Florence Pugh - Lady Macbeth Q&A

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for coming tonight to our third Shortlist screening to support the EE Rising Star Awards. My name is Chris Mandel, I'm the Features Editor at Shortlist and I'm joined by Florence Pugh. Thank you so much for joining us tonight, it's amazing to see this film again. Can you tell us a bit about, first of all, how you approached Katherine as a character and what you knew about her life before she got married? Because as it starts we see her kind of get married off and doomed to this life with this horrible family, but what do you know about her life before then? So I think it is worth saying that when we filmed Lady Macbeth, I feel like I'm quite quiet, am I quiet or can you hear me? All good? When we filmed Lady Macbeth there was a scene beforehand where she was seen with a child on a beach and she was supposed to be kind of like a tutor to this family and when she was sold with the piece of land, she was sold to those lovely men that she then married into. So we did actually film those scenes but when they came to edit it they realised that they actually, well Will thought that it was better that we meet her when she meets the rest of that household and we meet her when she's down the she's about to say I do and it's all a little bit too late to turn around. And at the time I was quite upset about that because I quite liked, obviously we see Katherine in a particular state all the way through the film and I quite liked seeing a little bit of warmth and kind of tenderness to her before she started killing everyone and I was a little bit bummed out about that and Will then obviously said well if we're going to follow Katherine's story then let's follow her when she's as scared and as I suppose interested as she is. So I got that but where I think Katherine is beforehand I don't, I never ever when reading it or filming it I never felt that she was a villain. I never thought that she was a monster. I think that she always acted in a particular way because of the circumstances that she was put in and I don't, I still today don't think that she's a bad person or a nasty person. I think she does awful things. So where I like to think she started before the film was as any 16 year old girl was at that time. I think she's just caught up in something very particular and she starts mothering children. A very specific set of circumstances and it is about one woman trying to survive isn't it in this really difficult situation. She has to use everything that she has to hand because so much is taken away from her at a young age. What was it like filming then? Tell us a bit about where you filmed that and the estate that you were on because it's an absolutely incredible place. Yeah so we filmed just outside of Durham. Will actually, the director William Aldroyd, he went to university there and he knew that area well and he knew how he wanted to set Lady Macbeth out and where we filmed was this estate and it was actually the estate, well was once, and this entire grounds was this amazing house that no one was living in, no one was using and it was completely empty and it still had some of, well obviously all the architecture on the inside, the design was still as it was and this estate was once a Victorian zoo, one of the first zoos. So actually the reason why it closed down, it wasn't made for that but it ended up becoming, the reason why this zoo closed down was because too many of the chimpanzees kept on running onto the main road which I thought was quite amazing. So they have all these drawings of these like you know lions and monkeys and actually where I get married in the church was the lizard hut or the lizard house where they kept all the lizards and snakes and the cold-blooded animals but yeah. Wow. I know it's kind of cool but yeah that's what we filmed and for filming wise we only really had one location so production office was set up there and usually when you're filming you always lose days in amongst the shoot to travel because you have to travel the entire cast and crew and location to wherever you're going but because we had one location it meant that we could really set up camp there and actually it really worked our favour because some days if a scene wasn't working or something wasn't happening we'd just move upstairs and go shoot another scene. So yeah. Tell me a bit about how you transformed into Katherine because watching the scene where her corset gets put on, I mean that made my ribs hurt just watching it. So what was it like with the way that she is made up and then how did that help you become her? People have always asked me how I prepared for Katherine and I didn't in a funny way. I didn't ever feel like Katherine was calculated. I always thought that she was and so I thought well I'm never ever ever gonna know how it feels to shoot a horse or how to smother a child so there was no point in me guessing because I think that's the worst thing to do. So I tried to trust myself and tell myself that well there is no preparation for that. I can't force myself to put on a performance because I have no idea how it feels to try and to bury a horse. So lots of those scenes I tried to not really think about and I tried to live in them when I was doing it. Not in a horrible way but in a way where I didn't really want to have that on my head. So lots of my preparation was completely down to the costume and down to the corset and when I first had my costume fitting Holly Waddington who is the costume designer put me in a corset and was putting on all these original garments on me and I was quite excited about corsets because I as a kid I always wanted to either go into clothes or go into acting or performing so I was always excited about materials and how things work and I was like yeah I'm gonna be in a corset it's amazing and I've always thought the corsets they are really beautiful they're a work of art and I remember asking Holly all these questions about the corset and she was putting me in it and just realizing that it was a different type of breath and about an hour into my fitting I got these awful back pains really really awful and they made a corset for me so it was for my body and it was obviously made kind of modern give so that I wasn't you know strapped in with whale bones which is what they originally made from but I started realizing that you are completely caged in your clothes especially in all the big dresses and all the big crinolines that was the point and I noticed that when you're in those corsets and when you're in those dresses if you eat you use breathing space to fill your stomach with food so you end up becoming silenced and I would only realize this when I was doing it and it's so it's so interesting because when women go on about wearing corsets it is completely true you cannot breathe and if you are to do anything you have to have someone to go to the loo with you let alone like help you bend over and put your shoes on so I just found that fascinating and if I knew that I didn't like wearing the corset then you can sure bet that Catherine hated wearing the dresses so we started putting that into the script we started making sure that whenever Catherine was in the corset she wasn't as free she wasn't as creative and whenever the boys leave home she's always either in a nightie in a dressing gown or she's naked and being happy as Larry and eating I wanted her to be eating when she wasn't in a corset so that played a massive part in my preparation because it does it affects absolutely everything you walk differently and talk differently and one of the things I really like about Catherine is that even from the start she's quite defiant to the people that have effectively like imprisoned her and even when you're like laughing at your husband I just found that so different to the way that in especially in period films the women are often beaten down and but there is this like spark in her from the start I think that she do you think she knows then that she wants to kind of find a way out or is it something that only happens when she I don't think she's ever planned it I think things happen because they do but one thing that I always loved and I even remember when I was reading it was how how confident she was for letting everybody know how she feels and I think a that's very rare for a woman in a period film and b that's very rare to actually watch a woman be unapologetic I suppose um I don't really see that too often only now that I'm really seeing a lot of it but it was so special when reading it knowing that it was set in 1865 that she just didn't give a toss and if she wanted sex she was gonna go find sex and if she wanted to drink alcohol she was gonna go drink the entire cellar's worth um and if she wanted you know company she would find it and that laugh that you said you know that was something I don't know she's constantly playing she's constantly pushing the boundaries she knows that Anna comes in every morning and opens the curtains and if she's gonna see the dressing gown on the floor I mean that's gonna mean one thing and one thing only isn't it yeah yeah she's bored she's completely bored and she's playing with someone that she she knows she can play with yeah um and I think that's where her naivety and her childishness comes into it is that she's just she's left she's left in the house with nothing to do something really interesting there because I wanted to my next question is going to be about um even though Catherine's circumstances are awful she doesn't seem to have a lot of empathy for Anna who's in a similar and worse uh position in a lot of ways um I wanted to ask you just a bit about Catherine and Anna's relationship and what your thoughts were on that and whether you were surprised she didn't maybe be a bit more empathetic towards her totally um and this was something that we me and Naomi we all went well we all went up Cosmo Naomi and I and and every uh most of the crew went up about a week and a half two weeks before we started shoot and that time was dedicated towards Will spending time with us and chatting about our characters and something that that me and Naomi couldn't quite get our heads around was why why did why they don't just buddy up and like both kill the men and both run away together because that's what you would kind of like that would be a great film exactly and I I think what we came down to was that I we we thought that that Catherine felt maybe betrayed because part of the scene previous which you guys didn't see sorry was they're on their way to the church it's about 10 seconds they're on their way to the church and Catherine asks Anna what's he like and Anna says yeah you're gonna be happy and she says yeah but what's what's he like essentially and and and Naomi Anna says he's a he's a respectable man and so then Catherine smiles and she runs off to the church now obviously that it plays anyway without that but what we felt happened was somewhere along the line Catherine felt like Anna had helped her get there and Anna hadn't helped her stop where she was going and Catherine being as stubborn and as childish as she were she she couldn't let go of that grudge and even though that's absolutely pathetic there has to be something said for the fact that when Catherine goes in and finds Anna being bullied she gets her down yes she's horrible to her later but she gets her down and she frees her but still even though she's been kind to her she has to then call her a pig like so I do think there is this funny like she won't let people be awful to her but she can't actually find it in herself to forgive this woman that essentially helped her be be caged and there is also something in the fact that if you look at the two women Catherine despite the fact that she has power she has no freedom Anna does and I can go outside and I can have conversations and I can go have a life even though she's working in the house she can still be free and so all those times where you watch Catherine looking out the window and looking at Anna that's where that came from in in me and how I tried to judge that was that despite the fact that there's clearly different titles weirdly Anna has more freedom than Catherine does and that really really gets to Catherine so that's where it kind of came from but yeah there is a kind of there's been lots of questions about why they didn't just buddy up and become but that's where we kind of came from and I feel like for Catherine to grow she kind of has to yeah I suppose you can imagine her not trusting her like what's to stop her ultimately turning her in or like because she'll have been in in that situation for so long yeah that she's conditioned to just you know serve her boss kind of thing yeah I thought that was a really interesting point and also one thing that is quite interesting is the relationship between her husband and his father there's a very interesting sort of toxic relationship between them because he even seems to ask his dad's permission to leave in the one of the dinner parties at the start that's really interesting yeah I mean part of where Catherine's behavior comes from is from copying the men so when the men are gone and she goes into the stables and she says face the wall she learned that from her husband telling her to face the wall when he tried like it's all really weird behavior that son has learned from dad Catherine's learned from son and it's all this kind of like childish learned behavior thing and their relationship between father and son is all as well when he dies and he says I shall place my two feet on his grave in the morning they don't like each other thanks dad but also you yeah you tell them to stop laughing which is exactly what Catherine thought that's really interesting how they kind of borrow that one of the scenes I really wanted to ask you about is the scene where you shoot the horse because I thought that horse was such an amazing performer tremendous acting from the horse he was genuinely incredible he was my favorite actor to work with ever when I so it was actually Will's birthday when we filmed it we filmed me getting married in the morning and then me shooting the horse later on in the afternoon and when we came to it the the horse trainer came up to me and he goes all right okay um so um the horse has three goals um and uh he'll do it once he'll do it twice he'll do it thrice and then that's it and I was like what do you mean he was like okay so first goal will be like you know give it a go second time you've got to ace it third time it's kind of a case the second time doesn't work but after the third time god doesn't really know you know horse doesn't really know that um that it's not working anymore and I'm like what do you mean he was like basically horse knows when it's working and when it's not working I was like wow this is amazing he's got a great contract and so I didn't quite understand what was going on and we kind of like went on and and I was I was told where you know I needed to do the gun and all this malark and then I walked on and as I walked on I I I shot the horse and as I shot the horse literally in time this horse leapt up and squealed jumped screamed whinny landed on the floor wriggled around as I shot it and this happened I screamed because I thought I'd shot the horse and then I've been like oh my god and then they say will goes cut cut cut Lawrence you need to carry on with the scene I was like I think I shot the horse like no no he's just reacting so this horse was so fantastic that I actually thought I'd shot this horse um and so this guy the horse trainer came he was like right okay so that was your first gone girl you got two more girls like oh god crap so then the second girl was like right okay so this horse is really gonna jump for it amazingly they train this horse with this these like they recognize what you're doing and the horse is also linked up to a lead and depending on what the guy does like with these holes and all this stuff the horse will then perform but the horse knows that he'll have three goes and then that's it so we did it and it was the most amazing scene because I just had to react this this horse I didn't have to rely on lines or someone you know doing their spin on something this horse was absolutely fantastic so that is why it was my favorite scene just because it was totally real um and horrible really horrible this horse was screaming and I went to go and shoot again like oh my god so yeah that's why it was my favorite also so unlike anything I've ever done yeah was the horse okay with you after when you stopped filming with the best bit was like afterwards when I have to bury the horse the guy comes up to me and he's like okay so you're done you're done the three girls and I'm like yeah and he was like right okay so um now now now you're doing the burying I was like yeah and he was like okay come in yeah so I was basically like in between the two horses legs he was like right go a bit to your left I was like yeah go a bit to your left yeah go a bit to your left yeah it was like right there go yeah he was like he'll kick you and he goes you go any further he'll smack you when is he going to smack when he goes well basically if I triggered him this horse would try and get up and as he got up he would just clobber me in the face so when I'm burying that horse I'm literally like um so yeah brilliant mate they say you shouldn't work with animals but that sounds like a really loved about especially re-watching the film is that sometimes you can't really tell what's actually going on in Catherine's head especially the more the film goes on um and I wanted to ask you about one of the scenes we talked about this briefly we interviewed Florence for the magazine and Florence told me this great story about a scene in the film and it was so good but it was such a massive spoiler that we were like we can't put it in the magazine so I really want to ask you in front of these people tell me about the the big lie that she tells and and how that scene came together so um I'm gonna do a bit backstory quickly um Teddy Teddy and Catherine I I I always believe that Catherine was um really shocked and and slightly it's her only bit in the film where I don't think she is maternal but I think it's the only bit in the film where she is and and and something to note is the fact that Teddy is the only person that ever compliments her even though she's had this entire relationship with um Sebastian with her husband with her father-in-law with Anna no one is ever actually nice to her other than Teddy. Teddy says that she's beautiful and so the way that I wanted to play that happened was that she for the first time was actually receiving some kindness which is rare and so when she ends up killing the child I always believed that that was a I mean obviously it's a difficult thing to do but I always felt that that was realizing that her survival if she thought about it was going to have to come before the kid otherwise the kid was going to get the house and her life and her money and she would be out on the streets before she knew it so that last scene when Sebastian comes in and says we killed the kid and she says and that boy that boy was like a child to me I never read that as as anything other than the truth but when I did that I always found it broke my voice because the thought of her loving something and then having to not loving but caring for something and then having to kill it because she had to survive before the child was always quite like whoa that's like nothing I've ever seen before and then when we first watched it in front of an audience that scene comes on and I'm watching it and I say and that child that child was like that that that child was like um and that whatever that boy was like a child to me um I'm watching it and everyone starts laughing I'm like what are you talking about it's not funny and then it kept on happening people kept on laughing and people kept on saying oh that laugh at the end did you really I mean that lie at the end did you really think about it and I still to this day which is funny because obviously maybe my head's too much in it but I then probably think that's the biggest lie in the film because she means it when she says it and how disturbing is that but she means it yeah she's talking about the child and uses it she's like so manipulative she uses it in that moment she's allowed to show a little bit of like you know sadness but only when it suits her right yeah and the first time I saw it I took it at face value and I was like wow we've finally seen this sort of scrap of humanity in her after all this stuff she's gone through and then you were like yeah that's not actually true she made it up and I then watched it this time and I was like oh my god I don't even think that she just made it up I think she genuinely felt that but she she gave it a slight window yeah yeah yeah but yeah and then everyone told me that that was like oh yeah Kath is really good at pretending isn't she I was like okay we haven't talked about Sebastian much so tell me a bit about what it was like working with Cosmo and and your kind of interacting together amazing so working with Cozy was fantastic and when we auditioned Shaheen casted it and when we auditioned and one of the notes that Will started giving halfway through the day was like I want you guys to wrestle so the aim of the game was he would try and push me and I would try and push him and whoever fell over first won and then we had to play the scene from there and there were so many amazing actors that day that were really really beautiful and had you know a wonderful presence but Cozy was the only one where me and I we both of us we just fought each other and that was the key of Sebastian and Catherine was this like push and pull this tug this fight and and actually it it was so easy to do any of the the naked sex scenes with him any of the fighting scenes with him because we just didn't care it was like if I elbowed him in the groin it wasn't a thing and if he kind of accidentally hit me in the chest it wasn't a thing it was just that was the nature of Catherine and Sebastian was to be um borderline aggressive whilst showing their kind of attraction to one another and he was was so it's usually so awkward to do any sex scenes um but for some reason it was just super super easy and there was no weirdness or funniness it was just like yeah cool we're open we're doing it I guess because the characters feel like they're on the same page in a lot of ways that must really help when you're actually working together um the film's been out for it's been quite a long time since the film came out um and I it's had such an amazing reception and I wanted to ask you why do you think the film and Catherine specifically have like resonated so well with people um I think because it's unlike things that we've seen I think she is uh very I've said this so many times but I really believe it I think she's a very modern woman in 1865 and that's rare I think we're very used to seeing um a period drama where it it sticks inside kind of the norm and it doesn't it doesn't stick inside the norm and we actually see this woman uh want things and not only want things but she goes out and gets them when she she's not allowed them and weirdly that's that's quite rare yeah um and I think lots have been lots of people have been attracted by that lots of people have been repulsed by that and I equally love that too um there's been so many Q&As where people have just shouted abuse at the fact that Catherine is awful and I'm like yeah great give me more um and then there's lots of people that want to you know thank Alice for its character and I just think it's um it's not usual that we that we find a woman like this as young as she is to react the way that she does and people have responded to that which is great and and I love talking about it so um yeah good and it what does it mean for you then given what you just said to be nominated for the rising star award oh amazing it's a bit of a weird one um my parents have been arguing over who gets the three plus one uh so I've been like guys calm down it's not worth a um it's mental I think when we made this film it was so tiny and it was such a small family and it was made for such a small amount of money that I never ever ever thought that it was going to make it this far not because I didn't believe in it but because it's just it's not expected um and when we were making it there was such a feel of like everybody mucking in and if that chair needs to be moved then someone quickly moved it which is so odd for film usually tv anything um and there was such a special feel because everyone was invested because of the storyline it's it's um we weren't all paid major major checks we were all kind of aware that this was because we all wanted to do it so when we worked on it everyone was putting their everything there was no no one that didn't want to be there and so to see this film now go so far is amazing and and um every time it's gone to a new festival or a new award or a new ceremony or a new whatever it's it's really lovely to see it move