_{Jackie by Antoinette Beumer}

In the film twin sisters in their thirties, Sofie and Daan, leave their gay father and his boyfriend behind in the Netherlands to find their birth mother after they receive a plea for help from a hospital in the US. When they arrive in the American mid-west (the film was shot in Albuquerque) they encounter a spiky, intransigent and, at least initially, very non-maternal woman living in a trailer. Her bleak world seems a million miles from Sofie and Daan’s comfortable existence back in Amsterdam. As the film segues satisfyingly into road genre, however, barriers between all three are gradually dismantled before a dramatic climax in New Mexico.

Beumer had assumed that she would be hiring a good but relatively unknown actress to play Jackie. Holly Hunter’s involvement came via the director’s sister Famke Janssen, a friend of Hunter. Janssen also knew Hunter’s agent which helped get the script higher up the pecking order. And after that things went swimmingly - sort of. Beumer takes up the story.

“Holly said herself after reading the script that she was Jackie, and that nobody else was going to play the part, and that was good to hear,” she explains.

“So I flew to New York, but we had a load of negotiations that did not go so well. For the Dutch producers (Eyeworks Film & TV) it was completely different having to deal with American contracts and lawyers, which is a complete other way of doing business, and they thought that we may have to find another actress. But Holly always said to me, whatever happens I am going to do it.”

Her role, effectively mute for the first 20 minutes of screen time, requires a lot of physicality, despite having her leg in a cast. No less intense were the demands made of the Van Houtens who were asked to play sisters very much at odds with one another. Their roles, Beumer argues, reprised the sibling complexities evident within not only their own lives but that of Beumer herself, sister to two well-known actresses.

“When we really got into it Carice and Jelka both discovered that it was difficult to make this movie together,” she admits. “They had to deal with things. You always have a certain role in the family.

If you are with other people you can be more yourself, and when you are older you develop. But somehow with your family you always stay the same. They always see you in a certain way. Carice and Jelka saw each other in a certain way that was sometimes difficult to let go with acting.”

“And Jelka was afraid to be in the movie with her sister because she is not really experienced yet,” Beumer continues. “She is more of a singer. She has done a lot of musicals but she was never the lead in a movie. Carice is of course our number one famous actress who is winning all the awards that you can win in Holland. But in the end I think they both did a wonderful job, and really overcame all of their fears.”

In terms of tone and atmosphere, the film evokes road classics such as Thelma and Louise and Paris Texas, films that Beumer studied before commencement of photography. She was also keen to infuse Jackie with a high degree of spontaneity, especially given the limitations on her budget and the small number of shooting days in the US (25 in total).

“I worked in a totally different way to how I ever worked before,” she explains. “It was an experiment. I was thinking I must find a way to shoot these three ladies in an RV, so I came up with the idea to rehearse separately with Holly away from Carice and Jelka, as I did not want the three to meet each other in advance. Also I wanted to shoot in chronological order which was a challenge.”

“I did very thorough rehearsals firstly in Holland, and then also did a couple of days with Holly, but then we just let go and improvised every scene,” she points out. “We always shot with two cameras to give as much freedom as possible, and it worked out very well. Holly liked it a lot. She immediately loved the idea of working that way. She loved being in her part all the time. I would just say ‘action’ and whatever happened happened.”
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