David O. Russell remembers Mary Tyler Moore; 'The Big Sick' at Sundance

She was so hungry and excited about working and talking about this role, that I thought she had no chance of doing, that she became the character in the bar. And we borrowed a cigarette from another patron in the bar... and she just started being the character and put on sunglasses in the bar, and it kind of was amazing to me. And then I couldn't think of anybody else in the role.

I was excited to meet her because she was the first icon I had met. She was a very powerful, famous woman who I'd watched on television, and I thought there was no chance - zero chance - that she would be able to play this role, but I was excited to meet her nonetheless. She showed up in that bar and she had on a very tight green dress for Christmas and her hair was red, to my shock, and was cropped, which is what we ended up going with in the movie. She had already shocked my expectations. She's an extraordinary woman. She was so hungry and excited about working and talking about this role, that I thought she had no chance of doing, that she became the character in the bar. And we borrowed a cigarette from another patron in the bar... and she just started being the character and put on sunglasses in the bar, and it kind of was amazing to me. And then I couldn't think of anybody else in the role. 



It was special because she was America's sweetheart, and then she became this kind of Italian-Jewish New Yorker that I knew with my family, with this fierceness.  It was all things at once. She was a consummate performer. She knew how to be funny and real and intense and emotional all in one breath.

She was extraordinary in that film and she showed a big dark side of her. For someone who had been this affable, lovable woman, who was very human and also with impeccable comic instincts, [she] played this cold-blooded terrifying person in Redford's picture, for which Redford won the Academy Award for director.

When [it] came time to do the scene, she ran the scene. It was her scene. It was like an eight or eight-page scene and she set the bar for everybody. She showed up early and her character drives the entire. It's like a three-ring circus, that scene, with Ben Stiller and Patricia Arquette and George Segal and Téa Leoni and the baby. She ran the whole scene and it was remarkable and she surprised everybody I think, including to when her nose was actually running and she was crying and it ends the scene when she blows her noise, which just happened organically. It's like a punctuation mark.



She was fearless and funny and she got the rhythm of everything. You had to run at her pace. She was so hungry to do it that she ran at a very fast pace and everybody was very excited to keep at her pace... it felt very electric when she was doing it because you don't expect someone who's supposed to be an ideal mother to be such a baroque, complicated person, who's verbally just running everything.

I watched her show religiously and she was like a Beatle to me. That show was extraordinary and she was extraordinary to me... She was a towering figure to me, and she was a feminist figure in the seventies because that was a new show that had a woman living on her own. It's hard to imagine now that that was considered in any way bold, but it was. And she was never married and she had a career, and that was someone my mother struggled with being at that time. So she was an important person.

KN: I was terrified. Emily was a lot more confident than I was. Not that I wasn't confident in what we made, I'm just a worrier. 

EG: I didn't know what the possibilities could be for this. I wanted the movie to play well at Sundance and I wanted audiences to like it here. I wasn't thinking beyond that. If we get that, we'll be a success and I'll be so excited. It didn't even occur to me — bidding. None of that stuff had occurred to me. I would have been more nervous if it had.

KN: I just wanted people to like the movie. I wanted the reviews to be good, you know. They always say, it doesn't matter! You make it for yourself! But you kind of do and you don't. You make it for yourself but then you want other people to like it as well. 

EG: It is true that people are very aware of a lot of things about us. It had not occurred to me that strangers would be coming up to me and asking me very specific questions about how we got together and my health and all this stuff. So that's been an interesting turn. 

KN: It's Monday morning and we showed the movie Friday night. It feels like it was three weeks ago.

EG: The first screening, I was very emotional. It just was really lovely to see it with such a large audience. We've seen it with test audiences before but this was a very different experience and so moving and touching that it was kind of overwhelming. You know when you have the lump and you can't swallow it? That's where I was on Friday night.

KN: I was so nervous during the whole screening that at the end I was a little bit deer in the headlights. The next morning, we had another screening at 9AM and that one I enjoyed watching. Then afterwards I got very emotional at that screening. What was good was, the first one, people reacted the way we wanted them to react so that gave me confidence. It didn't feel like a fluke. So the next day when they started reacting similarly, I was like, this is not a fluke. And then I could just sort of enjoy peoples' reaction to it and at the end — it really hit me when I went on stage after the screening at 11AM and people stood up to clap.

EG: We've seen this movie so many billions of time because we've been involved in the editing process that it gets so far away from you that it's easy to judge. I never wanted anyone to do an impression of me when they were acting. So I wanted someone who would have a similar vibe to me but do their own thing with it. Zoe is an amazing actor so I trusted her choices. So it's lovely to watch. You hear little lines written in that are lines I would say. Other than that, I'm just enjoying her performance as a character named Emily... that is kind of me. 

KN: What was great about Zoe was, as we were casting this movie, we were like, we need someone who feels so alive and full of life that when she goes away for a significant chunk of the movie, you still feel her presence and you miss her. That was the challenge in casting and Zoe was perfect for that.

EG: So far this has felt like a family affair because this is such an intimate story. Everyone is treating it with this lovely intimacy which I love. Everyone wants to shepherd and take care of this little baby that we've all created together. And that's really important to me. We've had this discussion of how the movie will be marketed a lot. I think about it constantly because it is so many movies. It's a cross-cultural love story, it's a love letter to parents and how we are like them and not like them. It's a rom-com. It's a medical drama. 

KN: For me the main thing was, we weren't going to be in the sales meetings. We knew that, but the people who were like Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel and Michael Showalter, who's the director — they love the movie and they get it. We really are sort of a hive mind. We knew that our concerns about how this movie was going to be presented would be represented by those guys. We talked to them afterwards and they just said, Amazon seemed to be the most passionate about this movie and just understood what it was about the story that was important.