Maggie Gyllenhaal was interviewed by Stephen Colbert at the Montclair Film Festival, on Oct. 24.
On Oct. 24, Stephen Colbert interviewed Maggie Gyllenhaal at the Montclair Kimberley Academy Upper School, as part of the Montclair Film Festival. The fest was screening Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, “The Lost Daughter,” and later gave her its Breakthrough Director & Writer Award.
The film (which had a limited theatrical release on Dec. 17 and began streaming on Netflix on Dec. 31) has received plenty of other recognition as well, including Best Director and Best Actress in a Drama nominations — for Gyllenhaal and Olivia Colman, respectively — in the 2022 Golden Globes. And many critics have predicted that it will be an Oscar contender.
In recognition of the interest in the film, Montclair Film has made the entire 80-minute interview available online. You can watch it below.
One of the most interesting segments of the video comes during the audience Q&A section (one hour and seven minutes in), when someone asks Gyllenhaal if she minds that many people are seeing the film on Netflix, instead of in a theater.
“Netflix has created a situation where my unusual, not-mainstream film can have somewhat equal value to something much more mainstream,” says Gyllenhaal. “It’s not about tickets, and who’s gonna rush to go and get tickets, but instead about creating content that satisfies many, many people. It means that my film has a kind of equal value to something much more easy to swallow. That is not true anywhere else, that I can see.”
She then mentions her dark 2018 film, “The Kindergarten Teacher.”
“It was also distributed on Netflix,” she says, “and I don’t remember what the numbers were now, but it was like some insane number of people saw that movie. And if it had been distributed by a really fancy distribution company, like whatever your ideal would be, it never would have hit numbers like that.”
Gyllenhaal adds, though, that the “The Lost Daughter” was “built” for a large-screen theater, and so is ideally seen in that format.
Here is the video:
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