It's a well-deserved fuss, since Marling is one of the great revelatory discoveries of 2010, a clear-eyed actress with an amazing ability to command the screen, whether as a manipulative cult leader in Sound of My Voice (which was also picked up by Fox Searchlight) or as the troubled, conflicted Rhoda in Another Earth. Next, Marling will be seen in her biggest film to date, playing the daughter of Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere in Andrew Jarecki's Arbitrage.
Movieline spoke with Marling via phone about the origins of Another Earth, the contemplation of paths not taken, and the sweet relief she's felt so far in watching a major Hollywood studio get behind the tiny-budgeted passion projects she thought she'd just be screening for friends in her living room.
We chatted last March at SXSW, where you brought both Sound of My Voice and Another Earth. Fast forward four months -- how has life changed for you since then?
Oh my goodness. That's a really good question; let me think of an honest answer. It's been good. Mike [Cahill] and I have been on the road for a while, every day a different city doing Q&As, and that has been really amazing, because you see so many responses to the film at once. You're in Philadelphia one day and Chicago the next, and it's really interesting. This movie -- everyone has very different feelings about the interpretation of it, and what happens. And they're strong opinions! People get really passionate about it. It's cool to see that, because you give up the film now to the audience, to the debate and the things they feel, and it doesn't belong to you anymore. It's a nice transference.
You shot both this and Sound of My Voice (with director Zal Batmanglij) on a shoestring budget, but to have it then reach such a wide audience through a studio release must be a sort of dream scenario for you and Mike.
Oh my gosh, it's so far outside the realm of the dream. It's like, beyond dreaming. When we were making this movie, we were saying at the beginning, "Oh yeah, we'll have a screening at our house. How many people can we fit into the living room? If we bring in chairs and we borrow this person's couch, we can fit 20 people in here to watch the movie!" That's kind of how we went about making it; we just wanted to make something, you know? The desire to just make something is so strong, you're not even thinking about how it could enter the world. Getting to go to Sundance, and Searchlight taking the film into their hands -- which are the most capable hands in independent filmmaking -- they put so much thought and feeling behind bringing this work into the world that basically, it's every day a state of shock and awe.
Mike was studying a lot of theoretical science when you and he first formulated the ideas that went into Another Earth. How did you translate real life scientific studies into forming the actual story?
You know, it's interesting. We would just show up to write every day, and we started with this more epic conceit -- first, the idea of a doppelganger. And then, what if all 6.93 billion people on this planet were also on this duplicate Earth, what if you could make literal and visual the sort of healing we all have, or are haunted by, the idea of twins, a duplicate you, another you and all the variations on that theme. And we started with that idea, and began to think: What's a human drama we could tell within that where the possibility of a confrontation with yourself would have the most emotional resonance? And that's sort of where Rhoda and John came from. But basically Mike and I would just get together every day and tell each other the story back and forth and try to move each other and try to make each other laugh, and try to make each other afraid. If, as you're telling each other the story back and forth, Mike or I is falling asleep or going to the kitchen to make a snack, you know that you've lost the other person. We spent a lot of time doing that, and once you crack the overall narrative -- that's what takes the longest, figuring out the story beat by beat as you tell it to each other. Then you finally open up Final Draft and actually start to write something.
Traditionally, doppelganger stories are somewhat frightening, but here with Rhoda, the idea of a double is actually hopeful for her.
Yeah! It's so true. For whatever reason in most science fiction, the doppelganger is, like, only one can survive! They're chasing each other and one has to die. But this is kind of the opposite of that. I think there's more room for the audience's imagination, because I think the audience puts themselves into the story, and they're thinking, "What would that be like, if there were really alternate universes, parallel universes, which multiverse theory, on the cutting edge of theoretical physics right now, suggests that there are -- multiple universes with duplicate planets. There's room in this story for the audience to plug themselves in, and you're sort of thinking, "What if I had taken that job?" "What if I had moved to Rome when I had that offer?" "What if I hadn't broken up with that person?" The collection of major what ifs, and also the minor ones -- all these small decisions that happen in a day, where your life begins to go onto one trajectory and move away from another. I think we all think about that.
With Rhoda it is one of those small decisions.
Completely -- and that's an interesting moment, too, because it hinges on the real question of, chaos or destiny? Are we just these charged particles randomly bumping into each other in the night? Is it meaningless, and a mess, or is there something ordered -- and is there a mask that is so divine that we cannot perceive it, that we cannot articulate it? That is what is really behind the workings of the universe, even, and that things are actually coming together in some meant way.
One might look at the last year or so of your life, and if you think of that question in regards to what your life might have been like if you hadn't made the decision to leave your office job.
Yeah. I've been thinking about that a lot, actually. I had thought in high school about going to drama school, and then decided not to. So I have to wonder, if I had studied drama and gone to drama school for four years, would I then have gone, "No -- I want to get into geology!" Lives are so weird, in that they can shift course so radically, and I sometimes wonder, "Do all roads lead to acting?" Or is this a particular thread that I'm following right now?
Speaking of this life, right now -- when we spoke last you were about to go into filming on Arbitrage with Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon. What was that experience like, and how different did it feel from working on Sound of My Voice and Another Earth?
There are of course differences, and yet at the end of the day it's always the same. You're still with a group of people, this tribe of people, no matter what size the tribe is, you're still there every day. Everyone has the script, and you're every day trying to figure out how to tell the best story. How do you be the most honest and true to the script? I feel like no matter how many times you do that, it never gets easier. The challenges are always different and if at any moment you fall, you're back at zero. It was very much that way on Arbitrage. And I think everybody who came onto the project was really there because the story was so thrilling and original, and interesting, and prescient.
How would you describe your character?
She's... interesting. She works at a hedge fund, and her father runs the hedge fund. She's his protégé, and she's fierce. That's not a space that has many women in it, so I shadowed some people for a while and it was fascinating to see how that all works, what women are like in that environment. She's very moral. She has this really strong belief system, and it's a weird dichotomy that there are some compromises they're making on the business side, and yet she's also very morally grounded. She was a fascinating character to spend some time with.
What was it like sharing scenes with Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere?
I was her daughter in the story; Richard and her are a married couple, and he's running this hedge fund. She's his wife, they're living this sort of perfect existence in New York and they have the perfect family, and it all starts to unravel from there. But it was a wonderful experience to work with both of them. Sarandon's just so incredibly generous and talented and present, I feel like I learned a lot.
What's the status of your next film with Zal, The East?
Zal and I are working on re-writing that right now, and we don't exactly know, we're not exactly sure of the way in which that will come together. But it's a fun story and it's nice to be thinking about the next thing and getting excited about it.
How do you feel about the fact that Fox Searchlight has embraced your films so much?
There's nobody like them. They're such an incredible group of people, and you really feel like the movies they take on are movies they really connect with on a visceral level. That's why they're so successful at reaching wider audiences than they maybe normally could. They understand, and I just think in terms of editing the Another Earth trailer. Another Earth is such a... Mike and I always had a hard time pitching the story, it's a hard story to tell. You're like, "Well, there's this duplicate Earth. And then there's this girl," and people are like, "What?" But they really feel the film and understand it. The trailer, the one-sheet, the way it all enters the world is an extension of how deeply they feel these things, and it's amazing. It's been an amazing thing to get to work with them.
As an independent filmmaker who was so invested in your work, it must have been a great relief to have a studio "get" your movie.
Yeah - and I guess part of it is, when you're making these independent movies there's so much sweat equity in it. You can't pay for anything, so it's just blood, sweat, tears, working insane hours, breaking all the rules just trying to make something. And when someone takes it and puts the same energy into it that you were, but they're doing something that you cannot do, it's an amazing feeling to see their commitment to it and to watch it enter the world. Especially when you were just setting out to make it, and had no idea of where it could go.