'A story that could take place everywhere': Lily Gladstone on the importance of The Memory Police

Lily Gladstone thinks 'The Memory Police' is so powerful because it is a "story that could take place everywhere".

The 37-year-old actress is starring in the sci-fi movie which takes place on an island controlled by a hidden force that makes people collectively forget and found the plot particularly hard-hitting as a Native American as it addresses the "effort to erase" culture and language.

Speaking at a screening of her film 'Killers of the Flower Moon' in Los Angeles on Sunday (18.02.24), Lily said: "It's the kind of story that could take place everywhere. I think anybody who comes from a world culture or a history where there's been a systematic effort to erase your sense of who you are, your memories, your language, your culture – in this film, birds are disappeared because they're deemed unnecessary."

'The Memory Police' is an adaptation of Yoko Ogawa's novel and will see Lily reunited with Martin Scorsese – who serves as an executive producer – and she explained that the ambiguity of the plot and setting adds to the picture's message.

She said: "It's on an unnamed island at an unnamed place, unnamed time. So it takes place nowhere and therefore everywhere."

Charlie Kaufman has penned the script for the film and Gladstone explained that it will contain aspects of his previous work on movies such as 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'.

Lily said: "The adaptation is done by Charlie Kaufman, so it's labelled as a sci-fi, but in the way that 'Eternal Sunshine' and 'Synecdoche, New York' was a sci-fi. It happens very much in the subconscious mind and deals with, of course, themes of memory, authoritarianism."