Director Todd Field shares his personal script notes for TR

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For his first feature in 16 years, TÁR screenwriter-director Todd Field dove into the intense world of a conductor — played by a commanding Cate Blanchett — who teeters on the edge of personal catastrophe. Last fall, Field told EW the ideas in the movie came to him at the beginning of the pandemic, and that he set about drafting a script mainly as a personal exercise for himself, to stay active, keeping his dream of casting Blanchett a secret.

Even now, with TÁR completed and released to raves, Field sounds close to its genesis, almost as if he still can't believe it got made. When we asked him to discuss a specific scene with us, he knows exactly which one: "I literally opened up my script and this was the first page in my binder, because it was where we began shooting," he says. "Honestly, I've got this binder that's got a big coffee stain on the outside. I picked it up off the floor, opened it up and went, 'Oh, look at that.'"

Below, Field shares his script notes (yes, that's his handwriting) on a pivotal moment in TÁR.

CIRCLE 1: Field color-coded his four camera operators for the day's shoot. "I had John Kolesnikow, my assistant, go out and get baseball caps for all of them," says the director, 58, recalling that since this particular scene was the first one shot for TÁR, everyone was still getting to know each other. "Well, except for Benjamin — he refused to wear the red cap."

CIRCLE 2: An acting veteran of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and more, Field storyboarded a shot of a bass drum being struck. "I certainly pestered plenty of wonderful cinematographers on sets that I worked on as a young actor," Field admits. For TÁR, he and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister manufactured a new set of lenses never used before.

CIRCLE 3: Why does Blanchett's Lydia Tár switch languages? "That was really important to Cate and I," Field says. "It's an act of respect. Had she been with this [Berlin based] orchestra for seven years, she would absolutely be fluent."

CIRCLE 4: For this passage by composer Gustav Mahler, Tár places her trumpeter backstage, a common solve, per Field. "It's a death march, a funeral march," he says. "It's something she's trying to push away from her, the sound of that call." A hint of what's to come? "Very much so."

TÁR is now in theaters.

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