The emotionally fraught monologue that Ellen Burstyn delivers to her daughter played by Vanessa Kirby in “Pieces of a Woman” is done in one long take, and Burstyn found the strength and conviction to give that performance and go to painful places because of something Kirby told her just before they began shooting.
The scene comes late in Kornel Mundruczó’s film after Kirby’s character has lost her baby in child birth. Burstyn wants her daughter to testify in a criminal trial against their midwife, and in Kirby’s reluctance, she pleads with her by invoking her own painful childhood as a survivor of the Holocaust.
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