The lives of others

This article is published in number 18 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 11, 2021

The Angels. Amy Adams sneezes. “No no nothing. It’s probably a bit of an allergy. ‘ But a shadow of terror shines through the intense blue of his eyes. “Health!”. “Thank you”. It must not be easy to be hypochondriac in times of pandemic and, of course, the role of an agoraphobic for the film. The
woman at the window she must not have helped, especially since Julianne Moore, another hypochondriac, was acting with her.

“It’s true. Illnesses were at the center of our talk, during breaks on set. But I have improved over the years. Since I am a mother, I have less time to go to “Doctor Google” and I also feel good about Covid. I try to rationalize, I use common sense, I inform myself without being too influenced by what happens. Yes, I have definitely improved ».

The miracle was therefore performed by her daughter Aviana, ten years old, with Darren Le Gallo, married in Italy in 2015. The name Aviana derives from Aviano, the town in the province of Vicenza where the actress was born 46 years ago. His father, a military man, was stationed at the local USAF (United States Air Force) air force base. “When it came to choosing, Aviana appeared among so many names. I was oriented towards more traditional names, but then it was born and we spontaneously called it Avy ».

Anna Fox, the character she plays in the film directed by Joe Wright, is instead a single woman, a child psychologist forced home by a particularly severe form of agoraphobia, the psychological disorder that creates states of anxiety in situations of great outdoors. Her life spends bored in one of those famous and beautiful New York brownstone houses, multi-story earth-colored brick houses. His life is divided between alcohol and interest in the business of the neighboring neighbors, until he witnesses a violent fact. A woman (Moore) is attacked by her husband (Gary Oldman), but when Anna calls the police, things don’t seem so clear and the psychologist’s own mental health is questioned. «There is a cultural osmosis that we are experiencing», says the director, «whereby, even without wanting to, you are conditioned by the world around you. Certain themes, certain female perspectives are becoming essential to cinema. But the theme of this film is not about women’s themes.
It has not so much to do with the doubts of others towards the protagonist, as in her own belief in what she has seen. Self-confidence is a universal theme, not tied to a gender ».

Amy Adams is not of the same opinion: “They call it” gaslighting “(literally gas lighting, in medicine, and in Italian it is defined as malignant psychological manipulation, ed) and the victims are almost always women who, abused and not believed, begin to doubt themselves and their sanity ». It is not the first time that the actress has explored the theme of doubt. It was called precisely The doubt the 2008 film in which she played an innocent nun, witnessing unclear events inside a Catholic convent directed by Meryl Streep. Alcohol abuse is also not a new topic for the actress. In the Sharp Objects TV miniseries three years ago, she played an alcoholic reporter. But Anna, according to the actress, does not suffer from a real alcohol addiction: “Her problems are different, mixing alcohol and pills for her is simply a do-it-yourself cure”. Practice, that of self-medication, very widespread in America, where the opioid drug crisis caused, according to an expert opinion in a trial against pharmaceutical multinationals, over 400,000 deaths between 1999 and 2017.

Based on a novel by AJ Finn, the drama directed by Joe Wright has nothing to do with The Backyard Window, Hitchcock’s masterpiece in which James Stewart plays a man in a wheelchair who spies on his neighbors from the window. “I saw him recently, but my favorite Hitchcock is Vertigo – The Woman Who Lived Twice. That was the masterpiece I looked at in the breaks on set. I like how the theme of identity is treated in that film ». Anna Fox’s identity is clear: she is a woman traumatized by an event prior to what happens in the film. «For me it was important to reconstruct who Anna was before the dramatic events that made her as she is, or rather agoraphobic. I’ve read a lot about agoraphobia. I have met some specialists who study how these traumas affect the human mind and create these states of unbearable anxiety. Anna is a woman trapped in her mind, before she is in the house ».

But Amy Adams – in unsuspected times, when the pandemic was still unimaginable – was happy to attend that home set. «I feel very reassured by a familiar space, so it was nice for me to always be in the same environment, this beautiful New York-style house. It was reassuring to come to work every day and know what to expect. I felt that I could really live in that house
perfectly reconstructed in a cinema shed. I felt trapped but it was not an annoying sensation, on the contrary ».
This must be the reason why the actress did not live badly the subsequent period of the lockdown: «On the contrary, I faced it with optimism. Compared to the past, I have become more sociable. From home I organized Zoom calls with the mothers of my daughter’s classmates and made group calls with FaceTime, without warning, to see who was answering. Then with friends we organized the “cinema evenings”, in which we watched a film together. I’ve seen masterpieces that I should have seen much earlier: The Hunter, The Godfather Part One and Two. I fell in love with the Robert De Niro of the seventies ».

She couldn’t do it before, she was born there in the seventies. After Aviano she returned to the United States, growing up with seven siblings in Castle Rock, Colorado. “I still have relatives in Colorado. When they come to see me, I take them to my star, on the Walk of Fame. They ask me, I would never visit it alone. I would feel embarrassed. To do what then? Take a selfie? I wouldn’t even have the opportunity to post it somewhere, I don’t go to social networks ». The impostor syndrome belongs to her. Nominated for six Academy Awards, the actress confesses that she went into crisis on the night of the 2009 Oscars when, sitting next to Meryl Streep, she did nothing but wonder: “What am I doing here? I don’t belong to this place, to this community. I felt like everything was going to vanish at any moment. ‘ It was probably the Mormon religion that she grew up with that influenced her. «I am very strict with myself, I live with feelings of guilt and I feel the weight of the slightest lie. I believe that all this has to do with the religious principles I grew up with and which are still part of me ”. The actress also wanted to reconstruct her childhood in The Woman at the Window.

“It helps me, I always do it for my roles. Anna imagined her playing with Legos. She must have been a child who loved to put things in order, to build. A child who loved predictability, organization and order ».
Like many productions, this thriller was also affected by the ongoing health emergency, but that wasn’t the only reason for the delays in its release. Produced by Scott Rudin, the film suffered the consequences of a complaint from a collaborator of the producer, who accused him of violent behavior on set. It seems that Rudin threw a computer at the employee, injuring him. Other delays were caused by a supplement of filming commissioned by Rudin himself after an unsuccessful test screening. Joe Wright has come to define the climate on the set as “intense”, “we have all become a bit feral.” Now, two years after the events, the film finds peace and arrives in streaming, on Netflix, from 14 May.

ON THE SET WITH JOE – Joe Wright, 48, director of Woman at the Window. Above, with Amy Adams in a backstage photo from the set. The film is based on the novel of the same name by AJ Finn: it is the story of a woman suffering from agoraphobia (fear of situations in open spaces), whose life
she is shocked when she witnesses a brutal crime.

photo NECKLACE SCHORR
Jason Rider service

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