“It was being pregnant,” she responds with a laugh. “It takes every ounce of your strength and psyche. You work extremely hard to create another human being.”
For some, the joyous and unexpected news might have been a good reason to shelve the project. But the Oscar-nominated actress (Up in the Air) was pulled too deeply into the story of a woman struggling with her devout faith to change course.
“This film was unstoppable. It was grasping me in a way that was beyond my control,” says Farmiga, 38. “I had valid excuses, but I couldn’t use them. ‘Not now’ becomes ‘never’ in this industry.
“This was a curve ball that gets thrown at you,” she adds, referring to her pregnancy. “I could have chosen to duck, but I opted to receive.”
Farmiga dramatically broke the news to the film’s financier during a tour of his new, sprawling studio in spring of 2010.
“I fainted,” Farmiga says, laughing. “And when I came to, I said, ‘By the way, I’m pregnant.”’
Rather than being deterred, the financier simply insisted that Farmiga get to work immediately before her pregnancy began to show too much. Pre-production began the next day.
To add to the complex situation, Farmiga juggled the rapidly accelerated pace of the project with intense morning sickness (“morning, afternoon, night, it’s relentless with me”) and the Montreal filming for her starring role in Source Code.
“I was BlackBerry-ing with my casting directors under the desk in between every close-up,” she says.
Back on the Upstate New York set of Higher Ground, “we set the production schedule around my belly,” Farmiga says. She immediately shot scenes in which her character was not pregnant and wore support hosiery to disguise the pregnancy. For later scenes, her team embraced the blossoming condition and wrote a pregnancy into the script.
“It was only natural. We were telling the story of a mother,” Farmiga says.
She counted on the support of her tight-knit family to help her through the trying 26-day shoot in stifling summer heat. Her son, Fynn, now 2, was a comforting constant on set and played the role of an infant in the movie. Producer and husband Renn Hawkey helped ease the burden each night.
“My husband got the brunt of it,” she says. “It was beyond exhaustion. My feet were swelling, everything was swelling. But he was there to cheer me on and massage me — until the alarm went off the next morning. And it was off to the field of battle. … It was the hardest thing I have ever done.”
Co-producer Carly Hugo says Farmiga’s gracious, fighting spirit was infectious on the set. “The feeling across the board was, if she’s still smiling, we’re going to smile,” Hugo says. “That went from cast to crew.”
Taissa Farmiga, 17, who plays the younger version of Vera’s character, says she was inspired by her older sister’s courage. “There were a couple of breakdowns,” she says. “But we pushed through. We did it.”
Farmiga gave birth in November and says her bubbling daughter was the force that carried her through the film, which has received strong critical praise since its Sundance premiere. Gytta (Ukranian for “gift” ) received a special thanks in the film’s end credits.
“I was operating from two heartbeats,” Farmiga says. “Her energy was there. Now that she’s out of the womb, I see what I was tapping into. This is one energetic child.”
