During his early morning walks, American film-maker and scriptwriter Azazel Jacobs likes to jot down random ideas in his notebook, often inspired by what he sees around him. When he moved from Los Angeles to his native New York at the height of the pandemic to be close to his parents, Jacobs recalls that “stepping out, just getting air and catching these glimpses of life was intoxicating”.
Jacobs, 52, and his wife, Diaz, an actor/producer, had lived in LA for more than 20 years. Going through the experience “of this thing with my folks”, who were increasingly in need of his support, also affected his writing on those pandemic walks, he says. “I was writing different ideas that felt like different stories. And then in one of those kinds of fevered dreams I realised they were three different sisters, who could be conjoined under one roof.”
Azazel Jacobs at a screening of His Three Daughters this month in New York Photo: GettyGetty Images for Netflix
They evolved into His Three Daughters, Jacobs’ latest film – a perceptive, raw and often funny family drama about memory, grief and the absurdities of waiting for a parent to die. Set over three and a half days, three estranged sisters gather in their ailing father’s small New York apartment to be with him in his final days and try to plan for the inevitable. While he remains (largely) hidden from view, each woman has a different way of coping with the situation. Katie (Carrie Coon), the eldest sibling, is a controlling Brooklyn mother dealing with a challenging teenage daughter. Highly strung, she obsesses about the practical details. Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is the peacemaker but finds it difficult to be apart from her young daughter for the first time, and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), who has a different mother, is a sports betting stoner who has never lived away from their father’s apartment. As tensions and grievances erupt, the sisters confront their fractured past, eventually finding acceptance and love.
I am speaking to Jacobs in a central London hotel. Known as Aza, the slim-built, tousled-haired, easy-going indie film-maker flew in from the US the day before and, pepped up by biscotti and coffee, manages to mask any jetlag. I remind him that we last met in 2017 to discuss The Lovers, a comedy romance starring Tracy Letts and Debra Winger – “a pandemic and a half ago, right?” he says with a gentle laugh. He told me then that he had written the script with Winger in mind and, subsequently, halfway through writing His Three Daughters, realised he had done something similar again. Jacobs approached each actor separately, sending them a printed script with an explanation that the character was not based on them precisely, but someone he thought they could have fun with. What was their response?
“They took it surprisingly well,” Jacobs says. “I was afraid that they would [say], ‘Why do you think you know me?’ but I knew their work well, their voices and tempo. And the writing of this was truly based on rhythm. I was hearing them as you would a certain musician you’d like to work with.”
The film has a strong theatrical feel, including Katie’s fast-talking opening monologue: was that the intention? “Yeah. In the script, it says, ‘Katie delivers’ and I wanted it to feel like an audition.” But he points out that, overall, the film’s performative nature is consistent with its cinematic quality. “The way actors don’t share frames. In theatre they would have to be all on stage together and it was important for me to isolate them and collapse and expand time in the way that only film could.”
I ask why he chose three sisters. “I’ve been getting this question [a lot],” he replies. “It doesn’t always happen but in this case, it poured out of me in a way that I just didn’t question anything.” When he made the comedy drama Momma’s Man (2008), in which he cast his parents, he learnt that he could be “a lot more honest once I started fixating on a son that wasn’t like me. I can see myself in each of these sisters, and I could be a bit more honest than maybe if it was three brothers.”
Jacobs grew up in Manhattan, the son of avant-garde film-maker Ken Jacobs and Flo Jacobs, an abstract painter. Previously, he told me that his parents’ respective Russian and Hungarian roots meant that the weight of Jewish history was always present in the family home, and that his name, Azazel, is “not a religiously friendly one by any means”. In Jewish legend, Azazel was a scapegoat, sent into the wilderness during Yom Kippur to bear the sins of the Children of Israel.
Putting the challenges of his name aside, he says his background has inevitably influenced his work. “It’s part of my life, so it’s hard for me to separate that.” The family in His Three Daughters are not Jewish but “it’s New York City and New York City is this mixture. I was walking through Chinatown yesterday, listening to an Asian family and the guy said, ‘Well, I’ve been schlepping this all the way up from downtown.’ What was interesting is that the film takes place in a building in the Lower East Side, and I have elders that settled there. So, there’s a foundation, especially in that neighbourhood, that I’m sure seeps through the walls in its own way and definitely seeps through me.”
When he was scouting for an apartment, Jacobs wanted something specific. The city’s rent stabilised laws means that tenants can move in at a certain rent with a limited annual increase, he explains, and after their parents’ death, the only way offspring can stay under the lease is if they were living with them. “Then you inherit this rent-stabilised apartment. For a lot of families that aren’t wealthy, this is gold. So, I was looking for an apartment in New York City that felt both like an apartment which many people could live in and, at the same time, could feel extremely valuable for a family. I wanted to give the impression that generations had passed through it.”
Jacobs has said that in making the film, he tried to create an environment that he wanted to escape to. Why did he feel that need? “Once I started becoming a caretaker of my parents, everything felt completely out of control,” he admits. “I was trying to learn how to pay someone else’s bills, understand their medication, how to get to doctor appointments. And then here’s this film that I’ve loved making, which I could have control of. It was that that I really needed,” he emphasises. “It was an escape.”
Undoubtedly, His Three Daughters will resonate with anyone who has experienced a similar situation of coping with a parent’s end-of-life care and the accompanying family dynamics. I remind him that he has been described as someone able to bring lightness to reality in his work and here he does it to great effect, from the insincerity of the visiting hospice nurse to Katie’s and Christina’s intermittent use of their childhood secret language. “I’ve always tried to see where the humour is in things,” he smiles.
To his astonishment, Jacobs has received “by far” the warmest response to this film than anything else he has made, “especially as I can’t tell you how outside of the grid it was made. I had a window of time before caretaking was going to take over and I took advantage of shooting then. We shot it without any fanfare.”
Making it was cathartic, he says. “People have spoken to me about how they related to this sense of loss but also how it gave them comfort, in the way it did for me. Knowing that is amazing.”
His Three Daughters is on Netflix from September 20
