Frances McDormand: 'Women Talking' helped her process feelings about MeToo

Three-time Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand says reading Miriam Toews' book, Women Talking, after it was published in 2019 helped her recognize, process and express the feelings she was experiencing at the beginning of the MeToo movement.

A film version of the novel, in which McDormand starred and also produced, is getting an expanded theatrical release Friday.

Set in 2010, the story follows a group of abused, illiterate women in an isolated religious Mennonite colony, who secretly meet in a barn and try to decide whether to stay or leave while almost all of the men are briefly gone from their village.

It stars Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy and Ben Whishaw.

"I was really fascinated with the conversation and very anxious about it. I kind of had an existential anxiety about it," McDormand recently told reporters about the MeToo movement, which in recent years has been raising awareness about the violence and harassment many women suffer in the workplace.

"I was talking with my friends, but when I read the book, I realized this was the kind of atmosphere, this was the kind of way I wanted to talk about what I was feeling, in a group of women -- with nuance, with a sense of humor, with a sense of community, with a sense of urgency, but with a real, thoughtful milieu. We think of the hayloft now as a very sacred place."

McDormand brought the book to the attention of She Said, Blonde and Moonlight producer Dede Gardner.

"I sent it to her and then sat down in an office with her, and she had diagrams and she had treatments, and she had already thought of how it could go from page to screen," McDormand recalled.

Gardner said in the virtual press conference that she immediately thought the book could be a great movie.

"It was structurally cinematic. There was an inciting event. There was a limited amount of time. There was a ticking clock. There was a consequence. There was a decision to be made. I didn't know what they would decide, so, to me, it had mystery," the producer said.

"It had everything I sort of hope for, in addition to being about something I feel so much about," she added. "It posited a different way to talk about all the noise that was around us. If there can be 12 Angry Men, then there can be eight women in a hayloft."

Stories We Tell and Alias Grace filmmaker Sarah Polley was a longtime fan of Toews' work and read Women Talking shortly after it was published.

Upon learning that Gardner and McDormand had secured the film rights, Polley asked her agent to see if the producers had a screenwriter/director lined up yet.

She was surprised to hear that the women had just reached out to her through the agent to see if she would be interested in the project.

"It felt very 'meant to be,'" Polley recalled.

She admitted she was heartbroken to cut elements she loved in the book when she brought the story to the screen, but she wanted viewers to feel the same way she did when she read the novel, and that meant keeping the film's run time under 100 minutes.

"It goes through you like a bullet," Polley said of the book.

"It's so efficient. It's so potent. You're not circling around things. You are right in it," she said. "It's got to feel like the book did, like it's over before you can even process the thousands of ideas and questions it raised for you."

Toews, whose works also include A Complicated Kindness and All My Puny Sorrows, was raised as a Mennonite, and she was moved to write from that place of experience when she learned about women and girls in a similar colony in Bolivia who were drugged and sexually abused by the men of their own community -- and then told the attacks were carried out by demons.

"It's a response to a true story," Toews said of her book.

"When I first heard about these rapes, these attacks some time around 2009, 2010, I was horrified. It was very unsettling and one of the reasons why I think it was so disturbing for me -- for everybody, obviously -- but, for me especially, was because I wasn't surprised," she added.

"I had so many questions and I wanted to think about those questions. I wanted to write about it."

The author didn't want to re-enact these crimes because she felt that would violate the victims again.

"I wanted there to be a conversation. I wanted the women to be talking, essentially," Toews said.

"It's an unusual structure for a novel, but it was a thing that just called me. I needed these women to talk about what had happened to them and what they were going to do about it."

The characters' personalities are based on Toews' family and friends.

"I just tried to take from those people and apply them to the characters in the book and try to keep them straight in my head," she said.

"That was, for me, how I organized [the story], and then there were two families, several generations from each family, coming together. I just tried to put myself into that loft and inhabit that loft and that conversation."

McDormand plays the supporting role of Scarface Janz, a woman who isn't sure leaving the colony is the answer.

"The decisions that are made in that hayloft affect the entire community of women, and not all of them make the choice that the women in the hayloft make," McDormand said.

The size and nature of the role might come as something of a surprise to people who expect McDormand to have more screen time or play someone who takes more decisive action against the men have wronged them.

"It breaks rules," she said of subverting people's expectations.

"It's like when you kill off one of the main characters in a long-format TV show. It's like: 'What? How dare you do that?' It's a good way to go about it."