Writer-director Azazel Jacobs “grew up in Lower Manhattan,” where his film “His Three Daughters” takes place. “I went away to Los Angeles for many, many years. My wife and I moved back here for a bunch of reasons, but one of them was to become a caretaker to my parents.” That’s part of what inspired his film, which tells the story of three sisters (played by Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen) who come together as their father is dying. We talked to Jacobs as part of our “Meet the Experts” film writers panel. Watch our complete video interview above.
“I had a window basically from sun up to 9:00 that I could just walk through New York City, and I was extremely inspired by the life that I was seeing, not only with the stresses that I was living,” he adds. “I really wanted to do something that was expressing what I was going through and just the kind of frustration and fears that I had, but also the hopes and the joy that I was seeing just being back home.”
The three sisters at the heart of the story actually represent different aspects of himself. “I found myself kind of shapeshifting into very different people when I first came back and being like, oh I need to get this form, or I just want to run away, or I want to just kind of be a peacekeeper the best way that I could,” Jacobs says. “And realizing that I could separate those different feelings into not only characters, but into siblings and keep them under the same house gave me some separation within myself and put them in conflict with each other in the way that I was kind of feeling deep inside.”
But despite the emotional turmoil of the characters and what they represented in Jacobs’ own life, “His Three Daughters” was “a lot of fun to write. The moment that I understood that these different kinds of approaches were actually these different sisters, I just started writing.” The first thing he wrote was the page-and-a-half monologue for Katie (Coon) that opens the film; he doesn’t usually write characters who “talk so much and say everything that they’re thinking,” but it was “so freeing for me.”
