“Company”, interview with actresses Emily Alyn Lind and Catherine Caylee Cowan

In competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, Company, directed by Casey Affleck, is a haunting fable told across three interconnected time periods, in which a mysterious young woman arriving at a 1975 Christmas gathering begins a chain of nested stories about grief, forgiveness and the unseen burdens people carry. Emily Alyn Lind and Catherine Caylee Cowan, actresses and, for Cowan, also a co-producer on the film, talk about the ensemble’s Russian-doll structure, a last-minute casting call that upended Lind’s plans, and the trust required to let Affleck direct scenes actors could not always see or hear each other in.

A Russian doll of storytellers

Asked about telling a story within a story, Cowan describes an ensemble built on the way stories are handed down across generations: “It’s definitely an ensemble and it feels like each character builds off of the other. And in a way that’s kind of how stories have been passed down by generations. Someone tells it and then they retell it. And we’re telling a story that’s from our perspective, from the female’s perspective”. Without giving too much away, she describes the effect that structure creates: “There is this Russian doll effect in the storytelling process. And there are some beautiful lines that accompany visuals that will be more powerful because there’s a lot of people just sitting in chairs and talking, but there’s also visual accompaniment”. Asked how she would describe the film itself, after co-star Scott McNairy called the script bizarre at the press conference, Cowan reframes it: “For me it was a meditation on forgiveness and grief, and how our relationships with the people in our lives can sometimes be very complicated and painful for each other, and the things that we want can be complicated, but time heals all wounds”. The shoot itself, she adds, mirrored that scale, spanning decades of story and a fractured schedule: “It is a period drama, but it goes from 1975 all the way back to the medieval section, so it spans generations and decades. […] We only had a few days of filming for those sections and they were also disconnected from the first part. We kind of went backwards when we were filming it”.

Trusting Casey Affleck completely

Asked whether Affleck, himself an actor, gives his cast room to find the scene, both actresses agree: “He’s really in there. Yeah, he’s definitely in there. He likes to craft it down to the period, but it’s somehow not annoying and it’s so helpful because respecting someone as an actor is another level. There is something inherently nice about the fact that he is an actor and he gets it”. Cowan illustrates that trust with the shooting of Alice’s cabin scenes, built around a real fire: “We drilled a hole into the roof for the smoke to go through because Casey really wanted it to be a real fire”. With her scene partner pulled out between takes for the heat, she found herself acting to a mark on the wall instead: “I would just do it to a point on the wall with Casey doing it. And so I didn’t actually have anything to respond to. So, I was completely reliant on Casey not only acting with me but directing me”.

Plot