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Off Screen Spaces: Azazel Jacobs on His Three Daughters
Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon in His Three Daughters Azazel Jacobs’s films treat the tragicomedy of human existence with tenderness and a heartbreakingly honest sense of the absurd. In his first released feature, The GoodTimesKid (2005), the anti-hero (played by Jacobs) is trapped in a repetitive nightmare of mistaken identity punctuated by Marx Brothers slapstick and 1930s movie dance routines. Jacobs made it with colleagues and friends he met when he was getting his MFA from the AFI Conservatory, some of whom became a permanent part of his team, including his wife Diaz, an actor and filmmaker in her own right. Momma’s Man (2008) memorialized the trauma of moving away from New York and leaving the magical Chambers Street loft of his parents, avant-garde moving image giant Ken Jacobs and Florence Jacobs, a painter and Ken’s invaluable collaborator. It was shot in that very four-flight walk-up, with the elder Jacobs playing the parents of Mikey (Matt Boren, definitely not a lookalike for the filmmaker), who returns to New York for a short visit and then cannot bring himself to leave. Momma’s Man is as close as a film can come to connecting the worlds of avant-garde and New York independent film. Mikey eventually departs again for L.A., as did Jacobs. His next three features—Terri (2011), The Lovers (2017) and French Exit (2020)—are more conventionally shaped narratives that nevertheless focus on characters who are anything but predictable. Debra Winger in The Lovers and Michelle Pfeiffer in French Exit are fearless in their portrayals of difficult women who are not easy to love.
The same can be said of Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne, who respectively play Katie, Christina and Rachel in Jacobs’s newest picture, His Three Daughters. They have gathered in the apartment where they grew up because their father, according to the hospice nurses who come and go, is very close to death. Katie and Christina have families of their own and have not visited often, but Rachel, who came to the apartment at age four when her mother married the now dying widower, has never left her only home. It’s a kind of Cinderella set-up, but there is no Prince Charming for Rachel, just the father with whom she shares an unconditional love and who is about to finally leave her. Brilliantly edited, time moves here in jolts of anxiety and relief, a sensation familiar to those of us who’ve shared the experience of a death watch. But His Three Daughters is not a gloomy film. Rather, it is filled with small and sometimes hilarious revelations, topped by a shift into the realm of magical realism as in the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and best left for you, dear readers, to discover on your own. (Beware the spoiler noted in the conversation that follows.)
Following a brief theatrical run, His Three Daughters streams on Netflix beginning September 20, 2024.
Filmmaker: All your films are in some way about family. The most obvious example is Momma’s Man, which for me is a riff on a dominant avant-garde film genre: the home movie. His Three Daughters is different. The characters are all played by professional actors, and the apartment in which the film is entirely set is nothing like the loft where you grew up. And yet, it feels to me like a very personal film—personal, but not autobiographical. And, after all, you not only wrote and directed it, but you edited it.
Jacobs: I knew I wanted it to be a New York family, but not artists. What I was chasing down is how time moves when you are with people who are passing—when the inevitable is going to happen, but we just don’t know exactly when. I’ve been in that situation, where time moved in a way I couldn’t understand. I wanted to express how this time is so strange when we’re waiting for something or dreading something, when we don’t want it to happen. Here is life and death. And you also have your lives outside, another reality that’s mounting. You have the right to not answer any calls, you have the right to not answer any emails, but the truth is, those things are still happening. Could I write time in that way? That’s why it was clear that I would be cutting this. As I was writing, I was thinking, “OK, shot, shot.” I already could kind of see that. The same thing happened with the actors. I was maybe halfway through writing when I realized that when I’m going to Christina, I’m seeing Lizzie [Elizabeth Olsen]. When I’m going to Katie, I’m seeing Carrie [Coon]. And the same thing with Natasha [Lyonne, who plays Rachel]. They are all actors I had worked with or had a personal relationship with. So, when that first draft spilled out, the characters were fully formed.
Filmmaker: When did you send them the script?
Jacobs: I always give it first to Diaz [also a producer on this film]. She has such a good sense of when things are just not truthful and grounded. After she read it, I worked more on the script and then reached out to all three actors simultaneously. I told them that I’d written this with them in mind, and maybe that was a bit weird because we don’t know each other well. I said, “I just see you as having the ability to play these characters,” and that if at first they might see the characters as types that were familiar, hopefully, by the end those types would be exploded and expanded and revealed to be something way different. I felt they were similar in that they felt hungry in a way I loved. It had nothing to do with financial reasons; it had to do with having something to express. I sent them hard copies of the script. I told them I was going to shoot on film and on location in one apartment, and that we wouldn’t have much time because we were going to do this for as little money as possible. I said I felt very secure about getting the money and that the four of us would be equal partners. We’re going to be paid the same, all four of us, and share the same amount of points. So, we’ll have great ownership of the film.
Filmmaker: Why did you want to shoot on film?
Jacobs: From the beginning, I knew I would shoot on film and on location. At the same time, I knew that most people will see this digitally, so what could I do to both embrace that and take advantage of it? I really wanted to do a bright film. That was one of my key things—make it very bright.
Filmmaker: How did you connect with Sam Levy, your cinematographer?
Jacobs: You probably know him from his work on Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. I saw a stand-up comedy special that he shot for HBO. The performer, Jerrod Carmichael, is telling his life story sitting on a stage. The visuals matched the tenderness of the story. The presentation, the colors—everything worked together. It left me quite moved. I very much wanted to work with people who were new to me and based in New York. Sam had shot film, and he came with a wonderful crew. He’s about my age and lives here on the Lower East Side, like me and Diaz, and he responded to the specific idea I had. I wrote with rhythm in mind, so shots were very particular. I didn’t want to use transitions like doors opening or people walking from room to room unless those movements had specific meaning. I wanted the interruptions to be very pronounced.
Filmmaker: The movie grabbed me immediately—that first image of Carrie Coon against a white wall, and her monologue, which she seems to be saying straight to the camera, and her barely suppressed anger. Then, we see Elizabeth Olsen, also isolated in the frame, and she seems to be in a totally different space, and then the same with Natasha Lyonne. It’s not until the fourth shot that we see they are all sitting together in the same pretty small living room, but each of them is locked in her own subjectivity and each is really prickly about being misunderstood by the others. For me, the whole film was about those kinds of discoveries, seeing something in every shot that I hadn’t seen or realized before.
Jacobs: A lot of times with film, you’re trying to place the character in a space so that the audience understands where they are. But the question is why, especially when we are going to spend so much time in one space. Maybe the characters need to discover where they are, and so does the audience. How do I keep on making this place transform? The idea is that they could share a space, but they aren’t sharing frames with each other. They’re in the same space but not really in the same world.
Filmmaker: For a very long time, each of them doesn’t know who the other two are. Did you ever think of Chekhov’s play Three Sisters?
Jacobs: Only when I started reaching out to producers and it came up. I love titles that say what the movie is. Like, Dead Man [Jim Jarmusch, 1995] is a perfect title: This is about a person that’s going to be dead. The narrative is all there. The title His Three Daughters tells the story of who these people are and how they are connected. What is their one connection? It’s through the father, his presence or his point of view. As far as influences, I ended up rewatching all of Hal Hartley’s films during the pandemic. We both went to college at Purchase at different times but had some of the same film teachers. This idea of people speaking their mind, like they do in his films, was really intoxicating to me because I’ve always written characters that keep everything hidden. And in this film, Rachel is the only character that holds back. Christina and Katie don’t. I know the idea of characters expressing everything came from Hal, as did embracing the theatrical in this real apartment. I also had the idea that I’d try to write a Rohmer film, but after two pages I let that go because there is nothing else that’s like Rohmer. But this morning, when I was checking the film print, I could feel some connection to those later Rohmer films—his idea of people expressing themselves, and feelings mattering, and that being enough for a whole story, for a whole film.
Filmmaker: Did you share those films with the actors?
Jacobs: I brought them Hal Hartley, Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends [1987], Michael Roemer’s The Plot Against Harry [1969] and Fatso [1980], the film that Anne Bancroft wrote and directed and Mel Brooks[’s production company Brooksfilms] produced. It was their only film [together]. It’s so daring. It treats comedy and pain in a way that is incredible. I felt these films were very brave, and I wanted to swing as hard as they do. But there was also the gift that Aki Kaurismäki gave—that you can say so much by saying less and show so much by showing less. Another film I shared with the actors that I saw when I was young and that continues to influence me is The Breakfast Club [John Hughes, 1985]. At the beginning, the characters are types, and by the end they realize that they are all different people, and they are whoever you want to see them as.
Filmmaker: How much rehearsal did you have?
Jacobs: Five days in the apartment. But we met a couple of times between when I sent them the script and when we started shooting about nine months later. I definitely had a lot of time to rehearse with them in my mind. I knew what I wanted. I’ve never felt so clear with a film before how long I wanted the shots to last for. I wound up writing out a colored shot list beforehand. I thought of it as all staccato, just “this, this, this, close up, close up, close up, close up.” I knew when I’d reveal the place. It was going back to chasing a certain type of time—that meant a certain rhythm that it had to be.
Filmmaker: How did you find the apartment that is just about the only location?
Jacobs: I was inspired by moving back to New York from Los Angeles and seeing this incredible will to survive. The film is about a New York City family, where they don’t own the apartment, but it’s rent controlled, so it’s their gold. I wanted this family to be like the families of kids I went to school with. Diaz and I put up flyers on a lot of buildings on the Lower East Side, and this one building responded, The Hillman Complex, on Grand Street next to the Williamsburg Bridge. When Rachel sits outside in the back, that’s the train coming across the bridge that we see. The smoke shop she walks to is right there on Delancey Street.
Filmmaker: This is the place where I’ll need to put a spoiler alert to readers. It’s a very strange thing that you do toward the end of the film, a real what-the-fuck moment, and each time I’ve seen the film it’s been disconcerting at first and then liberating and incredibly moving. The daughters have been in the apartment for three days, and the two hospice care workers who come and go explain to the daughters that their father will probably die very soon. Christina and Katie go into his room from time to time, and Rachel hangs around outside his door, and we hear the beeps of the monitors. But the camera doesn’t enter the room, and we only know about him through what the other characters say and how they react. Suddenly, the three daughters decide to wheel their father (Jay O. Sanders) into the living room with all the monitors and IVs attached. He starts talking and throwing off the equipment, and he gets up and walks around and tells stories about who his three daughters are and what they’ve been to him and he believes they should be to one another. It’s amazing and outrageous, and you can interpret it in all kinds of ways, including that we are inside his head as he is dying. In any case, films aren’t real, they are fantasy, so why not? And, you have already introduced his subjectivity in the title, His Three Daughters. But how did you get there?
Jacobs: This was a film without decisions, a film of instincts. So, when I was writing, I was as surprised as you are when he came out of the bedroom. I was writing, and suddenly, is this what’s happening? That’s what it felt like. It wasn’t like I was going to have him [talking in the scene]. In fact, if anything, I think once we got to that place, I was asking myself, why did I shoot myself in the foot with this? Everything was so easy. It was all so clear, and everything was fine. I had a film that just worked, and now this is happening? It scared me, it was the biggest risk, but it was important. The title came after I finished the first draft. So, you’re completely right that once he appeared, I realized I needed the title to refer to something that he was experiencing, alongside us, the whole time that we weren’t seeing him, when he was in the bedroom listening to their conversations. It was very important that he has a chance to speak, and whether that was real or not didn’t matter because films have this ability that I think we all wish we could have had, for loved ones that have passed or for ourselves. We all finally can speak. It felt like the thing to do to acknowledge what ultimately Christina says about depicting death, that only absence can do it. Everything else is fantasy. I wanted to acknowledge that this is the performance of life. The truth is that this is all wishful thinking. But I will also say that when people are passing, they surprise. And what I found so surprising about that scene, I find less surprising now, when I have spent even more time up close with the process of dying. It doesn’t seem nearly as farfetched as it did when I first wrote it.
Filmmaker: Then, suddenly there’s a cut, and he’s no longer in the apartment. It’s over. But you had to have him alive in order for us to feel his absence in death.
Jacobs: I did one work-in-progress screening of a rough cut for friends, and there were a few people that felt there’s a rule, which is if a film can exist without a scene, then that scene isn’t needed. And there were people who felt just as passionately that the scene was needed. Mostly, it was women that felt the scene should be there, and mostly men felt it should be cut. I left the screening feeling confused and woke up the next morning in a complete panic. But Diaz, who is my closest collaborator, said if there’s something that’s not working for the scene, then just get the scene to the place it needs to be and judge it at that point, because it was still a rough cut. She really, really helped me with that scene, getting it precise, bringing it down to what I thought could work. I loved cutting this film, and I wanted to do some bold moves cutting. In a lot of the films I love, a whole story is conveyed in a single cut, and that scene gave me that ability to do that. That’s why I stuck with it.
Filmmaker: You showed the film at TIFF in 2023, where Netflix saw it.
Jacobs: Toronto was the only festival we went to. They were really passionate about the film, and Netflix had real clarity about how they saw it coming out.
Filmmaker: It opened in theaters on September 6 and drops on Netflix on September 20. I’ve seen screenings of the DCP, and it’s just radiant.
Jacobs: We worked really hard on it at the lab to get to that place. I had a sense, from the dailies I cut on, that it could be as radiant as it wound up being. But I just saw the 35mm print, and it’s a completely different experience. The vibration of the light and just the shape of everything—it feels like its own thing. I had to question myself and make sure that I wasn’t making a 35mm [print] for vanity reasons because I hadn’t had the ability to make a print for so many years. But when I saw it today, I let go of the idea that this is like a parallel of the DCP. I realized that this is a different way of telling this story, of experiencing this story.
Filmmaker: I presume they will be screening the DCP in theaters.
Jacobs: Yes, the print is only for special occasions.
