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Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal breaks down the moment in which Olivia Colman’s Leda finally reveals a long-held truth—and the screenplay diverges significantly from the Elena Ferrante novel it’s based on.

What is Leda (Olivia Colman) hiding in The Lost Daughter? What is it about her past that is haunting her as she vacations in Greece? In this pivotal confession from Leda to Nina (Dakota Johnson), the young mother who’s become Leda’s obsession, the central piece of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s cinematic puzzle clicks into place.

Based on Elena Ferrante’s novel, The Lost Daughter (Netflix) honors the thematic core of its source material while charting its own path in crucial ways. Gyllenhaal, making her feature writing and directing debut, rigorously twists this story of maternal ambivalence into her own creation. This scene’s reveal—that Leda abandoned her young children for years, initially to pursue an affair—arrives much earlier in the book, more as dramatic setup. Gyllenhaal realized that to preserve the tension of her film, she needed to hold it as long as possible. “It really threw my entire script into shambles,” she says of the shift. “But out of that cracking it up came the space where I started to come through.”

Filmed in intimate, moving close-ups with the actors, the sequence is at once agonizing and heartbreaking. Gyllenhaal, Oscar-nominated for her script, walked us through executing it on the fly—both on the page and for the screen.

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