You don’t have to look too closely to spot Nicole Holofcener’s influence on The Last Duel, as improbable as that may seem. When she first came aboard the Ridley Scott–directed action film (in theaters Friday) as both producer and cowriter, it seemed like an odd match: Here was a lauded indie filmmaker, known for writing and directing biting slices of life such as Lovely & Amazing and Enough Said, being asked to envision a big studio sword-fight movie, one starring and cowritten by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.
But Holofcener’s contribution to The Last Duel is particular, essential, and fitting. The film is divided into three chapters, each governed by the point of view of a specific character: Jean (Damon), a knight; his wife, Marguerite (Jodie Comer); and his friend Jacques (Adam Driver), a squire. The story examines their competing perspectives over Marguerite’s allegation that Jacques raped her while Jean was away—a claim that leads to the two men’s fight to the death, the last judicially recognized duel ever fought in France.
Holofcener, Damon, and Affleck adapted Eric Jager’s 2004 nonfiction book of the same name. In taking on Marguerite’s story, the final and longest section of the film, Holofcener found that her heroine had been largely lost to history, as many women of her time were—a footnote, a plot point, a tragedy. The writer used this as motivation: to devise a whole character, in the vein of the women who so vibrantly come to life in her other films, complete with a prickly personality and unique voice. It’s an approach that not only adds intriguing nuance to this macho type of film, but also complicates the entire nature of it: After 90 minutes or so of watching men’s perspectives on Marguerite, we see her own story play out as a kind of corrective.
Recently Oscar-nominated for cowriting Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Holofcener tells Vanity Fair that adapting The Last Duel both challenged and excited her, and she’s come away proud of the work she and her collaborators did on the film. With this career departure, she’s ready to wade into more uncharted territory too.
Vanity Fair: I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time. When I saw your name attached to The Last Duel, I thought, Well, this is a very different kind of project.
Nicole Holofcener: No kidding. [Laughs] Wouldn’t it be funny if I inserted all my indie characters and indie dialogue into the movie?
I would not complain. So what did you find you were getting yourself into? I’m broadly familiar with the book, and you approached the material pretty innovatively.
Matt and Ben had already outlined the book to be in three parts: one guy, another guy, and one woman. They asked me if I could collaborate with them and write the Jodie Comer part, which I did. And then after, I would send them pages and say, “Is this all right? Does this language sound at all medieval?” And they said, “Yeah, as much as ours does.”
Did you get into the book? I’m curious about how you worked off of it to tell this specific point-of-view story.
It was a hard read because of the subject matter. I did a lot of research, finding out what women in this day and age did or might’ve thought, or just how horrible their lives were—really having no agency or control over their lives. Essentially, they were their husband’s property. I became very invested in giving Marguerite de Carrouges a voice and a personality, three-dimensional qualities based on what I could glean from that time period and from information about her—which was not a lot, trust me. So what a challenging part to write. I loved it. It was completely out of my wheelhouse, but I enjoyed the challenge. And besides: People are people, then and now, ultimately. I like writing about people.
Can you talk about some of those things you did bring out in the character that, maybe, were a bit harder to find, or something we wouldn’t expect from a woman of that time period?
Well, giving her dialogue was certainly a challenge. What would she say? And how would she say it? What were the repercussions for what she said? I gave her some hobbies. I can’t say they all ended up in the film, but intuitively, I just started to write her and put myself in her horrible shoes and didn’t find it that difficult. I found it fun to create a person that I believed existed then. And a lot of it I made up; [I] don’t believe I quoted anything from the book. I just know that if she experienced what she experienced and she had to express what had happened to her, this is what she might say. And of course I tried to make it more eloquent than what might’ve been, because it’s a movie.
What did you find when you did come together with Matt and Ben and start overlapping a little bit?
I questioned [Matt and Ben] on some of the pieces they were writing about. They asked me for my advice on their scenes. I asked them for advice on these scenes. And we were just all over the script, basically. I think that a lot of what I had written was intact…. But I stayed out of the battle scenes.
Yeah, I remember a quote of yours from a few years ago, when you talked about putting action scenes in your movies and how they would put you to sleep.
[Laughs] It’s funny because when I was watching the shooting, I thought, Well, I don’t really need to see the battle scenes. That’s not where I come in. And then it was fascinating to watch! It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It was a choreographed stuntman dance that was quite amazing. All of the ways that Ridley shoots in general is pretty amazing because he uses so many cameras. He’s created a scene in one take, five angles of a scene in one take. But the violence and the special effects and the horses, stuntmen—that was really cool. So I was wrong about that. Green screen might put me to sleep, but action did not.
If Ridley Scott’s doing it, I guess it gets a pass.
Yes, exactly. It’s pretty good.
How did you work with Jodie Comer, especially given, as you mentioned, the sensitivity of the part and what she’s going through in the story?
We worked on her scenes, her dialogue. She gave great suggestions. We’d read through the scenes also with Matt and Ben. She and I got together a few times socially and would talk about the character, and that was pretty much it. We’d hang out on the weekends sometimes. That helped her feel like she wasn’t the only female in the group. We had a really good collaboration. We both trusted each other.
I’m curious for your perspective on the decision to tell the story in this way, splitting the script between you and Matt and Ben. Do you think that this movie arriving at this particular moment, with you involved as both writer and producer, signals a shift in the way these kinds of stories get to be told?
I think so. Yes. I think we’ve all been made aware of how crazy it is that more women aren’t telling female stories…. Matt and Ben [had already decided] to split it up into three parts. It is such an interesting way to do it because the person that we would think is evil, maybe evil, doesn’t think he’s evil. There’s a lot of nuance there. It relates to today, where men do horrific things but somehow are not aware of it. Obviously, that’s very relevant now. And if they are aware of it, they’re not aware of the damage that they can do. We wanted to create three-dimensional characters in this way because human beings are nuanced. Ultimately, the character does do a very bad thing. There is no question as to what the truth is, but everyone’s truth is different, even though there ends up being just one factual truth.
When the project was announced, there was some backlash to the idea of telling this kind of story right now. Did you understand that? And what would you say to people who are concerned about the way a story like this would be told right now?
It’s a really sensitive time. I think people didn’t know the angle we were going to be coming from with this movie—that it actually is a very feminist movie. We immediately engaged some #MeToo groups and Geena Davis’s group to advise us, to listen to us. We listened to them; they saw screenings; they pointed out some tricky parts. We addressed them. We really wanted to get it right. We don’t want controversy. We just want people to watch this wonderful movie and be moved by it and be excited by it. It’s a huge sword-fight movie, but it does have, in the end, a really important story about this woman that we wanted to tell.
The other side of that is you being brought in to do this. It marks a new, different kind of stage in your career. Does it change the way you think about what you might do in the future?
Yes, actually. The last couple of years I’ve been offered some really interesting, strange projects that I didn’t think I would ever have the opportunity to do—like a big movie, or an animated movie I did writing on, and Marvel stuff. I always think they’re kidding when I get the call, but I’m thrilled when I get it. I’m really excited about doing other things because often, if I get offered something to direct or to write, it’s usually something that I feel I could do myself, like a romantic comedy or a family-relationship movie. This kind of thing, I would never come up with.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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