Even though these supporting roles brought critical acclaim and prizes, Kirby was in no hurry to find her first lead role on the screens, she said. She played many complex characters on stage: women like Rosalind, the fiercely intelligent heroine of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”. She was waiting for a protagonist on the screen where she could feel some of Rosalind’s “magic”, she said, which made the performance “like flying when you step on stage”.
“I was never able to find these papers on the screen,” she said. So she waited, using her minor parts as opportunities to observe and learn, asking Anthony Hopkins about her art when they worked together on the British TV drama “The Dresser” and watching how generous Rachel McAdams was in the film “About Time,” she said.
It is fitting, given Kirby’s theatrical background, that “Pieces of a Woman” started as a play, written by Kata Weber, Mundruczo’s partner, who was inspired by the couple’s own experience of losing a child. The play “Pieces of a Woman”, which takes place in Poland, consists of only two scenes: the birth and an explosive dinner with Martha’s family, which takes place halfway through the film adaptation. The debut in 2018, directed by Mundruczo at the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw, was a success and the production is still part of the company’s repertoire.
Around the time Mundruczo turned 40, five years ago, he began to want a wider audience for his work, he said, then stopped working in German, Hungarian and Polish; “Pieces of a Woman” is his first film in English. In adapting the play for the big screen, Mundruczo set it in Boston, he said, because he felt the city’s Irish Catholic culture reflected Poland’s conservative social landscape.
The loss of a pregnancy is rarely featured in on-screen entertainment. Mundruczo said he hopes that watching Martha’s experiences will encourage “people to be brave enough to have their own response to any loss,” he said.