You would be forgiven for remembering Jena Malone as the angry stepdaughter in that maudlin Susan Sarandon vehicle Stepmom , or as angry young Jodie Foster in that Carl Sagan movie.
A girl. JM: It's less industrialized. A third of the country is forest. It's a free-for-all there. You drive for two hours north of Bucharest and you're in the mountains with men who are just hauling logs all day β and these women in traditional clothing driving cattle across these old dirt roads, but on their cellphones.
It's very strange. ESQ: And it's a huge cast. It seems like it would be hard to manage out in the Romanian wilds. JM: It was definitely insane. And we had really bad horses. There were horse trainers there, but they were very, very horrible horse trainers, and six or seven actors ended up in the hospital.
I'm just glad that we made it out alive, to be honest. It got dark. JM: It definitely got pretty dismal. Bucharest is a very dark town. The food is bad, the people are angry β. ESQ: That probably helped set the tone for the show. It's not exactly light-hearted fare.
I read that the director, Kevin Reynolds, and Kevin Costner had previously butted heads. Was there tension between them on-set? JM: Oh, no. You read those things about "butting heads" and it's just because you have two creative men wanting to make something. I feel like they worked really well together. We were losing time, we were losing actors in the hospital. Kevin stepped up and started directing second unit, Kevin Reynolds shot twelve pages a day in the snow in the middle of nowhere, driving three hours to location.
