplest. “All My Life” (1966), characterized by Mr. Mekas as a “koan,” appears to be a two-and-a-half-minute lateral tracking shot along a worn straight picket fence overgrown with wildflowers and occasional rose bushes.“The shot — and the film — lasts as long as it takes for Ella Fitzgerald to sing the song of the film’s title,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times in 2011. The film, she added, “ends with a pan up to the sky, a gesture that is an ecstatic punctuation mark on a film revelation.”The fence is real, but the straightness of it is an optical illusion; at one point the camera pans by a right-angle corner of it concealed by a rose bush, though the viewer is unaware of the change in direction. As Mr. Sitney wrote after viewing the film more than 100 times, Mr. Baillie’s “genius consisted in realizing that there must be a single point in which to plant his tripod so that the panning movement would seem to keep the fence equidistant at all its moments.”Mr. Baillie lived his Zen.Julia Carmel contributed reporting. More

Hi, I’m Walt Dohrn. I’m the director of ‘Trolls World Tour.’ “First things first, these trolls need some serious cheering up, and we’re going to have to go top shelf.” Now this scene here we find where Poppy, the queen of the Pop Trolls, is trying to connect with the Country Music Trolls by singing the most important songs of all time. So we had a lot of fun coming up with this scene. It started with hours and hours of meetings, making lists of guilty pleasures or songs so bad they’re good kind of idea, really recognizable songs. We really wanted to go over the top because from the Country Music Trolls’ point of view, these characters don’t really understand the cultural sensitivity of this genre just yet. When we presented this notion to Anna Kendrick, who did the voice of Poppy, and Justin Timberlake, who is also our executive music producer, they rolled their eyes a little bit at the concept of this. But by the end of it, like these characters, they were completely into these songs. We had a choreographer who really choreographed this guy. And so the story artist add a lot of jokes, the choreographers add jokes, and then we take it to layout, who add some moments. And then it gets to the animators, who kind of interpret all of that business there. But one of the best jokes, I think, coming up, this kind of final joke. “Tell ‘em, Poppy.” “Shake that!” [WIND WHISTLING] “You suck!” This ‘you suck’ tumbleweed came out of an idea from a story artist, which I thought was really kind of perfectly described how most of the audience was feeling at this point. And this last joke here, Branch kind of has the last word. This was an improv from Justin. I think that’s how he really felt. “Well, I knew it. ‘Who Let the Dogs Out,’ too far.” More

Harvey Weinstein, the former powerhouse movie producer who was sentenced last month in a New York courtroom to 23 years in prison, is facing a new criminal charge in Los Angeles County in California, officials announced on Friday.The county district attorney, Jackie Lacey, said that one felony count of sexual battery by restraint was added to an existing case against Mr. Weinstein.Mr. Weinstein, 68, was charged in January with one felony count each of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, sexual penetration by use of force and sexual battery by restraint.That criminal complaint was related to charges stemming from accusations made by two women: an Italian model and actress who said he raped her, and a second model who said he trapped her in a hotel bathroom and masturbated while he groped her.The authorities said each of the attacks happened within about a day of each other in 2013.“As we gather corroborating evidence, we have reached out to other possible sexual assault victims,” Ms. Lacey said in a news release. “If we find new evidence of a previously unreported crime, as we did here, we will investigate and determine whether additional criminal charges should be filed.”Lawyers for Mr. Weinstein could not be immediately reached on Friday.The victim in the latest case was first interviewed by law enforcement officials in October 2019 as a possible corroborating witness in the charges brought in January.Last month, she provided detectives with information confirming that an assault took place within the 10-year statute of limitation — on May 11, 2010 — at a Beverly Hills hotel, Ms. Lacey said.Prosecutors have started the process of requesting temporary custody of Mr. Weinstein from New York, the first of several steps in the extradition process. California prosecutors said it was unclear when he would be transferred to Los Angeles County.Prosecutors also on Friday announced that two cases involving Mr. Weinstein were declined for prosecution because the victims did not want to testify against him.His sentencing in New York last month capped a stunning fall from power for Mr. Weinstein that began in October 2017 when, after years of rumors, several women openly accused him of sexual assault and harassment. He tested positive for the coronavirus in March.The women’s stories sparked the #MeToo movement, prompting women to speak publicly about their mistreatment by powerful men in industries including business, manufacturing, the media and the arts among others. More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.Allen Garfield, a veteran character actor who was a memorable presence in “The Conversation,” “Nashville” and many other films, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 80.His sister and only immediate survivor, Lois Goorwitz, said the cause was complications of Covid-19. Since suffering a stroke in 2004, Mr. Garfield had been living at the Motion Picture & Television Fund Home, a retirement facility, where several staffers and some residents have tested positive for the coronavirus.Mr. Garfield began studying acting at night while working as a sportswriter for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey. He later joined the Actors Studio, where he studied under Lee Strasberg.“I became an actor in order to be trained by the masters, which I was, at the Actors Studio,” Mr. Garfield said in a television interview. “From the moment I stepped foot in the Actors Studio, I audaciously stepped out and said who I was, for better or for worse. I put my stamp on things as an actor and as a director.”An immediately recognizable supporting player, Mr. Garfield became a screen mainstay in the 1970s, appearing in such notable films as Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974), Robert Altman’s “Nashville” (1975), Michael Ritche’s “The Candidate” (1972) and Richard Rush’s “The Stunt Man” (1980).He was best known for playing talky, anxious characters, bringing an intense authenticity to his portrayals of salesmen, corrupt businessmen and sweaty politicians.In “The Conversation,” he played a weaselly surveillance expert who was a rival to Gene Hackman’s character. Mr. Coppola would cast him again in “One From the Heart” (1981) and “The Cotton Club” (1984).In “Nashville,” Mr. Garfield was the husband and manager of a country singer played by Ronee Blakley. In “The Candidate,” he was a brash advertising expert working with a young Senate candidate played by Robert Redford. In Tony Scott’s “Beverly Hills Cop II” (1987), he was the furious police chief who goes on an expletive-laden tirade against Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold and John Ashton before getting fired himself.On television, he was seen on episodes of “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Chicago Hope,” “The West Wing” and many other series.Mr. Garfield was born Allen Goorwitz in Newark on Nov. 22, 1939. (Years after taking the professional surname Garfield, he briefly returned to calling himself Allen Goorwitz in the late 1970s and early ’80s.) He was a Golden Gloves boxer before becoming a journalist — he once said he took up boxing as a way to deal with anti-Semitic bullies — but had committed himself to acting by the late 1960s.After playing small parts in films by Woody Allen, Brian De Palma, Milos Forman and Robert Downey Sr., he was cast in a rare lead role, as a bumbling private detective, in the 1971 comedy-mystery “Cry Uncle,” directed by John G. Avildsen.He had a stroke before he began filming the Roman Polanski film “The Ninth Gate” in 1999 — Mr. Polanski made his partial paralysis part of his character — but he continued to act until shortly before having a second stroke in 2004.The New York Times contributed reporting.[embedded content] More

Shailene Woodley isn’t used to being at home. Since she began acting at 5 years old, she’s spent much of her life on set in TV shows (“The O.C.” and “The Secret Life of the American Teenager”), movies (the “Divergent” franchise and “The Descendants”) and more recently, two seasons of the HBO hit “Big Little Lies,” in which she played the troubled single mother Jane.But now that the coronavirus has upended everything, the 28-year-old Woodley has sheltered at home for the last few weeks, social distancing with no company besides her dog. It’s the longest she’s lived in her own home since she was 17.And to be honest? She’s kind of loving it.“I’m an introvert’s introvert,” Woodley told me this week by phone, “so this feels like heaven in a lot of ways because I don’t have to talk to people, I don’t have to deal with people, I don’t even have to look at people. I can play the game of being an extrovert when I need to — it’s a big part of my job — but my happy place is honestly being alone.”Normally, Woodley would be gearing up for a press tour to promote her new film, “Endings, Beginnings,” but with theaters closed down, the movie will now debut April 17 on digital and on demand May 1. In the romantic drama, directed by Drake Doremus (“Like Crazy”), Woodley plays Daphne, a young woman torn between dating two best friends: Jack (Jamie Dornan), a nice guy offering stability and comfort, and Frank (Sebastian Stan), who’s wilder, harder to pin down and better in bed.Much of the film is improvised, which posed a unique challenge for Woodley and her co-stars. “You understand the elements that create that particular person, and you create borders for that,” she said, “but the thing about a Drake Doremus movie is that you don’t really establish a character: You kind of go in as yourself.”She also spoke about her new outlook on her career and health problems in her early 20s. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.When you don’t know what lines are about to come out of your mouth, how does that change your relationship to who you’re playing?For me, when I’m building a character, I’m only experiencing different shades and colors of who I personally am. Daphne is one color of me that I got to explore, but I was speaking as Shailene, from a place within my own heart. I think she’s a little bit of my alter ego.How so?When I was 18, I moved into a cabin in the middle of the woods with no cellphone, no Wi-Fi. I’m a loner, and in Daphne, I got to explore some of the more extroverted side of myself who could go out and be free and live with abandon. It was fun to put myself in the position to think, “If I wasn’t worried about the consequences of taking all these drugs and staying at a bar in Silver Lake until 2 a.m., what would that be like?” Because it’s just not something I would allow myself to do.How do you approach a love scene differently when there’s a level of improvisation to it?Luckily, our intimate scenes came toward the end of the shoot, so there was a great level of trust with the actors. In one scene, Sebastian picked me up and took me across the room as the camera followed us, and it was a completely different sex scene than what ended up in the movie. But we had to explore all different parts of these two people’s physical nature to really get down to the essence of what worked for this film thematically.Was there an intimacy coordinator?For me, intimacy coaches make me uncomfortable because it feels like another set of eyes that I don’t need. But I have no problem stopping production when I’m uncomfortable, and I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of people, so I think it’s wonderful that there’s a lifeline that people can lean on to know they’ll be protected. That being said, the best thing a director could do is ask an actor right off the bat: “What are you comfortable with? What are your boundaries?”There’s always a tension to cinematic love triangles where you wonder who the lead character will end up with, but while I was watching “Endings, Beginnings,” I did think to myself, “What would be so wrong with Daphne just continuing to see both men, if that’s something that they can make work?”Listen, I’m someone who has experienced both an open relationship and a deeply monogamous relationship in my life, and I think we’re in a day and age where there should be no rules except for the ones designed by two people in a partnership — or three people, whatever floats your boat! But there has to be a level of responsibility in any relationship dynamic, and that responsibility is simply honesty and communication and trust. Apart from that, it’s really none of our business what people choose to do with their lives.And this situation is not necessarily about Daphne trying to figure out which guy she likes more. It’s about them offering different versions of herself she could be, too.Absolutely. We’re societally conditioned to assume that one person can be our end-all, be-all. This is a concept I’ve been thinking about often right now, because I’m very much single [after being in a relationship for years with the rugby player Ben Volavola], and I’ve chosen to be single for a while. The idea of being with someone … is it only because you’ve fallen in love with that person, or because there’s a newness to understanding yourself because of what that person can offer you?Daphne spends much of the movie trying to unpack her past. You’re 28 now, nearing the end of your 20s. When you think back to what you were like 10 years ago, how different were you?In my late teens, I had a strong idea of my identity and the meaning of my life, but then I went through an abusive relationship. That combined with, honestly, the commercial success I had in this industry began to wear on my strength. My 20s felt a little bit like being in a washing machine, where you’re being thrown all over the place.As a teenager and as a child, I always thought acting was a hobby, and I never wanted the idea of making it into a career to take away my passion for it. But in my 20s, there was a huge chunk of time where fear and anxiety and competition were definitely at the forefront of my mind and my ego in a way they weren’t when I was younger.Was that being whipped up by the industry, or were those things deep inside you and you had to learn to deal with them?I think it was probably a mixture of both. I haven’t spoken much about this yet publicly, and I will one day, but I was very, very sick in my early 20s. While I was doing the “Divergent” movies and working hard, I also was struggling with a deeply personal, very scary physical situation. Because of that, I said no to a lot of opportunities because I needed to get better, and those jobs ended up going to peers of mine who I love. They went on to a lot of success, but there was a mix of people saying, “You shouldn’t have let that go!” or “You shouldn’t have been sick!”That was combined with my own internal process of, “Am I going to survive what I’m going through right now and ever be healthy, or even have the opportunity to work on projects I’m passionate about again because of the situation I’m in?” I was in a place where I had no choice but to just surrender and let go of my career, and it brought out this negative voice in my mind that kept spinning for years and years afterward.And how are you feeling now?Now I’m on the other side of it, thank God. A lot of the last few years has been about focusing on mental health for me, and it’s a slow process. But because of that work, I feel very grounded and rooted in who I am and very clear about everything in my life, whether it’s my career or my relationships or my own internal worth. I feel very grateful to have walked that line of fire, because now I know what I don’t want to ever go back to. More

A key distributor has halted deliveries and shops are shuttered, putting the entire industry in jeopardy: “A lot of people are going to lose their livelihoods.” More