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Allison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. Our next guests are the leads in the film, Monica, about a trans woman who returns home to care for a mother who didn't care for her at an important time. A review on Rotten Tomatoes called it "A beautiful and deeply affecting film, and one that will leave you thinking for weeks." When Monica, played by Trace Lysette sees her dying mother Eugenia for the first time in years, Eugenia, played by Patricia Clarkson, is on the decline physically and mentally, and does not recognize her child and thinks Monica's another unwanted caregiver.

Over time, both women who are vulnerable for different reasons, warm to each other, their time together helps heal some wounds. It's a film where the most important parts are often unspoken, where the drama takes place quietly in the invisible spaces between the characters. As of a [unintelligible 00:00:59] review and Variety noted, Monica is "Conceived with uncommon sensitivity toward the interior lives of its characters, as well as to the shifting codes of trans representation. Monica is a film about making amends where the person who deserves the apology is also the one doing all the work." Joining me now to talk about the film, which has its theatrical release tomorrow is Trace Lysette, who plays Monica. Trace, nice to meet you.

Trace Lysette: Hi.

Allison Stewart: And Patricia Clarkson, who plays her mother, Eugenia. Patricia, welcome.

Patricia Clarkson: Hello. Thank you.

Allison Stewart: Trace, when you first got involved with the film, what aspects of this story were you actually just really excited to bring to screen?

Trace Lysette: Well, I think just the chance to lead after, I don't know, 10 years on TV. To get the chance to lead a feature film, it's a dream of every actor. I think every working actor dreams about that. To see a trans character in the title role is just so rare and unheard of that I knew it was worth fighting for. I read the script, it was good. I had it sent to me in December of 2016, so it's taken us a while to get here.

Allison Stewart: Oh. Wow.

Trace Lysette: Yes. It's not lost on me that the importance of this film, especially now with everything that trans people are going through. I just fell in love with Monica, because I knew her so well, and I knew how much she represented so many of my trans sisters and myself.

Allison Stewart: Patricia, you've been in so many strong films. Most recently, she said you were great in The Station Agent and Sharp Objects. You played a very different kind of mother. You've read some really interesting scripts in your career. What was something in this script that you hadn't seen before?

Patricia Clarkson: The profound quiet. The lack of dialogue, the lack of explanation. It required so much of us, such internal life from me and from Trace, and I was drawn to it immediately. It's the fastest I've ever said yes, and as you know, I've been working for a long, long time. I said yes in one day to this film, and it was not lost on me that an extraordinary trans actress could lead a film finally. That was very important to me also.

Allison Stewart: Trace, the film opens with a closeup of Monica. She's in a tanning bed and she's the only person we see on screen, in focus, anyway, for a good 15 minutes. When you were in conversations with your director about this introduction of your character and you having to just hold this movie for this period of time, what were those conversations about that first 15 minutes?

Trace Lysette: We shot it out of sequence. That first scene where I'm walking-- Well, there's the tanning bed scene and then there's the scene walking through the parking lot. That parking lot scene was actually one of the last scenes, if not the last scene, we shot in the movie .

Allison Stewart: There's something almost poetic in that a little bit, right?

Trace Lysette: Yes.

Allison Stewart: In the scene, you're in a car, and there's a man sort of out of frame, and he's like, "I'm going to help you." Then he clearly is just kind of harassing you.

Trace Lysette: Cat calling.

Allison Stewart: You're like, "I got it. I got it. I'm good." [unintelligible 00:04:19] for our audience.

Trace Lysette: Those moments are so complicated for a trans woman. They can go left in the blink of an eye. If for whatever reason they discover that you are trans, it can turn into any number of things, violence, verbal violence, physical violence. Back to your first statement or question, it was-- I guess, the first period of time on set, the first, I don't know, few days and even over the first couple weeks, the conversations with Andrea were deeply affirming to me, because I think as a working actor, I knew I was ready, and I knew I was ready to do the tough internal work of it all. Having these conversations with Andrea about him affirming that you can hold the space and he was pleased with what was happening, just made me feel even safer. I think that's the biggest gift an actor can get on set, is to feel safe with such a gentle but specific director.

Allison Stewart: What does that do for you as an actor to be safe? What's an example of something that you could do as long as you felt safe that you might not do to protect yourself if you were in a situation where you're like, "I'm not so sure?"

Trace Lysette: Safety to me just frees your imagination and also your heart. Patricia and I work very similarly in that I don't think we over prepare. We just work a lot from our gut and our heart. A lot of those scenes, they don't feel like acting. They didn't feel like acting when we were doing them. They don't read back that way. They just feel like the truth.

Allison Stewart: I saw you nodding your head about the safety part of this.

Patricia Clarkson: I think the greatest thing a director can give-- Safety is not a blanket. It's not a cuddly. It's not about being cuddled and praised. Safety actually, is where we do our best work as actors. It gives us freedom to go to the extremes, and whether that's emotional or comedic, it doesn't matter. That's what we're striving for every day and especially in Monica. We never really knew where we would go, the two of us, in these very deep emotional scenes.

Allison Stewart: Patricia, when you were thinking about Eugenia's character being sick, being ill, what did you and the director want her illness to look like?

Patricia Clarkson: It was never defined specifically, because brain cancer can affect you in so many ways. I researched, and I actually knew someone with brain cancer. You never know if a limb is going to go, it's always headaches. You never know what part of the brain. You never know where it's going to affect you, but I knew it was debilitating and I had to-- At times, Eugenia would give in and at times she's still fighting for her life. She still doesn't want to leave this life. It's heartbreaking, but it is the truth. She really is in the final month or two of her life.

Allison Stewart: We're discussing the film, Monica, with its leads, Patricia Clarkson and Trace Lysette. Let's play a click from the film Monica. In this scene is just a little bit after Monica returns home to take care of Eugenia, her mother. Her mother doesn't recognize her, and they're sort of feeling each other out. This is from Monica.

Eugenia: What's your name again? Please, remind me.

Monica: Monica.

Eugenia: That's a nice name. Is it a family name?

Monica: No. It's the name I chose for myself.

Eugenia: Oh. I wish I could change my name, too. Eugenia means born into good genes. That's not me clearly. Look at me. I hate my name.

Allison Stewart: It's so interesting. You learn a lot about both women in that moment, that very simple scene about-- I think there was one reviewer who refers to St. Monica as the Patron Saint of Motherhood. The name Monica, obviously, is the name of the character, and it's a chosen name. When you think about that name being chosen, why do you think your character chose Monica?

Trace Lysette: Oh, wow. that's a good-- I never even thought about it that way, and especially because I'm coming home to kind of mother her in a way.

Allison Stewart: Exactly.

Trace Lysette: That's actually one of my favorite scenes, is when I hold you and you're crying out for your mother. When I think about trans people as a whole, claiming their names, I actually embraced my name and kept it. Trace has always been my name, but I lucked up because it's androgynous, I guess. It's a reclaiming of who we know we are on the inside, and just staking our claim to what we know to be true and letting the world know that we are also who we evolve to be, not just who we are assigned at birth.

Alison Stewart: What do we learn about Eugenia at that moment, do you think?

Patricia Clarkson: You mean about her name?

Alison Stewart: About her name and how she feels about herself.

Patricia Clarkson: I think it goes back to, that this woman still, I think, grieving the loss of her child and dying without that child near. Yet she doesn't know quite yet that that child is standing right in front of her. I think she knows that she should have had a better life and she didn't. Did she bring that on? I do think in the end, the beauty is in this woman in the last months of her life has the most profound experience a woman can have or a mother can have, is that she learns to love her child unconditionally, and she will die with the love of that child in her heart, and her child will die with the love of her mother in her heart. I don't know if I gave too much away, but maybe I did. Oh, well. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: I don't think so. Things can happen in a lot of different ways.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: There's so much interesting cinematography in the movie, Trace. A lot of times the emotional scenes, we don't see your faces. When you think about your job as an actor, do you know in that moment that this is not going-- that your face might not be on camera? You don't know, so the magic of the editor.

[laughter]

Trace Lysette: Most of the time, I'm just focused on the scene and the emotional work. It's not really my job to think too much about the cinematography, although sometimes it does affect what I'm going to do. I do like to be in the know. Admittedly, there were some surprising moments when I watched the first cut of the film, and I had to digest some things.

I think what was challenging is that because my face wasn't in every emotional scene, that's just how authentic I had to be in order for the audience to really feel what's going on with Monica, because I didn't have the crutch of having the camera front and center. I just didn't, and I couldn't phone anything in, not that I would, but I had to bring it every single scene, every single day. Looking back on it, at times it was a little hard to think, "Where was my coverage?" That's Andrea's vision, and I had to just bring Monica every day and do the best that I could.

Alison Stewart: Where is her emotional state when we first meet her? We get clues, but it's never really explicit. What's important to Monica before she even gets back to her family?

Trace Lysette: I see a girl that is just existing, getting by, has been through a lot, and I deeply identify with that. She's a fully well-lived, post-op trans woman. I think she's searching for love. I think that's evident in the scene where she's out and has the phone call outside the bar and then has the random, one-night stand with the guy, who in my mind, she doesn't even tell she's trans. That was an empowering scene for me in a weird way, because, yes, she's seeking validation after she had just been rejected by someone who obviously did know she was trans. That's that weird duality that I think some trans women like myself have had to navigate for a very long time.

Alison Stewart: Patricia, so much of the drama and the tension between Eugenia and Monica is unspoken. For you as an actor, what creative opportunities does that provide?

Patricia Clarkson: Again, I've done so much work, and I took this movie on because it was deeply challenging for any actor. We all had to work within a very specific frame. I joke that we had to keep our elbows in literally and figuratively. We never knew where we would be and where our faces would be when we were--

Andrea Pallaoro, it made us better actors, and I think that's what we strive for. I want to take on parts at this point in my career that are going to challenge me, that will be surprising for me. Every day was a challenge to have no words to cling to, none often, and just air or my dog. That's my real dog in life. That's my dog in the film. She's passed.

Alison Stewart: I'm sorry.

Patricia Clarkson: It's a bittersweet moment for me. Anyway, but then I had Trace. Trace and I, thank God, had this incredible rapport and love from the moment we met. The moment I met her, it never wavered. It was destiny. It was fate for us to play mother and daughter.

Alison Stewart: How long was this filming?

Patricia Clarkson: Short. We had a day in [unintelligible 00:16:16].

[laughter]

Trace Lysette: Yes. It was like a month in Cincinnati and then I did a week and a half in LA.

Patricia Clarkson: We had no money for this film, and that's the beauty of it also.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask, you've worked on, I'm sure films with incredible budgets, and time small. What is it about working on a small film that is exciting?

Patricia Clarkson: We had a first-class, world-class crew in Cincinnati, I will say. We had an absolutely first-class crew, one of the best crews I've ever worked with. That sometimes you get on these small films. You have people who are there just for the love of the film, and sometimes inexperienced, but it doesn't show. They were all just so helpful and alive and available. It was nice. Cincinnati was nice to be-- I had never been to Cincinnati. It was great. Really great to be shooting there.

Trace Lysette: It's hot in the summertime. I grew up in Dayton, 45 minutes north of there. It was a full-circle moment for me.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned earlier, Trace, unfortunately, we're in this political moment where conversations about [unintelligible 00:17:26] and children are really fraught. There's a part of, I don't want to give anything away, but there's a part of the film that deals with a child now. When you think about the conversations you'd like people to have after seeing this movie over drinks or coffee, what were some of the things you'd love people to think about, to talk about?

Trace Lysette: I just hope it opens minds. I think because it's such a delicate film that maybe people will be more receptive to it than anything that is heavy-handed or preachy. You get to see Monica just doing ordinary human things like holding a baby in the sunshine at the end of a dock in her bathing suit with her brother. Some of the silent moments are just so beautiful, playing freeze tag in the forest with her nieces or niece and nephew and-- I don't know. I hope it creates empathy and conversation and allows people to think for themselves.

Alison Stewart: Congratulations to waking up this morning to the film being a New York Times Critic's Pick. I saw that first thing when I walked in [laughs]. The name of the film is Monica. It opens tomorrow. My guests have been actors, Patricia Clarkson and Trace Lysette. They are the leads in the film. Thank you for coming to the studio.

Trace Lysette: Thank you so much.

Patricia Clarkson: Thank you so much.

[music]

Alison Stewart: That is all of it for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.

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