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Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó broke through internationally in 2014 with his snarling social parable about the downtrodden rising up against their oppressors, White Dog. He puts aside political allegory to drill deep into the heart of family tragedy in his first English-language feature, Pieces of a Woman. Puncturing a brittle European veneer with spikes of more American emotional volatility, the drama wears influences from Ingmar Bergman to John Cassavetes - not always lightly. Despite some contrived script passages and unsubtle symbolism, the first-rate cast keeps it gripping.

Written by Kata Wéber, the director's partner and frequent collaborator as both screenwriter and actress, the new film is expanded from a multimedia theater piece they developed together. It opens with a superbly controlled pre-title sequence running almost a full half-hour, which will be harrowing for anyone contemplating parenthood.

Martha ( Vanessa Kirby) seems serene as she receives congratulations at an office baby shower, and her partner Sean ( Shia LaBeouf), a construction engineer on a Boston bridge project, is already bursting with pride about becoming a dad for the first time. Even his irritation at the shade implied by her controlling mother Elizabeth ( Ellen Burstyn) buying them a car ("She got it gray like her soul; that's her spirit color") can't dampen his high spirits. He gives Martha a gift of framed ultrasound photos of their daughter to hang in the nursery.

Having prepared for a home birth, they call their midwife when contractions start. But Martha begins to freak mildly when the woman is unavailable, caught up in the middle of a difficult labor. Sean tries to keep the mood light with jokes and romance as Martha's water breaks and the replacement midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), arrives at the house. She reassures Martha that her nausea is normal and only begins to show concern when the baby's heart rate slows between contractions. Within minutes of their daughter being born, apparently healthy, the infant abruptly turns blue, and the paramedics arrive too late to save her.

This is a startling sequence of events, made more urgent by the restless agitation of DP Benjamin Loeb's camerawork, darting among the three adults in the house. The meticulous blocking that went into setting up this virtuoso scene must have been head-spinning. It all happens so fast that even with the immersive sense of participating in real-time trauma - shot in a single take using a gimbal - you find yourself later struggling, along with the characters, to piece together specific details as doubts, recriminations and unfounded guilt begin surfacing, both in private and public.

The absence of conclusive findings from medical examiners only compounds the couple's lack of closure. Sean, who has a history of addiction, reacts with violent frustration while Martha becomes cold and closed-off, horrifying her mother with her stubborn decision to donate her daughter's body to science. Elizabeth, an iron butterfly who wears her hair like a lacquered helmet, barrels ahead with legal action against the midwife, a witch-hunt stoked by the medical establishment. She enlists Martha's slick attorney cousin Suzanne (Sarah Snook), who's confident they can win both criminal and civil cases against Eva.

The action is punctuated by shots of the harbor and date stamps, marking intervals over the seven months following the tragedy, during which the lawsuit is pushed forward while family relations break down.

In one strong ensemble scene that points to the material's stage roots, tensions boil over during a lunch gathering at Elizabeth's home, to which Martha's sister Anita (Iliza Shlesinger) and her car salesman husband Chris (Benny Safdie) also are invited. Chris and Sean get into an animated back and forth about grunge bands and the weird period when The White Stripes were passing themselves off as siblings instead of spouses. Suzanne feigns interest, having zero engagement in pop culture, while Elizabeth dithers about, working on her own plan to help Martha move on.

Loeb's nimble camera again is a valuable storytelling tool as it ricochets among the guests in another feat of single-take dexterity, zigzagging between rooms but rarely taking its eye off Martha's pressure-cooker state for long. Her explosive anger makes it clear she doesn't share the hunger for justice that her mother supposedly "needs." This prompts an overwritten but nonetheless effective speech delivered in bristling close-up by the formidable Burstyn, in which Elizabeth spits out the harsh history of her own birth as a Holocaust survivor in Central Europe.

While LaBeouf brings his customary physicality to some punchy scenes, ranging across uncontrollable rage, caginess and crushed vulnerability as grief poisons the couple's relationship, the movie's shattered core, as its title would suggest, is Kirby's Martha.

She visibly hardens in the wake of her devastating loss, discarding the lovingly assembled elements of the nursery with a resolute absence of emotion. A scene where she returns to work - silently absorbing the pitying looks of her colleagues with the air of a woman as dangerous as she is damaged - is one of many such moments of charged intensity. And when she gazes at children on the street or the subway or in a department store, her eyes could be expressing tenderness or resentment. The remarkable Kirby gives a tough performance, bleeding beneath her armor-plated guard but refusing to soften Martha's abrasive sides as she undertakes the isolating work of learning to live with her loss.

In smaller roles, Snook and Parker both make incisive impressions, and Safdie is always an interesting screen presence, too infrequently seen beyond his movies with his brother. Jimmie Fails, such a revelation in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, is under-utilized.

Mundruczó's command falters in climactic courtroom scenes that seem pedestrian and too movie-ish compared to the edgier psychodrama that's come before, especially when Martha gets stuck with a big heart-stirring trial speech. Such flaws are heightened by increasing overuse of Howard Shore's intrusive score in the latter sections. There are also clumsily obvious touches like Martha's interest in sprouting apple seeds as a metaphor for rebirth, or clunky allusions to bridges as tricky structures that sometimes need to be burned.

It's unclear who the audience will be for a drama so unflinching that its sunny coda feels almost like a betrayal. But those with the stomach for a forcefully acted representation of the gut-wrenching impact and long-range after-effects of sudden infant death will be rewarded with moments both powerful and affecting.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Production company: BRON Studios, Little Lamb, in association with Creative Wealth Media
Cast: Vanessa Kirby, Shia LaBeouf, Molly Parker, Sarah Snook, Iliza Shlesinger, Benny Safdie, Ellen Burstyn, Jimmie Fails
Director: Kornél Mundruczó
Screenwriter: Kata Wéber Producers: Ashley Levinson, Aaron Ryder, Kevin Turen Executive producers: Martin Scorsese, Jason M. Cloth, Aaron L. Gilbert, Sam Levinson, Stuart Manashil, Viktória Petrány, Steven Thibault
Director of photography: Benjamin Loeb
Production designer: Sylvain Lemaitre
Costume designer: Rachel Dainer-Best
Music: Howard Shore Dávid Jancsó
Casting: Jessica Kelly
Sales: BRON Studios
126 minutes

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'Pieces of a Woman': Film Review | Venice 2020

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Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó broke through internationally in 2014 with his snarling social parable about the downtrodden rising up against their oppressors, White Dog. He puts aside political allegory to drill deep into the heart of family tragedy in his first English-language feature, Pieces of a Woman.

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Pieces of a Woman: What Happened To Martha & Sean's Baby

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Pieces of a Woman is a difficult, harrowing film that deals with the loss of a child in a direct, head-on manner, yet the baby's actual fate is not shown on screen.

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In Pieces of a Woman, the actress inhabits a new kind of role-one that will not only garner Oscar buzz but also provoke important discussions around loss and motherhood.

WHEN VANESSA KIRBY was 21, she did a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Octagon Theatre in Bolton, outside Manchester, England. She played Helena, in love with Demetrius, who is in love with Hermia instead. "All these schools used to come in, loads of kids," she says. "They were always super bored or fidgeting."

During her monologue at one performance, speaking desperately of a love that has been thwarted, someone dropped a box of candy down the stairs, and they rolled all over the stage in front of her. "And I was like, 'Oh, God, fucking hell. What am I doing wrong? And then I saw this girl, off to the left. And she was, I don't know, 13 or something, and she was listening to every word," Kirby recalls.

"And there was something in that little girl that wanted to hear what Shakespeare was saying, via me...perhaps she was feeling something," she says. "So I just did it to her."

Kirby, 32, is magnetic, even on Zoom-there is a way the texture of the screen shifts, gets more lively, when she comes on any screen-and watching her recount this story felt like a glimpse into how she is able to channel discomfort into performance.

She is on the verge: both of breaking out into that coveted carries-the-movie, Oscar-nominated category of actor and of figuring out the kind of actor she wants to be. She's tried out action franchises-she's currently filming the next two installments of Mission: Impossible, continuing the role of the White Widow that she originated in 2018's Mission: Impossible-Fallout, and starred in the latest Fast & Furious film-and is best known for her devastating performance as Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of The Crown. It's her latest role, though, in Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó's first English-language film, Pieces of a Woman, which premieres on Netflix in January, that promises to propel Kirby to that next tier. Her portrayal of Martha is being touted as a breakthrough; the term "Oscar-worthy" has been uttered countless times.

We met over Zoom on a Saturday: She was in London; I was in New York. It was my morning, her early afternoon. We both wore turtlenecks. I planned to take notes as we talked, but instead I leaned forward, rapt. Both of us gestured a lot. Pieces of a Woman is about motherhood and grief. The film, with a screenplay by Kata Wéber, stars Kirby and Shia LaBeouf as a couple whose child dies during a home birth; it assiduously, unflinchingly chronicles their struggle to come to terms with the loss.

The opening scene of Pieces of a Woman is a nearly 30-minute-long take of a labor that ends in the baby's death. The scene is painful, gorgeous, terrifying-moments of it feel like horror. Kirby says that each time they finished filming, she and her fellow actors felt a sort of ecstasy, running out into the snow-they hugged and screamed; Kirby sobbed after the first time through. "It was completely surreal because we were there," she says. "We were just there. We were witness to something."

Kirby, who doesn't have children, prepared for this scene for months. "I started watching everything I could find," she says. "Endless documentaries, home birth videos, but everything was so sanitized; everything was so edited." She ultimately got in touch with an obstetrician, Claire Mellon, who agreed to let Kirby shadow her. Kirby had to go to shoot another movie and had only two weeks on the labor ward, at Whittington Hospital in Islington. Pregnant women she'd met agreed to let her watch them give birth, but none of them ended up going into labor over the period she was there. On the last day, "I had my suitcase, and I was flying to Romania that night [to film The World to Come], and a woman came in nine centimeters dilated. Claire said, 'I'm going to ask her.'" Much to Kirby's surprise-"Why would anyone want some stranger there? An actress? During this most sacred moment?"-the woman agreed. "I watched her for six hours go through a really difficult labor, no painkillers, forceps. It got really, really difficult.... I watched her go on a completely lone journey, like an odyssey, through the most primal, almost divine.... And I saw the power and the fear in all of it."

"I came away far more of a woman in appreciating the sacredness of the feminine in a way that I don't think I had fully realized," Kirby tells me. "I feel like I had lived something in human experience I hadn't lived before."

For parts of the scene, as my husband and I watched, I looked over at him, and he was, just as he had for some of the 40 hours I was in a very complicated labor, staring at his phone to avoid having to look at it. "I'm not sure I can finish this," he said.

At one point during the scene, Kirby's character, Martha, starts burping. The third burp, I tell Kirby, was the moment when my husband had to look away. It helps us not just see but smell the various dimensions of the female body, how close it is to animal, how at its mercy Martha is.

And yet Kirby manages to inhabit the power in that moment. She says of watching the labor that day: "It brought everything that I sort of had known intellectually into being, which is, this is like the magnificence of being a woman, and its creation essentially.... It almost gave birth to the film inside my heart."

Kirby speaks too about discomfort as an opportunity to force people to look at things and think about things they might not otherwise. "I think getting in touch with something that makes someone deeply uncomfortable, and deeply feeling...," she says. "I think you search beyond, you look outside places that you usually look, for resolution, or for understanding, or for connection."

The idea that there is no space for women to talk, to be heard when it comes to the traumas our bodies have experienced, feels so entrenched in what it is to live inside a female body, it feels necessary to say out loud how important this film feels. And when it comes to infant loss and miscarriage, in particular, these silences feel that much more pointed, since so often women-and Kirby's Martha is no exception-misperceive these experiences as their fault. But if the outpouring of feeling that arose in the aftermath of Chrissy Teigen's posting about her pregnancy loss is any indication, Pieces of a Woman could function too as a catalyst for more of these conversations, another opportunity for women who have endured these traumas and these losses to find spaces to feel seen and understood. I ask Kirby what she learned in these observations prior to filming: "To know pain," she tells me, "is power."

The birth scene in the film gives us discomfort; it initiates a descent into an almost unimaginable grief, but then Kirby performs for the rest of the film another way of being, harder and more complicated, maybe, to inhabit as an actor, which is to say an almost stultifying way of locking one's self up. Martha doesn't yell or scream; she hardly speaks through many of the scenes. Instead the film seems to get at something truer, deeper, about the singular experience of female trauma-the way that so often the expectation is just to be quiet and to carry on.

In The Crown, Kirby as Margaret cries and yells; she instigates. Her eyes are almost always wet. She performs her grief if only because performance is perhaps the only way she knows to get people to look. There's a sophistication, but also a surrender and a resignation in knowing the limits of this type of performance. Kirby has taken on a harder role with Martha, who stays pinned up and stoic almost the entire time. "I was worried," says Kirby. She gestures to show me the length of a piano. "Martha is functioning on a more limited scale."

Speaking of Kirby's ability to perform this subtle agony, the film's director, Mundruczó, says, "She has this nervousness inside her." He compares her magnetism to Catherine Deneuve. "You have to find someone who is rich inside. The icon, which I believe she is, you can see yourself inside her. She is always facing you somehow."

I'm not sure I have ever, as a mother, as a woman, been so wholly moved by a performance; to my mind, great art is a process of forcing people to look, and there is something extraordinary about what Kirby forces us to see. She says she wanted to "serve the women who had been through this," but also "grief generally." "I almost want the movie to hold people's hands somehow," Kirby tells me. "To feel less alone because of the shared experience that it is."

The second of three children, Kirby was born and raised in Wimbledon, with a magazine editor mother and a urologist father. "I always felt really different at school when I was little, and really lonely," she tells me. She studied English at the University of Exeter and turned down a place at the prestigious London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art (LAMDA) to do Arthur Miller, Henrik Ibsen, and Shakespeare with David Thacker at the Octagon Theatre. She always wanted to be an actor: "I found that space of drama and theater was the least judgmental," she says. "I felt my calmest, most connected, most accepted spaces were always those."

If there is a through line in her disparate performances, it's "subversion," says Kirby. Finding roles where the characters are "nonconformist...the marginal, or the outsider, or the one that lives on the outskirts." I would add that there's an openness, a confidence and a willingness to press into spaces that feel uncomfortable and hard. During the filming of Mission Impossible-Fallout, Kirby went barefoot throughout the shoot as a way of living that subversion. "I wanted to be something different than another femme fatale."

One of the most compelling moments in Pieces of a Woman turns out to be an unscripted choice, pushed by Kirby. Martha's mother, played by a stolid, stunning Ellen Burstyn, yells at her daughter to convince her to testify in court against the midwife accused of causing her baby's death. Burstyn's character is unrelenting. Her face turns red. Right before they shot the scene, Burstyn says Kirby approached her: "Make me go to court," Kirby told her. Burstyn says she went through the lines she'd been given, every bit she'd practiced, but she knew she had not yet convinced Martha to go to court. "So I kept going," says Burstyn. "I have no recollection of what I said after that." She laughs.

I ask Burstyn to explain how Kirby was able to get her to open up like that (and did not ask but thought, "What chutzpah!," to press on an icon like Burstyn that way). "You can't explain magic," she says.

Mundruczó describes this process as necessary for making the film feel life-like. "You have to wait for things like this to be born in front of you," he says. "It takes an immeasurable amount of trust." You wait, he adds, and make the space for, "[w]hat they create that is way more than what you have on the page."

I ask Burstyn, no stranger to portraying complicated women, what she thinks Kirby has accomplished in this movie, and she thinks for a minute before answering. "Rawness," she says. "Vanessa is helping to reveal the depth of womanness in a way that's true."

"Raw"-it's the same word that Crown creator Peter Morgan used to describe Kirby's acting. That kind of performance derived from an ineffable internal force. He recalls her audition for Princess Margaret as "catastrophic in every way." She had "fake tan smeared all on her shins, but even more of it on the palms of her hands, which were a darker shade than any of the rest of her. She was sweating," he continues. "It was so terrible." He laughs. And yet, as Morgan tells it, even "the whirlwind of energy and chaos" that she entered with couldn't distract from "her honesty, electricity, and magnetism. The fearlessness and raw exposing of herself" she showed in everything she did. "This woman is going to be magic," he recalls thinking. "And that's borne out."

Kirby's father is a well-known prostate surgeon who treated cancer patients. "I saw him save people's lives, and here I was, going on stage," she tells me, "putting on these silly costumes. I never thought it was any more important than what anyone else does." And yet, as I talk to Kirby, as I've thought over the past year about what matters to me, how art might function in times of crisis, the idea of making space for other people to feel deeply and complexly feels more urgent than it ever has. "I know that in my experience," says Kirby, "whenever I've had the most difficult times, I think you want to transcend it, so you search more. So when people say to me, 'God, this must have been so hard,' I say actually, 'It was truly the most profound experience.' Because I got to go to a place that I hadn't been before, and that changed me, you know?"

"I feel that the faith," she adds, "that creativity and art-and that includes the audience as being an essential part of that relationship-that in the darkest of times, creativity, I think, has this impulse to flourish somehow, to speak about experience. I have faith that there will be a lot of spaces where people find a need to speak."

Vanessa Kirby. Jacket, Giorgio Armani.

Fashion editor: Charlotte Roberts

Photograph by Scott Trindle

Dress, Prada. Ring, Bulgari High Jewelry.

Gucci

Gucci

"Vanessa is helping to reveal the depth of womanness in a way that's true." -Ellen Burstyn

Blazer, Gabriela Hearst. Top, Chanel. Serpenti earrings, Bulgari. See Where to Buy for shopping details. Hair: Neil Moodie for Biolage; makeup: Celia Burton for Armani Beauty; manicure: Pebbles Aikens; production: Rosco Production; set design: Louis Simonon.

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Discovery Service for University of Arkansas - Fort Smith

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In Pieces of a Woman, the actress inhabits a new kind of role—one that will not only garner Oscar buzz but also provoke important discussions around loss and motherhood.

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" Pieces of a Woman" has garnered a lot of awards buzz for Vanessa Kirby 's fearless performance as Martha, a woman grieving the loss of her baby in childbirth. Since premiering at the Venice Film Festival in September, talk has also centered on a scene that depicts the birth - which was filmed in one 24-minute, unbroken take as her character moves throughout the apartment, including in and out of the bathtub.

And while it was intimidating to shoot, Kirby told Variety's Award Circuit podcast that it was actually a relief to be done in one take. "Some people are kind of surprised when I describe it like that, because they think that it would be scarier but honestly, truthfully, it's not," she said. "I was definitely more afraid of the idea of breaking for lunch [and then] coming back, having to go into the bath and try and get myself to a level that she might be at. My biggest fear was that it would at any point feel phony."

Kirby spoke to Variety's Awards Circuit podcast about her work in both "Pieces of a Woman," now on Netflix, and in "The World to Come," which also premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is playing the Sundance Film Festival this month prior to a Feb. 12 release. Kirby talked about her journey as an actor, having a pajama party with co-star Ellen Burstyn and her upcoming projects, including more "Mission Impossible" films. Listen below:

The British thespian is best known to audiences for her work on the first two seasons of "The Crown" and films like "Hobbes and Shaw" and "Mission Impossible - Fallout." But Kirby began her career on stage. "I realized what those three years at university gave me was total permission to fail," she said. "And oh, my God, I did. I was terrible."

She said of her first on-camera job, "I was totally terrified, every minute of it. I was a rabbit and headlights, really."

Kirby was eventually cast as Princess Margaret opposite Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of "The Crown." But Netflix was still a relatively new streamer, and she wasn't prepared for what an international hit the show would become.

"There was an innocence about it," she said, noting they Season 2 was already in production when the first season aired. "I really thought my mum would like it and my granny might fall asleep. And I'd be happy with that, you know," she joked. "So that when it came out, and suddenly it was getting such warm, lovely response, I think we were all really blown away. And then when Claire, she brought her Golden Globe to the set, it was just so surreal."

When Kirby was offered the role in "Pieces of a Woman," she said that "I felt ready to do a lead. I suddenly thought, I think it's my time now. I think I feel ready to do it, knowing what that responsibility was, and not under estimating it."

The film is directed by Kornél Mundruczó, from a screenplay by Kata Wéber. The two are partners and knowing the story was intensely personal to them, Kirby admits she felt an extra responsibility to get it right. She spoke to many women who had lost their children at different stages of pregnancy, and said she "literally could not have done it without them."

The intimate drama also stars Ellen Burstyn as Martha's mother, and Kirby said that she was starstruck to first meet the actor. Burstyn, however, quickly put her at ease.

"She did this amazing thing where she said, 'Honey, do you want to come for a sleepover? Let's have a pajama party!' And so I did," Kirby said. "We had a pajama party and we stayed up till 3 a.m., we talked all night. She cooked me dinner. It was very sweet. And so that helps take the edge off a little bit."

Also in this episode of the podcast, Paul Raci discusses his role in Oscar contender "Sound of Metal," and the Awards Circuit roundtable breaks down the good and the not-so-good latest editions to an ever growing field of film awards contenders.

Variety 's "Awards Circuit" podcast, hosted by Clayton Davis, Jenelle Riley, Jazz Tangcay and Michael Schneider (who produces), is your one-stop listen for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each week "Awards Circuit" features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives; discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines; and much, much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts. New episodes post every Thursday.

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Vanessa Kirby on That Heartbreaking 'Pieces of a Woman' Scene, and Her Slumber Party with Ellen Burstyn

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" Pieces of a Woman" has garnered a lot of awards buzz for Vanessa Kirby 's fearless performance as Martha, a woman grieving the loss of her baby in childbirth.

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Ellen Burstyn Interview on Pieces of a Woman

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Ellen Burstyn Interview on Pieces of a Woman

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We interview Pieces of a Woman star Ellen Burstyn about what drew her to the project, working with the film's director, and much more.

Pieces of a Woman is a magnetic film driven by its powerful directing and performances. The Netflix tale, currently available on the streaming platform, follows young couple Martha (Vanessa Kirby) and Sean (Shia Labeouf) as they deal with a heartbreaking miscarriage.

The incomparable Ellen Burstyn, who plays Martha's mother, spoke to Screen Rant about what drew her to the production and the many different perspectives on grief that are echoed in the film.
What attracted you and hooked your participation in this film?

Ellen Burstyn: You know, it was a very logical progression. I read the script, I loved the script, I asked to see the work of the director, and they sent me a film called White Gog. It's so good. The last shot in that movie is one of the most incredible shots I've ever seen.

I liked the script, I liked the director, and then I said, "Who's playing Martha?" And they said, "Vanessa Kirby," and I went, "Oh, I saw her in The Crown. She's good. Let's do it." So, I was in.

The mother and daughter come into conflict in this film because they both have so much pain at their core. What brings the two together, and what keeps them apart?

Ellen Burstyn: I think I want what's best for my daughter, but what I think is best for her is not what she thinks is best for her. And that's our conflict. She's grieving in her way, which I don't think is a good way. I think she would be much better off if she would express it and feel it, and not have it all be locked up inside. And she demands not to be told how to grieve. So, I think that's our basic conflict.

That's really what the film is about. Everybody gets to grieve their own way; it's a profound human experience. From my point of view, you don't really know who you are as a human being until you've grappled with your feelings that deeply.

The director Kornél was really able to invoke emotion with his camera movements, especially in that opening scene. I felt as helpless as the character Sean was in that scene. Can you talk to me about the collaboration process of working with Kornél and Kata?

Ellen Burstyn: Well, they came to my apartment for four days before they left for Montreal. I didn't go with them; I wasn't there at the beginning. I wasn't there for the birth scene.

We spent time together, four days, reading the script and talking about the characters, arguing with Kornél and Kata. You know how actors are: "Well, what about if she does this?" We went through all of that; got to know each other, and got to relate to each other as the characters. I invited Vanessa to come spend the night; she did, and we had a nice pajama party and talked on a deep level. I cooked her dinner and, like a good mother, I cooked her breakfast. We got to know each other and really love each other. It was very easy, actually, for me to feel maternal toward her. Which I still do.

Elizabeth claims to be seeking justice for a daughter, but do you think she's really trying to find a way to heal herself?

Ellen Burstyn: It might be that. I think it's more that she doesn't recognize her daughter's way of grieving. She doesn't recognize that what she's doing is what she has to do. Elizabeth's way of dealing with things is to go after it, to deal with it, to make it better, to stage that chair, put a pillow on it; don't just let it sit there. She's very active and outer.

Martha's an introvert, and holds things inside of her. I just don't understand that. I mean, she's got somebody to blame. Why doesn't she blame her? Instead of carrying all the blame herself and blaming herself for what happened and feeling shame and all the things that I think she's feeling. It's a different headset that we have.

Next: Vanessa Kirby Interview for Pieces of a Woman

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Ellen Burstyn Interview: Pieces of a Woman

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We interview Pieces of a Woman star Ellen Burstyn about what drew her to the project, working with the film's director, and much more. Pieces of a Woman is a magnetic film driven by its powerful directing and performances.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
" Pieces of a Woman" has garnered a lot of awards buzz for Vanessa Kirby 's fearless performance as Martha, a woman grieving the loss of her baby in childbirth. Since premiering at the Venice Film Festival in September, talk has also centered on a scene that depicts the birth - which was filmed in one 24-minute, unbroken take as her character moves throughout the apartment, including in and out of the bathtub.

And while it was intimidating to shoot, Kirby told Variety's Award Circuit podcast that it was actually a relief to be done in one take. "Some people are kind of surprised when I describe it like that, because they think that it would be scarier but honestly, truthfully, it's not," she said. "I was definitely more afraid of the idea of breaking for lunch [and then] coming back, having to go into the bath and try and get myself to a level that she might be at. My biggest fear was that it would at any point feel phony."

Kirby spoke to Variety's Awards Circuit podcast about her work in both "Pieces of a Woman," now on Netflix, and in "The World to Come," which also premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is playing the Sundance Film Festival this month prior to a Feb. 12 release. Kirby talked about her journey as an actor, having a pajama party with co-star Ellen Burstyn and her upcoming projects, including more "Mission Impossible" films. Listen below:

The British thespian is best known to audiences for her work on the first two seasons of "The Crown" and films like "Hobbes and Shaw" and "Mission Impossible - Fallout." But Kirby began her career on stage. "I realized what those three years at university gave me was total permission to fail," she said. "And oh, my God, I did. I was terrible."

She said of her first on-camera job, "I was totally terrified, every minute of it. I was a rabbit and headlights, really."

Kirby was eventually cast as Princess Margaret opposite Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of "The Crown." But Netflix was still a relatively new streamer, and she wasn't prepared for what an international hit the show would become.

"There was an innocence about it," she said, noting they Season 2 was already in production when the first season aired. "I really thought my mum would like it and my granny might fall asleep. And I'd be happy with that, you know," she joked. "So that when it came out, and suddenly it was getting such warm, lovely response, I think we were all really blown away. And then when Claire, she brought her Golden Globe to the set, it was just so surreal."

When Kirby was offered the role in "Pieces of a Woman," she said that "I felt ready to do a lead. I suddenly thought, I think it's my time now. I think I feel ready to do it, knowing what that responsibility was, and not under estimating it."

The film is directed by Kornél Mundruczó, from a screenplay by Kata Wéber. The two are partners and knowing the story was intensely personal to them, Kirby admits she felt an extra responsibility to get it right. She spoke to many women who had lost their children at different stages of pregnancy, and said she "literally could not have done it without them."

The intimate drama also stars Ellen Burstyn as Martha's mother, and Kirby said that she was starstruck to first meet the actor. Burstyn, however, quickly put her at ease.

"She did this amazing thing where she said, 'Honey, do you want to come for a sleepover? Let's have a pajama party!' And so I did," Kirby said. "We had a pajama party and we stayed up till 3 a.m., we talked all night. She cooked me dinner. It was very sweet. And so that helps take the edge off a little bit."

Also in this episode of the podcast, Paul Raci discusses his role in Oscar contender "Sound of Metal," and the Awards Circuit roundtable breaks down the good and the not-so-good latest editions to an ever growing field of film awards contenders.

Variety 's "Awards Circuit" podcast, hosted by Clayton Davis, Jenelle Riley, Jazz Tangcay and Michael Schneider (who produces), is your one-stop listen for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each week "Awards Circuit" features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives; discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines; and much, much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts. New episodes post every Thursday.

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Vanessa Kirby on That Heartbreaking 'Pieces of a Woman' Scene, and Her Slumber Party with Ellen Burstyn

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" Pieces of a Woman" has garnered a lot of awards buzz for Vanessa Kirby 's fearless performance as Martha, a woman grieving the loss of her baby in childbirth.

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We interview Pieces of a Woman star Ellen Burstyn about what drew her to the project, working with the film's director, and much more.

Pieces of a Woman is a magnetic film driven by its powerful directing and performances. The Netflix tale, currently available on the streaming platform, follows young couple Martha (Vanessa Kirby) and Sean (Shia Labeouf) as they deal with a heartbreaking miscarriage.

The incomparable Ellen Burstyn, who plays Martha's mother, spoke to Screen Rant about what drew her to the production and the many different perspectives on grief that are echoed in the film.
What attracted you and hooked your participation in this film?

Ellen Burstyn: You know, it was a very logical progression. I read the script, I loved the script, I asked to see the work of the director, and they sent me a film called White Gog. It's so good. The last shot in that movie is one of the most incredible shots I've ever seen.

I liked the script, I liked the director, and then I said, "Who's playing Martha?" And they said, "Vanessa Kirby," and I went, "Oh, I saw her in The Crown. She's good. Let's do it." So, I was in.

The mother and daughter come into conflict in this film because they both have so much pain at their core. What brings the two together, and what keeps them apart?

Ellen Burstyn: I think I want what's best for my daughter, but what I think is best for her is not what she thinks is best for her. And that's our conflict. She's grieving in her way, which I don't think is a good way. I think she would be much better off if she would express it and feel it, and not have it all be locked up inside. And she demands not to be told how to grieve. So, I think that's our basic conflict.

That's really what the film is about. Everybody gets to grieve their own way; it's a profound human experience. From my point of view, you don't really know who you are as a human being until you've grappled with your feelings that deeply.

The director Kornél was really able to invoke emotion with his camera movements, especially in that opening scene. I felt as helpless as the character Sean was in that scene. Can you talk to me about the collaboration process of working with Kornél and Kata?

Ellen Burstyn: Well, they came to my apartment for four days before they left for Montreal. I didn't go with them; I wasn't there at the beginning. I wasn't there for the birth scene.

We spent time together, four days, reading the script and talking about the characters, arguing with Kornél and Kata. You know how actors are: "Well, what about if she does this?" We went through all of that; got to know each other, and got to relate to each other as the characters. I invited Vanessa to come spend the night; she did, and we had a nice pajama party and talked on a deep level. I cooked her dinner and, like a good mother, I cooked her breakfast. We got to know each other and really love each other. It was very easy, actually, for me to feel maternal toward her. Which I still do.

Elizabeth claims to be seeking justice for a daughter, but do you think she's really trying to find a way to heal herself?

Ellen Burstyn: It might be that. I think it's more that she doesn't recognize her daughter's way of grieving. She doesn't recognize that what she's doing is what she has to do. Elizabeth's way of dealing with things is to go after it, to deal with it, to make it better, to stage that chair, put a pillow on it; don't just let it sit there. She's very active and outer.

Martha's an introvert, and holds things inside of her. I just don't understand that. I mean, she's got somebody to blame. Why doesn't she blame her? Instead of carrying all the blame herself and blaming herself for what happened and feeling shame and all the things that I think she's feeling. It's a different headset that we have.

Next: Vanessa Kirby Interview for Pieces of a Woman

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Ellen Burstyn Interview: Pieces of a Woman

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We interview Pieces of a Woman star Ellen Burstyn about what drew her to the project, working with the film's director, and much more. Pieces of a Woman is a magnetic film driven by its powerful directing and performances.