The Unforgivable releases December 10 on Netflix. The drama features an all-star cast including Sandra Bullock in the lead role. She’s joined by Vincent D’Onofrio, Jon Bernthal, Richard Thomas, Linda Emond, Aisling Franciosi, Rob Morgan, and Viola Davis.
“Released from prison after serving a sentence for a violent crime, Ruth Slater (Bullock) re-enters a society that refuses to forgive her past,” reads the logline. “Facing severe judgment from the place she once called home, her only hope for redemption is finding the estranged younger sister she was forced to leave behind.”
ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with The Unforgivable director Nora Fingscheidt about the drama, her great cast, and its exploration of class.
Tyler Treese: What I really loved about the film was that you show all sides and all the characters have believable motives. How was it juggling all these different perspectives while still telling a narrative that makes full sense?
Nora Fingscheidt: Well, it was a little bit like juggling or playing Tetris or Jenga or something. Each time you take away something from one character, in the end it might crash. So it was a constant balancing throughout the script, throughout the shoot, throughout the edit of finding the right amount, and not get confusing because there are many characters and each one reflects on Ruth and Ruth connects them all. But Ruth is a very silent character for the first half of the film. So how do you stay connected to somebody who speaks so little?
You assembled such an all-star ensemble here. Can you just talk about the cast and I assume it makes your job as a director a lot easier when you can just depend on them to just nail their performances?
Yeah. Absolutely. There is this saying that life is easy when you have good actors and now I can tell you it’s true. It really is. Of course it also puts a lot of responsibility on my shoulders because then I have to make sure we capture it the right way, and their magic is not that all of a sudden the filmmaking doesn’t hold up to the quality of performances. But that’s the great challenge and what I love about this job.
So when I came on board, it was clear, of course, Sandy, who plays Ruth, is a producer and we sat together with our casting director, Francine Maisler, and all of a sudden, we thought, okay, who would be the perfect cast for this particular role? Really handpicked and we were so lucky to get the perfect cast together and that they said yes to play those roles. It’s amazing.
There’s a really interesting element of class to the story and we see how that impacts how everybody views Ruth. Can you speak to that dynamic? I thought it was so intriguing and had so much to say, despite it not being the focus.
Exactly. For us, it was important that all the families that we portray around Ruth kind of mirrors society [and] live very different lives. First of all, to distinguish them, but also to see how their reaction is to Ruth and how they deal with pain and anger.
You have the Ingram family, played by Viola and Vincent, and they are obviously the wealthiest family, but then you have the Malcolms, who are more like a suburban, middle-class family, but very protective and very loving for their daughter. But while protecting her, they are also doing some harm to her. Then you have the Whelan brothers who are the ones who struggle the most and have difficulties of dealing with their loss that they experienced so early on.
We thought that it is important to show all those different sides, and then of course you have Ruth who comes out of prison and enters freedom and has to start basically from rock bottom from a place where everybody judges her and nobody sees her. Nobody listens to her.
