Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Bride!, The Lost Daughter, Secretary, The Honourable Woman) shared the pleasure she gets out of directing and her transition from acting during a chat with a group of journalists at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on Saturday.
Discussing the work of a director, she suggested: “I feel it is very similar to being a mother. You become a mother – all of a sudden you are actually responsible for the life of another person. That is both incredibly exciting, powerful, and absolutely terrifying.”
She concluded: “In terms of responsibility, it is really major. That’s a really interesting thing about directing, way more so than producing, and also way more so than acting.”
Gyllenhaal also shared the joy she experiences as a director in the prep process with her cinematographer “thinking through the movie in a joined imaginary world,” explaining: “It’s so cool, it’s so intense, and there is the pleasure for me in being on set with a plan with a shared language that we’ve built together.”
She concluded: “That was new to me, and I didn’t know how much I would love it. So sometimes when people ask me if I want to act, I think no, I want to prep with my cinematographer, and I want to keep learning this language that I have gotten so much pleasure out of learning.”
