Julia Ormond stars as Ivy in Jake Mahaffy’s new movie Reunion, alongside Emma Draper as her daughter Ellie, who has returned home very heavily pregnant. Secrets from the past are brought to light, and the family reunion proves to be anything but jolly… Ormond, who’s currently starring in The Walking Dead: World Beyond, chatted with Paul Simpson about the film – and why the process is called “acting”…

Thank you very much for the time, and normally at this point I would say thank you for an enjoyable movie but it’s Reunion we’re talking about so I don’t think that’s an appropriate comment.

(Laughs)

Thank you for a very thought-provoking movie, thank you for a very interesting movie. What did you think of both the storyline and of Ivy, when you first read the script?

I thought that what Jake [Mahaffy] had done was really quite extraordinary in the script but I would agree with you. I hope that doesn’t also equal that you wouldn’t recommend it.

Oh not at all.

There is this thing about “oh is it enjoyable, am I going to enjoy it?” and I had exactly the same reaction. The way that you’ve categorised it is very accurate but I find a thought-provoking, emotional, visceral film experience just as valid. That is probably why I’m heavily drawn to comedies as my balance. I will be all over the map in terms of my own personal experience as to what I would go see.

I felt that I’d never read something that came at an issue like parenting from the inside out, and overturned it and made me think about it in a different way. That I thought was really rare and extraordinary.

I looked at his past work and I felt that he had hit a tone that was very remarkable and that if he could achieve the combination with this then it would be really creepy but thought-provoking and not just creepy.

I found it original that it was a take on parenting because all too often things that are disturbing to the level that I found this disturbing tend to drop into the silo of sexual predators and I feel a bit conflicted as to what that does to us as a society and what that endlessly reinforces for us, especially as women or trans people or that has a gender lens to it. So for me, something that came at it from a parenting point of view and a mental health point of view, I thought was fascinating.

How did you get to hear of the project?

They sent me the script and they sent me an offer. It’s always a delight to know that somebody writes a character like Ivy and they go ‘Oh, you know who’d be really good? Julia’! Not particularly flattering on that perspective although I think one convinces oneself as an actor, ‘Oh they must think I’m an actor with chops’ but I’m not sure…

I’m in The Walking Dead: World Beyond at the moment and one of the cast members said, ‘Oh I think they just know as soon as you walk through the door that you are the character’. I was like ‘Excuse me!’ (laughs) That is not necessarily something I want to hear.’

But then, at the end of the day it’s called acting, that’s the point isn’t it?

It is.

It is inhabiting somebody different. Quite often, with a role like this, if it’s not played with a verisimilitude, if the person playing it isn’t inhabiting that character properly, rather than seen to be acting it, it adds a layer. It’s like going back to the 1960s, the old Star Trek, where they’d film ladies through a gauze filter and you’ve always got that little bit in the way.

Yes. So this one for me was often acting.

That’s a wonderful thing for you to understand and to have observed about actors. I would often describe the experience of playing a character as you do go into a bit of a tunnel. it’s rather bizarre how it spreads to the rest of your life. I find myself doing things, like not feeling able to socialise while I’m working, because it feels as if it takes me out of where I’m at and as if I’m not being authentic with people I’m with. It’s a really strange thing, what it does to your life outside of the project. It is as if you are pregnant with something you can’t quite birth until you’re out of it and it does affect you.

I would say that playing Ivy was one of those experiences where I think I just really underestimated it. It wasn’t so much a tunnel, it was a bit like being scuba diving with insufficient training. It felt as if I was deep underwater and it didn’t feel comfortable at all.

I think you are supposed to take great relish as an actor from playing flawed characters but this one was, thankfully, not a six month shoot.

I don’t mean to cast any aspersions; I’m not connecting that to the process or to the environment.

I think it applies across the board, I did a book on serial killers about three or four years ago and my wife was delighted when I delivered it.

If you touch something or are around something, you absorb it…

It’s Nietzsche isn’t it: you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Yes.

Was it a real house or was it a set? I know it’s a cliché but the house is a character in this.

It was an actual house and even more bizarre was, we ended up shooting it at a time where in New Zealand there was an explosion of cicadas – more cicadas than normal. It became this tortuous white noise that was inescapable for everyone. We were surrounded by woods and there’s this noise going on all the time. They were so concerned about it they felt they were going to have to dub the whole movie. They’re big bugs that I wouldn’t want crawling on me and it felt like we were surrounded by them.

That could be a horror film in itself!

It’s the sort of house that could have been just an amazing gorgeous house in this amazing New Zealand setting if it didn’t have the smack of the story with it as well.

They were a really small crew for this, it wasn’t quite guerrilla crew but not far off it – I think it was something between 20 and 50 people. They worked their tails off, they worked so hard.

The guy who did the catering was amazing: he took one area of the house and turned it into this bright lively café. So you could walk out of the thickness of the air that was the house into this other space, and he was just absolutely sweet. It was one of those films where the people who were on the crew helped you through it, and were very important.

Crew are always important, crew always affect your experience as an actor and what kind of emotional experience you’re going to have as well.

There’s getting the script and receiving it; you read it and you think oh and you imagine it in the way that you have. You have a discussion with the director or they’ll show you lookboards or whatever, but the emotional texture, the emotional tone when I watch a piece back, for me is inseparable. I’m not sure that someone else is having the same experience or if watching it back brings back for me what the collective experience was.

On this, there were a few critical people for me.

Reunion is the sort of film that could have been shot nearly in chronological order for quite a lot of it, or at least the key contemporary stuff. Were you able to do that and maintain that throughline between you and Emma?

I don’t think we did it exactly but it was pretty much and that was such a luxury.

I’d like to spend half an hour just talking about Emma. She was so extraordinary and was actually pregnant doing this role.

There was also a beautiful thing that was brought forward by the producers, and I think insisted on by Emma and us, that there was a Maori prayer element and meditation element that helped them, helped her protect, helped us protect. They did a prayer on the land before we started.

Emma as a spirit and as a human being just has such extraordinary capacity to step in and out of what she’s doing. Clearly I haven’t developed that skill to the extent that she has but she was so down to earth, she was so gifted, she was so real, she was so anchored in it and so fluid. And courageous: it’s such a courageous role. When you are playing something that’s that out there, it takes real balls as an actor. It takes a real gutsiness to go for something that could not work, that sits out on a limb.

It’s almost being prepared to fail gloriously, isn’t it?

Yes and actually, from my perspective, that is key and critical to the good stuff. Creativity is really about giving yourself licence to fail and choosing a director or choosing a team is about who are the people I choose to be selective over my failures. Because you hand your failures over to whoever you’re working with to cut together in to what hopefully works out as a movie.

If you had to name one thing that you’ve taken away from this experience what would it be?

(long pause) Parenting awareness. Is that a weird thing?

I did a film with HBO a while ago that was about autism. The nature of autism and the experience of it was played through visual dramatization or the director tipped it so that you had this experience of the anxiety of someone who is autistic. I think all of us have an element of anxiety and there was something just very loveable about the way that that aspect was shown that we could all relate to. Even if we’re not autistic, we could relate to the aspect of the experience of being autistic or having a family member with that.

I think this film, for me, just made me very aware of fear-driven parenting, where we think we’re doing one thing but actually it’s having this different impact on the child. For me, it is about an extreme parent/child experience that should resonate with every parent.

Reunion is available on digital download from 101 Films now; read our review here

Thanks to Joely Cook for assistance in arranging this interview.