With apologies to Paul Simon, the new film Carolina Caroline features one of the strangest and most mournful mother and child reunions to grace the big screen in some time. Midway through director Adam Carter Rehmeier‘s contemporary Bonnie & Clyde riff, the Bonnie of the film’s bank robbing duo — Caroline Daniels, played by Samara Weaving — makes the mistake of tracking down her mom, Deborah (Kyra Sedgwick), who abandoned her years ago.
Locating Deborah’s preferred watering hole in a rundown one-stoplight Southern town, Caroline takes a seat at the bar just as her target comes barging in. The older woman approaches her, and any hope that Caroline has for a joyous reconciliation immediately goes off the rails. In the grand tradition of Beatrice Straight in Network, Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, or Steve Park in Fargo, Sedgwick delivers a one scene performance that lingers over the rest of the film. Immediately after this disastrous encounter, Caroline returns to her Clyde, Oliver (Kyle Gallner), and the two plan their biggest heist yet… which inevitably goes wrong.
In an extended conversation moderated by Gold Derby, Weaving and Sedgwick went deep on their single shared shared scene — penned by the movie’s screenwriter, William Thomas Dean IV — providing an illuminating window into how this kind of impactful moment comes together through a fusion of performance and filmmaking. Here’s how it all went down in their own words.
Samara Weaving: Adam shot it the whole movie chronological order, so Kyra and I didn’t meet until midway through the film. [To Sedgwick] When you came in, I’d done all the scenes of Caroline wanting to see her mom, but I hadn’t met you, and I hadn’t really gotten to know youand you just came in as Deborah. Honestly, there was no acting on my part. I just sat there and watched you, and reacted in the moment and it was just incredible.
Kyra Sedgwick: I worked on that scene a lot, and what’s so surprising about it is that it feels like a one act play dropped in the middle of this movie. But it’s also set up beautifully, because throughout the movie Caroline is going, “Are people just born bad? If my mother is bad, does that mean I’m bad?” There’s that looming questions over her character the whole time, and then I come in. We didn’t really rehearse it, because it was great to just dive right in. It was a long scene, and I was grateful they did my coverage first! I was like, “Shouldn’t Samara go first?”
Weaving: I told them, “Point it at Kyra!”
Sedgwick: That was really nice because usually you do the star’s coverage first, so that was lovely and nice for me. And Adam shot it as standard coverage — me walking into the bar in a wide shot, then my coverage, than a two-shot from the back of us at the bar and then Samara’s coverage. I found that her outfit helped me a lot. I arrived on set, did a costume fitting and went straight into shooting. They had this leopard tank top for me, which helped with her physicality. I saw her as a viper, which was fun to play.
Weaving: You also did this amazing thing where there’s this vulnerability to Deborah, and you think they’re maybe going to reconnect. You can see them getting along maybe, and then it pivots to shock, which is a lovely turn. I think if you had come in really hard as Deborah, Caroline would have just left.
Sedgwick: Yeah, totally. She’s all chatty-chatty with Caroline and she’s suddenly like, “That’s one too many questions, bitch.” [Laughs] It’s such a well-written scene, and the beats were all there. It was like riding a wave and the words were there to support you.
Weaving: I like to prep and prep and prep with my drama coach, and one of the things we were talking about is, “What is Caroline’s mindset?” There’s this anticipatory excitement and yearning on her part to find out who she is. I tried to keep an open mind and a curiosity in that scene so I wasn’t playing the end at the beginning. The costume designer helped me with that as well; we put her in this almost childish outfit. And then she slowly just gets shot in the heart.
Sedgwick: And Deborah starts to figure out what’s going on as Caroline keeps talking to her. In my mind, she starts looking at her and thinks, “Oh yeah, I remember those eyes. I remember that face.” And then she just wants to crush her like a bug. The way I approached it is that every time she’s thought of Caroline over the years, she’s just taken another drink. You know, people really hate women that leave their children; they think it’s the worst thing that a woman can do. Men seem to be able to do it all the time, but you don’t see women do it a lot in movies. It’s a cardinal rule that it does not happen.
Weaving: Setting that scene at a bar was so smart, because it’s not like Deborah is successful! There’s a brokenness to her, and I could empathize because you understand how anger is easier than being heartbroken and sad.
Sedgwick: It’s so much easier. And it’s great that there are other characters that come in and because it’s a public place.
Weaving: By the end, Caroline sees herself in Deborah, and that’s what scares her. There’s totally a world where that’s her future, and it’s scary. And I think it informs a lot of her questioning of who she is later. We did that scene in two days, and I don’t remember taking a break — I was just sitting there, crying. I had this intensely emotional experience, which is quite rare on movies.
And then something magical happened in the scene right after that, which again we shot in sequence. I felt like I needed a hug, and I got in the car with Kyle and the blocking called for me to shove him off. So I pushed him away, but this instinct happened where I just grabbed his hand out of the window and he grabbed it back. We didn’t rehearse it — we were just in flow with each other. It was a magical moment.
