Jessica Chastain was in Cannes last month, where the film she stars in, The Tree of Life, a modest number about the dawn of man, about grace and nature and the struggles of a family in 1950s Texas, won the festival's grand prize, the Prix d'Or.
And Jessica Chastain was in Cannes last month, where the film she stars in, Take Shelter, about a man (Michael Shannon) who is either going crazy or has foreseen the end of the world, won the Critics' Week grand prize.
And Jessica Chastain was in Cannes last month, where the film she stars in, The Wettest County in the World, a Depression-era crime drama with Shia LeBoeuf, Guy Pearce, and Mia Wasikowska, was the object of a bidding war. Harvey Weinstein ended up with the distribution rights.
In short, the 30-year-old Juilliard graduate, who hadn't even worked in movies until four years ago, had the Cannes Film Festival experience of her life.
"I'm realistic enough to know that my first Cannes experience will never, ever, be repeated," says the actress, on the phone from Austin, Texas, where The Tree of Life was premiering last week. Terrence Malick, the famously private and independent-minded writer/director, lives in Austin and had been working on the film, shot in the Lone Star state, for the last three years. Hugely successful in its first week's run in New York and Los Angeles, and the object of mostly rapturous reviews, The Tree of Life opens Friday at the Ritz East.
Chastain plays the wife, the mother, in The Tree of Life, opposite Brad Pitt and three preternaturally self-possessed first-time actor kids. Like Malick's other films - Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005) - his fifth feature has long passages of wordless action and moments of reverie, of transcendence, that other movies, and moviemakers, rarely approach.
"I first heard from my agent, who said that they were casting this role," says Chastain, recalling the long and winding road she has been on with her director and The Tree of Life. "That was 31/2 years ago, and no one really knew anything about it.
"So I showed up at the audition and it was a lot of behavior - putting a baby to sleep, singing a lullaby, looking at someone with love and respect. And there was a bit of dialogue from a Eugene O'Neill play, so they could hear my voice. And after that audition I got a call: Would I like to meet Terrence Malick? . . . So I got on an airplane."
More meetings, and more auditions, followed.
