By Christine Westwood
“I’m just the monkey in a cast of great actors,” jokes Australian actor, Travis Fimmel, on the press line ahead of the premiere screening of Rebecca Miller’s Maggie’s Plan at The Sundance Film Festival. Fimmel, sporting a beanie and woollens against the snowy weather, explains that it’s his first time at Sundance, and he’s deliberately, or humbly, making light of his impressive screen credentials. “I’ve got Warcraft coming up this year, and another couple of seasons of Vikings. This film was such a pleasure to do, and now I gotta get a job. I’m looking for diverse roles, and this was great because it was so different from the other characters that I’ve been playing. I’ll sleep with any movie!”
The great actors that Fimmel refers to include Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, and leading lady, Greta Gerwig, who had a hit at Sundance with the lovely comedy, Frances Ha. “All my scenes were with Greta,” Fimmel explains. “Greta is a great woman, and she’s very talented. There was a little bit of improv. I was wearing shirts in New York in January, so in most of my scenes, you just see me fighting the cold. It’s a romantic comedy, and it’s enjoyable and quirky. I think that audiences will have fun.”
The “plan” of the title is for Maggie to have a baby on her own, but things change dramatically when she falls in love with John (Ethan Hawke), and he leaves his wife, Georgette (Julianne Moore). Three years in, Maggie sees that John still longs for his first wife, and her plan now becomes a mission to reunite the couple. On the surface, Maggie’s actions are those of a highly controlling woman, yet Gerwig plays her with a meticulous innocence and directness that makes her well-meaning, in spite of her blundering in other people’s lives.
In the opening scene, we see Maggie helping an elderly man across the road, setting up her character right away. Maggie wants to fix things, and she goes towards people and engages in their affairs. In the first minutes, she explains her pregnancy plan to her best friend Tony, played by a wonderfully cantankerous Bill Hader. He and Maya Rudolph perform as a great couple: they’re funny, astringent, and ironically, given Maggie’s plan, stressed by being parents. Travis Fimmel, meanwhile, plays Guy, a maths genius turned pickle entrepreneur who is to be Maggie’s sperm donor. The character is so idiosyncratic and improbable that at first he appears clownish, but Fimmel brings a wealth of nuance to the role, offering a sense of purity that echoes Maggie’s own.
“I saw it at Toronto and absolutely loved it,” said Trevor Groth, Sundance’s director of programming, in his pre-screening introduction of Maggie’s Plan. “It’s Rebecca’s first foray into making a full-on comedy. She was born as a filmmaker at Sundance in 1995.” Miller’s work as a writer and director includes The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Personal Velocity (an early digital festival hit in 2002), and The Ballad Of Jack and Rose. An occasional actress too, Miller is the daughter of titanic American playwright, Arthur Miller (The Crucible, Death Of A Salesman), and wife of Oscar winning actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, to whom she has two children.
Miller spoke to FilmInk about the style of Maggie’s Plan. “I think a lot about the visuals,” the director says. “I draw and paint a lot. I told everyone involved in the production that I wanted the film to be like a wonderful crisp apple…like the best apple that you’ve ever had: a little bit tart, sweet, and nourishing. Somehow, they interpreted that. It brought out the intelligence of the story. It’s intelligent yet emotional, and it doesn’t condescend to the audience in any way, yet it’s very relatable. There are complex and shifting relationships between the characters. We worked on it for a long time beforehand. The characters evolved a lot according to who I had cast. I write a character, and then I want to sew it in to an actor like it’s a beautiful dress, perfectly formed to their body and their spirit and who they are. Then we end up with something that’s really alive. It’s from an unpublished book by Karen Rinaldi, who’s a friend of mine. I changed scenes around, but its more or less her story”
Gerwig adds: “We had a long time before we shot, so Rebecca and I spent over a year hanging out and talking. We traded images and texts that we thought would work, and we talked about the character moving through the script. By the time that we did it, we had a clear picture of who she was.” Adds Miller: “With Greta, there was a long process of talking about the character of Maggie. We came up with the idea of her being a Quaker. I wanted the idea that she was different from other people. She wasn’t saintly, but there’s something pure about her. She’s always trying to do the right thing, and she’s always helping people even when it goes wrong.”
Actor, Bill Hader, brought on a different kind of preparation. Elaborating on the development of her characters, Miller says that she “was mindful about Bill Hader being so great with improvisation. I was saying, ‘You can add what you want’ and he said, ‘Please don’t make me improvise! It’s a like a warm blanket to have the script!’”
Speaking to the audience after the premiere screening at Sundance, Miller admitted that this was a far different bow than that of her 1995 debut, Angela. “When I screened my first film, I was as nervous as anyone can be without dying,” she smiles. “This festival has been at the turning points in my life as a filmmaker. My work has tended to be more dramatic, but I’ve always liked the comic parts in my films, and I thought that if I like that, then why not switch the balance and make this more comedy.”
Maggie’s Plan will be released later this year.
