Anne Hathaway Totally "Broke Down" Filming Her New Melodrama 'Mother Mary'

Anne Hathaway apologized after she "broke down" in front of Michaela Coel.

In a Vogue cover story about the film, the cast and crew opened up about shooting the movie. During a particularly difficult scene, which director David Lowery reveals took about a week to film, "at one point Annie broke down and said, ‘I have to apologize, because I think what's going to come out of me will hurt you.' And Michaela took her hands and said, ‘I love you, I trust you.'"

Anne didn't just act in the film, she also recorded some original songs with Jack Antonoff. In the movie, Anne's titular Mother Mary leaves the public eye while trying to figure out who she really is, before reconnecting with the old friend (played by Michaela Coel) who helped her create her now-iconic persona at the beginning of her career.

“What struck me right away, reading the script, is that you can’t ‘perform’ Mother Mary,” Anne Hathaway says in the interview. “If I got the part, I would have to become material David could craft with.”

“I had to submit to being a beginner. The humility of that—showing up every day knowing you’re going to suck. And it has to be okay. You’re not ‘bad.’ You’re just a beginner," she continues. "Getting to that mindset—I had to shed some things that were hard to shed. It was welcome. But it was hard, the way transformational experiences can be hard.”

Another difficult part of the film? The fact none of the songs existed at the beginning of shooting. “It was so confusing,” Anne says. “If I’d had the music a year before we ever turned a camera on, I would have tattooed every note of it on my soul, and there would have been a whole process, very specific. And that was not available to me. In the end. I am very grateful I could not take control.”

In short, Mother Mary is one movie that required a lot of its stars — and it promises to be a movie viewers won't forget. “David’s writing is so vivid—we were forced into an intensity,” Michaela Coel says. “The physicality [Anne] had to learn in preparation for this job—and it’s not just us in the barn, it’s the crew, it’s the producers, and so of course this day was terrifying, a little monster on her shoulder, but no one realized until after the first take. And then to keep doing it—take after take. That requires a lot of strength. Gallons and tons.”