When Azazel Jacobs began writing His Three Daughters, he realized he’d created characters with three very specific stars in mind: Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen. The filmmaker had a relationship with each of these decorated actors; the roles seemed tailored to each of them, playing to familiar types before digging deep beneath the surface. “They’re still searching for something that they may not have had a chance to express,” Jacobs tells Vanity Fair. “While each of these characters spoke to them, it also felt like something that maybe they hadn’t yet done.”

As teased by the trailer (which you can watch exclusively above), the movie feels different—authentic, spare, suffused with tough love—because it was made that way. A portrait of three estranged sisters at very different stages of life converging under their dying father’s roof for his final days, His Three Daughters is a searing grief drama exactingly realized by Jacobs and enlivened by powerhouse performances. After hand-delivering them scripts, Jacobs promised his cast that he’d make the movie on real locations, that he’d shoot on film, and that every shot would count. And he brought them all deeply into his process.

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“I was reaching back to a certain filmmaking approach that I grew up with and saw a lot of but hadn’t seen recently,” says Jacobs, whose last film was the Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle French Exit. After launching amid noisier premieres at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, His Three Daughters earned rave reviews, leading to a splashy Netflix pickup and early awards buzz for its main trio of actors. This is truly intimate filmmaking, leaving the actors to introduce established personas before diving into daringly vulnerable places. Lyonne’s wise-cracking detachment will initially feel familiar, for instance, but it takes on a whole new dimension when she breaks your heart.

In their first extensive interviews about His Three Daughters, Coon, Lyonne, and Olsen spoke with Vanity Fair about the singular experience of both making and now sharing the movie. “For me, it’s now been a 40-year career,” Lyonne says, “and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen something like this.”

Interviews for this story have been edited and condensed.

Vanity Fair: Azazel Jacobs wrote each of these roles specifically for you. How did you react to the characters, knowing that?

Natasha Lyonne: It did take me a second to connect with Rachel, ’cause I am so not a pothead. [Laughs] But really, I was like, Is it more interesting if I’m playing Lizzie’s part and a deadhead or something? It was almost confusing. It made me think a little bit, like, Gosh, I really want to do this for Aza, but where is the surprise in me smoking pot? We all think of me as somebody who smokes pot!

But because I let go so completely, I was able to find all of the vulnerability that’s tethered to that: the reasons why I used to smoke so many cigarettes in the first place, or insert-substance-here. I relinquished myself to it. I was able to find all the soft sides of it rather than in something like Russian Doll, where it’s almost like I’m front-facing with the hard edges of it, and the nihilism of it, and the New York of it, and the Lou Reed of it. In this, because it was a family sort of chamber piece, it’s how a person gets to be that way on the outside when you meet them on the street. I come off hard-edged and tough, but it’s only because I’m so soft that I’m wired that way as a coping mechanism from childhood or whatever. It was safe to go there, the why behind all of the smoke that’s always puffing out of me.

Elizabeth Olsen: When we talked about the script for the first time, I said [to Jacobs], “It’s really funny that this is the version of myself that you envision.” I think of myself as kind of direct and demanding, but I do have a nurturing softness to me, and I do act as a mediator often. He knows that part of me as well. I feel like I tapped into a softness that I don’t think I’ve been able to put onscreen before. I was enjoying going back to other films as references. I was thinking about Dianne Wiest in Hannah and Her Sisters, even though she’s a totally different character, but she exudes such softness in everything she does. I was trying to allow that part of myself that Aza, I guess, sees [laughs], but is something I haven’t put on camera.

Carrie Coon: I feel that I often play high-strung controlling moms. [Laughs] It might be a vibe that I give off, which is funny because I’m actually pretty relaxed in my life. Natasha is right in that you kind of read those things and you think, Oh, these are all types. And then as the script unfolds, what you understand is that the form follows the function—the story unfolds in such a way that the audience first encounters the sisters as they’re seeing each other. And then as their point of view gets complicated, so does the audience’s. The audience is actually going on the same journey as the sisters are going on, as they’re rediscovering each other inside of that grief.

The film opens on this unbroken shot of you, Carrie, delivering this very fast monologue. From there, the visual style is very deliberate. Can you talk about working within that?

Coon: Prepping for this felt like prepping for a play. It’s very dialogue-heavy. I knew I was doing the big opening speech, and that I was first up in a room full of heavy hitters. Incredibly intimidating. And I also have two small children, and I don’t have enough time to prepare anymore. [Laughs] These days I always feel underprepared for every job. I was a straight-A student, and there’s just no way that I can live up to my own standards anymore. I swear, I was about to quit the business before this. I was having very serious talks with Tracy [Letts, her husband] about how I didn’t think I could keep being an actor and being a mom at the same time. I felt really overwhelmed by it all. But then this script was so compelling, I knew I had to do it.

With the first scene, I knew Aza wouldn’t move on until he felt it was just right. But it’s so theatrical. Even the way it’s shot, it’s so stark against that white wall. It’s very exposing. There’s not much to rely on. There’s nothing to do with your hands. It really is all about punctuation. The first three lines, I don’t think there’s any period at all. It’s like a run-on sentence.

Lyonne: We shot it all in that apartment. I’d walk back home with [cinematographer] Sam [Levy], show back up the next day, and then we did rehearsals in that same apartment. The danger of acting is no false moves. You can smell a lie onscreen. But if you are genuinely settled in the space, you’re able to fully embody something. It also really opens the prism or aperture of what you can do, because no comedic moment is without drama, and no dramatic moment is without the full scope of human emotion, especially in a piece like this that’s about family, mortality, friendship, and the sisterhood—it’s tackling such sweeping themes that, every moment, all things are on the table and come to the surface. It’s really fun to work in that way.

Olsen: There was no place to hide. Anytime we had to do a quick setup change, we would all just shuffle around each other. Our sound mixer was always in our father’s room. Restrictions are exciting creatively because they allow for you to have to really be specific with the space and the time you have. There’s an energy to having the limits that makes you have to really problem-solve as effectively as possible.

Coon: I think only three quarters of the way through the movie, in the dinner scene, is the first time you see us all in the same frame. Aza and Sam would argue a little bit over how to shoot it because the constraints of the space were so extreme. You can’t take out a wall. It was really challenging. We had Jovan [Adepo] and Rudy [Galvan] and Jasmine [Bracey] intruding on our space, and it really felt like a violation to have them there, in the best way. We were mirroring what was happening in the story.

Olsen: And you’re not quite sure where you are, or oriented in the space, until the relationships grow and shift with the sisters. They’re just incredibly isolated.

Given that intimacy, how did you find working together and getting to know each other?

Coon: Lizzie is so effortless, and Natasha is so relentless in pursuit of the truth, and you just can’t help but feel like the weakest link whenever you’re in the room. But again, by virtue of the fact that we signed on to do the movie, we all knew we were going to come in super prepared. That’s who we are. We’re just ready to roll up our sleeves and do the work. We were also crammed into this tiny space. We were literally on top of each other.

By day three, we were basically just sitting on each other’s laps in there, trying to make Queen Bee in the New York Times [Spelling Bee]. That’s how we bonded. Aza would say, “Hurry up and make Queen Bee, because we have to get this scene before the end of the day!” We were in these little dressing rooms in this rent-controlled apartment building, hanging out all day long, and it was delightful.

Olsen: All three of us as actors really show up from a very open, honest place, knowing that there’s no time to have too many boundaries. [Laughs] We said yes to this project, we all understood the rules and the restrictions of it, and we were all here to play. We all fell in love with each other very quickly.

Coon: Elizabeth Olsen has done such interesting work, and I think we haven’t even touched what she’s capable of yet. I feel like her moment hasn’t even arrived yet, because she’s young—and so, so talented. I can’t wait to see what happens to Elizabeth 10 years from now. And I feel like we were bumping into Natasha at the apex of her career, firing on all cylinders—as a director, as a producer, as an actress—and has had this incredible second lease on her life, having been an addict. Because she’s very open about her journey through life, and the fact that she’s alive is a bit miraculous, and I feel like she lives that way. She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

The movie premiered in Toronto without any of you in attendance, given that it happened during the SAG-AFTRA strike. Was it strange, observing it from a distance? How did it feel seeing it resonate?

Coon: I haven’t seen the movie yet. The rough cut I saw was on a laptop, so I haven’t actually experienced the film, even though I’m doing press for it. I feel really alienated from that moment in Toronto.

Lyonne: It’s a testament to the movie itself that, despite not being able to do the usual steps and promotion, the work stood on its own—and it rose. It actually was very keeping in line with the experience of making the film.

It hearkened back to something more meaningful, a time when the arts were actually just about making a piece of work from the heart rather than being concerned with how it was received or expectations or box office or packaging or marketing. So many of those ideas have so thoroughly corrupted us as people, let alone an industry. Just the way that we commodify everything has really ruined us in so many ways. In a way, Toronto was almost like the perfect vehicle for it, in that there were no beautiful actresses in the mirror. No gorgeous designer dresses and all that fanfare. It is simple: one heart catching another.

Coon: Aza Jacobs is a very specific filmmaker. I feel that if you were given a pile of films and nobody told you who made them, you would probably be able to pick his out, right? You’d say, “These three were made by the same person.” I mean that as a compliment. His vocabulary is very strong and very specific, and he hasn’t historically been for everyone. So the shocking thing for me was how much people resonated with this particular film, because it’s very much an Azazel Jacobs film. It doesn’t exist that far outside of his oeuvre, and yet the world embraced it in such a way that it’s clear he put his finger on the pulse of something in the grief, in the lack of sentimentality in dealing with that grief. I was really surprised how it was received in the world, if I could be frank. I mean, incredibly gratified. I didn’t expect it.

His Three Daughters will be released in US theaters on September 6 before hitting Netflix on September 20. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.