‘Causeway’: Lila Neugebauer Talks Jennifer Lawrence’s “Intuitive” Power, Losing Flashbacks & Living in “Present Tense” [Interview]

When Lila Neugebauer was first handed the original script for “Causeway,” the acclaimed New York theater director responded instantly to its intimate, psychological portrait of a military veteran struggling to readjust to life in New Orleans after returning home from Afghanistan with a traumatic brain injury. 

“It was a very personal work, and that script was characterized by a deeply felt lyricism and patience,” says Neugebauer, of the story that would become her feature debut. “Even from that point, part of what struck me about it was the proposition that the primary transformation of a film could transpire internally, inside a character. That was very appealing to me from the outset.” 

READ MORE: ‘Causeway’ Review: Jennifer Lawrence Has A Superb Second Coming In A Tender, But Downbeat Character Piece [TIFF]

Now in theaters and streaming on Apple TV+, “Causeway” takes a subdued yet sensitive approach to its story of reintegration and recovery, opening as Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) struggles to regain her coordination and recall details of her life, with the assistance of physicians and counselors. In her first weeks back in New Orleans, Lynsey takes a job cleaning pools and stays at her mother’s house; she has resolved to “go back to work” once able, which concerns her caregivers, and the distant expression that still settles like a storm cloud across her features suggests a long and painful road ahead. Meeting local mechanic James (Brian Tyree Henry), Lynsey forms a tentative friendship, coming to connect with another lost soul who yearns to move beyond a trauma that’s altered the course of his life. 

Adapted by novelist Elizabeth Sanders from her own short story, then titled “Red, White, and Water,” the original script for “Causeway” struck a chord as well with Lawrence, who read it about six weeks after Neugebauer had attached herself to the project. The actress soon reached out so the two could meet to discuss “Causeway” in New York, where they both lived. “We have very different life experiences, the two of us, but there was a degree of connection to this material, and to this character’s inner life, that connected us to one another, quickly and deeply,” recalls Neugebauer. 

This was back in the spring of 2019, the year after Neugebauer opened a Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s “The Waverly Gallery,” which was nominated for two Tony Awards, winning one for Elaine May’s lead performance. Neugebauer first began her theater career 15 years ago, at Steppenwolf in Chicago, and has since directed a wide stylistic range of productions, from richly naturalistic works to more haunting, expressionistic dramas. Her honed theater instincts are on full display across “Causeway,” which reverberates deeply in part due to its faith in the power of an actor’s presence to communicate unspoken volumes about a character audiences are meeting for only a short while. 

Given that Neugebauer filled out the ensemble for her feature debut with performers she’d encountered previously through the theater, our conversation about “Causeway” started there, with a question about the unique emotional clarity that artists can carry with them from the stage to the screen.

Your supporting cast is an embarrassment of riches: Linda Emond, Jayne Houdyshell, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Russell Harvard. Tell me about working with these actors, how they came to be involved in “Causeway,” and drawing from the wealth of talent in the American theater scene.

I’m so glad that those actors are known entities to you. It was so joyful to get to populate this movie with people I knew. The entire supporting cast in this film, they’re all people who I knew from the New York theater community, whose work I admired — people I had either done work with or developed plays with, or whose work I had seen off-Broadway or on Broadway. Having a shared reference point, feeling like we were coming from the same community, was hugely enriching, for the set and for me on set.

Within the intimate dialogues driving “Causeway,” as well, I was just so riveted by these supporting characters, and the nuances these actors are able to create through their presence on screen. It feels very alchemical.

That’s so beautifully articulated. Though it is a character-driven story, it’s also relatively spare. And part of what I think of as uniting all of those actors, is that they are people who — in part, I imagine, based on their work in the theater — have a deeply ingrained practice of working to draw dramaturgical inferences and extrapolations from text. They’re all actors who, in a potentially suggestive or spare scene, are doing the work to create a larger architecture for themselves — of given circumstances, personal history, psychological framework — that they can draw upon when playing fairly suggestive scenes.

With Jennifer Lawrence, as well, I found myself watching that performance so closely: the triumph of Lynsey’s hand-eye coordination slotting a CD into the car stereo system, the wariness in her gaze as she wades into the inflatable pool with her mother. I could compare that subtlety of expression, the sense of larger architecture, to her work in “Winter’s Bone,” before she became a movie star with franchise commitments to honor. 

Jen is an incredibly intuitive, perceptive, and frank person. She’s a remarkably good judge of character, I think. [Laughs] That might sound like an unrelated observation, but I think it has something to do with her perceptiveness. When we started working on this film, not long after we first had dinner to talk about doing it, we met every day for a couple of weeks. In the morning, we would have breakfast, and we would read through the original screenplay for this film, one page at a time, slowly. We were free-associating, personalizing, and developing a shared understanding of this character, and of the film, that we were envisioning. That time was hugely foundational for us in terms of developing a shorthand, a shared language and understanding. 

To what you were describing, about the different sides of her work that you’ve seen, I’ll just acknowledge that the register in which this performance lives was not something we ever had to talk about. It was something we both felt and understood at an intuitive, tacit level, that subtlety and restraint. Sure, there were explorations on set — calibrations, dial turning — but the fundamental essence of the performance and the register of the film, we had a shared understanding of from the outset.

Production on “Causeway” began in the summer of 2019 in New Orleans, only to be delayed by Hurricane Barry. Tell me about the film’s journey from there.

How much time do you have? [Laughs] Sure. The basic logistical contours, to give you a framework, are that we had already shot through the flash floods, heat waves, and lightning holds, but then that hurricane stopped us in our tracks. We had to evacuate, so we lost about a week. And Jen had a hard out, so we always knew we would be coming back. But, by the time we were able to get everything in place to come back, it was March of 2020. Somewhere between 12 and 18 hours before I was supposed to get on a plane, I got a call that all union production in the country was shutting down, due to the pandemic. 

From there, it would take several attempts of starting up and having to shut down, due to a constellation of pandemic-related challenges, until we were finally able to get everyone together and complete photography 18 months later, i.e., two years after that initial 2019 photography. What I can flesh out about the development of my own understanding of the project in that interim begins with some discoveries I was already in the process of making in the fall of 2019, editorially. 

Even though we had not completed photography, I began an editorial process at that point; we had shot enough that that made sense. We had flashbacks we’d shot. Jack Fisk, [our production designer,] turned a landfill in New Orleans into an astonishingly credible army base in Afghanistan. Diego García, [our cinematographer,] shot it on 16mm. Cinematically, it was hugely arresting. The performances were incredible. It was beautiful. It was some of my favorite stuff that we shot. 

It was a painful set of months in which I was discovering that the best version of this particular film, in my estimation, did not involve any of that photography. That had become apparent to me by the end of 2019. The relationship between Jen and Brian’s characters was always the most important relationship in the film, but their storyline was not as central as it is in the film that exists now. With those flashbacks gone, with an awareness that what was happening between Jen and Brian on screen was so clearly the heartbeat of the movie, and with that additional time, we were afforded the opportunity to let that story grow.

It’s such a bold decision, recentering the film in that way. I can’t imagine what that was like.

I assume those kinds of discoveries in the editorial process, to different proportional degrees, exist for everyone. Jack Fisk said to me early in the process that there’s the movie on the page, there’s the movie you shoot, and there’s the movie you edit. And I think I understood that at a theoretical level, at that point. I understand it to a very different degree now.

The editing rhythms you found for “Causeway” are graceful but also quite bold: the fade to black in Sharon’s shower, and the elision of transitional beats throughout the film. Another element of “Causeway” that impressed me was the pacing of its reveals, gradually filling in these characters’ inner lives: the reveal of Lynsey’s brother’s addiction clarifying her aversion to pills, for example. One consequence of restructuring the film is that you end up telling a story about two characters suffering from PTSD without breaking from the present tense of their lives.

Much of my reflective and exploratory processing — by way of trial and error, exploring different editorial strategies in that fall of 2019 — led me to a conviction that the more disciplined, rigorous version of the film exclusively lived in the present tense. And a lot of it has to do with what you just articulated, which is that the concern of the film is processing what happened and trying to live, simply to continue taking steps forward in the wake of what happened. It struck me as fundamentally the more focused way to do that, to release the illustration of the past entirely — which is not to suggest that I think what happened before doesn’t matter. It absolutely matters. It’s simply that I want you to pay attention to how they deal with it. 

Most of all, that’s what I want you to pay attention to, how they deal with it — not simply when they’re explicitly processing it, but also when they’re trying to do something as seemingly basic as tying their shoes. I say them, because this logic applies to both James and Lynsey, even if we’re following Lynsey for more of the film. He’s, of course, living in the wake of trauma as well. We don’t show his accident either. 

I’d add that, though there’s a real patience to a great deal of this film, it’s paced within an inch of its life. And part of the discovery, and the editorial process, also had to do with rhythm, with metabolic processing of emotion. Those flashbacks were more kinetic. There was a more explicitly emotional relationship between the camera and subject. It was more overtly dynamic, the way it was shot. And I found that, when I interrupted the present tense, something was being diluted, and something was being lost, even if something energetically felt like it was being gained. Something bigger was being lost in terms of purity and clarity of purpose and approach.

To clarify, Robert Frazen (“I’m Thinking of Ending Things”) and Lucian Johnston (“The Tragedy of Macbeth”) were your editors on “Causeway.” Was Jennifer Lawrence involved in that process as well, given the duration and closeness of your collaboration?

She was not, but I was definitely keeping her in the loop. And she saw early cuts of the film, absolutely, so we were in conversation, but Jen was not with me in the editing room.

“Causeway” has a screenplay credited to Elizabeth Sanders (“The Last Light”), Ottessa Moshfegh (“My Year of Rest and Relaxation”), and Luke Goebel (“Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours”), three novelists with extremely distinct sensibilities. Tell me about your collaboration with them.   

The original screenplay for this film that I read was by Elizabeth Sanders. It was called “Red, White, and Water,” and it was an adaptation of a novella she had written. It was always set in New Orleans, which is where Elizabeth’s from. I would say the core DNA of this film, in terms of its premise and its contours, is rooted in that original script. The first round of development on this script was informed by an enormous amount of consultation that I did with U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs medical professionals — people with expertise in traumatic brain injury (TBI), occupational therapists, physiotherapist neurologists — and also conversations that I was having with U.S. Armed Forces service members and veterans, many of whom had incurred TBI, but also others who were willing to speak so generously and openly about their reasons for enlisting, their experiences while deployed, and the challenges that they encountered when returning home. Along the way, we benefited from the remarkable contributions of Ottessa Moshfegh and Luke Goebel, writers who I think have a particular awareness of the body and are unafraid to go to a raw, stripped-down place in terms of characterization.

“Causeway” is now in theaters and on Apple TV+.