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    ‘You Hurt My Feelings’ Review: She Can’t Handle the Truth

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    The director Nicole Holofcener’s characters are known for their brazen honesty. But it’s dishonesty that drives her new film, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.I love a complete sentence for a title. Even better: a complete-sentence title that also describes a filmmaker’s chief concern. “You Hurt My Feelings” sums up the Nicole Holofcener experience: funny in its wounded bluntness.It’s the seventh comedy she’s written and directed since 1996. With more emotional harmony and generosity than her other films, it takes the same stock of ways we can bruise each other, partners, strangers, kids. Her characters — comfortable New Yorkers and Angelenos — tend to lash out; their preferred approach to honesty is brazenness. The new movie embraces more constructive impulses. It’s dishonesty that interests her here, the mild kind that one character calls, in his defense, “white lies” — what you tell a person because the truth would just be a whole thing.The white liar is Don (Tobias Menzies). For two years, he’s been reading draft after draft of a novel his wife, Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), has been working on and telling her how good they are. The movie’s about what happens after she overhears him, at a Manhattan sporting goods store, telling her sister’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), that, actually, he doesn’t like the book, but the truth would kill her. He’s not wrong. She’s a weepy wreck for two scenes with the sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), convinced that now she’ll never be able to trust Don. But Holofcener is drawn more to the process of healing than she is to the wielding of hurt.Twenty minutes pass before that sporting goods store encounter. By that point the movie’s already shown us what Beth’s and Don’s lives are like, together and apart. They’ve got the sort of sturdy, affectionate, unselfconsciously idiosyncratic bond that means they’d just as soon share an ice cream cone as a bed. One thing that’s probably kept the marriage firm has been saying “I love this” and “it’s great,” when it’s not. White lies are like Advil for certain relationships; they keep the inflammation down. In the aftermath of Don’s bombshell, up go her quills. She starts sleeping on the sofa, ignoring him and distancing herself, and he’s confused. Then one evening, in front of Sarah and Mark and a sad bowl of underdressed salad, she tells him that she heard what he said. Then the movie does what too few American marriage comedies do: adjudicate the disappointment. It becomes about the truths that flow from that unburdening.Holofcener makes the smart decision to put Beth and Don in the constructive honesty business. She teaches writing to adults. He’s a therapist. I don’t think either of them loves what they do, but it looks like they make a good living at it. We get to watch her respond to her four students’ story ideas and, in one case, to an actual piece, and to observe him with a handful of patients. Holofcener’s films are fleet. Rarely do they exceed the 92-minute mark. But their social resonance springs from a marvel of proficiency.Every relationship Holofcener gives us — and just about every scene — explores some type of candor, some act of leveling: between Don and Beth; Beth and Sarah; Beth and Don and their foggy 23-year-old son (Owen Teague); Beth and her agent (LaTanya Richardson Jackson); Beth, Sarah and their mother (Jeannie Berlin), a widower who lives under her daughters’ skin; a pair of married lesbians with whom a tipsy Beth instigates an argument; Sarah, who appears to be an interior decorator, and the particularly particular client displeased with her taste in lighting. Plus everything with the students, the patients and Mark, whose acting career is in neutral. I didn’t mention Beth’s pretty successful memoir about her (verbally) abusive father, whose title you need to hear stumble out of Louis-Dreyfus’s mouth. But Holofcener could have used it for just about any one of her movies.Her targets, themes and tropes haven’t changed. It’s still narcissism and personal vanity (Don wants an eye job). It’s still the emotional disturbances of moneyed, dissatisfied liberals who need Black people and the poor to make sense of themselves as successfully good white folks. (Beth and Sarah do complacent volunteer work at a church’s surprisingly stingy clothing giveaway.) No American director’s more committed to exposing the smugness and self-aggrandizement of bourgeois urbanites.The cantankerous, obnoxious and cruel characters are still here, too. Most of them are just sitting on Don’s couch. The harshest of them is a couple played by (the actually married) David Cross and Amber Tamblyn. These two hate each other, and they squirt Don with their bile. Now, in a Holofcener film, we can study intense marital dysfunction from the compartmental vantage of a mental health professional, somebody who in his personal life uses a completely different approach to communicating with his wife. Menzies’ good-natured neutrality here perfectly serves both Don the shrink and Don the husband.Holofcener continues, nonetheless, to be more interested in character than in great acting. That makes sense since she needs her casts to approximate some version of us or people we recognize. Which is to say that everybody here is life-size. Louis-Dreyfus knows how to find real pathos in a hurry. She’s a pro at putting across Holofcener’s casually cranky snobbery (about new coffee shops, clean menus and $19,000 benches). Beth’s in the middle of saying something racist about the weed shop where her son works when the movie’s least believable incident goes down.Part of me thought I wanted something wilder from Holofcener, comedy that felt like crisis. The way some of her earlier films do; the way it does in the novels of Nell Zink and Patricia Lockwood. But her studies of ego and frailty are closer to Albert Brooks and Larry David: about breaches of etiquette rather then psychological breaks. Still, this feels like a quiet breakthrough for her. She’s put the emotional dynamite away (her steadiest supplier of TNT, Catherine Keener, isn’t here). Instead, this is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.You Hurt My FeelingsRated R for language (the painfully honest kind). Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Nicole Holofcener on the Absurdity of Everyday Life

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      SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Sisters from another mister. Cinematic alter egos. However you define it, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Nicole Holofcener have a connection that rivals the great movie partnerships of our time. New York transplants who are similar in height and in age, Louis-Dreyfus, 62, and Holofcener, 63, each have two grown sons, a healthy self-deprecating attitude and the ability to riff on any topic: cake (it’s their favorite dessert), Hollywood gossip (yes, Robert De Niro did just have a baby) and the indignities of aging.Holofcener arrives at the restaurant at Shutters on the Beach first, takes glass cleaner out of her purse and cleans her brown-rimmed spectacles. Five minutes later, Louis-Dreyfus grabs a chair, pulls out the same glasses in green and her own bottle of glass cleaner, and wipes them clean. (Am I the only one who doesn’t carry glass cleaner in her purse?)On the set of their new film “You Hurt My Feelings,” they were like two halves of the same person. Louis-Dreyfus was styled similarly to how Holofcener usually dresses: loosefitting pants, button-down blouses. With Covid protocols firmly in place at the time — those not in a scene were masked up — they were often mistaken for each other.“You definitely feel like they are separated at birth,” said the producer Anthony Bregman. “They are both mothers before filmmakers. They have the same sense of humor, the same honesty, the same potty mouth. But I think what’s at the core is that they have the same disbelief, or wonder, at the narcissism of social interaction.”Tobias Menzies, left, and Louis-Dreyfus as a long-married couple facing relationship issues in “You Hurt My Feelings.”Jeong Park/A24Take Louis-Dreyfus’s new podcast, “Wiser Than Me,” which has ranked high on the charts since it debuted in April. In it Louis-Dreyfus interviews women who are older, and therefore wiser, than her.“Maybe you’ll still be doing it when I’m old enough to be interviewed,” Holofcener told her.“I won’t,” Louis-Dreyfus replied.“And you’ll be like, she’s not that wise,” Holofcener said.“I’ll do this for eight more years and the last episode will be me talking about me,” Louis-Dreyfus said, laughing at the thought.The two first met a decade ago, when they partnered on “Enough Said,” the 2013 romantic comedy about a divorced woman grappling with sending her daughter off to college while contemplating a new love. They later collaborated on an Amy Schumer sketch that went viral but weren’t able to make another film together, until now. “You Hurt My Feelings” follows Beth (Louis-Dreyfus), a somewhat successful and happily married writer who overhears her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), criticizing her new novel. The fallout proves devastating.The premise is yet another example of Holofcener’s ability to mine the mundanity of life for the absurd. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.Was there an inciting incident that prompted this film?NICOLE HOLOFCENER It started brewing as soon as I started screening my movies or having people read my scripts, wondering if they’re telling me the truth or not. And believing that I can tell. What a nightmare this situation would be, if somebody that close to me revealed to someone else that they didn’t like my work, or even just one of my movies. They have to love everything, in other words, for me to feel safe.“What a nightmare this situation would be, if somebody that close to me revealed to someone else that they didn’t like my work, or even just one of my movies,” Holofcener said. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesJULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS She’s very sensitive.HOLOFCENER I just came up with a what-if. What would be the worst scenario of somebody telling me they love something and me not believing them? I do have friends that I don’t believe. And there’s one person in particular that I don’t believe. I’m actually OK with it. Because I know they love me and get me and clearly they’re wrong. I mean, it hurts a little. They didn’t admit it.Since Nicole wrote this script with you in mind, did you connect to it immediately?LOUIS-DREYFUS Yes. I think it’s interesting to consider the notion of worth and self-worth. Am I my work? And who am I without my work? That’s certainly something I like to think about. And that this is ostensibly a great relationship between a married couple, and then the wheels just totally fall off the bus. That was kind of terrifying to consider.I told Frank Rich [the former New York Times columnist who was an executive producer of her series “Veep”] the premise of this before we shot it. He audibly gasped.HOLOFCENER Oh good. That’s my audience. Not the people who would hear the premise and go, ‘Yeah, so what? Like, what planet are you from?’Since you wrote this with Julia in mind, did that change your approach?HOLOFCENER [To Louis-Dreyfus] Just don’t listen, because it’s going to sound stupid.[Louis-Dreyfus throws her cappuccino-stained napkin over her head to avoid eye contact.]HOLOFCENER When you have Julia in your head, it’s bliss, because it just makes me funnier, knowing that she’ll do it. She just sparks my imagination.Is there a scene that you wouldn’t have written if Julia wasn’t your lead actress?LOUIS-DREYFUS Oh God.HOLOFCENER Certainly, I can see other actors doing the scenes differently, and I’m so glad they’re not in it and she is.What scene specifically?HOLOFCENER The scene where she’s sitting on the couch with her sister, she’s smoking pot. This is after she’s heard the bad news; she’s crying. It’s tragic. And you really feel for her, but you’re laughing because of that face.LOUIS-DREYFUS Oh gee, thanks.HOLOFCENER Julia walks a very fine line between comedy and drama. And that’s what I like to do with my writing. I didn’t have to do much, or anything, for her to get what I mean. We know this movie is about something fairly minor in the world of things.Louis-Dreyfus “walks a very fine line between comedy and drama,” Holofcener said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesLOUIS-DREYFUS But also very major.HOLOFCENER But in the big picture, we’re not going to be crying for her. We hope she’ll get over it. But I think that scene works because she seems like she’s about 16. I think all of us are sometimes still 16. Especially when it comes to getting approval or not getting approval. I still think of myself that way. So that’s funny to see a grown-up person behave like they’re 16, in an honest way. Not in a movie way. Or a histrionic or a silly way.How difficult was it to shoot the scene in the street right after she’s overheard her husband trash her novel?LOUIS-DREYFUS That was very nerve-racking because we had paparazzi issues that day.HOLOFCENER It was our first day.LOUIS-DREYFUS Which sucked, by the way. We didn’t own the street. It was just brutal trying to shepherd people and get them out of the shot or into the shot or whatever. And then we have paparazzi across the street, as I’m trying to legitimately look as if I’m going to vomit. You know, that’s not a good look.HOLOFCENER And they want to take your picture.LOUIS-DREYFUS I’m trying to stay in the scene. But that look of when you’re actually heaving. I defy the most beautiful woman in the world, Isabella Rossellini is not going to look good, doing that.HOLOFCENER She did it so well that someone walked by and asked her if she was all right.We don’t often see a longtime happily married couple depicted onscreen.LOUIS-DREYFUS Normally, if you see a couple married a long time, you’re going to see them butting heads.HOLOFCENER Or having an affairLOUIS-DREYFUS Or somebody gets a heart attack. In this case, it’s much more fresh and interesting.HOLOFCENER I think there are hardly any movies about people our age. And they generally tend to be, in my humble opinion, too silly or too broad.LOUIS-DREYFUS And not real.“You definitely feel like they are separated at birth,” said the producer Anthony Bregman.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThe majority of the characters in this film are experiencing doubt over their careers and if they can or should pivot to doing something else. Clearly, that topic was on your mind, Nicole.HOLOFCENER I feel that way. Sometimes. I wonder how much time I have left, and do I want to be doing the same thing. Is it too late and what would I do? I think a lot of my friends feel the same way. Or they’re retiring early and making pottery and are very happy. I can imagine retiring.LOUIS-DREYFUS You can?HOLOFCENER Yeah, just like, leave me alone already. I have no more ideas.Do you really feel that you’re out of ideas?HOLOFCENER Well, at the moment I’m out of ideas.Do you usually feel this way right after you’ve finished making a film?HOLOFCENER I’m usually out of ideas every day. That’s why I make so few movies. So it’s really true. I don’t know if I’ll make another movie. I hope that’s not the case. I did think that before this movie, so, you know, I’m assuming I’ll keep going for a while.LOUIS-DREYFUS You will.HOLOFCENER And my characters will grow old with me.LOUIS-DREYFUS I wasn’t thinking about this character as an age thing. Maybe that was wrong of me.HOLOFCENER She’s afraid she has an old voice. We’re all afraid of that.LOUIS-DREYFUS To tell you the truth, I feel like this age, there’s just so much more to do. There’s a huge freedom. It’s like who cares. Try it all. Risk it all. The benefit of being this age is that you have so much experience under your belt, if you’re lucky. Which you do. And I do. And you can apply it. I want to make another movie with this one. You’ve got to get an idea in your head. More

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      Sundance Unveils 2023 Film Festival Lineup

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      Veterans like Nicole Holofcener and Ira Sachs and first-timer filmmakers like Randall Park made the cut, as did films about Ukraine.Nothing has been easy for the Sundance Film Festival. It’s been thwarted by pandemic complications, management upheaval and a business that is undergoing an identity crisis. But the confab will finally return to the snowy mining town of Park City, Utah, in January for the first time in three years with a slate of films it hopes will announce to both Hollywood and the rest of the world that independent filmmaking is back.Culled from a record 4,061 feature submissions, Sundance 2023, set to begin Jan. 19, will be filled with veteran filmmakers and those just starting out, subjects big and small, and a host of urgent topics. Stalwarts like Nicole Holofcener and Ira Sachs are returning to their roots with new films, while studios will unveil their fare.A24 is premiering “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” from the director Raven Jackson and producers Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski, among others. Searchlight is screening “Rye Lane” from Raine Allen-Miller. Amazon has “Cassandro,” the documentarian Roger Ross Williams’s first foray into fiction filmmaking, and Focus Features is showing A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One” in the U.S. dramatic competition.Brooke Shields (Disney), Judy Blume (Amazon), Michael J. Fox (Apple) Willie Nelson and Little Richard are all getting the documentary treatment, while subjects like the Ukrainian war and films both by and about Iranian women are being explored via multiple entries in multiple genres.“A lot of the filmmakers are looking at relationships: family, work, institutions — things we often look to for stability in unstable times,” said John Nein, Sundance’s senior programmer and director of strategic initiatives. “In the program, there is a reflection of an age of anxiety in terms of the relationships we have with traditional institutions. There are all these ways of exploring just how tenuous those relationships can be.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.Indeed, Daisy Ridley plays a woman obsessed with her mortality in one of several films opening the festival, “Sometimes I Think About Dying”; Jonathan Majors stars as an amateur bodybuilder struggling to find human connection in “Magazine Dreams”; and Susanna Fogel directs Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun in “Cat Person,” based on the popular New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian.With anxiety comes antiheroes, who abound in films this year, the programmers say. These include Randall Park’s directorial debut, “Shortcomings,” about a cynical 20-something (Justin H. Min of “After Yang”) who traverses the country with two buddies looking for the ideal connection, and Sachs’s “Passages,” which challenges audiences with the terrible decisions made by the lead character (played by Franz Rogowski). Holofcener, who often traffics in the world of anxiety, has reteamed with Julia Louis-Dreyfus for “You Hurt My Feelings,” the story of a novelist whose long marriage is upended when she overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) giving his honest reaction to her latest book. It also hails from A24.Among documentaries, the filmmaker Luke Lorentzen follows an aspiring hospital chaplain on a yearlong residency in “A Still Small Voice,” which the director of programming Kim Yutani called “one of the more fascinating journeys I saw this year.”It’s all happening at a time of transition for Sundance. The institute’s chief executive, Joana Vicente, only joined the group in September 2021, a few months before the festival was rocked for the second year in a row by Covid-19 and was forced to shift in January to a virtual format in light of the rise of the Omicron variant. Five months later, the festival director Tabitha Jackson announced her departure after just two years at the helm. She has since been replaced by the former New York Film Festival executive director Eugene Hernandez, who stepped into the role in November but will not oversee the event until 2024, the organization’s 40th anniversary.“It was less than ideal,” Vicente said. “But I actually look at these past two years as incredibly successful festivals where we launched incredible films, some of which went on to win the Academy Awards,” she said, referring to “CODA,” the 2022 best picture winner. “We reached audiences in ways that we had not reached before, people who could not afford to come to Sundance, who thought Sundance maybe was not for them: film lovers, film students were able to connect and to discover these films.”Sundance’s virtual platform allowed patrons from all around the country to access films that previously had been available only to those who trekked to the snowy mountain town of Park City. The 2022 festival received some 818,000 unique visitors to its online portal during its 10-day run. For 2023, of the 101 features screening at the festival, 75 percent will be made available to view remotely.“We’re definitely prioritizing the in-person experience,” Vicente added. “But we are also continuing to build on what digital affords us in terms of reach and accessibility.”Similar to 2022, when Sundance screened films on a pressing news topic — a documentary and a feature film on the pre-Roe underground abortion network the Jane Collective — this year, the programmers added three films made by Iranian women and two that chronicle the conflict in Ukraine, ripped-from-the-headlines subjects that are likely to prompt heady conversations.In the U.S. dramatic competition, “The Persian Version” tells the screenwriter-director-producer Maryam Keshavarz’s story about a large Iranian American family that gathers for the patriarch’s heart transplant, only to have a family secret uncovered. “Shayda,” produced by Cate Blanchett’s company Dirty Films, is Noora Niasari’s feature debut about an Iranian mother who finds refuge in an Australian women’s shelter with her daughter when her estranged husband returns. And “Joonam,” competing in the U.S. documentary competition, tracks director Sierra Urich’s investigation into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity.In the world documentary competition, Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol,” from “Frontline” and the Associated Press, chronicles a team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged town and their struggle to document the atrocities. “Iron Butterflies,” from the director Roman Liubyi, investigates the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people. Three men with ties to Russian security services were convicted of murder by a Dutch court, but they are unlikely to be arrested.“The excitement I have around this program is significant,” Yutani said. “I think the offerings take a viewer on a complete roller coaster. There are a lot of films that are going to really strike people in a personal way and touch them. I also think there are some real thrills. So I encourage people who are coming to the festival to take chances.” More

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      When Matt and Ben Met Nicole: How They Came to Write ‘The Last Duel’

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      For their first writing reunion since “Good Will Hunting,” Ben Affleck and Matt Damon collaborated with the writer-director Nicole Holofcener on a period drama.It’s been nearly 25 years since Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote and starred in “Good Will Hunting,” and cemented the kind of Hollywood partnership where one name is rarely spoken without the other.But for their first writing reunion since then, “The Last Duel,” the men didn’t want just another version of The Matt and Ben Show. What they did want for this historical drama about a woman who was raped, and the men who refuse to believe her, was a female collaborator. And so they sought out the writer-director Nicole Holofcener, celebrated for her nuanced observations of thorny contemporary women in movies like “Enough Said” and “Friends With Money.”“The Last Duel,” directed by Ridley Scott, based on Eric Jager’s 2004 book and in theaters Oct. 15, depicts France’s final officially sanctioned trial by combat: In 1386, Jean de Carrouges, a knight, and his friend-turned-rival, Jacques Le Gris, a squire, are ordered to fight to the death after Carrouges’s wife, Marguerite, accuses Le Gris of raping her, and he denies it. Whoever survives will be proclaimed the winner as a sign of divine providence. Should Carrouges lose, Marguerite will be burned at the stake for perjury.The film, set amid the brutality of the Hundred Years’ War, is divided into three chapters — the “truth” according to Carrouges (played by Damon), Le Gris (Adam Driver) and finally, Marguerite (Jodie Comer). Damon and Affleck wrote the male perspectives, while Holofcener wrote Marguerite’s.“The heaviest lift in the architecture of this screenplay was the third act, because that world of women had to be almost invented and imagined out of whole cloth,” Damon said. “The men were very fastidious about taking notes about what they were up to at the time. But nobody was really talking about what was happening with the women, because they didn’t even have personhood.”“This is an adaptation of a book that we read,” he added, “but Nicole’s part is kind of an original screenplay.”Ben Affleck, left, Nicole Holofcener and Damon. Affleck sent her some pages he and Damon had written. “They weren’t good,” Holofcener said, “but they were good enough for me to say, ‘I want to work with these guys.’”From left: Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times; Dan MacMedan/Getty Images; Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesOn a spirited video call in late August — Damon in Brooklyn, Affleck and Holofcener in Los Angeles — the three discussed the intricacies of their collaboration and of portraying sexual assault during a violent period when women were little more than chattel. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Let’s start at the beginning. Matt, it’s December 2018 and you’ve just read Jager’s book. What happened next?MATT DAMON Ridley and I had been looking for something to do together since “The Martian,” and we’d had a few near misses. So I sent it to Ridley, and he loved it. In March 2019, Ben came over for dinner, and he took the book that night and called me at 7 the next morning and said, “Let’s do this.” And that was how we set off to writing. But very quickly, through a bunch of different conversations we were having with a bunch of people, we decided that it would serve the story best if we found the best female writer we could to write the female perspective.NICOLE HOLOFCENER [Dryly] Plus, Ridley and I have been looking for something to do together for years.DAMON [Laughs] Oh, now I’m an [expletive]. Oh, God.HOLOFCENER No — no. Am I making fun of you? I didn’t mean that. I was just thinking about how different my sensibility is from Ridley’s. That’s all.DAMON Yeah, yeah. Well, Nicole was our dream writer and our first choice. And thank God she said yes. And she said yes in large part because Ben, behind my back, sent her about 10 or 15 pages that we hadn’t shown anybody. And I was so embarrassed, like professionally embarrassed, that he sent them to Nicole Holofcener.HOLOFCENER They weren’t good, but they were good enough for me to say, “I want to work with these guys.”DAMON I think they were bad enough that she was like, “Oh, these guys need help.”HOLOFCENER Bad enough so that I wasn’t intimidated to be able to write for medieval language, at least in English. But they’re so talented, and I was immediately very flattered. The only hesitation I had was, “Can I come out of my own little world and write about something like this?” And as soon as I started and I got their support, I found that I could do it.Jodie Comer as a 14th-century woman who accuses a squire of raping her.Patrick Redmond/20th Century StudiosSo why three chapters?BEN AFFLECK Very quickly, we recognized that the film has a clear point of view on who’s telling the truth. And that this incredibly heroic character, Marguerite de Carrouges, had this story that deserved to be told. It was evident that it was going to be an exploration of the dynamics of power, roots of misogyny and survival in medieval France. It had all the elements of what makes a story really great to tell — the idea of an unreliable narrator, a second unreliable narrator and then a kind of reveal of what happened through the eyes of a character who was both the hero and whose humanity was denied and ignored.HOLOFCENER But also, you get the fact that it wasn’t black and white to the men, and it was so black and white to the woman about what happened. So, the male point of views offer this perspective of male delusion.Nicole, Marguerite wasn’t nearly as fleshed out in the book. How did you go about creating her world?HOLOFCENER I did research about what women were like then and what they had to put up with. I gave her a friend to be able to talk to. I knew that she would have to take over the estate when he was away fighting. So I read up, “Well, what did they do?” Took care of the animals and the horses and the harvesting. And I really tried to imagine just how awful it was for her and how she dealt with the awfulness. Her life was pretty bad being married to Jean de Carrouges and so when she was violated, she had nothing to lose, really. I mean, she was going to suffer. She had the potential of suffering dearly and dying, but at that point she was just tired of having no voice.How do three writers keep things straight?AFFLECK Once the script got close to a completed stage, then it got passed around, emailed. In fact, one of the biggest challenges was the maddening technological aspects of keeping up with various versions — that they had included everyone else’s changes.HOLOFCENER We kept working off the wrong drafts. It was like: “Wait a minute. I took that line out two months ago. Why is it still there?” We’re not the most technically savvy.DAMON We had one of those moments where I think we’d done half a day on one of these things and we’re realizing, “Oh no, this is the wrong draft,” and then you have to try to go through and figure out what you’ve done.HOLOFCENER Matt doesn’t even have a laptop. So don’t get me started.How did you make sure you were portraying Marguerite’s rape accurately without exploiting it?AFFLECK We were especially sensitive and careful to really listen and do research, whether it was consulting with RAINN [an organization that helps victims of rape, abuse and incest], survivors of assault, historical experts, women’s groups, and trying to allow all of those other experiences to inform the story and make it as authentic as possible.HOLOFCENER I think that those organizations really, really wanted to make sure we were making it clear what the truth was — that this is not “he said, she said.” This is not ambivalent.AFFLECK We had questions like: “Are we whitewashing if we don’t show the emotional toll and the severity of this? To what extent does it become too much? And where do you feel the bounds of tastes are?”HOLOFCENER A lot of it was about how often do we see the rape and how long is it? How long do we have to suffer through this? That was a topic of conversation. And so we took their notes seriously and did a lot of trimming. We had to show some scenes twice, but it was necessary. We had to see the rape twice, as disturbing as it was to watch.Damon and Comer in “The Last Duel.” The writers had to decide how much of the attack to show given that it would be repeated to show different perspectives.20th Century StudiosWhat choices did you make to either stick with or depart from the book?DAMON The biggest departure is the rape scene. Marguerite de Carrouges, what she said in court and over and over again to an ever-widening group of people and eventually all of France, was that Jacques Le Gris entered her home with another man, Adam Louvel. We have in the movie Louvel coming in, but then Le Gris tells him to leave. In Marguerite’s actual testimony, the rape was much more brutal. She was tied down and gagged. She almost choked to death. And Louvel was in the room.HOLOFCENER [Le Gris] told himself he loved her.AFFLECK What was fascinating was the degree to which this behavior and attitude toward women was so thorough and pervasive, and the vestigial aspects that are still with us today. That’s really powerful. What we have hoped is people will look at it and go: “Have I always understood how my actions were being perceived by others? Have I always recognized other people’s reality, truth, perspective, in the course of my behavior?” And maybe reflect on that.Ben, I understood that you were originally going to portray Le Gris. And then you decided to play the libertine Count Pierre d’Alençon instead of facing off against Matt onscreen. Why?HOLOFCENER He came to his senses.AFFLECK What happened truly is that —DAMON We heard Adam Driver was interested. [Everyone laughs.] More