The Lost Daughter is a richly-textured film about Leda Caruso’s (Olivia Coleman) grappling with her past. It’s a deeply-nuanced story adapted from a best-selling novel by Elena Ferrante which explores the expectations, fears, confusion, and intensity of motherhood. Maggie Gyllenhaal shared her thoughts about her film with Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

Maggie is an established artist who boldly, yet delicately enters thorny storytelling terrain with a spirit of exploration and discovery. She does so free from personal judgement, preferring to leave such conclusions to the audience. We asked her what drew her into this particular story.

“I was compelled by how truthful the novel was,” she began. “Elena Ferrante is so specific and careful in articulating something so delicate as the experience of being a woman in the world.” Maggie approached the adaptation as “a beacon and a roadmap for women.”

The biggest challenge in telling the story of Leda across two timelines twenty years apart. She initially started working on the screenplay without worrying about the logistics of it and focussed on the big picture.

Maggie Gyllenhaal

The Lost Daughter is a film equally about motherhood and womanhood. “For many woman, motherhood is not a part of womanhood. For me, it is.” This is the essence and intention of Gyllenhaal’s film. “There is a whole spectrum of feelings, needs and ideas that are rarely put on film.” As the film progresses into slices of Leda’s younger life, we see the punishing demands of raising children at the expense of her own self-care.

The Lost Daughter sticks to familiar narrative structures of the mystery/ thriller genre. This serves as a useful framework to contain the breadth of who Leda is. “But the way through the movie is to get inside Leda’s mind. The minutiae, the shift, and the growing that goes on inside her mind is the journey the audience takes with her.” Therein lies the beauty in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s story, where her storytelling reach far exceeds her narrative grasp.

As a fiercely independent filmmaker, Maggie isn’t interested in traditional roles as frequently depicted in her impressive acting resume. She certainly doesn’t portray Leda in a simplistic protagonist/ antagonist or hero/villain dichotomy. People are far more complex than that. She cites an example from an early cut of the film when someone wasn’t clear whether Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), Nina’s (Dakota Fanning) pregnant sister in law, was friendly or ominous as an example. “Exactly,” replied Maggie. “That’s the whole point. That’s what I’m trying to hit. That’s often the reality of meeting a person where we can’t discern whether they’re good or bad.” This uncertainty forces the audiences to further engage with Leda to draw their own conclusions about her. “It might shift on a dime,” Maggie continued.

Ms. Gyllenhaal relishes these moments of not knowing what truly drives Leda. Perhaps she will never know. All Maggie knew while she was making the film was that Leda wasn’t crazy. “Leda had to be a person with a functioning mind who’s also doing unusual [and sometimes impulsive] things.”

Maggie isn’t ostensibly against screenwriting templates with a clear introduction at the start and resolution at the end. “I think we’re so used to seeing films with a particular fixed structure, we’ve already swallowed it. But you can play around with that formula without even referencing it.”

A key moment in the film occur when Leda sits on the beach or when she inexplicably (possibly even to her) steals a child’s beloved doll. Maggie didn’t frame these as traditional plot points, but rather, “when something inside Leda starts to get cracked open, borne out of being alone on the beach with space for her mind.” Leda is healing, reflecting, and trying to comprehend herself.

Creating films which are rich character studies deliberately don’t come with easily signposted entry points. However, the audience needs an anchor in order to travel with them. In order to elaborate on her screenwriting process, Maggie references Caryl Churchill, one of her favourite playwrights. “Nothing she writes is literal. Everything is a vibration between the lives and the circumstances of the characters and how they reverberate off each other.” This philosophy especially holds true in the relationship between Leda and Nina. There is clearly a deep bond, camaraderie, and understanding between them that sometimes manifests as a look or subtle gesture. It is more a meeting of souls than a meeting of people.

Almost every line of dialogue is attached to a stick a dynamite which may either explode or stay inert.

Consider the line of dialogue Leda utters to Nina when she first meets her on the beach “I like your bathing suit.” “Of course, it just doesn’t mean that. It means Leda is fascinated by her, as well as a thousand other things,” said Gyllenhaal.

In order to invite the audience to participate into their journey, “You make space for the storytelling to happen in the space between the lines in her mind.”

Adapting The Novel

Maggie Gyllenhaal had a relatively short novel (144 pages) to adapt into a 2 hour movie. She tapped into the creative muscles she uses as an actress to start writing. “What is the intent of the scene in a piece of text? Why does this scene need to exist in the context of the story? I figure out what each scene is emotionally and how to express it cinematically.”

A key difference between the novel and the film was Leda’s big reveal of having abandoned her children for three years. “In the book, this happens really early in the story… in the toy store scene.” Gyllenhaal pushed this scene back in the film version because she didn’t want the audience to be affected by this burden for most of the film. Holding off, created a crescendo. Until that point, Maggie closely adhered to the structure of Ferrante’s novel.

Nina (Dakota Johnson). Photo courtesy of Netflix

“I stopped following the book and started writing for myself around this point.” Fortunately, Elena Ferrante approved. She advised Maggie that, “It’s really important that my adaptation becomes mine. That’s the only way it will become good.”

Once Maggie truly owned the story, there were aspects in her film that weren’t in the book and aspects from the book that didn’t make it into the film. “It’s a sister to the book, but its own thing.”

Gyllenhaal sought feedback from her colleagues, including her husband, Peter Sarsgaard (who plays Professor Hardy). “Good notes can come from anywhere. Sometimes it’s very internal. It’s very much about the tone and story that I’m seeing in my mind. A good note feeds it, takes care of it, pushes it, and tightens it.”

In conclusion, Maggie Gyllenhaal offers some wisdom to make a successful film, “If you are following someone honestly, you can do whatever you want in terms of form.”

“I leaned on a traditional thriller story structure as a way to tell my story. Inside of that scaffolding, I allowed myself to express myself freely. At some point, I’d like to know what happens when I throw away that traditional format. I’m curious to know what my work would look like.“