MRH: The sense of isolation in Pascale’s character is incredibly deep in the film, but there are things in your script that give us some psychological background which helps explain why she is such an introvert. One major clue comes up in her conversation in the coffee shop with the artists / prostitute / hustler and recalls the family farm she and her father lost. There’s also the coffee shop scene where he coat gets stolen, and we see how ill at ease she is around people.

DW: In the original story there’s a lot of political referencing to the time period, and I had to justify and come up with some other reason why she couldn’t afford to go out and purchase another coat. After my research, though, I actually ended up going into places like Goodwill and the Salvation Army, and found that you couldn’t buy a woman’s winter coat for under $50, which shocked the Hell out of me. I’m sure there are outlet stores where you can find something that’s suitable, but I needed something more for her to go to such lengths to get the coat back; there had to be a sentimental connection, so I tied that in with the father and the need to keep this particular coat, and also the reason why she was struggling financially on minimum wage. A lot of people who read the script felt that people don’t struggle so much, and I disagree with that.

MRH: No, I think it was quite true in showing people saving as much as they can to economize. It’s no different than turning down the thermostat and for months sleeping in a coat. I think almost everyone (myself included) has gone to extremes to either stay warm, spread out the food budget, or do whatever you can to get by because minimum wage is never enough to survive on, so to myself, her extremes come off as very truthful.

DW: A lot of her money went into protecting and giving her father the lifestyle outside of the institution, which here in Quebec aren’t the greatest. We shot in an actual home, and it was fairly expensive, and I was shocked that the amount it cost to put one of your relatives… can get quite expensive, so every penny that she had would end up going to pay for the comfort of her father.

That also showed the side of how big her heart was, and is: that she would put other peoples’ needs first before her own, and by doing that, that sort of justified and earned me the right to be able to make it plausible that she would get up at 11 o’clock in the middle of the night and travel probably not as far as she thought she was going to go. (She ended up going way out to the outsides of the city.) [After she steals a coat from someone] I needed for her to deliver the coat to the rightful owner…She needed to correct her wrong, because that was the kind of person that she was.

MRH: How much did you work with Pascale in terms of developing the character, because I found her performance to be very nuanced. There’s so much going in her face and behind her eyes that it really helps the character.

DW: Well, Pascale and I have known each other for twenty years… When we started working on Girl in the White Coat it became very easy to communicate to her in just a few simple words or a very simple direction, and she knew exactly what the character was going through, and what she needed to do… We both understood the character so well that if she was ever to go beyond the character’s believability I would be able to pull it back, and if something was too obvious I could easily pull that back and ask her to make it more internal so that a lot of it happened like you said behind the eyes, so you could see the subtext.

I was a bit worried at first because she had done a lot of theatre and a lot of television just prior to working on the film, and a lot of that work was very external. We had a week of rehearsal, and… she quickly fell into the quiet subtext of the character. She really understood the character so well that we were able to create [Elise] fairly easily, because of our working relationship in the past.