“The thing she really told me was, ‘I care about the density,’ ” he explains in our interview. “We worked on that word a lot with the kids, also with the girls.” He illustrates the concept with a metaphor he has borrowed from Ferrante. Imagine that the lines an actress reads are a river that runs calmly along the surface of the earth. Then imagine that the actresses are the earth, and that under the earth is another river, a wilder one whose current leaps in the opposite direction, whose roar is muted. Every time the actress speaks her lines, she must offer a glimpse of the river that runs
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