Sienna Miller On A Leap Of Faith And Challenging Herself With ‘Wander Darkly’

Sienna Miller is on a roll. After a screen sabbatical around a decade ago, her return has gone from strength to strength with a rich tapestry of acclaimed work. Some might call it a Siennaissance.

The actress continues her winning streak with Wander Darkly, which co-stars Diego Luna. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020.

“I don’t know how I’m finding these projects,” Miller mused. “I tend to want to be really challenged by things. Whatever the project is, I want to connect with it.”

“Independent cinema is always a gamble. You never really know how the films are going to turn out. It’s a leap of faith. But I read this script, and I was just in love with the concept. I’m glad that it got into Sundance, and I’m glad that it’s getting released. Those are the cherries on top.”

Wander Darkly is written and directed by Tara Miele. It tells the convoluted and reality-bending story of a couple revisiting their memories as they process a traumatic experience. There may have been cherries on top of the project, but it wasn’t a cakewalk for Miller.

“I think it being so personal to her was extremely useful. I paid attention to her mannerisms at first, and then I somewhat let that go because it was distracting,” she explained. “I felt the depth of meaning in it from her, and that is inspiring to be around. That’s always galvanizing.”

“In terms of how we got there, it was complicated. It’s such an unnatural experience. In some of these scenes, you’re in the past, you’re in the present, or you’re commenting on the past from the present. It was a little difficult to know which was what in any given moment. Tara had to be very on top of it all. Aside from that, the whole experience is somewhat confusing because I can’t remember an awful lot of it because that was my mental state. It blends into one big haze as an experience. It took us 23 days to shoot, and we worked very, very long hours. The whole thing was a lot of hard work but also cathartic and complicated.”

Miller added, “It required one person at the helm to have a real grasp on what it was that they wanted to achieve, a real and clear vision for what it would ultimately be, and real faith from Diego and I that that would be achieved. There were moments where we were like, ‘There is just no way this can work. It makes no sense. We’re completely lost.’ However, Tara would be there, and the producers said, ‘We’re watching the dailies. It’s working.’ There was a lot of reassurance because it felt so unnatural and, for want of a better word, clunky.”

Because of Wander Darkly’s subject matter, the actress would be the first to admit that the experience was also a challenge for her away from the set.

“It was tough because it was very heavy. I knew I had to somewhat surrender to that experience, but I’ve got a kid, so I can’t go home and mope about. I have to pull it together,” she revealed. “I think some of the best acting I do is that getting home and being like everything is great. That moment is probably more challenging than what I’m doing at work because, of course, by osmosis, if you’re in that state for 12, sometimes on this 17 hour days, it’s in you. There’s something about being swept up in someone else’s experience of the world that I find interesting, and it breeds empathy and connectivity and all of those things that I think make us humans, so it is more than worth it.”

It all worked out.

Wander Darkly was a movie that, whatever we did on set, the movie had to be somewhat made in the edit,” she explained. “It was very technical. We would have to do things like suddenly at the end of a scene looking to the right because that would transition into a whole other alternate universal or walk out of a door we’d walked out of before, and there would suddenly be water on the ground so that could become the sea. It was so ambitious on such a small budget. That was where I think it was especially scary.”

“I think the moment I realized that it worked was when I saw it at Sundance and watching with an audience for the first time. The visual effects are astounding, adding a whole new layer that makes it work even more. It’s really hard to be objective about your work, especially on something like this. I’m watching a scene and remembering how we could lock down one street that I have to lie on, sobbing for 60 seconds, then traffic had to be released, then we’d wait for five minutes to be able to lock it off again, and get back to that same state. The whole thing was such hard work that you’re reminiscing about your experience, as opposed to being swept up in it in a way that I would if it was someone else’s film.”

Like Miller, her co-star, Diego Luna, also has an impressive range and a rich quilt of a resume that boasts indie films and big, critically acclaimed Hollywood movies.

“We had a rehearsal process for this, which is rare. That was great because it got really personal in the discussions around the concepts and themes that the movie deals with and a kind of barrier that had been broken down,” Miller enthused. “Diego and I had also known each other for a while and had been friends, not great friends, but very happy to see him in a room somewhere kind of friends. When Y Tu Mamá También came out, it was the same time that Factory Girl came out, so we were running around for the first time in Hollywood to all these parties. We’ve also run into each other along the way since. I knew that he was a really lovely person and that I liked him. I think that we both felt vulnerable in this and needed to trust each other.”

“I think anybody with a big ego or a load of arrogance, and those people do exist in Hollywood, would have made the experience a nightmare. Diego is an amazing actor. Everybody knows that he’s also a fantastic director. He’s somebody who moves through life with huge empathy, and that made me feel safe. There are also these moments of dark comedy in this movie, and you need that. I think Diego is particularly funny in it. It’s such a weird concept, but humans often laugh in those moments. We make jokes to lighten the deep trauma surrounding us.

Miller also pays tribute to another co-star, the city of Los Angeles, where the film plays out, a perfect blend of the ethereal and the raw.

“There’s something kind of cohesive about the New York experience, and you know what you’re going to get, but LA is so big and vast and sprawling. It also just looks great.”

“I love that Tara shot this in places I’ve never been to in Los Angeles. She lives in East LA, and I never really spent time there, but what a cool part of the city it is. It’s a pretty extraordinary city and very cinematic, so many iconic places, but you can still make them look special and unique. The street light installation at LACMA, Chris Burden’s Urban Light, is a great example. It was beautiful. I love seeing that but looking at it from above, it’s an angle that I didn’t know before, but it looked magical. The whole movie is kind of surreal and dreamlike, and those locations lend to that perfectly.”

Wander Darkly is in select theaters and available on VOD from Friday, December 11, 2020.

Speak Your Mind

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Get in Touch

350FansLike
100FollowersFollow
281FollowersFollow
150FollowersFollow

Recommend for You

Oh hi there 👋
It’s nice to meet you.

Subscribe and receive our weekly newsletter packed with awesome articles that really matters to you!

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

You might also like

30 Under 30 Europe: Making Manufacturing And Industry More...

Anyone who’s undergone a major decluttering project in their home knows that clothes are...

Activist Engaged Capital sees a path to lift VF...

A shopper passes in front of a North Face store at the Easton Town...

After Controversy, Treasury Confirms Social Security Recipients Don’t Need...

Getty Winston Churchill was alleged to have said,...

How Do You Want To Launch Your Startup Idea?

Every startup goes through four repetitive phases: research, development,...