Ned Benson's debut films are the same story from different points of view

When Ned Benson's The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, the event was introduced by the festival organisers as an "unprecedented cinematic experience". Consisting of two films - subtitled Him and Her - showing the dissolution of a marriage from the male and female perspective, the event was certainly unusual, if not quite as rare as the festival wanted you to think.

After all, an interconnecting film series that follows multiple characters is nothing new. Take Lucas Belvaux's 2002 Trilogy of films ( On the Run, An Amazing Couple and After Life) that can be watched in any order - Benson says that's also possible with The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him and Her. Or the two-part 1988 adaptation of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, directed by Christine Edzard. Or, more famously, Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours films, which draws disparate characters together in its third part, Red.

It was watching news footage from Cannes when Three Colours: Red played in competition back in 1994 that inspired the New York-born Benson - then only 16 years old - to investigate European cinema further. Soon he was gorging on everyone from Kieslowski to Olivier Assays, Laurent Cantet, Agnès Varda and the Dardenne brothers.

Yet while Benson admits Kieslowski's thematic interests and visual style were an inspiration, he never set out to copy the structure of the Three Colours trilogy. Instead, it was only after the Columbia University graduate sent his initial script to actress Jessica Chastain (who he'd befriended after meeting at the Malibu Film Festival) that the idea evolved.

"We just had this script and then we developed this character, and all of a sudden it became this two-movie project," he says. At the time, Chastain was working on Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, about to burst onto the Hollywood scene (she's since gained two Oscar nominations, for The Help and Zero Dark Thirty).

Benson asked Chastain to play Eleanor, in a script that was written from her husband Conor Ludlow's point of view. "I said, 'I would love to because I really believe in you, but I would like to also have the female perspective. I want to know why she disappears, where she goes, who's in her life…' And then he went and wrote Her. And it was really special," Chastain says.

With two scripts, one showing Conor's viewpoint and the other Eleanor's, the combined result is a film about how a couple deal with themselves and each other - in this case after the death of their infant son has torn them apart. "All of a sudden I had this film that was based on perspective. I had his side and her side, and we thought that was pretty interesting to at least try to film," says Benson, who until now had made only short films.
Casting James McAvoy as Conor, Isabelle Huppert (one of Chastain's idols) as Eleanor's red-wine-swilling mother and William Hurt as her father, Him and Her indeed make for an intriguing 190-minute viewing experience. Containing some overlapping scenes, "you can view them however you want to view them", says Benson. "They each contextualise the other. I don't think the order really matters. There was never really an intention of how exactly they should be watched, and I want the audience to watch it in whatever way they want to."