Jessica Chastain spends a lot of time before a film shoot creating the memories of her characters.

The Oscar-winning actress likes to create the history of her characters in the run-up to a production to help inform her performance in each scene.

“I spend a lot of time creating the memory of the characters I play. So even if it doesn’t have anything to do with a scene, even if I never talk about something, I create a history for whoever I’m playing, because then what it does is it will just always walk into the room with the character,” she told Variety. “Especially someone like Sylvia, who leads with it.”

Chastain plays Sylvia, a woman struggling to overcome addiction and sexual abuse, alongside Peter Sarsgaard as Saul, a man with early onset dementia, in Michel Franco’s Memory.

To help her create Sylvia’s memories and history, the Zero Dark Thirty star drew from people she knew who had “experienced very dark things” and read what she could that reminded her of the character.

Thanks to her preparation, the 46-year-old didn’t “feel nervous” before shooting Memory’s intense emotional scenes, even though she knew Franco wouldn’t film as many shots as usual.

“The way Michel works is there’s no coverage, so you need to make sure you’re on set with someone who can bring it because you’re not going to be able to edit around a moment,” she said, to which Sarsgaard added, “When you’re acting with someone else who’s having a real experience, then you have a real experience.”

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