Aaron Sorkin has compared directing his leading lady Jessica Chastain on new film Molly’s Game to “driving a Lamborghini”.

The 55 year old filmmaker was speaking at the 2017 edition of CinemaCon in Las Vegas at the end of March, and he said that the 40 year old star made life very easy on set and that he really didn’t have to do much in the way of directing in terms of her role.

Jessica ChastainJessica Chastain at CinemaCon 2017 in Las Vegas

“It was very daunting until she [Chastain] made it very comfortable – it’s like driving a Lamborghini,” he said. “You don’t have to work very hard, you don’t have to put your foot on the pedal very hard, it wants to go fast and it knows what to do. You really just have to be encouraging and make a small adjustment once in a while.”

Molly’s Game, based on the memoir of Molly Bloom entitled ‘From Hollywood's Elite to Wall Street's Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker’, is currently in post-production and is set to be released in the United States by the end of 2017.

Sorkin describes Chastain’s character Molly as “super smart, she graduates from college with all kinds of honours, she’s heading to Harvard Law School, she’s 100 yards away from making the Olympic ski team when she has a freak accident that prevents her from doing it. She decides that before she goes to law school she’s going to have a year off, go to Los Angeles and be a waitress, just to be young and in hot weather for the first time in her life.”

Aaron Sorkin and Jessica Chastain at CinemaCon 2017Aaron Sorkin and Jessica Chastain at CinemaCon 2017

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“She ends up running the world’s most high-stakes poker game, because she has this great entrepreneurial business sense. The game keeps getting bigger and bigger, she keeps making it get bigger, until millions of dollars are changing hands every few minutes, and her fatal mistake is that she accidentally lets four members of the Russian mafia into the game, and that’s what got the FBI very interested.”

About his motivation for directing it, the Moneyball and The Social Network filmmaker said: “I suddenly became interested in doing it because after I’d written it… I felt there were traps in it and ways to do it wrong. The story has a lot of heart, and I wanted to make sure that the heart was there, along with the glamour and the excess and the decadence and the gambling and everything.”

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