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Where’d You Go Bernadette (2019)

Where’d You Go Bernadette (2019)

Cate Blanchett as: Bernadette Fox

Directed by: Richard Linklater
Selected Cast: Emma Nelson, Billy Crudup, Kristen Wiig, Judy Greer, Laurence Fishburne
Written by: Richard Linklater, Holly Gent, Vince Palmo (Based on Maria Semple’s novel of the same name)
Release Year: 2019
Genre: Drama | Comedy
MPAA Rating: PG-13

Bernadette Fox, a Seattle woman who had it all – a loving husband and a brilliant daughter. When she unexpectedly disappears, her family sets off on an exciting adventure to solve the mystery of where she might have gone.

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Promotional; Behind the scenesRelated Videos

The last videos is a playlist of selected interviews with the cast, just click on the playlist icon/thumbnails to see the other videos in it.

Quotes from Cate Blanchett

“Because it’s an epistolary novel, it’s a wonderful thing, but a bugger to adapt. It’s all written from a very particular perspective. What Bernadette is masking is grief and melancholy — a sense of loss, an inability to deal with her creative failure. In a movie, you get to get inside that. Hopefully we’ve created something that is strange and absurd and still has the absurdity of the novel, but also gets to what the book is deliberately pushing away, which is having to look at yourself. It’s not always funny. And [another] challenge of adapting it for the screen is [that] the central character disappears. All of those things that you can hold off and don’t question in a novel, when you see them, you ask different questions of the film. It’s a tricky thing, to balance the disappearance but then actually seeing Bernadette’s journey.” (Entertainment Weekly, August 2019)
“She [Bernadette Fox] literally goes to the farthest reaches of the earth in order to find herself! I’m so obsessed with the Antarctic. If I’m honest, I thought, “Oh, God, I finally get to go!” And then Rick said, “Well, you know, it might have to be greenscreen because of the budget.” I went, “Oh, sh—.” I was very disappointed. But then of course, the quality of the light and the experience of being there. We went to Greenland and got caught in, I don’t know, a Category 20,000 hurricane? [Laughs] We were living the dream! That was an extraordinary part of the shoot. It was fantastic. And the ship reeked of vomit. That’s a very intimate experience to have with your fellow castmates! [Laughs]”
On other things she loves about working in the film: “Everything with Kristen Wiig, of course, I adored. All of the stuff with Billy; I’d worked with him years and years ago on a film, so it was really great to work together again. In the end, it was maybe like Bernadette: all of the stuff that we shot on the ice. The house itself was a character too. The production design was so fantastic. All of the set decoration and just talking to the art department about this house, which was an extension of Bernadette herself.”
On filming in Greenland: “We went to Greenland and there is this absolutely no acting required, gobsmacking, iceberg wonder, that you see reflected in my glasses. We got caught in a hurricane, so all of that footage you see there is what we actually went through. For the kayak scene, I think it was one of the happiest days of my life. I lived in Australia for many years and every friend would come over and say, “Oh my God, did you see the whales just outside the harbor?” I didn’t see them. Whales must have something against me. And when we kayaked out, a whale and a calf were breaching. And so, I saw my whale. It felt like an eternity, a wondrous eternity that we were out there, but I think we were on the water for about five days.” (Oprah Daily, August 2019)
On Kristen Wiig: “I was so thrilled when Kristen came on board. I wish I could have had more scenes with her. Kristen is hilarious and it’s the same reason she’s a great actress, ‘cause everything she does is grounded in truth. It was a privilege.”

Quotes from Others

Richard Linklater:
— On what drew him to the film: “When [Annapurna Pictures‘] Megan Ellison gave me the book — what a complex, exciting and multileveled character in Bernadette Potts. You know you don’t see characters like that come along very often in fiction. She reminded me in a lot of ways of my own mom, you know, brilliant but pretty erratic. You could look at Bernadette in different ways, but you can’t question her love for her family. The mother-daughter relationship is very intense, I have three daughters and two sisters, so I had a front-row seat to that my entire life [laughs]. I made my mother and son movie with “Boyhood,” so this is my mother-daughter movie. That was the jumping-off point, but it was a portrait of an artist not producing her art, it was complicated. It’s also the story of a broken relationship, where husband and wife don’t seem to care about each other as much as they used to and they need to reconnect.”
— On Cate Blanchett: “[Cate Blanchett and I] kind of met a few years ago. It was wonderful coming together for this. We talk a lot about some of the best actresses ever, well, history will say that Cate is part of that club. I got into her wavelength, and she was trying to get on mine too. It’s an intuitive process, and she brought everything she had to the role. There’s a genius in her, which can’t be described, but then there’s the work ethic which can be characterized, and Cate came to work every day willing not just to work hard but dig in and have fun. She is not this diva/crazy person that someone with her kind of celebrity and fame may succumb to. I can’t say enough good things about her.”
— On the locations: “Our schedule wasn’t working for us, actually, when we were shooting the bulk of the movie we couldn’t do Antarctica, so I shot a bunch of clips there as a backdrop — so for certain scenes, like the Penguins, that was Antarctica. We shot in four different places: Seattle, Pittsburgh, Antarctica, and Greenland. We got caught up in this huge Antarctic storm, they call it a hurricane over there, as we were taking shelter in this huge cold war-era spy vessel we were on.”
Billy Crudup:
— On filming in Greenland: “We shot in Greenland, which resembles the last bit of the end of the world. Like Antarctica. Like Earth’s biggest meltdown. Primordial. Icebergs, rocks, mountains, scarce tundra. No parks or recognizable features. Being there, you learn what our planet could descend into.
We stayed on a single decommissioned Russian ship, a seven-story, 350-foot vessel. Off-hours we observed whales, colonies of fish, wildlife, geography, and existed through an 80 mph hurricane with the Atlantic’s 30-foot rolling seas.”
Emma Nelson:
— On Cate Blanchett: “Cate is totally down to earth; she is very funny and wonderful to be around, not just as an actor.
In rehearsals, [Blanchett] had ideas I would not have thought of and she put meaning behind every scene and analyzed every line Bernadette said. I learned a lot. It helped us become Bernadette and Bee.”
— On the car scene where Bernadette and Bee sing Time After Time: “That was in the script and it was probably my favorite scene to film because it’s such a personal moment between them and it showcased their relationship so well, not just as mother and daughter but Bernadette and Bee are partners in crime. It was fun for me because there was rain coming down, we were singing and dancing in the car, and I felt like there was no one outside the car filming; it was just Bee and Bernadette and so it was easy to fall into that scene.”
Troian Bellisario:
— On her favorite moments working with Cate Blanchett: “The rehearsal process was really incredible just because I’ve always, particularly as an actress in theater, looked up to her. So to watch her in her rehearsal process was really fantastic. To see her curiosity and her sense of play was really inspiring to me. And then, when we were shooting in a world heritage site called the Ilulissat Glacier, we had to stop the scene sometimes because a gray whale would come through in between the camera and us on kayaks. So in all of that natural beauty, sitting there trying to do a scene and remember lines across from Cate Blanchett, and then they have to hold for a whale, it was overwhelming on a lot of different levels.”

Trivia & Facts

Filmed in USA, Antarctica, and Greenland.
Cate Blanchett earned a Golden Globes nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.
While on location in Greenland, the cast and crew encountered a hurricane for 36-hours while they’re on a Russian ship, they filmed the hurricane which made the final cut of the film.
Cate Blanchett and Billy Crudup previously worked together in Charlotte Gray (2001).
The film was originally slated for Mother’s Day release on 11 May 2018 then pushed forward to 18 October. It was then moved to 22 March 2019 then 9 August until settling to the 16 August 2019.
Bernadette’s work in Antarctica in the film was based on the Halley Research Station, designed in real life by Hugh Broughton Architects.