Azazel Jacobs is an American film director and screenwriter whose work often delves into the complexities of human relationships and personal identity. He has directed several notable films that explore deeply personal and often unconventional narratives, including Terri, The Lovers, and French Exit. His latest film, His Three Daughters, premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and features Elizabeth Olsen, Natasha Lyonne, and Carrie Coon as three estranged sisters who reunite to care for their ailing father.
Ahead of a limited theatrical run and a digital release on Netflix, FILMHOUNDS spoke with Jacobs, delving into just how personal a story this film really tells.
The three sisters, Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), all have their own lives, their own goals and their own ways of coping with what's going on. I wondered how far outside of yourself you had to look to find such different personalities.
Oh, not far. I am all three of them, just at different times. I see myself switching between them every day, and it has a lot to do with not just what I'm experiencing, but what people are expecting of me. Because of that, I felt like I was writing multiple different stories in different directions. Then I realised each of these perspectives could be a different character — but as it was all coming together I knew they were all in me.
Your films usually seem to have characters who don't express themselves very well, or they at least hold things back. The characters in this are so much more forthcoming, but they still have a problem with understanding one another. Because of that, it felt like they must come from a place where they haven't been so comfortable in expressing themselves previously — does that reflect a personal journey?
When I started writing this, I started with that first monologue that Katie gives, and it got me so excited to have a character who's just speaking and letting everything pour out. I have to bring it back to the experience I have with my parents — it's just like time has suddenly changed for me. There's a realisation that this time that I have right now could be the only time that there is.
Whenever I'm making a movie I'm always thinking about how it could be the last film that I ever make because I'm never sure I'll be able to make another for one reason or another. This one poured out with a very specific urgency of needing to get things out and needing to say things. Writing felt more like transcribing because these characters had so much bubbling up in a way that I hadn't experienced with previous characters before.
One line that really stood out to me was the one where the father, Vinnie (Jay O. Sanders), wishes he'd been better at expressing himself. I felt it personally but I also felt it for the three sisters. Do you think they also have that wish for themselves, or would it be a wish that they could read one another better?
I think it's the latter — Katie even questions how she became this person who isn't her, and she talks about how people keep expecting her to be this person. I think it's that they're misreading how they're supposed to be towards one another, and I think that's true especially at the start of the film. They all sit down at this table and they all present to each other who they think the others are.
I think when Vinnie says he could've expressed himself better he doesn't mean he didn't express himself at all, but that maybe he could've been more of himself in the words he said, and that he could've shared how he truly felt rather than presenting what's expected of him.
The story that Vinnie tells about Bliss feels really important, but I wasn't sure why it came out as it did. Was it written with any intention?
Bliss is a person who's no longer with us, who, the last time I saw when we were young, was surprised that I recognised her. She was someone who I really did love, and because that wound up being the last time that we saw each other in our early twenties, it stayed with me that she was surprised. It's always stayed with me. Sometimes these things are just hanging around and then they come out. Or rather are waiting to come out.
Last night I was with a bunch of London boys who I met when I lived here in the early ‘90s, and I don't know if you saw The Lovers but right at the end there's a scene where Tracy Letts sings ‘It Must Be Love' — that Madness or Labi Siffre song. That's something that one of those guys did in 1994, and last night I told them that I'd just been carrying that moment ever since. It's a very similar story with Bliss.
I think about her all the time. And I think about how at least I was able to say to her “What do you mean? Of course I fucking recognise you, you changed my life.” At least I had that moment as our final conversation, so I just didn't question it coming out.
This whole film has been me not questioning anything — even when the father emerges it wasn't like that was my plan. I always felt he'd be in this other room, and I'd make a very clean, simple, neat independent film. It was always about the sisters and it was never about the father, but then all of a sudden I'm writing and the father's coming out, and that felt really scary to me.
I'm about to have a bunch of friends from back in the day see the movie for the first time, who know Bliss and are gonna remember her, and I don't know how they'll feel about that. Am I kind of taking someone's life and using it for the art, and is that a thing? I don't know. And the only way I'm going to be able to answer is in the same way as what I'm saying to you — she's with me and it popped out in this way, and this is the way I felt I could express her.
I think I was surprised at how well you made what is essentially a single-location film in such a small apartment, and that you made it feel so intimate rather than claustrophobic. Now knowing that so much of yourself has gone into it, it makes complete sense that it would.
One of the things that I tried to do so it didn't feel claustrophobic was to unveil the apartment in the same way that we were unveiling the characters of the sisters. As they're slowly showing more sides of themselves to each other, we're also discovering more sides to the apartment. Hopefully it feels like the apartment grows as they do, and that they constrict each other as much as the apartment constricts them.
I thought it was interesting that Rachel is the only one who has a kind of free roam of it, and she's also the only one whose day-to-day life we get to see first-hand because she's the only one who actually lives there. Is there any thought behind why it's her story specifically that's presented in that way?
Definitely. Rachel has a lot of my brother in her. We're not blood-related but we've been brothers since we were in strollers, and although we grew up together we went on very different paths. We still talk every day.
From the outside world, you would think he's just someone who's maybe had a hard life, and that he's this big strong person and somebody who you would walk in the other direction from. But I see how he really is, and I see his heart. So Rachel was kind of a way to talk about this person who's been so instrumental for 51 years of my life.
Rachel, out of all the characters, is probably the closest to somebody else who I know intimately in that way. So that's why it was easier to go into this whole thing of why she wasn't expressing herself. Like you said, most of the characters I've been drawn to in the past hold things back, and in this case, what Rachel holds back is so amazing because we know she's not who the sisters think she is. And it's so beautiful that she gets reprimanded for these apples and she doesn't say anything, she just holds back. What Natasha does with that character is just so heartbreaking because we understand that she's not who either of her sisters is seeing.
I saw an interview with Natasha Lyonne, and she mentioned that to play Rachel she was asking herself why she was smoking so much and trying to self-destruct. I was really surprised by that because, to me, Rachel didn't seem like she was trying to self-destruct — I felt she was the most strong-minded of the three.
One-hundred percent. She's not just getting high, she's maintaining. I think there is a part of Rachel that is destructing in that she's losing a huge part of her life in her father, and it's in a way that's completely different to what her sisters are experiencing. The irony that they don't see him as completely her father is part of it.
It's like losing your loved one but because you're not married to them, suddenly it's not equal to somebody else just because there's no paper that proves that this person was close to you. That happens all the time with friends, too. We lose someone and we don't know how to quantify it, and in this case that's being questioned.
So I see Rachel's self as being destroyed by this process, but I don't see that she's bringing it on herself. I don't see the weed smoking as part of that either. In fact, I like the idea that because she's forced to go outside to smoke she's the only one of the sisters who is able to get some space and some fresh air. She turns that into a mentally healthy situation, even though she's forced into it.
His Three Daughters is on Netflix now.
