Vanessa Kirby Talks About Filming a 30-Minute Labor Scene for 'Pieces of a Woman'

Vanessa Kirby is getting a lot of Oscar buzz for her work in the Netflix movie Pieces of a Woman and she’s opening up about one of the pivotal scenes in the film.

The movie opens with a 30-minute labor scene and she discussed how she prepared for it during a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar.

“I started watching everything I could find. Endless documentaries, home birth videos, but everything was so sanitized; everything was so edited,” Vanessa said.

Vanessa ended up shadowing an obste­trician and witnessing a live birth.

“I watched her for six hours go through a really difficult labor, no painkillers, forceps. It got really, really difficult…I watched her go on a completely lone journey, like an odyssey, through the most primal, almost divine…And I saw the power and the fear in all of it. I came away far more of a woman in appreciating the sacredness of the feminine in a way that I don’t think I had fully realized. I feel like I had lived something in human experience I hadn’t lived before,” Vanessa said. “It brought everything that I sort of had known intellectually into being, which is, this is like the magnificence of being a woman, and its creation essentially…It almost gave birth to the film inside my heart.”

The trailer for the movie, which also stars Shia LaBeouf, was released this week.