Maggie Gyllenhaal: New film had so little cash I got naked on a ferry

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new movie was made on such a tight budget her costume changes involved getting “totally naked” in a ferry bathroom.

She plays the lead in The Kindergarten Teacher, about a successful teacher who forms an obsessive relationship with a poetically brilliant pupil. She told an audience in London that the film, by writer-director Sara Colangelo, was harder to fund as it was written, produced and led by women.

“We never thought we would have enough money, and we didn’t,” she said. “We all got paid nothing and deferred our salaries because we go, ‘I’m grateful to even be able to make it,’ and, ‘We’ll make it work because we are a group of women and that’s how we do it.’”

The movie, out this month, is set in New York.

“I changed my clothes in the bathroom on the Staten Island Ferry. It was maybe my most un-filmstar-like moment.

“One should never be totally naked on a ferry,” she said. Gyllenhaal, 40, who co-produced the film, has two daughters with actor husband Peter Sarsgaard.

She is running a project with Autograph Collection Hotels offering a hotel room to three aspiring female screenwriters for a week so they can focus on their work.