Indie filmmaker Azazel Jacobs makes a true New York movie with “His Three Daughters,” his profound and moving drama about a trio of sisters hemorrhaging emotions about their father, who is dying in the next room. Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen deliver career-class performances as Katie, Rachel, and Christina, respectively, who stress over how to write their father’s obituary and how to come together despite years of spite between them. And tensions bubble up in a monologue-driven, theatrical directing style where Jacobs holds on the performances in long takes where other directors might want to cut to a reaction shot or somewhere else.
“I wrote it to a cutting rhythm. I tried to write the script so it would move exactly how I wanted it to film,” Jacobs, who has explored New York stories before, from “French Exit” to “The Lovers” and his breakout, “Momma’s Man,” said in a recent IndieWire interview. (Jacobs’ films are right now being featured on the Criterion Channel in a career-spanning retrospective.) Here, he puts his actors on location in a Lower Manhattan three-bedroom apartment that feels astonishingly lived-in.
“Since I could hear Katie’s voice a certain way, this staccato way in, and Christina’s has this certain type of melody, and Rachel has a different one, I did my best to represent the script with how this movie would move. Then I wound up doing a color-coded version of the script just so I could think about where the cuts would be before shooting … because we’re in this one space, separating them, revealing the space slowly, compared to the actors and the characters that are also revealing themselves in this similar way, layer by layer.” Jacobs shot the movie in New York on 35mm with cinematographer Sam Levy.
Jacobs wrote the script with these three actors in mind, which was perhaps shocking news to each of them, who play scabrous women who locate the worst characteristics of each other and then blow them up into throwdown fights. With Coon, Jacobs had previously directed her husband Tracy Letts in “The Lovers”; Olsen was the star of the Apple TV+ series “Sorry for Your Loss,” which Jacobs directed a handful of episodes on; and Lyonne is a registered New York cinephile who Jacobs chased after she advocated for “French Exit” on social media. They met at her birthday party in New York, where Lyonne was screening Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” and Jacobs was the plus-one of his “French Exit” star Lucas Hedges.
“I had this chance. I had a real location. I had a place. How could I play with it in a way where it was being given to me? What could I do with that gift? Rather than, oh if I can move this wall and get the camera over here, and put a light through here. We were forced to shoot this way because we were on the sixth floor,” Jacobs said. “We can’t hang lights through the outside. We can’t shoot daytime when it’s nighttime. We had to live true to what was happening.”
Other than the moments when Rachel takes to the courtyard to smoke a joint rather than in the apartment at Katie’s behest, “His Three Daughters” never leaves its single location. And it never shows us what’s going on inside the bedroom of their father, Vincent (eventually played by Jay O. Sanders in a dreamy fantasy sequence, where he gets to say his piece).
“When I got to the place where the father is emerging, it was as much a surprise to me as anyone,” Jacobs said. “I knew I was very hesitant to go into the father’s room because I find filming a dying scene or a dying person wrong, and I feel quite lied to when I go through that process in my own life, when someone’s dying, I feel pretty lied to in films. The idea of going to a sick person’s room I was hesitant to, but then suddenly having the father walk out, I was surprised. I also got very excited. I had, without seeing the father, a very neat, independent film that colored within the lies and played with the rules that it set up, and suddenly something else is happening, and with a much bigger risk that could be divisive but also was something unexpected for me and hopefully for an audience. What other reason to make films than to show something unexpected?”
Movies that include a bedside vigil for a dying person often come across as maudlin, though “His Three Daughters” thwarts that entirely in not only keeping us out of the father’s room but containing the drama to the squabbles between the three sisters. Katie, for one, is upset about the fact that there are only apples in the refrigerator, with Christina joining from California and Rachel at this point permanently living there alongside her dying dad. (She’s his stepdaughter from a second marriage, unlike his natural children Katie and Christina, and that becomes a sticking point, too.)
One movie on Jacob’s mind, though, and with a great bedside vigil scene, was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,” in which Tom Cruise pleads to his ailing parent (Jason Robards) about what a shitty father he was as his mortal coil shuffles off. Also, that death is flash-forwarded to in an earlier musical sequence, where the entire cast of “Magnolia” sings Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” in a narrative-breaking choral round.
“The singing part of [‘Magnolia’] is so essential to that film. I watch that scene quite a lot in my life. I go back to it because that balance between, OK, well, yes these are incredible performances, you feel these people dying, and at the same time you address that this is a film, and we are talking to you as an audience member about the fantasy the film has enabled,” Jacobs said. “It’s cool that you bring that up because the other version of saying, ‘Hey, could you cough again? Could you be a little sicker? Could you put on this makeup?’ It was a very conscious decision that I wasn’t bringing out a father that was given all this makeup to look gray. I wanted this experience that I felt like the father wanted, and that the sisters wanted, which was some idea that at the end of our lives, it’s a fantasy that we get to say some regrets, some I love yous, some final stories. Even if this is not truly happening, it’s truly happening for us in the moment, and hopefully it’s truly happening in some realm for the characters.”
Jacobs doesn’t have a direct loss that corroborates why he made “His Three Daughters.” His father, experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, and his mother, are still very much alive. But that doesn’t make Jacobs any less capable of directing a movie about parental loss. Jacobs’ relationship to New York City, which he returned to last year after living in Los Angeles, also played a factor.
“It’s a personal film. My parents are both with us, but they are at an age that, over time, becomes very limited. There are health issues,” he said. “When I moved back to New York, I saw a window that I had before becoming more of a caretaker would take over, and this window I could use to tell this story. I’ve had people pass before me, and I’ve gone through this strange experience with how time moves that I really wanted to replicate with this film, and at the same time, I was very much facing this reality in my own family’s life. I wanted to express not only my fears about it but also my hopes.”
As for sending off a script to three actors he wrote it for, who didn’t necessarily have the same vibes as those characters, he said, “I was so confident in this film. I felt very sure, not only for them being in the roles, but also how it was going to be shot, where it was going to be shot, who I was going to work with. More than any other film I’ve done in the past, I could see this one all the way through. Maybe that was convincing to them, that I was already so convinced that they were absolutely were the right person, and that this would be an interesting and worthy experience.”
While Jacobs met Coon through her husband Letts, it was Sean Durkin’s movie “The Nest” that sold him on why she was right to play Katie, a bitter mother for whom caretaking becomes a nagging burden. And that goes not just for her father, but her messed-up sisters, too. “‘The Nest’ just blew me away. She’s just amazing,” Jacobs said. Recall that “The Nest” features Carrie Coon in a scene-stealing, chainsmoking leading role as a woman rebelling against her husband’s (Jude Law) financial downfall. And her own status as a mother.
“I remember when ‘The Lovers’ premiered, she sat right behind me. Hearing her laugh [during] that film was comforting and exciting. She was getting a kick out of that film, and it meant a lot to me … But then definitely seeing her work, which wasn’t surprising because you can feel that kind of force coming off her. Really, truly, kudos to Sean Durkin for ‘The Nest.’ That was the first time I saw her and was like, how do I get the chance to work with her?” Jacobs said.
Coon and Letts are proud cinephiles boasting a massive physical media collection in their home. Did Jacobs, who revisited the films of indie maven Hal Hartley in making “His Three Daughters,” get a chance to check it out? “All three of [the actresses] love film and know film. With Lizzie [Olsen], I went to L.A. with a stack of Blu-rays, and watched a bit of Hal Hartley stuff, we watched ‘The Plot Against Harry,’ we watched ‘Fatso,’ not that I was making that film but that balance, it’s such brilliant writing, that balance between the humor and the heaviness was something I wanted Lizzie to see. With Carrie, our conversation weren’t so much about film. She knows everything I’ve seen and more. She just has that language in her. Our conversations had much more to do with what was directly on the page. I could feel those 5,000 Blu-rays in her house carried alongside within her.”
One of the most piercing and real moments of “His Three Daughters” finds Coon and Olsen speaking pig Latin, a secret way of altering words that is often code for youngsters to speak without adults understanding them. “I didn’t speak it as a kid, and I just looked up different pig Latin languages, so I typed in the pig Latin — I don’t know if it’s that, it’s like a childish gibberish — that seemed like the simplest way of communicating. It was something I’d seen with siblings before but not something I ever had. I wrote it out phonetically and I remember getting a call from both Lizzie and Carrie saying, ‘So how is this actually said?’ I only wrote. I didn’t know how it was said … I let them know, I just wrote it, and I hope you’ll figure it out, and they did, and by the time they showed up, they could both do it very quickly. It was the first time I was hearing what that would sound like out of my mind, an instinct they used and embraced and stuck with.”
Jacobs was reminded that he made the film almost as a comfort to himself, to the idea of his parents dying one day down the line, and how to approach that grief ahead of time. “I’m grateful to have this film right now where I’m farther along in my own life with my own parents. It’s something I made to be a comfort not only to myself at this time but hopefully for other people.”
“His Three Daughters” is now in theaters and premieres on Netflix Friday, September 20.
