You are listening to The Next Best Picture podcast, and this is Will Mavity's interview with the director for pieces of a woman, Cornell Mondrusco. I wanted to stay at home. She sounds really good. Hi, baby. I wanted the baby to decide when she wanted to come. My daughter came into this world. For the time that she did. And I can't bring her back.

So, Cornell, I mean, I actually recently did an article on the best long takes of this year.

There were a lot, but it's hard to think of anything in the realm of long takes this year

that is just wildly impressive as what you start the film with. So why don't you tell me a little bit

about how you decided to kind of open with this 22-minute long take or however long it is

and the process of making that scene come to life. Sure. Thank you. You know, I mean, when you have, when you read like a 35 page burst and when you are facing such a variety of emotion and so amazing view on a female longing and love to the newborn, that was impressive.

So I felt shocked that as a filmmaker, how can I do this?

And of course, there are no references for a birth like that because burst itself is not really for screen

right so it's uh it is it is it is something which is very difficult to create mostly create

badly or artsy or whatever but it cannot be significant part of a movie.

But, you know, when you read it,

it was no other reason just to jump into it.

So basically, our idea was like,

and to be honest, as a father of three,

I also experienced a little bit like that, that how you can lose control somehow when a birth starting and how you can creating this kind of crazy amount of

emotions and be as close to Martha as on the page.

And we end up with the long take, but I think we use the long take kind of differently

than you normally use or what is the tradition for that, because you usually use somehow for real time.

Yes?

So this is somehow long, they connected to real time.

But we basically do, we expanded the film time for, I don't know, 24 minutes,

but we compress into that expanded film time, we compressed like 16, 18, whatever, how many hours of emotion and story somehow, a complete labor.

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