On The Big Screen, The Goldfinch Takes Flight

ON A MARCH DAY ON NEW YORK CITY’S UPPER EAST Side, producers huddle on the narrow first floor of an art gallery, studying their monitors and surrounded by pictures of flora and fauna.

- Sarah Begley

Eagles and herons adorn the walls, but the bird that serves as the focal point of this big production is much daintier: small enough to perch on a finger, yet still beautiful enough to start a sensation.

The bird, of course, is a goldfinch—or rather a painting of one from the 17th century by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius. That indelible image was the inspiration for Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2013 novel, The Goldfinch, which tracks the winding coming-of-age story of a teenage boy who steals the painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the aftermath of a bombing in which his mother is killed. Here at the gallery, director John Crowley—best known for helming the 2015 Oscar- nominated film Brooklyn—is shooting the final scene of the book’s much anticipated film adaptation. The real action is taking place upstairs, where Ansel Elgort and Nicole Kidman are filming, but this characteristically cramped Manhattan gallery is too small to fit everyone on one floor, so most of the crew watches from below, Kidman and Elgort visible in miniature on the monitors as they shoot one take after another.

It’s a particularly frigid day, so Kidman and Elgort are both bundled in parkas over their costumes when I meet them downstairs after the shoot wraps. Elgort holds a plastic cup, lid and straw with his hand pulled inside the sleeve of his parka, such that the cup appears where his hand should be, while Kidman is wearing a gray wig and prosthetics to look older, as she’s quick to point out. Could it be the formula for a second Oscar, after she donned a fake nose to play Virginia Woolf in The Hours and went on to win Best Actress?