In “Italian Studies,” Vanessa Kirby gets lost in New York. This shimmering wisp of a drama — in theaters and on VOD this Friday — offers a breezy pre-pandemic portrait of the city, following an author who wanders its crowded sidewalks and falls in with its young minds after inexplicably losing her memory. As hazily directed and ever so slightly written by Adam Leon (“Gimme the Loot,” “Tramps”), “Italian Studies” is less about solving the mystery of Alina’s sudden amnesia than asking how her surroundings might fill the wiped-clean slate of her identity in with vivid details (read our review here).
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At the film’s center is a beguiling lead performance by Kirby, captured on the precipice of her ascendance to Hollywood stardom. First conceived in 2017 and shot piecemeal in the two years that followed, “Italian Studies” invited the British actress to leave behind her more typically rigorous research process, which had prepared her to play Princess Margaret on two seasons of Netflix’s “The Crown” a role that earned Kirby her first Emmy nomination and a British Academy Television Award).
Instead, Leon asked Kirby simply to show up during filming and stay open to her environment and co-stars — a cohort of rising young talents that included Simon Brickner, David Ajala (“Star Trek: Discovery”), Fred Hechinger (“The White Lotus”), and Maya Hawke (“Stranger Things”). Kirby’s resulting performance is as enthralling and fluid as the movie around her is immersive and unmoored; as a woman who must find a way back to herself using only her inner resilience and native curiosity, she commands your attention without a trace of actorly affectation, never once betraying a sense of self that would have shattered this piece’s dreamlike elusivity outright.
For Kirby, looking back on “Italian Studies” means stirring up fond memories of a simpler time. Filming was completed before a mixture of mega-franchise supporting roles (in “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” and “Hobbs & Shaw”) and star turns in acclaimed dramas (like “The World to Come” and “Pieces of a Woman,” the latter of which earned her an Oscar nomination) cemented her arrival as a ferociously talented actress on the fast track to greatness.
With “Italian Studies” finally released, Kirby sat down with The Playlist to discuss filming in New York all those years ago, the illusory nature of self-knowledge, and her upcoming role as Empress Joséphine in Ridley Scott’s upcoming historical epic, currently titled “Kitbag.”
It was depressing that, seeing all these intimate gatherings and unmasked conversations, I had the thought “this must have been shot some time ago.”
It’s a quintessentially New York, pre-pandemic period film. It’s literally years and years before the pandemic, which is wild to think about. And to see where our lives are now compared to then, it’s quite strange.
Adam talked to me about it first in 2017, and we shot it in 2018. That’s four years ago, four-and-a-half years even. And that really does define it as an artifact of its time, somehow, as a captured moment in time of an experience. It’s quite surreal to see — and surreal for me, to see my younger self in that environment.
I can imagine. Watching you in “Italian Studies” felt so refreshing in part because your career has so completely exploded in recent years that I wasn’t expecting to see you at the center of a smaller, softer indie. Given that it’s a memory piece from your past, what do you remember most vividly about shooting the film?
It’s so interesting that you ask that, because actually — really, truly — it was those teenagers. I mean, Adam had met them and always wanted to do a film with them. And, while doing a play in London, I was going to be traveling back and forth for a few days in New York. And we thought, “Well, why don’t we try to do a short film together,” because I loved his [previous work set] in New York. And that’s how it sort of began. He said, “Look, I would love to put these teenagers and their experience on screen.” And I remember thinking at the time, “God, no one does that, for real. No one puts real people on screen, humans that are at the formative moment in their lives, when they’re trying to work out what their true identity is, which is ever-fluctuating in that period. Do we get more rigid as we get older, more set about what we think our sense of selves are? It was this fluid, mercurial journey, really, where Adam wanted to explore fundamentally identity.
I always felt really honored, actually, to be put in an environment of younger people, with whom I wouldn’t have had any interactions otherwise. You just don’t really mix, do you, when you’re an adult. And it was so humbling. I felt intimidated by them in some ways to begin with, because I thought, “Oh, God, I’m not cool. And I don’t know anything.” And the whole point is that there wasn’t a script, and Adam just wanted to journey and lead the process, which he really did. And it was very initially alarming for me because I love having a script, knowing what I’m doing beat to beat. But I couldn’t do that. I had to follow the journey and follow faithfully the sense of identity that teenagers are forming, with Alina being much more of a blank canvas to reflect in a way that ever-changing sense of self, not being tethered to one thing or the other as something’s forming.
And New York was a place to explore that because we talked about “Lost in Translation” and how actually it would feel for somebody to experience this crazy urban jungle we’ve created, with teens, with technology, and with systems that differentiate in terms of, “You’re this person and I’m this person, and you belong here, and this is the hierarchy.” What if that was all imploded in some way, and you just had somebody that was actually so sensorily open to what that environment is. Is that environment natural, or not? And how does it define you, or not? That’s how it came into being. Adam always said it was an experiment, and it was. As you said, it’s surreal seeing my younger self finding a sense of self within that journey, opposite these teenagers who are incredibly real and visceral and in a way more confident.
I love that question the film asks: in the absence of memory, what can fill you in as a person? What around you do you draw from, and what makes you who you are? I’ve read that you listened to Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” during filming, and I’m sure your interactions with the other actors on set were instructive. But how does one get into character when a character’s interior life is so clouded and missing in action?
It was challenging for me because what was being asked was to take away rather than add. And it was really hard to strip back: to be transparent, elusive, or enigmatic as an essence. I like to forensically research roles, and I wanted to do this psychological condition. I started speaking to a psychiatrist about memory loss and disassociation and fugue states and all those sorts of things in between. I learned all about them. And Adam at one point was like, “I’m not asking you to do that. I’m not asking you to play a real-life condition or state of being. I’m asking you to just trust in the process and follow my intuition and my lead on where I feel the movie is asking to go.”
The roaming nature of it was really ultimately just reflecting the inner [life] of these teenagers who really, for me, are the movie. I always felt very much secondary to them. I felt like it was honoring that state of being when you’re that age. If you’re going to look at it like a metaphor, it’s almost like smoke, isn’t it? That period, I just remember it so clearly, thinking, “Oh, am I this person, or am I that person?” The structures that we buy into as an adult, those definitions of self: they seem solid but, really, aren’t they all just illusions? Is it illusory? The movie really is roaming like that and probably is just as non-prescriptive or undefinable as it is to feel 14, 15, or 16.
You’re about to start shooting Ridley Scott’s next film, a historical epic in which you play Empress Joséphine, a role that Jodie Comer had once intended to play. Have you seen “The Last Duel” yet?
Yeah, [I have.] Ridley is just the master, isn’t he? I’ve always wanted to work with him, and I’m so excited to work with him on something that’s so bigger-scale. And yet, this is so about relationships, and to play someone real as well is a great honor. Every moment so far, I’ve been so grateful for. And I’m really excited about the process. We start pretty soon, in a few weeks now. So I’m just trying to stuff in all my knowledge about French history and about this really extraordinary person, Joséphine. And I’m very excited to work with Joaquin [Phoenix, who’ll play Napoleon Bonaparte.] Watching any of Ridley’s previous films — which I’ve gone back and watched all of them — is very, very exciting.
How does your process differ in preparing for a larger-scale project versus something as small-scale about memory, identity, and the quest for self?
Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting, because each thing requires something different of you. And you have to learn quite quickly what the requirement is. Often, the fear of getting it so badly wrong means that you do everything you can to learn what that is, what’s needed, quite quickly.
For something like a film about Joséphine, it’s reminding me of my process for “The Crown,” where you have to play someone real and there’s this amount of forensic research you have to do, to collate all these different impressions that have been recorded of them, the real person, and bring it into one being for this version of this person on screen. That’s requiring something different of me, but the journey is slightly familiar, just because in studying someone real — of whom there wasn’t lots of footage or anything like that, just books — it’s been really amazing to absorb. And music really comes into it for me now. So, [this historical epic] is a very different process I’m embarking right now, right here. I’ve got virtually everything I could find just filling my whole house right now. And I’m loving it.
With “Italian Studies,” it was asking something completely different. It was asking me to not do any of that. And that was really tough for me because I like to know what the scenes are, and I like to prepare in that way. And Adam was literally saying, “Don’t prepare, just come as-is. Be on the avenues, in the streets, and be with these teenagers who are only bringing themselves.” I couldn’t bring my process to it, because the teenagers were only being themselves, and I had to be accessible for them to do that. And it required a surrendering of your own self in a way — either a surrendering of me as a personality, who’s nothing like Alina, or a surrendering of my process as an actor. And that was terrifying, quite honestly. And I had to keep looking to Adam to be like, “Are you sure? Is this enough of a scene? Do I need to do anything else?” Because, usually, I’d have my notes and my scripts and I’d have my prep and I’d know my lines, but none of those things applied. I had to just turn up and hope for the best, like jumping off a ledge.
It’s clear that “Italian Studies” exists in a very specific place for you, but do you see yourself continuing to alternate bigger-budget projects with smaller indies like this? That range seems to excite you, moving between such differently scaled projects.
Honestly, I live by it now and choose things that really scare me, because that suggests that I don’t know what it is. And that means that I’d rather find out something new than know what something is, though that’s of course in equal part completely terrifying. Sometimes, I think, I question my own sanity for that reason; it puts you in various situations where you have to move through the fear, somehow, and try to do it anyway, even if you look like an idiot or if you fail or whatever.
For “Italian Studies,” there was something really difficult for me about regressing. Alina regresses to being in a childlike state, where she doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t have anything to hold onto. It’s quite scary. In a way, she seems younger than the teenagers and playing that state was really hard, to give up the idea of growing up and being an adult. I still look at myself as very young in that film compared to myself now. It’s sometimes hard. As I’m sure the teenagers in the film, like Simon [Brickner], will look back and be like, “Ah, that was me at that time, in that age.”
Part of the other reason why — and I have really thought about this recently — is that the nature of the things I’m interested in are always quite weirdly different. And that’s because I started in theater for so long, for so many years, before I did screen. And I realized that every play is like its own genre. Ipsen is completely different to Chekhov, and that is completely different to Shakespeare, and that is completely different to Arthur Miller. And when you enter their worlds, like “All My Sons,” compared to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” it’s like a different genre of film. And so, playing in all these different worlds to me is such a privilege. And I feel so lucky. Every day, I feel so grateful to learn something new about the world. Learning about French history, which I knew nothing about, or learning about the royal family, who I really was indifferent to, is to me just great. It really lights me up. I learned a lot about what it is to be a teenager in a place as difficult as New York, in the sense of it being so vibrant, transient, vivid, loud, and busy but also poetic. And I just learned all that from that experience of “Italian Studies,” and for that, I’ll always be grateful.
“Italian Studies” hits theaters and VOD on January 14.