Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding Ken Regan/Courtesy of Paramount Vantage

When did she come on board?
Well, as soon as I had a script I wanted to show people, she was my first choice. So I had a coffee with her. She and I are both very shy people so it was a kind of halting, quiet — but warm coffee. We really connected at the same time and I slid this envelope with the script across the table, she took it, and literally the next morning she called and said she wanted to do it. So that was the quickest and maybe the best version of that I'll ever have. It was great.

There've been a lot of reports about the camaraderie that was on set in the Hamptons on Long Island. The idea of actors living together and getting to know one another is something that you only heard about in the '70s. Was this a concept that you purposefully thought would gel the cast together in advance?
Yeah. A lot of rehearsal for me is hanging out. I mean particularly when you have such great actors. When you're rehearsing the scenes get good very quickly, so it's important not to burn them out before we start shooting. So a lot of rehearsal, I think, becomes about getting to know each other. We had the luxury of two houses [including] the house that we shoot in, and we would all spend time in there. We'd rehearse in there. We'd just hang out in there. Nicole and Jennifer would lie in bed and talk. It was a way to really kind of connect to the house of the movie. And then we also all just lived nearby. Nicole lived next door to Jennifer and me and Jack lived down the road. And on the weekends we'd have dinners and play games. And so it was a very camp-like experience.

It's vaguely reminiscent of The World According to Garp in some ways, because you've got that beautiful house on the ocean, a family situation that's pretty quirky with the eccentric intellectuals, and then also an actor like Jack Black who parallels Robin Williams in Garp in being a comedic actor in a dramatic part. Was that in the back of your mind at all?
No, it's interesting, as you're saying it. I'm thinking: "Oh, that's interesting." But no, I hadn't thought of that movie specifically at all. I like that movie though.

Are there any other influences? In the past, you have referred to Ingmar Bergman.
Well, Eric Rohmer, the French director, and Bergman both made movies that I admire a lot. There's Pauline at the Beach and there's a movie called La Collection that Eric Rohmer made that I love a lot. And Bergman made a lot of these movies in the '60s, Persona and a movie called The Passion of Anna that all take place on an island. They didn't have any direct influence; I wasn't watching them when I wrote or made this movie. But I think there's a certain kind of atmosphere and feeling of those movies that [I admire]. They're very psychological movies about the characters, but the surroundings also take on some kind of significance. I think they're very interesting about the inside world and the outside world, and that's something that I was thinking about with Margot.