‘Let Them All Talk:’ the movie was almost entirely improvised.

Let Them All Talk is, ostensibly, based on a screenplay by short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg (who the cast says was on set and extremely helpful) but the stars say that the movie, which is set on a cruise ship and follows what happens when a novelist (Streep) travels to England to accept an award and invites her two oldest friends (Bergen and Wiest) along for the ride, was largely improvised

When Bergen let it slip that there was “no script,” Wiest demurred, “Well, I wasn’t gonna mention that.” “I mean, they would give us the outlines of a situation, and then we knew where we had to end up,” Streep explained. “But they didn’t tell us how to get there.” While Eisneberg was on hand with ideas and character biographies, it was up to the actresses to figure out what they were going to say and how they were going to say it. It was an experience both Bergen and Wiest described as “terrifying.”

“I think that [Soderbergh] liked all the ellipses, and he didn’t want to know everything. He wanted there to be mysteries surrounding everybody’s interior quest,” Streep said. “That’s the feeling I got. And so we didn’t even discuss it amongst ourselves. We kept our cards close, so that it would be something that would unfold over time. And maybe we’d figure out what was going on by the end, but it wasn’t laid out.”