Christine Aylward: Was there a point in time when you were growing up where you knew you wanted to be an actress, and if so, do you kind of remember that pivotal
point?

Jessica Chastain: Yes, it's so funny. My grandmother took me to go see a play when I
was, like, six years old, and I remember before we got there she
had said, "Now this is a professional play. I mean, this is what
they do for a living. This is their job." I'm thinking, okay,
that's interesting. Then we were in the theater and the lights
came up, and that was started up on this little girl who was
probably ten years old and she was opening up a book and
reading. I just remembered at that moment, I just thought,
"Well, this is my job." Like it just like kind of clicked in.

Christine Aylward: Wow.

Jessica Chastain: This articulates everything that I knew I was going to be. So I kind
of always knew I was going to be an actor. I just didn't know
how it was going to happen. But yeah, it's my grandma.

Christine Aylward: Wow, I love that story.

Jessica Chastain: Yeah.

Christine Aylward: And then you went to Juilliard?

Jessica Chastain: Yes. Then I went to Juilliard, which is where I met my best friend
who's here with me, and Juilliard kind of changed my life,
because growing up I didn't have any real exposure to the arts.
My first week there I remember being in the cafeteria and I'm
sitting at the table and looked down and there's Baryshnikov and
I'm in the elevator with Yo-Yo Ma. Then the next day it's Itzhak
Perlman...I mean it's just this undeniable source of great inspiration andartists. I had four years of very, very, hard, difficult,wonderful training in Shakespeare and Ibsen and Strindberg and Chekhov. It kind of set me up that no matter what I work on inthe future it will never be as hard as the four years at Juilliard.

Christine Aylward: Really?

Jessica Chastain: Yes. Sometimes a film maker will talk to me, "You work really hard.
You do a lot of research. Did you realize you work very hard?" I
kind of think like this is nothing. This is not working hard. In
fact, my big critic from the teachers at Juilliard, that I kept
hearing from them was, "You work really hard. You should play
more. Why don't you play?" But yeah, so that was my experience
there.

Christine Aylward: Well, you're working hard here. You have two films here at Cannes,

Jessica Chastain: Yes. It's a interesting thing to have my first, my very first Cannes
and I have two films. It's exciting to even just be here with
one film. It's exciting to be here to support a friend with one
film, but to have two films, it's unbelievable. It's shocking. I
don't quite know how to deal with it. In fact, I think the
adrenaline from the experience is kind of keeping me afloat.
I'll go home and then I'll sleep for a week.

Christine Aylward: So how do you pick a project? What, for you, needs to be there to
really draw your attention?

Jessica Chastain: It's always to me about the character, and so it starts with the
character. Is this going to be and it usually has to scare me.
Is there a skill that I don't know? In many of my films I'm
doing something scary, whether it be nudity or speaking another
language or accents or having no time to shoot it really. So
that's always part of it, and then I ask myself, "Well, who am I
acting with?" I think my scene partners that's everything to me.
I'm the kind of actor that is mostly informed by seeing what my
partner is doing and what's kind of happening in the air between
us, that electric current. So that's very important, and then of
course the film maker. So those are the tiers for it. I always ask myself, "Who's goingbe my teacher on this film?" If it's a master class, what am I going to be taking away from it?

Christine Aylward: That's a great way to think about it. Who was teacher on "Take
Shelter"?

Jessica Chastain: Well, definitely, both Jeff and Mike. Because Jeff has such a unique
voice, I think that for me as an audience member going to the
cinema, I was like starving for this new voice. So to hear him
talking about the scenes and then how collaborative he was and
what he taught me about . . . there was a scene I was very
scared to play and he was really adamant. He said, "No, trust
me. Just trust me." I did and I watched it, and it's one of my
favorite scenes in the film. So I know he was right, and that's
difficult for me to admit.

Christine Aylward: What scene was it?

Jessica Chastain: It's the scene after Curtis is fired and Samantha slaps him and then
when she comes back and she lays everything out. This is how
it's going to be, ba, ba, ba. I was scared that it was going to
be to mean to just be like this is what we're going to do. I
watch it and I like how strong she is, because it's a woman who
will do whatever she can to keep her family together, and she's
not going to leave her husband, but these are the rules we're
going to play by. It's a woman who feels like she's losing
everything but has to grasp on to some type of structure, and
that was Jeff. Jeff helped me get to that point. Then, of
course, Michael Shannon is a great teacher, because when you're
acting with him, it's like being on a roller skates where you
can't get too comfortable, just be like, "I'm just going to
chill, I'm going to relax. You do the acting." Because you're
always engaged. He's always doing new things that demand you to
be always in the moment, always emotional, spontaneous.