For me it was a really important early idea that I said, “I think Sadie should have been right near Jake all along and he only realizes it at the end.” There is a kind of if/then thing that happens, like, “Oh, my gosh. But I thought that you have to have it be a dramatic, active choice. You just get to live with him in the time it takes you to read that. He’s writing letters to himself and to her. But adding that scene in Maine, you’re exactly right that I wanted to dramatize Jake’s active choice, because in the book, I think there are 30 pages at the end where he’s sitting at the Tamarack Motel in the ‘ 60s writing this down.
So the fact that that’s two things is fine with me, because I think one doesn’t cancel out the other. Going backwards, I’m totally fine with the idea and interpretation that, “Oh, she really recognizes him,” that there’s a literalness to it, but to me the point is that she remembers, somewhere in her, their love affair rather than his face. So it was having that tenderness, but also a moment of bittersweetness of “I get to experience this. It’s like you’re holding your grandmother, but it’s the woman that you love. And then the third part was the visual of their connection, of seeing James get to have this double-ness of holding the woman he loves in his arms. We knew the character of Sadie, but we’d never seen this actress before, so understanding that somehow she knew that she was near the end of her life, you sense that in her speech. The second piece was understanding, in that actress, who she had become, that she was a person of integrity and had had a satisfying and deep and rich life and that there was some poignancy. That’s the greatest.” I do think that this is an act of real altruism on his part, that he gave her up so that she could live, whether or not they got to be together. The first thing that needed to happen is you needed to understand, “Oh, my God, she lived. You needed to see Jake seeing Sadie and being happy that she was alive. Thinking about it chronologically, people lived in Jake and James Franco. What were the beats that were hardest or most essential to execute so that you felt people would buy it? We always wanted an older actress, but I think the only conversation we had is I wondered whether Young Sadie should be there at all, if he should only dance with Old Sadie, but then I thought, “No, you need that magic.” I will also say that I thought the chemistry between Sarah Gadon and James Franco was so unmistakable that I wanted to see them dance together one last time.
Constance Towers, the woman who ended up playing Sadie, was really quite astonishing and a lifer actress.
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