Rooney Mara on How David Fincher Helped Influence Future Role Choices

Etan Vlessing
·3 min read
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Rooney Mara says she chooses movie projects these days based on who is seated in the director’s chair and has been doing so for some time.

“For me, I really go by the director. I learned that pretty early,” the Women Talking and Girl With a Dragon Tattoo actor said Friday when explaining how she ended up starring in director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ English-language debut, La Cocina, which bowed at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday.

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The two-time Oscar nominee plays a waitress at a high-stress Manhattan restaurant where she strikes up a relationship with a backroom cook, played by Raúl Briones. “I had some bad experiences as an actor,” Mara continued.

So it took her role in David Fincher’s The Social Network, where she played Erica Albright, to restore her faith in acting. “It was the first time I worked with David Fincher and I realized follow the director. Follow the director. So I really make my choices based on who I want to work with. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about them,” Mara told the Berlin presser.

It helped that Ruizpalacios pitched his movie, which he also wrote, with emotion. “He (director) wrote me this beautiful letter. The way he talked about the experience of how he wanted to make the film, it was just an experience I wanted to have,” Mara recalled.

Of course, it was left to Ruizpalacios as the director who was tasked with pulling off a movie adapted from Arnold Wesker’s 1957 stage classic The Kitchen, and which revolves around a high-stress kitchen in a Manhattan restaurant where Mara’s character, Julia, has a relationship with Pedro, a backroom and undocumented grill cook, played by Raúl Briones.

Despite being set in New York City, the producers of La Cocina had a full-scale kitchen built on a soundstage in Mexico. “I knew we’d have more time to rehearse and have more control,” Ruizpalacios recounted.

And the Mexican director certainly didn’t have food porn in mind when shooting the film that will have its world premiere in competition at the Berlinale.

“I worked as a student in a Rainforest Cafe, which is a very un-food porn restaurant. I was more drawn to that, to the collective experience of being with other people in kitchens where you form a band of brothers, and then when the rush starts, it’s every man for himself,” Ruizpalacios explained.

And when he says men, the director means macho men, as Ruizpalacios insisted he had little need to make his male characters in the rush hour kitchen kind and empathetic towards one another.

“Kitchens are, from having personal experiences in them, a caste system. It’s very strict caste system where boundaries and hierarchies are not stepped over,” Ruizpalacios said when responding to a journalist during the presser questioning why his movie was filled with toxic masculinity.

“So it would be untrue to portray a kitchen where all the males are understanding and caring for each other, it’s just not the case. That’s not how the cookie crumbles in those places,” the director added.

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