Andrea Riseborough on the all-female crew behind ‘Nancy’

Larry King: You’re working on a new film called ‘Nancy,’ that has all-female department heads. You mean everybody behind the scenes is female?

Andrea Riseborough: Yeah I think we had like 35 vaginas and 3 men.

Larry King: 35 vaginas and 3 men?

Andrea Riseborough: [chuckles]

Larry King: What was the idea about-

Andrea Riseborough: We called it ‘There Will be Blood.’

Larry King: [chuckles] Who is Nancy?

Andrea Riseborough: I met a director, Christina Choe, who’d made a documentary about North Korea a few years ago, and she’d written this script called ‘Nancy’ which had this antihero—which I kinda resent, the term ‘antihero’—but this female character was an antihero, who lives an almost hermetic life with her mum. Think hoarder, copies of ‘National Geographic,’ her mother, very depressing situation. She’s a little older than I am, but she has this sort of childlike spirit and is a compulsive liar, meets men through miscarriage websites. All of that’s a lot of information, but after the election, Christina wrote a beautiful statement, director’s statement, when we were trying to get the last of the money together, and I’d brought Barbara Broccoli onto the project maybe about six months before that, and we needed the final push for an extra bit of money.

And Christina wrote this beautiful statement about not being able to see a female antihero, you know, I feel in so many ways women can’t get away with being imperfect, on screen. Not in life, but on screen, and it’s such an inaccurate representation of what a woman is, because we’re just as likely to kill people or have normative desperation or hopelessness or go off the radar, you know, like-

Larry King: There have been occasional stories of imperfect women.

Andrea Riseborough: Yeah, occasional ones.

Larry King & Andrea Riseborough: Not enough.

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