The Magic of Cinematic Death: A Conversation With 'His Three Daughters' Director Azazel Jacobs

“It felt like I was suddenly going into a place that was taking risks in a different way.”

Netflix

An urgent current runs through His Three Daughters – it’s at once a rambling jolt that licks a balmy sweat onto your palms, and the syrupy sense that too much time has passed without any of the right things having been said. It’s a feeling, in other words, like being alive. And this is the splendor of Azazel Jacob’s film: it contains the whole of life — the happiness, sadness, and everything in between — within the span of a handful of days spent at death’s doorstep.

The film follows estranged sisters, Katie (Carrie Coon), Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), as they converge upon their father’s home during his final days. In an apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, they are together for the first time in years to care for Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), who is in hospice care after a battle with cancer. As time wears on, the unease between the sisters that at first bubbles up in petty arguments — about why there are so many apples in the fridge, or the unsigned Do Not Resuscitate form that hangs over Katie’s head like a scepter — crests to shouting matches as pent-up rage is finally forced to the surface by the shared, close walls of the apartment.

As each sister’s contradicting adult personality coalesces — Katie is the typical eldest, a stickler to the way things ought to be done, Rachel loves sports and is fairly avoidant, and Christina is calmness personified, doing yoga when she’s overwhelmed, ostensibly looking forward to returning to a perfect life after Vincent’s death — they realize that they don’t know as much about each other as they once did. All the while, they wait with bated breath for death, which they have been advised will come at any moment. His Three Daughters prompts Katie, Rachel, and Christina toward an at once prickly and tender reconciliation, teaching them to love each other through a celebration of their father. 

Jacobs, who directs, writes, and serves as producer for the film, offers us a deeply personal tale that suffers the ache of eternal questions about death. His Three Daughters’ gift is salutary even if it is unsatisfying, both in the knowledge it delivers and the dress in which it is adorned: the death of our loved ones will strike us like apocalypse, and the only thing that can possibly tamp its blow is love. 

Movies often don’t render grief with appropriate starkness, choosing instead to filter it through the shimmering and clean dust of romance. It’s an injustice that Jacobs ameliorates through the finality of the father’s heavy absence even before he is dead, through what he leaves unsaid and thereby has them say. We get a sense of Vincent not only from the words that Katie, Rachel, and Christina say about him, but also in the people we see they have become. They are strident women who have built good and safe lives for themselves, captivating us even as, perhaps because, they get waylaid in their grief by sisterly quarrels. With His Three Daughters, Jacobs has, through a balletic balance of sobering reality against the gossamery magic of cinema, gifted us not only with a guiding light through the dark maw of death, but also a delicate celebration of the actresses who carry his film with a poetic grace worthy of a beating heart.    

I was lucky enough to talk to Jacobs about His Three Daughters. Our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity, below. 

AM: I wanted to begin by asking you a basic question — where did the idea for the film come from? 

AJ: I have parents that are old now and suddenly something that seemed very, very far away was very close in terms of facing their passings. I saw that there's also this window, as I was getting drawn into figuring out how it would potentially work and how things would potentially work after they're gone. I also saw a window before I would be fully consumed in terms of becoming more of a caretaker, and so I took advantage of that window by going to the story. And I think the story for me was a way to deal with some of the fears, but also a lot of the hopes that I have while I've been going through this process. 

AM: Where did each sister come from?

AJ: The truth is that they came from me. I found myself shifting into these different people. I've been getting very serious about getting this DNR, getting all these different things. And it obviously also comes from my own experience with other loved ones. I know I can be a Katie, a Christina, and a Rachel at different times, so I'd like to think that they all came from the same place at the same time. I'm somebody that walks around New York City with a little notepad and writes different ideas of potential stories. In this case, I suddenly saw that each of these different ideas could be represented by these sisters that are in one place, but coming from very different directions.

AM: Watching your three beautiful actors move around each other was beguiling. I have a sister, and the sisterhood that you represent is so resonant with me, it just feels so true. I imagine that there was a lot of trust among your actors, so how did you work with them to kind of craft this lived-in dynamic? 

AJ: I mean, that has much more to do with their incredible ability. I remember Tracy Letts saying this thing about chemistry when we made The Lovers, that it's not like pixie dust; actually, the actor's job is to create chemistry. And that's always stayed with me. And watching them, because they met for the first time when we were in rehearsals, they had never met each other. They knew of each other's works, and they were big fans of each other's. But it wasn't until we all gathered about a week before shooting that they actually met each other, and then being together for about five days, just figuring it out, going through the script, just talking it through. I think that part of the connection just had to do with the fact that they were fans of each other, that they really were not only pulled in by the script and us working together, but with them working with each other. I think that's a big part of the connection that you're seeing. Maybe at least that's what I see, but it is a testament to the magic of acting when it's in hands like theirs.

AM: Did you have in mind that you were going to get Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne, or did you find them afterwards? How did you go about casting?

AJ: I started with them. I really was halfway through the script when I realized I was writing for them and Jovan Adepo [who plays Rachel’s boyfriend Benjy], and went straight [to them] once I got to a good draft of the script. I had enough of a relationship with each of them. I had worked with Lizzie, I had worked with Jovan. Carrie Coon's married to Tracy Lett, so I met her, and then Natasha. I had crossed paths enough that I was able to directly reach out to them. So that's where it began. 

AM: I wanted to talk about the setting itself, the apartment. There are all these big feelings and emotions and an apartment that at times feels too small for the bigness of it all. How important was the setting for you for the story? 

AJ: It was a location that I was writing for without knowing the actual location. I just had a feeling that I knew that it had to take place in a New York City apartment. I really wanted a working class apartment, like the type of apartment that I would go to. I grew up in an artist loft. My parents are both artists, so it was very different from the way that I was raised. But going to friends' houses, I know these places and especially the idea that it is a rent stabilized place and that this was going to be passed on to the kids, that's the goal for a lot of city kids: just the idea that you're going to be able to hold on to a place that you're raised in and be able to afford living here. So, yes, it does feel small, but in terms of New York City, that it’s a three bedroom is really something to treasure.

I was able to reach out to a lot of kids that I grew up here with, and that would take me down different paths to different housing complexes. And then one led me to this place in the Lower East Side. Amazingly, it was about 900 apartments. It's nine buildings, and they sent out an email to every resident. And so my wife (who’s a producer on the film) and I went to visit. We went to see lots and lots of places. And then we walked into this place, and while it looked completely different, it was a young couple there, the bones of the apartment felt so correct for the story. It's like one of those things where you walk in and you go, “Did I dream about this place?” It felt instantly right.

AM: My favorite bit is when Christina quotes their father saying, “The only way to communicate how death truly feels is through absence, everything else is fantasy.” And then the sisters kind of figure out what he meant by that. Rachel gives her own interpretation. Katie gives her own interpretation. So, what does the phrase mean to you? 

AJ: For me, death has been one of these things that keeps shifting. I think the biggest heartbreak for me is when I really feel that person's gone, or an animal that I've loved. [It’s a heartbreak] when I suddenly can see what they brought to my life, and suddenly it's not there. I think sometimes when I've gone through somebody passing or an animal that I've loved, I'm living with them so much each day, and then it's like there's this moment where I've let go, and that's when it becomes very clear what life is like without them.

That's what it meant to me at least. And it was also a way to address — I think the first time that I remember [losing] a person close to me, I was 19, and my first feeling was how lied-to I felt generally in films, not having [that] slow motion, not having replay, not having music behind it. It just felt so interrupted and so sudden and so gone. And so this was a way for me to talk about death in a way that I felt comfortable with addressing that, the kind of fantasy that film affords death, at least in a way that felt more truthful for me personally. 

AM: Did you always know that the father was going to be in a room, but you're never going to show him? Was that always the plan to just have him absent?

AJ: Yeah. I did not expect him to emerge from the room. That was a surprise. I definitely kind of went in there when I was writing, and I wrote this forward, so it wasn't something that I plotted out. It was like I was writing forward, and then suddenly here I was and the father was emerging from the room, and I was surprised. I was surprised in a way that I think maybe the audience could get surprised by it, and then I was challenged by it and I embraced it. It felt like it suddenly went from a very kind of tidy story to something that wasn't tidy and suddenly something where it was breaking certain rules, which is what I love about films. When they suddenly break rules that they set up for themselves. It felt like I was suddenly going into a place that was taking risks in a different way. And the film was no longer becoming a small independent film, but something of its own. 

AM: I wept, continue to weep, like a baby when you have the father talking to the girls, telling them how much he loves them, and telling them a final story about his first love. And then it turns out it — his telling — was all in his head. It felt like a bit of an injustice, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like it makes sense that he says his piece even if it didn't really happen. But why did you do that? It hurts to watch, but it makes sense.

AJ:  Well, I think it really does happen for us. We get to go through it, we get to hear these things, whether they [his three daughters] get to hear it or not, we get to hear it. And it's really important that he feels like he gets heard, at least by us. This concept of getting to say these things like, “I'm sorry, I love you, and here are some other things that you may not know about me that have been essential to me.” I had such a strong desire for that in my own life that I wanted to be able to give that to him in the way that I felt the magic of cinema could afford.

AM: My final question for you is what would be something that you want audiences to take away from this film?

AJ: The truth is that it was a joyful experience making this movie. So if there's some part of that joy that translates over to an audience, that gives some kind of feeling — [this is not to say] that there's a lot of hope within this kind of thing. Having our parents go before us obviously is what we hope for in a lot of ways. But I do hope that there's a sense, or people feel like they see themselves and they feel a connection, and they do find some celebration of how amazing life is.

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