A Good Person: Highlights from Zach Braff & Florence Pugh’s Q&A
To celebrate the release of Zach Braff‘s latest drama A Good Person on Sky Cinema, here are the highlights from a post-screening Q&A I attended with the writer/director and the film’s star Florence Pugh several weeks ago.
The film stars Pugh as Allison, a girl whose life goes off the rails after she’s involved in a tragic car accident. She has become addicted to opioids – but she finally starts to turn her life around after befriending Daniel (Morgan Freeman) in AA meetings. In case you missed it, here’s my review.
The duo promoted the movie in London back in March and here are some of the most interesting things they had to say about the film’s origins and production.
Florence on not being allowed to read the script while Zach was writing it
I really was not allowed to read anything. I kind of got to know the script and the character through discussing it over dinner… I got to know her family and these characters before I actually read any of the dialogue.
(So) when I got it, I was already a part of it, I was already a part of the process and I had already learned who she was so I just needed to fill in the gaps with what I was gonna do then.
Florence on her reaction to the script
He knows how I talk, he knows how I take the piss out of people and I think he just put that in his script and I was allowed to come in and fill in where it was needed. But reading something that is dedicated to you, written by someone who knows you so well, is a wonderful gift. We had a dialogue that was already there so it meant that if anything didn’t feel right, we could change it and create it together, so that was really cool.
Florence on how she prepared for the role
I think whenever you create anything else it’s really important for you to do as much research as possible and we really did. He spoke to many people in writing it. I spoke to many people trying to understand the physicalities and the thing for me that I really found important in every performance that I do is what is their body feeling like? I didn’t quite realise the actual sheer pain and the restlessness and the itching and the problems that you create in your head. And it is a hunger. The skin is hurting and the only thing that’s going to fix it is this thing.
For me, it was really important to talk to people that had gone through it and had come out the other end and we did it and wrote many notes and did a lot of research and then I tried to feel it in myself. There’s only so much that note-making can do until you start warming up your muscles to it. It was a huge leap of faith and then you have a director who is there to catch you if you put a step wrong. Making movies like this only works if you trust every single person there, everybody, you need so much trust and a lot of safety on set.
Zach on getting the balance between light and dark
I don’t like a film personally that doesn’t have a release. If it’s a drama, I want to have some release. If it’s just inconsistent, and don’t get me wrong, I know that this is a very heavy film, but I strategically designed places for the audience to have a rest, a breath, a laugh. Because that’s actually what happens in life… That’s what I set out to do – have it be real and have it be raw but allow the audience moments of levity to just kind of release steam like a steam engine.
Zach on his writing, shooting and editing process
The only good thing about lockdown was you had to find something to do. Lockdown at least gave me structure, I committed to myself that I would write every day. And for a writer, it’s hard, sometimes you’re just staring there at the screen at the blinking cursor and nothing’s coming but then other days it really does flow well. That’s what I did: I just wrote every day. Probably six months or so, but it’s in fits and spurts. Then we shot it in 26 days and I edited it for a few months. This could have screened at the end of last year. It’s been done since then.
Zach on the shoot itself
It was very stressful. We tried to make it as easy as possible so we moved to the town (Maplewood, New Jersey) and we had our dog there and we had our friends there. But it was very taxing, it was exhausting, it was very hard, it was emotionally taxing on Florence, and Morgan is 85 years old; he’s a trouper but it’s certainly tough on him as well.
A Good Person is available to watch on Sky Cinema now