December 17, 2013 | Los Angeles, USA

After a screening of “August: Osage County” at the TV Academy’s theater in North Hollywood, Deadline’s Pete Hammond sat down with three of the stars from the film’s cast – Meryl Streep, Margo Martindale and Abigail Breslin – to talk about making the film based on Tracy Letts‘ Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play of a deeply dysfunctional Midwestern family coming together, physically if not emotionally, after a tragedy. The three actresses talked about living and cooking together for two months in a group of condos behind a Toyota dealership in the Oklahoma town where the film was shot; what screenwriter-playwright Letts and director John Wells took out and put into the two-hour movie compared with the original three-hour play; the “real” secret behind the makeup that transformed Streep and the emotional challenges of playing a cancer-stricken, pill-popping matriarch who’s mad at just about everybody, including herself.