When the script was finally shipped off to Hahn, she just knew it was something she couldn’t turn down, “When I got the script it said, ‘Private Life by Tamara Jenkins,’” she recalled. “I was so excited because I loved ‘The Savages’ so much, but the title could have been about anything, I had no idea it would be about infertility and assisted reproduction. I went in completely blind, and I just fell in love with this couple. With the specificity of this marriage in the same way I love the brother/sister relationship in ‘The Savages,’ I just love her writing, it’s so gorgeous and clear and so specific. When I finished reading it, I thought ‘oh well, now my heart’s going to be broken because I probably won’t get this part’ [laughs].”
She did land the part, but not before meeting up with Jenkins and Giamatti at the filmmaker’s NYC apartment, and suffice to say they hit it off immediately, “She set our dinner, and it was just the easiest, most casual, hilarious meeting. I just felt I knew him forever, we just felt like siblings, only in ways long marriages can. It was set, so perfect and easy and then you added Kayli to the mix, and it was “of course!” It all felt like it fit.”
“Tamara’s integrity as a filmmaker is so high,” Carter said. “[The story is] an embarrassment of riches” that stems from “the way that people speak to one another in the script. Everybody is endowed with such resonance and so clearly coming from somewhere that is very specific to their character.” As a woman, Carter says she rarely finds screenplays this rich in female characters. “It’s almost scary for me to have such a gift of a script like this and I can honestly say, after finishing this, that I read only a single script that I’ve loved as much in the past year and a half since I got to make this movie. As a young woman, I find it frightening not to find a character to grow attached to; it’s slim picking out there.”
Hahn, who gives a heartfelt performance as Rachel, was struck not just by Tamara’s personal experience, but also by the hundreds she read online, so much so that research turned into sheer personal curiosity. She read countless books and devoured YouTube testimonials (positive and negative) of women discussing their fertility and IVF journies.
“Those stories really touched me, most are set to beautiful music, and they just killed me,” she laughed. “The vulnerability, it was just too much to bear. These videos, they would devastate me. So that was the work I did, I would just kind of go home and fall asleep watching these videos, it wasn’t even researching anymore, I was just compelled to bear witness to their stories and watch them over and over again.”
In her research, Jenkins realized so many couples were suffering in silence, and their IVF experience was indeed, private. “It was happening all around me, and there seemed to be a kind of mini-epidemic with people pursuing parenthood through these means,” she said, noting the phenome is more and more widespread given many women and artists trying to launch their career before they have children.
“A lot of writers, journalists, artists waited due to their careers, and when the time came for them to want kids they were up against limitations,” she explained. “It’s also grown so much in the culture; tons of articles, books, journals. I was interested in writing about marriage, a middle-aged marriage and I was trying to look for the perfect metaphor for middle-aged marriage because you’re up against the differences of what your expectations were about life then and what you have now.”
Jenkins, who treats the material with deep humanity, but laced with hilarious ironies, deeply felt moments and genuine emotional suffering says she loves the “shimmer” between comedy and drama. “I aspire for that tone as a filmmaker and writer because I feel like it’s an alive place, that tone,” she remarked. “Kathryn and Paul great actors and they can straddle that thing; not many actors can. Phil Hoffman and Laura Linney had that ability too. It’s a particular actor to be able just to do that.”
Hahn is a little more humble stating that “It’s all in the script. Everything we needed was in the script. You just have to play what Tamara wrote. All I had to do was really listen to Paul. I wanted to do Tamara’s writing right, which feels like you’re a fly on the wall in their bedroom, it almost feels like a documentary.”
With her new film finally available on Netflix now, Jenkins hopes she won’t go a decade between films next time, “I can’t wait another ten years because by the time I make that next movie I’ll need a walker [laughs].”
“Private Life” is available on Netflix now. Bonus: Watch the full New York Film Festival press conference for “Private Life.”
Check out all our coverage from the 2018 New York Film Festival here.
