January 06, 2014 | Los Angeles, USA

Meryl Streep and Margo Martindale participated in another Q&A for “August: Osage County”, moderated by The Los Angeles Times’ John Horn. Martindale told how important it was for the actors to socialise and spend time together to become a family, and Streep talked more about thea idea of having all actors housed together. “You never have enough time on a movie. This is born out of a play, very intensive, word intensive, and we really had to feel like sisters. That was really important to me. So I said to John Wells, ‘What about the living accommodations? I could just see it that everybody would be in their own gated community, and I said ‘Why don’t we all live together and find kind of a condo thing, where we all live together’ This went real big with some members of the production, who needed some convincing, but it all worked out. We all lived in this weird little condo village that was just being built as we were living there. We had some tragic dinners together that would mirror what was coming in the movie. The food was not so good.”

The actresses also dished on the father character played by Sam Shepard, whose disappearance is the reason for the family to reunite. “Sam Shepard walks away with a lot of good feeling and I don’t know where he gets off because, honestly, he seduces my baby sister and then he kills himsel. And in a way suicide is a really selfish act and very cruel to everybody. It’s like aimed at the family. I understand it aimed at me but also the girls. It marks them and its succeeding generations and everyone has to figure out. Martindale called the original Broadway production “pitch perfect. It was three hours and ten minutes that went really fast”.