Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps felt like they got to have a three-week “sleepover” filming Father Mother Sister Brother — but portraying two estranged sisters enduring the world’s most deeply uncomfortable afternoon is what they reveled in most.
In this season’s awkward holiday anthology, director Jim Jarmusch explores the inner workings of disconnected families through three distinct stories, each centered on adult children reckoning with long-standing emotional distance.
For Blanchett, 56, and Krieps, 42, the film’s “Mother” chapter became an intimate study of how siblings, no matter how grown, fall back into old roles when under a parent’s eye. Set in Dublin, the vignette follows sisters Tim (Blanchett) and Lilith (Krieps) as they reunite with their mother (Charlotte Rampling) for tea — a ritualized meeting that happens just once a year at the suggestion of her therapist. Despite its surface politeness, the annual visit becomes a pressure cooker where resentment is communicated through baited silences and passive-aggressive remarks.
“There’s a real gentle power to the film, and it accrues a kind of collective understanding of what families can mean,” Blanchett exclusively shares in the latest issue of Us Weekly. “We all bring our own personal understanding of family, not only the families that we’re biologically connected to, but the ones that we’re tangentially connected to, or the ones that we have created.”
Blanchett, who lost her father at just 10 years old, admits she grew up in a type of “silent” household herself. And while, unlike Tim, she was able to form a “deep and close” relationship to her own sister, she understands how “glorious and complicated” that dynamic can be.
“I think what’s interesting about siblings is that they evolve into being quite different creatures in the outside world, but when they come back together, they somehow revert to dynamics that they’ve established before they were seven,” she tells Us.
In the case of Tim and Vicky, the pair oftentimes feel like they wish to be closer but cannot push past the walls that exist between them. Blanchett points out that the women are “entering middle age” and therefore have a sense of “acceptance” that things are simply how they will always be.
“[Lilith] is the character who sucks up all the oxygen, and Tim doesn’t get a lot of time above the water,” Blanchett says of their dynamic. “That doesn’t mean she’s unconfident or shy or a wallflower, perhaps in the outside world, but maybe that’s who she becomes in the space with her mother and sister.”
Blanchett grew up in a “household full of women” — she sends condolences to her “poor brother” — and learned at an early age that every family is “unique” in how it forms its “own sort of behaviors and gestures and ways of relating to one another.” The genius of Jarmusch’s storytelling, however, is pointing out how there are similarities based on your position in your family.”
“Jim [wrote] something so strange and so particular and deeply awkward, that we just had to play that and work it out. And it lent into the performative nature that we often have in families, that we perform these roles, almost for one another rather than for ourselves,” she explains. “So as the tea is being passed, there was a kind of a strange, rigid, almost mischievous and performative quality to their relationship that we had to sort of try and unpack.”
For Krieps, the trio’s disconnect traces back to generational trauma.“When you never learn how to share feelings or share your life, you don’t know [how],” she explains. “I know a lot of people who, no matter what, they would never not see their kids. A therapist could tell me 500 times not to see my kids and I would never do that.”
She adds that Lilith and Tim’s mother “was probably working and very happy with being this emancipated woman,” which is likely a result of being “hurt in her childhood, where either her mother didn’t love her, or her mother wasn’t loving her the right way.”
“We all carry trauma over generations and generations, and I think Lilith doesn’t dare to say the real truth, which would be to [say], ‘Why were you not there for us? Why are we here only once a year, I would like to see you for Christmas?’” she explains.
For Krieps’ own life, it’s imperative to be the person “stopping the train every 50 meters” to emotionally check in on her loved ones, so playing Lilith was a change of pace. “Let’s talk, what is really going on? Tell me what you’re really feeling,” she says. “I constantly remind people of telling me what they actually think, what they actually want.”
She adds that being heavily communicative has its “downsides” too, however, noting that she’s often labeled the “troublemaker” of her family. “I get in a lot of fights because I try to wake them up. I’m like, ‘No, I’m not buying that. What do you actually think?’”
Ironically, the emotional turmoil seen on screen between Blanchett, Krieps and Rampling’s characters was countered by an unexpected closeness off camera. Blanchett recalls nightly dinners, long conversations and spending time gabbing with her costars “just as if we were on this extended sleepover” while being “cast ashore” in their filming location of Ireland.
“We shot in the same location, and we spent the entire time in between takes on the bed in Charlotte’s room,” the Oscar winner tells Us. It felt like we went into this formal, rigid performance space and then we had this long-form dialogue that went on for the whole time we were shooting between the three of us. The four of us, including Jim, obviously.”
Krieps, for her part, enjoyed the juxtaposition of bonding with her costars in their downtime and getting to play into the uncomfortable tone of their scenes.
“It made me feel a little bit like theater. We were this family, and we knew what we had to do, and because we are actors, once we were on stage, we slipped into this character or in this tension,” she recalls. “And even though we were in a tension that you physically feel yourself, you are still having fun. We had fun being difficult!”
For Blanchett, it was the perfect way to kick off her year. “It was three very separate weeks for me in Ireland, and my family didn’t join me, so I felt like I was with a couple of sisters,” she says. “t was a really beautiful way to begin the year. Just incredibly intimate and special.”
Father Mother Sister Brother hits theaters nationwide on December 24.
