Mary Beth Keane
I went through many, many drafts of this scene. I didn't want anything that felt like melodrama (obviously), and a scene like this could so easily slip toward that direction. I just tried to remember who they were, their personalities, and what they'd both been through. Also, what connected them (a heritage, having left their homes for a new place, though neither of them ever made a drama of that, either). Then I thought about all the odd conversations I've found myself in in my own life, and the sort of surprising things we end up talking about when we're not totally comfortable. I think, for Francis (maybe for everyone), the IDEA of something is always cause for more bitterness than the actual real thing. So when he sees Anne, I imagine him understanding on some instinctual level that she got a raw deal, too. I think there are things all of us understand in our guts, first -- long before that info reaches our brains.
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