“I’ve seen too many movies probably, especially the ones made for children…everything is so bright, nice. Even if they get heavy, there is a beauty and clarity to it all. This feels so real.”

Just under three minutes into director Azazel Jacobs’ film, His Three Daughters, Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) shares this thought with her sister Katie (Carrie Coon) and half-sister Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) at a dining table, as their father enters his last days down the hall of his apartment, attached to a machine murmuring the sinister sounds of life-support. The wordless facial reactions of her sisters—as Christina pines for the simplicity of children’s films to be applicable to real life—are just enough to reveal the complicated relationship between these three women. It also reveals the kind of film Jacobs has made—something more real than bright and nice.

For her part, Christina moves her head with a feline quickness and tear-filled eyes that betray the calm, measured, upwardly mobile power-mom persona she has carefully cultivated up to this moment. But now, after conferring with visiting hospice care nurses and confronted with their ailing father just steps away—keeping up appearances in front of her siblings has become too exhausting. She struggles to find any beauty or clarity in death at all. Families are supposed to be perfect, like her own. If she isn’t up early doing yoga stretches, or singing along to the Grateful Dead, Christina is in constant flux, always leaving rooms to find moments to simply breathe or just sit on the floor.

Rachel, their half-sister, has never left home, instead drifting in and out of their father’s apartment to buy weed, bet on sports, and retreat into a comfortable numbness back in her old room. Katie, the eldest, hovers like an overworked C-suite executive who perceives both child-rearing and the impending death of their father as inconveniences to navigate like any other workday full of equally important emergencies. Christina, of course, has given her short soliloquy at the dining room table, just after calling home to check in on her family again—her bright, nice family, where she would never allow anything to get too “heavy.”

Outside, on The Crosby Bar terrace in Lower Manhattan, at a very different table, I’m sitting across from Elizabeth Olsen who is here to talk about His Three Daughters. It’s an early evening in SoHo that hints at approaching autumn, so Olsen orders a hot herbal tea, and we immediately start talking about Russians.

It’s difficult not to think of Chekhov’s Three Sisters when seeing her new film—for its general conceit, if not its exact thematic elements. Then, as if we’re at a pretentious cocktail party, we try to recall the exact words of the opening sentence to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the one about happy families being all alike. By the time we get to Stanislavsky and theories of performance, Olsen admits she is both a total nerd about discussing the “craft of acting,” but also fully aware that most people find it insufferable and boring. After finally managing to mutter, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” we start to talk about the sisters in her new film, and how their own unhappiness surfaces as they each navigate their own way toward, and through, their father’s last mortal moment.

“I love that. I was just thinking about Anna Karenina yesterday,” she says, after we remember the passage. “Families are endlessly fascinating. There are a few things about Christina that I found to be a challenge because she has no clear arc, she’s a mediator in her family. She’s like a ping-pong ball, trying to figure out what role she plays. I have done that a lot in my life, even with friendships. I always want to know someone’s side, or where they are coming from, right? Christina isn’t necessarily like that. She’s trying her own survival technique, which is to not get offended or take things personally. For her, that process was to just remove herself from uncomfortable situations and leave the room. I’m more proactive in my life, but I do know that terror, that feeling about what might come up if someone says the thing that finally crosses a line.

“I also really wanted to play her because the opening monologue, to me, was this opportunity to tap into these women that I have adored in films,” Olsen continues. “Like Dianne Wiest, who has this sensitive softness to her. Or characters who live on a different planet from the other people they are occupying space with. That was interesting to me, to be able to bring that sort of tone to this movie, from characters I’ve adored in other films. You can’t not think about Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), even though Dianne Wiest’s character is way more outgoing than Christina. I also just really wanted to work with Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne. We were constantly asking Aza if the other two were actually going to do the film, because we all really wanted to work with each other.”

The entire film is held in place by the casting of Coon, Lyonne, and Olsen. Get one wrong, His Three Daughters collapses under the weight of its confined spaces, stage-ready monologues, and the swing of emotions that run from dark humor to grief, rivalry, and back again, in repeating cycles of familial mood shifts. The accusations fly around the small apartment, old resentments are stirred, and in time, as the rooms become more familiar to us, our presence watching them becomes nearly palpable. Yet, it’s the opposite of claustrophobic. We are the silent sibling. We watch as these sisters ebb and flow to the metronome of medical equipment, putting each other on trial in a kind of messy family court of their own making. 

“You look at all of these characters and you try and associate them with who they are in your own family,” says Olsen. “Are you a couple of things in each of these sisters?How do we reflect on the role we have taken within our own family, if we assume that we’re the ones that have all the responsibility? Maybe there’s actually someone else who’s doing the heavier emotional lifting. Watching people pass is something that is incredibly painful. When I think about the people in my life that I have done my best to help out when a loved one was in hospice care, my memory is of having  no concept of time. I think that was really important for Aza to show in the film too—this complete lack of understanding of even what time of day it is. How long have we been here? When you find yourself sucked into these life experiences, time is on a totally different planet.”

Recently, Olsen’s career has been on other planets as well. I jokingly congratulate her for making His Three Daughters, because she has finally escaped the prison of the somehow still-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. She doesn’t see it that way, and eventually, we convince each other that the MCU isn’t all that bad (in terms of its effect on the cinema-going experience). She is likely contractually obligated to say it, but she convinces me too. However, a quick glance at her filmography, and ever since her breakout role in Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), it appears she’s been trying to get back to making films such as this one we’re discussing, where a small group of people with a small idea end up making something of great value with little money.

If the MCU is keeping the theater lights on and the projector spinning, then maybe, in time, there will be room again for films such as His Three Daughters to not just get made, but to possibly thrive again in movie theaters. That she has spent the better part of a decade appearing as Wanda Maximoff in the series WandaVision, three Avengers films, two Captain Americas, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, hasn’t made her any less inclined to gravitate toward smaller stories with far more limitations than what a big-tent summer blockbuster can get away with—in both its story and how much money gets burned to tell it.

“I won’t make a movie to stream,” Olsen says, matter-of-factly. “If I make a movie, it has to have a cinematic release. That’s a rule of mine. Unless no one else can buy it. I just think it’s incredibly damaging to the thing we’re trying to rescue, which is the cinema, and the group experience of seeing a film together. I have been so impressed by how Netflix has been handling our film. They did a 35mm print for us to do special screenings because they knew that was going to be important to us. They have given such attention and care to a film that is in one fucking location with three women talking the whole time! That alone is admirable. It’s amazing. I’ve been really surprised. There have been movies that I’ve almost done until I found out they would not be in theaters. From a morality standpoint, I just can’t do that. I’m so happy that Netflix will give this film we made a theatrical run before it streams.”

Looking above us, we notice dark clouds passing immaculately clean, large windows that catch their reflection and make us wonder about how much longer the weather will allow us to pine for the glory days of cinema. Surrounded by large brick buildings, sitting in this carved-out oasis where waiters weave like ice skaters bringing small plates to important people, I latch on to what she just said about His Three Daughters. It is all filmed in one unremarkable location and (spoiler alert) has no explosions. It’s a small film, bound by its budget, made on a shorter schedule, and didn’t require a green screen.

Maybe it’s because her husband is a musician, or that we’ve talked about Kneecap, the forthcoming film about the Irish rap phenom of the same name, or that we both like Sharon Van Etten. Whatever the reason, Olsen’s new film and her apparent unimpeachable taste in music leads me to bring up Jack White. I am reminded, as we speak about the making of His Three Daughters, that White once said of his former band (The White Stripes), that imposing limitations on your work is a surefire way to become more clever and more creative to get to where you want or need to be. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got, and if it isn’t enough, you have to make it so. Olsen responds to this idea with enthusiasm. We continue to talk about films being limited by space, by time, and by money— precisely as it was with His Three Daughters, even with the backing of a behemoth such as Netflix. I go a step further and suggest that these so-called limitations are exactly why the film she made is so good. That they don’t make movies like this anymore, except when they do. 

“I think limitations are important,” Olsen says, with a sheepish smile and a glance in my direction that somehow seems related to her reluctance to talk about craft. With a nudge of encouragement, she continues. “OK. There’s an Anne Bogart essay that I read in college. She’s a theater director. She wrote about structure and limitations and talks about it in relation to the kinetic energy of particles in a box. When you have all of the sides of the box in place, everything is bouncing off each other. If you open the lid, everything dissipates. That’s how limitations can be incredibly helpful. Without them, you can wander down an endless road without having any point of view. If you create limitations for yourself, you’re more committed to just letting things happen.”

This energy she is describing is what permeates throughout the apartment in His Three Daughters. If Netflix knows anything about what the filmgoing public wants, at least it knows that spending money on a movie such as this one will increase their (cultural) capital and reputation among those who view films as important, not just entertainment. Netflix knows that producing quality art films on a dime will bolster their reputation as a cinema-loving streaming service and help them attract even more film stars who came of age in movie houses. But we’re clearly not living in a golden age of anything. There is too much choice, too much scrolling, too much “content,” and rarely is there one thing that commands the morning water-cooler conversation, especially when so many of us are now working from home.

This leads us down a path where I describe a world in the very near future where she has neither the time nor the interest to inhabit the MCU as Wanda any longer. It’s not too difficult to imagine that she’d play the part even if she wasn’t asked. We start talking about AI and all of the inevitabilities that technologists and futurists say we are powerless to do anything about. 

We imagine an alternate Elizabeth Olsen who is simultaneously working on a film called His Three Daughters, while somewhere else, a composite, computer-generated version of “Elizabeth Olsen” is cartwheeling in tights as Wanda Maximoff. The real Olsen has eloquently expressed her preference for the cinematic experience. She is someone who deeply understands the difference of watching a film in a room full of strangers, as opposed to pausing it dozens of times to check your texts while perched on a couch at home.

If she’s given an inch, simply by participating in a Netflix production with the promise of a short, theatrical release, then how does she feel about the possibility of multiple Olsens bandying across screens of all sizes in a future promised to us by, well, crazy dudes? Tech bros with enough of an outsized sense of self-importance that ruining art would be a badge of honor, instead of a mark of shame.We agree that we don’t like this future. She doesn’t think it will happen.

“Maybe I’m in denial as a survival technique,” she begins, tentatively thinking through the implications of AI on her own work. “We obviously need to protect ourselves against someone being able to replicate a person’s face and their voice. What happened with Scarlett Johansson [whose voice was replicated to introduce a new version of Sam Altman’s ChatGPT], that was really weird, so strange. These moments that arise when we can prevent them with lawsuits, I think we just have to keep doing that. But I’d rather be naïve and not assume that AI is going to replace us. It will definitely replace jobs. We’ve already gone through so many insane changes. It’s insane how fast it’s happening. But I have blind faith that actual humans won’t connect with it in a way that helps it to proliferate as much as it has been promised. And the people who do connect with AI on a human level? We should all be concerned for them, like, right now [laughs].”

Not wanting to end on such an inhuman note, and maybe to fight back in some small way against the inevitability of an AI future we’ve been promised (or threatened with), I bring up Gena Rowlands. Her recent passing is top of mind to us both, especially because—as I tell Olsen—I think both Rowlands and John Cassavetes would have loved His Three Daughters. Who else but Gena Rowlands could be held up as the gold standard for work made by real people, about real people. “Absolutely. I love watching her so much,” says Olsen, happy to be back talking about the work she loves. “What a great long life of such great work. I’m obsessed with Gloria.” 

“My favorite has always been Opening Night,” I reply, the interview over. 

“Opening Night is legitimately my favorite too,” says Olsen. “I know everyone loves A Woman Under the Influence, but Opening Night. Wow. There is an insanity there that is different from A Woman Under the Influence. God, she was so good in that. And Faces, I love that movie so much...”

And right here, if this were a scene, the camera would slowly lift up and away and out of the confined brick space of the hotel bar’s courtyard. The small, light-green table—where we’ve been talking for well over an hour about her movie, movies, and our love of movies, in general—becomes smaller and smaller. If there were credits, they’d be rolling already, and our voices would drift off after being swallowed up by the sounds of the city on the other side of the walls. We’re just two people now. People who love movies. Talking about them with reverence in the greatest city in the world. There has to be more of us. Because nothing, absolutely nothing, is as inevitable as it seems. Technologists be damned.

Photographed by William Lords

Styled by Anna Katsanis at Walter Schupfer Management

Written by Gregg LaGambina

Hair: Marco Santini at Walter Schupfer Management

Makeup: Moises Ramirez

Flaunt Film: Sophie Elgort

Styling Assistant: Ana Mendoza

Location: East Village Mansion, NY Film Locations