After her divorce, Laura decided to change her life. She settled on an idyllic farm in Virginia and dedicated herself to raising chickens, marketing eggs, and cultivating her garden. Laura’s happy routine is cut short when she is diagnosed with cancer. So her daughter, Charlie, who is studying economics in the city, is forced to move in with her mother to take care of her.
Mother and daughter manage to maintain a pleasant coexistence despite the illness and the young woman’s longing for the university, but things become complicated with an unexpected arrival: that of Solange, Laura’s mother and Charlie’s grandmother, who did not even know that I had a grandmother.
Andrea Riseborough is Laura, Morgan Saylor plays Charlie and the great Catherine Deneuve becomes Solange, the hippy and charming grandmother in Those Wonderful Days, a comedy that reclaims country life and delves into family relationships, which premiered on Friday in the Spanish rooms.
The relationships between daughters and mothers that run through the film caught the attention of Martin Scorsese who “was fascinated and became the producer of the film and also got involved in the script, the editing process and the editing,” they explain in an interview. with La Vanguardia Marco La Via and Hanna Ladoul, directors of Those Wonderful Days
The couple of filmmakers already had a cinema great, Scorsese, in their film and despite their youth they managed to get another star, Catherine Deneuve, to also join the project: “We wrote the character of Solange thinking about Deneuve. But she had no idea. When we finished the script, we sent it to her agent, but it was a disaster, she told us that she did not speak English and that she had not the slightest intention of reading it.”
It was like a bucket of cold water, but the filmmakers did not give up and contacted a French colleague, the now deceased Bertrand Tavernier, to whom they gave the script. Tavernier also became passionate about the story and brought it to Deneuve. “Two months later, we met with her, who was very interested, because she is a great lover of nature and animals,” the directors add.
So Deneuve joined Those Wonderful Days and became for a few months the foster grandmother of the young actress Morgan Saylor who remembers that “the first day of filming she was very nervous about working with two greats of acting like Deneuve and Riseborough, But they were both very welcoming, Deneuve told me that I could call her Aunt Catherine and the truth is that they were very affectionate and we had a great time during filming.”
The three protagonists “are free, strong women, very feminist in their own way and very different from each other and what we wanted was to put them under the same roof to see how they would communicate, understand each other and exchange their points of view,” add La Via and Ladoul, who describe their film as “a fairy tale where ordinary women become heroines.”
The directors also remember the eventful filming due to the weather: “The film takes place over a year, but we filmed six weeks in October and November. It was terrible, because the week that was supposed to be summer it rained every day,” they remember with a smile now that they have overcome the bad experience.
