Maggie Gyllenhall’s newest role is director.
Maggie Gyllenhaal may come from a family of filmmakers, yet she never let herself dream about directing until recently. Things changed very quickly and very profoundly for Gyllenhaal when she found herself writing to Elena Ferrante, asking for permission to adapt her 2008 novel “The Lost Daughter.” Ferrante said yes, she could have the rights, but there was one condition: Gyllenhaal had to direct it herself or the contract was “null and void.” “I think I’ve always been a director and I just didn’t feel entitled to admit it to myself,” Gyllenhaal said Friday at the Venice Film Festival before her film makes its world premiere in competition. “I think it’s a better job for me actually.” Ferrante’s novel, which preceded her Neapolitan quartet, follows a middle-aged college professor and mother of two grown daughters on a solo vacation, where she is transfixed by a younger mother and her daughter. Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley play the lead, Leda, at different stages of life. Colman’s Leda is vacationing in Greece when she notices Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her young daughter on the same beach and makes a bizarre decision involving the daughter’s doll. Gyllenhaal said Ferrante’s novels present, “Secret truths about a feminine experience in the world that I really liked having spoken out loud… It seemed like a kind of dangerous, exciting thing to try.
