Thomasin McKenzie Fell in Love With ‘Eileen’ Co-Star Anne Hathaway ‘By Watching “Princess Diaries”'

I have always been a big fan of Annie since Princess Diaries. That was like my, played a big role in my childhood, that film. So I think that starstruck kind of feeling really lended itself to the relationship between Eileen and Rebecca because Eileen is in awe of Rebecca. She is starstruck and when I first met Annie I was like, bow down, be clean. But thank you so much for that. That's an amazing thing to hear and a very complicated thing to process on camera. It's so exciting to have a movie that you just fall in love with, you know, I mean I think whether or not you make movies or are involved in movies. If you're a fan of cinema it's so exciting when something comes down the line and you feel like somehow it understands you and was made just for you. It just talks to you and you just connect with it and that's how I felt watching this one. I'm also a little obsessed with it, like I can't get it out of my head. For me right now what I'm responding to in film is films that manage to successfully combine emotion and chaos and I feel like this film does that beautifully using the language of classicism which is just my exact desired wheelhouse. So I'm just, I feel really lucky to be in it and you know, always so lucky to be in a film that's considered worth something but then to be in one that you yourself love and that your inner 16-year-old girl was just dying for and never got to see before, that's how I'm feeling about it. You know when I was really up for the challenge of trying, I'm real curious when I see stuff on screen that works. Father, daughter, I mean I have four of my own and it's tough to fool me as an actor but when I see it done well and not played at, you know, the ugliness and the beauty and not take out any of the tough things that you'll see that he says to her but he doesn't mean it to be like, you know, around the fireplace. He doesn't, he just says it, you know, so that was I think the challenge. The trap is to try to force, in my humble opinion, try to force things, oh go hang out, go do, you know, I remember talking to De Niro about him and Foster when I worked with Bob and I said, how did you, because I was coming into this thing and I said, he said, you know, I never pushed it, we would just go have breakfast. I'd just pick her up and we're going to have breakfast every morning and you would talk about, we started talking about life, not like just what's the script and what do we think about it. So I got her, you know, I would just talk to you about life and then I think it's just not forcing it and letting it come to you and then all of a sudden things start to happen and you don't know why and then a little something else happens and she's brave, she's brave, brave as they come with this material because it ain't easy, it ain't easy, you know. There were tough days of coming at you, you know, with that material. Both of these two, I think you're going to hear a lot in the next coming year on these performances, I was blown away, blown away. I love cinema that is about performance, that, you know, actually trusts actors to go for it, to take a risk and we see it on screen and I think we've certainly captured that with this film. It's hard to sum it up because I'm really open to people's interpretation. I mean, I know what I feel it is and I could say that, you know, what attracted me to this was that it was a very dark love story but that really is just one strand. I think everybody here probably has a different takeaway from the film. Yeah, I think it's quite an elusive film because there are so many different takeaways from it and it means, like you said, something different to each person, so many different themes. For the screenplay, we knew that we needed to tell the essential story in the most visually interesting way appropriate to the story and the scenes that we captured, I mean, we did a pretty faithful adaptation, wouldn't you say? Yeah, I think we definitely stayed true to the book. It's a first-person narrative and so having a way to get that into the script in such a specific way that the character, well, Thomason, can embody the character and everything that she's thinking and communicating in the novel, and she really does that. It's like every look on her face, every moment, it's telling the story that would otherwise be first-person. You know, Tess is an amazing novel. We knew we didn't want a voiceover, so she became voiceover. Why did you not want a voiceover? We really wanted to give viewers the subjective experience of being close-up and personal with Eileen, this really exceptionally strange character.