the script. Her emotions are very close to the surface, which I think is what makes her great actress. We just talked for ages, not really about the script, we just talked about being a parent, about kids, about loss and then she said she'd do it, which was brilliant. And then I remember I went to New York for what I thought were rehearsals and the first day that I met her she said "oh let's just go for a walk". We spent the day in Central Park and ate a lot of hot dogs with a lot of mustard and sat around and talked nonsense about everything. Nothing to do with the film. She is a really really great actress and I don't think that she's used enough, partly because she doesn't play the system. I don't think she's had her dues. I think partly it's that she seems difficult, and she is, but I think that in an actor that's a great thing. You want actors who challenge you, who aren't yes men. But I think in Hollywood, and I'm speculating here, that she's too much of her own person even though she commands huge respect as an actress.
Hannah Gross then was a relative newcomer. How did she get involved?
Hannah came out of auditions really. She's from Toronto and her parents are quite well known actors. She had done one short indie film called Darker Than Blue and she was really good in it, but really was just her audition. You can see by her that she's a really really smart woman and she has a strange kind of presence in the shot. She didn't come rushing into the audition trying to impress, but she had a captivating kind of presence. And I was just delighted that she came on board. I think she is wonderful and I know that Catherine felt that she was wonderful. I know that she's in Mindhunter on Netflix now. We talked a lot about her character. How do you communicate in a part where you virtually say nothing. She has a very complex inner journey going on and sometimes for the director if an actor is good, and they are on it, then you leave them be. And Hannah is definitely that. We talked a lot before and we read different things and we would have listened to different pieces of music, but then I felt that she just got it. And very much I left her to her own devices.
It must have been hard for her sitting outside in the cold for so long.
It was so cold. It was the coldest march in 150 years. And I thought I was kind of used to the cold here, but then I thought that this is a bit rough! I didn't want to appear weak in front of my macho Canadian crew, but then I started to gather that even they thought that it was incredibly cold. We would have had a heated mat under Hannah and there was heaters in her clothes, but it was still brutal. I had a load of scenes with the Hanna Schygulla character that I had to drop because Hanna was in her 80's. We were shooting one day and I thought this woman could die if I don't get her inside. And then the other thing you're in Toronto in winter and you think it's going to look beautiful but at those temperatures it doesn't snow. We were filming sometimes at -25 with wind chill and having to put fake snow in. The first few times I went to Toronto was for the Toronto International Film Festival and you get a totally different impression of the city. I suddenly arrived in to do pre-production on the first day of January and thought "Jesus"!
Was it an easy decision to make it in Canada?
It's a Canadian book, it's a Toronto or Ontario story, so there was never really a question of shooting anywhere else. I know that a lot of Irish films are shooting there because of the co-production agreement, but this would have nothing to do with that really. Although it was a beneficiary of that. We established a relationship with Sienna Films who are a very well respected production company in Toronto, and so the entire production happened in Toronto, and the entire crew were Canadian. Even though my Director of Photography was a Mexican woman ,which is unusual. We post-produced back here in Windmill Lane. it happened around