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Then she paused and took the actor aside. (“I have been brought out in all sorts of outfits to show off my costume to the director.”) She prepared to address Domińczyk in front of the whole set. A million things were going on when the crew approached her to present Dagmara Domińczyk (who steals scenes as a mercurial woman around Leda’s age) in her bathing suit costume. The Lost Daughter taught Gyllenhaal “about being loving.” She remembers her first day of shooting on the Spetses beach in Greece-a crucial location in the film-and a specific moment in the middle of the frenzy. She’d think about a given section for weeks without putting pen to paper once she got some extended time alone-a plane ride, say-she’d write for hours and hours straight through. “The process of taking a text as an actor, analyzing it, distilling it to, ‘Why is this scene in this movie? Why do I think it’s important?’…is, in an emotional and intellectual way, very similar to the way I worked on adapting the book.” She initially constructed it bit by bit. “The scripts that appeal to me are the ones that allow space for expression,” Gyllenhaal says. A sense of menace creeps in as the narrative jumps between the present day and Leda’s memories, unfurling a rigorous exploration of identity, lust, and regret. She encounters a rambunctious family, and particularly a young mother who reminds Leda of her own fraught experiences in parenthood. It follows Leda, a literature professor and mother of two grown daughters, on an extended summer vacation. Recently acquired by Netflix for a December release, The Lost Daughter tells the kind of story that has characterized much of Gyllenhaal’s filmography: psychologically thorny, deeply internal, erotic, and human. “That scared me a little bit,” Gyllenhaal admits. Ferrante replied with her seal of approval-and a condition: Gyllenhaal had to direct the movie, “no question.” (The pseudonymous Ferrante explained why in a 2018 Guardian essay.) “What I had to say was, ‘I don’t know exactly how I will adapt this, but I know there are things inside it that are fundamentally interesting to me,’” she explains. Why so long? Her feeling amounted to “don’t fuck this up.” Gyllenhaal knew she didn’t want to set the book in Italy, as Ferrante did she didn’t know how faithful she’d stay to the text otherwise. Gyllenhaal wrote to Ferrante that she wanted to script and direct a Lost Daughter film. Reading the book, Gyllenhaal says, she felt that “some secret piece of my experience as a mother, as a lover, as a woman in the world was being spoken out loud for the first time.” They reached out to Ferrante’s team, only to learn the rights were stuck in development, and were instead turned onto another, less-known Ferrante title: the slim, brutal The Lost Daughter. She’d just read the novel and felt eager to adapt it. After a production meeting for The Kindergarten Teacher, Gyllenhaal took her fellow producers to a bookstore and bought them Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment.