A Ghost Story (2017)

iDid you have any anticipation that the scene with Rooney’s character and the pie was gonna become such a thing?

There was a point once we had it in the edit where I realized this would inevitably become a meme on the Internet and I knew there’d be GIFs of it floating around. It’s probably the scene I’m the most proud of in my directorial career because it was so tempting to get in there and mess with it, to make it a dolly shot or to even add an edit to it or close up, but to just get the camera back and let her carry it and sustain it for as long as she felt she needed to. It was magical watching that happen on set. And so as I was watching it I knew it’d be a scene that would define the film. I didn’t know to what extent, I halfway thought that it would define the film where people would walk out in the middle of the scene, but the fact that it worked on an emotional level for the vast majority of the audiences was very meaningful to me and I embraced the meme-ification of it, even though I try not to pay attention to it.