Rachel Lee Goldenberg on Balancing Clare’s Past and Present for ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’

Tiny Beautiful Things asks us to look inward at how the choices in our past can affect our present and how we can use those experiences to carry on into our future. It is, all at once, dreamy, immediate, and nostalgic and features an incredibly messy and relatable performance from the incomparable Kathryn Hahn. Director Rachel Lee Goldenberg, who helmed the first two episodes, guides us with care and precision.

This limited series is one of the only shows that I can think of that shows how characters use physical intimacy to combat their dark or troublesome feelings. Clare, played by Hahn and Sarah Pidgeon as a young adult, acts before she thinks. When her mother, Frankie, passes away, she sleeps with a young funeral director before people arrive for the service, and, in the present, she uses physical contact as a balm to sooth her ailing marriage.

“It was something that when I first read it the read both scripts, it stuck to me,” Goldenberg says. “I recognized that from Cheryl’s work in Wild–to have that need. To me, the sex isn’t about the sex, at least in the in the first couple episodes. It might be in a later episode with Danny where, maybe, it is about having feelings that just feel so big and so overwhelming and is so all encompassing that it needs to come out in some way. That is how I thought about it and how we talked about it. The way we talked about the moment where Joel touches young Clare’s shoulder, we wanted her to think, ‘Did that hand touch my mom’s hand?’ It’s such a big feeling, and it’s so fucking hard to deal with those feelings that you just have to do something. How do I get more of…this? And how do I get it out of me? Or when Clare is having sex with the Uber driver, that’s coming from another place. She feels so shitty that she needs to bring things back for herself. Sex is unlike anything else in our lives and we just go on as people who walk around in clothes and reply to emails and just act normally. Sex is an example of something more physical and more emotional and raw.”

When Clare attempts to sleep with an Uber driver, she is shocked and tickled when she is tossed on a water bed. Remember those? I didn’t think they made those anymore! Hahn’s face registers so much: confusion, delight, pain, regret, and so much more. Goldenberg reveals that the slippery tone was particularly difficult to grab while shooting this seemingly simple scene.

“It’s a scene that is one of my favorites to shoot, and it wasn’t easy,” she says. “That moment where she realizes it’s a waterbed and she is oscillating between so many emotions is one of my favorite things about the show. Her immediate ‘I’m an idiot…what am I doing?’ feeling and her thinking that it’s hilarious but on the verge of tears…you can’t tell if she’s laughing or crying. There is a version of that scene that is about ten minutes long, and she is going back and forth like that. Kathryn’s work in that scene is so gorgeous and unlike anything that I’ve ever seen. The comedy isn’t supposed to be a break from the reality–the comedy is the reality. The reality is sad and it sucks but it’s going to be a funny story. It’s something that Liz Tigelaar say when I started asking her questions about what is the intention of the scene? Or is this person feeling this way or this way? And she said, ‘This show is both and.’ For instance, a person can feel strong, and they also want to be taken care of, or they can be a mess and yet be incredibly wise. Clare is a shit show, but she has these amazing instincts. That was a perfect ‘both and’ scene, because she desperately wants to have sex but she’s never felt more pathetic in her life. It was hilarious and heartbreaking on the page.”

When we are introduced to the younger version of Hahn’s character, we assume that the filmmakers consider those scenes as flashbacks, but Tiny Beautiful considers them alive. When the past invades Clare’s mind and heart, they appear for a reason. Goldenberg reveals how they calibrated the past and present.

“Finding the visual language of that was a journey,” she admits. “When we see which version of Clare was in the script, but bringing that to life was something we had to talk about. It’s an oversimplification, but we would call it Past Happy and Past Sad and then Present so there were three looks. We would need to establish how much was introduced into each scene was quite fun to do. For that bus scene, we had to make sure that it didn’t feel too literal, because the show isn’t literal at all. There was one iteration, where you see exactly what’s happening with the child stepping onto the bus and the child handing her the balloon. We don’t need to see it that way, because the letter itself is so beautiful and it speaks for itself. How do we messy that up and put it in a strung out, heroin haze? That scene, for instance, had a dreamier feel. One thing that Liz talked about the past and the present was not that we’re never doing flashbacks. We’re sort of in two timelines but then they merge. We are trying to add context in a non-linear way, and that felt very ambitious to me. It felt fluid and that could change. Sometimes we don’t know, sometime we do, and sometimes, like a Dear Sugar letter, we won’t know until the end.”

The end of episode one ends with Clare discovering an old box placed on her porch with an old, yellow coat curled up inside. It sends a shock wave through her, and her longing for her mother has never been stronger.

“The way that I thought about it was that young Clare has never fully allowed herself to believe that the coat could be returned,” Goldenberg says. “There is a part of her brain that thinks that the coat doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe Frankie got her money back for it and it was figured out. Having that proof was supposed to feel like a discovery. She has no choice but to face it the feelings of guilt that she had about it. Since the show is from Clare’s perspective, we have this moment where she finds this coat as almost her realizing her crime. If her mom was there, she would’ve told Clare that it was fine. Frankie wants her to have what she wanted. We are living in Clare’s guilt, but Frankie would’ve been able to tell her that it wasn’t a big deal. It was nice to zero in on that moment to show how big and painful that it can be. Then it doesn’t need to be.”

If the marriage between Danny and Clare is over by the season’s end…does that mean he will immediately move on with Mel? There is an optimism that Quentin Plair brings to Danny’s final few scenes, and he seems ready to move onto the next phase of his life. Goldenberg was reluctant to reveal her personal thoughts.

“I have my own thoughts and theories, but I don’t want to reveal,” she says, thoughtfully. “It needs to live in the ether. What I love about shooting those scenes is that we have these incredible actors. It was so fun to shoot those therapy scenes. It’s actually very rare that you get scenes that long and get to play within that time. Because they are all so good, it was a director’s dream that we do the scene, and then I give a note and it’s totally different. That was so fun to do for me because of the level of skill between Kathryn [Hahn] Quentin [Plair] and Tijuana [Ricks] was so strong that I could give a minuscule adjustment that it show how good writing can become twelve different things when you put it on its feet.”

Tiny Beautiful Things is streaming now on Hulu.