[Web series are] “the best opportunity we have to express our voices, because we can use any type of format we want. I think it’d be great to see more shows that represent different viewpoints and experiences than are typically seen in comedy…” “The internet has been great for creators to get their voices heard! … I think having a diverse writer’s room isn’t just essential but should be mandatory.”
Secrets & Liars, a seven-episode comedy about a texting serial killer and the less-than-motivated friends who try to track him down, is the first web series from comedy duo Ilana Rubin and Lana Schwartz, available on their website. Not only did they create and write the series, they also star in it as the leads who are best friends. Schwartz and Rubin kindly took the time to speak to us about the process of creating their first series, and the projects they’d like to see more of, now that there are fewer barriers to production.
Bitch Flicks: What inspired you to make a web series? What drew you to the idea of making a comedic thriller?
Lana Schwartz: Ilana and I have been working together, writing and filming sketches for a few years now, and we felt like now was the time for us to do something a little more ambitious. There are so many different ways to tell a story and we wanted to do something that we felt represented our comedic voice. We were interested in doing a comedic thriller because we both love dramatic teen shows, and these dramatic situations seemed like such a sharp contrast to being a regular person.
Ilana Rubin: I think we were enticed by the idea of committing to something a bit bigger than a sketch where an idea begins and ends in 3-5 minutes. Longer narratives are the kind of entertainment we both enjoyed, so we wanted to try our hand at that. Personally, I love acting. It’s my favorite part of creating something of your own, and I was excited to play someone very different from who I am in real life.
I think we were drawn to this specific genre because we both enjoy those kinds of shows. Lana is a huge fan of Pretty Little Liars while I really enjoy shows like True Detective. With Secrets & Liars we were able to bring the absurdities of both shows under one umbrella, while really emphasizing the ridiculousness of teen thriller tropes. There was so much to play with!
Bitch Flicks: What was the most challenging part in making the series? What was the most rewarding part?
Lana Schwartz: The most challenging part was getting all of the details together. It was hard to bring together so many different people, and coordinate with our locations and crew. But I think that’s also why it was so rewarding – because we got to see everything come together in a final product.
Ilana Rubin: I will save the best for last and start with the most challenging parts. I think the most difficult thing was having our hands in every area of the production. While we did have a wonderful and talented crew (Brittany Tomkin) producing and directing (Jorja Hudson), we really were involved in every aspect when it came to the logistics. We sought out the locations, [did the casting], and had input on cinematography as well. Logistical planning is my least favorite part of any production because there’s so much that goes into it. I have so much admiration for the production managers and line producers whose literal job is to make sure that’s all under control.
The most rewarding part was actually shooting everything and doing it and at the end of the day having this thing that we wrote and created and could show the world. I’m still so proud of us. It’s just a drop in the bucket of what we will create in our lives, but I think it’s a really big testament to our work ethic. It was also pretty great to be able to shoot in the high school we went to and see some of our old teachers in the process and know that we have their support as well. Shout out to Francis Lewis, one of the best public high schools in Queens!
Bitch Flicks: How long did it take to film? What kind of equipment did you use?
Ilana Rubin: The process was a little stop/start. Our first shoot day was before Christmas and then we took a bit of a break because of the holidays and started back up in January and then we finished around March, I believe.
Jorja used a Canon T3I, and we rented an Astra Light Panel but shot without a tripod. It was mostly handheld because we wanted a more gritty feel to it. For audio, we used lavalier mics and our sound operator (and editor), Carina Jollie, was also using a boom. She is a superwoman.
Bitch Flicks: It seems like web series have opened a lot of doors in terms of the type of stories people can tell, and the number of people who can produce their own shows. What kinds of opportunities do you see for performers online? What kinds of shows would you like to see getting made?
Lana Schwartz: It’s been really great to see the opportunities and recognition a lot of our friends have gotten for their web series. The Other Kennedys is a really great one, and Life, After is another series that recently came out that also centers around two best friends under unique circumstances. It’s the best opportunity we have to express our voices, because we can use any type of format we want. I think it’d be great to see more shows that represent different viewpoints and experiences than are typically seen in comedy, and stuff that delves deeper into people’s real experiences.
Ilana Rubin: I definitely agree. The internet has been great for creators to get their voices heard! The world obviously always needs improvement, but I think this has been a great thing to come of this digital age we’re living in. I think having a diverse writer’s room isn’t just essential but should be mandatory. This is tricky coming from a straight white woman who writes with another straight white woman, but I would love to see more web series with different voices being heard. I also write for a web-talk-show, Deadass, and our writing team is one of the most diverse I have ever seen. I don’t believe you can create a dynamic story/concept without the minds of people from different backgrounds and experiences.
I think I’d like to see more series with heart. There are incredible ones that are just plain silly and joke-filled, and those are great too. A good mixture is healthy! But some of my favorite ones are Clench and Release, Under the Table, Awkward Black Girl, and Triplets of Kings County, where you can invest in the characters while also enjoying the goofs.
Bitch Flicks: Is there going to be a second season of Secrets & Liars? What other projects do you have coming up?
Ilana Rubin: Yes! As of now, we will be doing a season two, but we have some other things we want to work on first. I just had a play go up at the Annoyance Theater called Phat Camp. Lana has a sketch show that I’ll also be acting in going up at The PIT called The Best Part. We have a couple of videos that we’ll be releasing in the meantime and some that we plan to shoot before we start writing season two. We also host My Hometown, a monthly comedy show about the places people are from, so there is a lot to be excited about!
Lana Schwartz: Everything Ilana said! Plus, also, my sketch team Deathbird has a second spank (an audition for a run) going up at Upright Citizens Brigade.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.
‘The Lotus Gun’ is a critically acclaimed short, independent student film co-written and directed by Amanda Milius. The film is a beautifully rendered post-apocalyptic story with a Western aesthetic that features a queer relationship between its two female leads.
The Lotus Gun is a critically acclaimed short, independent student film co-written and directed by Amanda Milius. The film is a beautifully rendered post-apocalyptic story with a Western aesthetic that features a queer relationship between its two female leads. Set in a future of wide open spaces, The Lotus Gun is a survivor story about Nora (Lauren Avery), its laconic, independent lead, who escaped from a drug cult and a life of sex slavery.
The cinematography of this film is breathtaking, conveying more about a world long gone to seed than any exposition or carefully placed ruins possibly could. The Lotus Gun critiques collectivism, favoring instead an individualistic approach popular in the Western genre. Here the communal, sharing societies are actually patriarchal, and they commodify women, engaging in sex trafficking and sexual slavery. It is then not surprising that naive Daphine (Dasha Nekrasova), Nora’s partner, is fascinated by a young man who wanders onto their property, while Nora plans to kill him, knowing the threat he poses.
Enter The Lotus Gun.
Guns are often a key feature of the the Western genre, and the relationship between the old West protagonist and his (usually) gun is often a love story. Here, guns are so scarce that few have ever seen them, so the gun itself is a phallic relic. Interestingly, Nora, a woman, is presumably the only person left who has one.
The Lotus Gun is an engaging film with arresting imagery and a plot that took me to surprising places. I look forward to seeing newcomer Amanda Milius’ next projects. My only critique is that the two female leads, being thin, white, blonde women, are not as unique as the story itself. I did, however, appreciate how dirty they were, their skin covered in blemishes and bruises, their clothes ripped and dusty.
I had the privilege of interviewing talented writer and director Amanda Milius.
Bitch Flicks: What made you choose to make this film?
Amanda Milius: I have always been drawn to the things people do when there’s no law around, so in pre- or post- current versions of society or civilization. I had both smaller and larger versions of this particular story I’d had for a while, and at school we got to do these sort of smaller 5-minute films throughout the program. So I explored different aspects of the kinds of people and stories I like, and I just wanted an opportunity to get one fully realized thought out. It happens to be 25 minutes long, which I certainly heard no end about from everyone I know… But I’m glad it is what it is because it wasn’t meant to be 12 minutes long.
I like the idea of these two very different kinds of women and how differently they react to the world and how their basic personality makeups create a conflict just out of that. Nora sees the world as an inherently bad place and Daph feels the opposite. I also just wanted to express my particular style and aesthetic and really have a story where that could be featured… I definitely didn’t want to do anything indoors; I really like people having to survive in nature. I had a very particular visual style I wanted and I used to be a photographer for fashion and music magazines so I’ve had time to sort out the style I like and I wanted a moment to showcase that.
Thankfully, I found a really great team of people who also got it and really expanded on it. Sean Bagley, the director of photography (DP), is just as much a part of it, same with the costume designer Adam Alonso, and the production designers Marcelo Dolce and Katie Pyne — everyone really got it and so it comes together in a very good way, thankfully.
BF: Why do you feel this is an important story to tell?
AM: Because even though society does exist and keeps us safe, there are things we take for granted as reality when they are only just imposed on us from society. So how real are they? How is equality between people maintained? How do the weak stand up to the strong or groups of people when they are outnumbered? I maybe have more of Nora’s point of view of the world: I don’t think people will act the way they do now when civilization is gone, and so then how will people decide what’s right and wrong? What kind of women will survive and how? How will men and women interact? I think it’s important now. I think it’s a good thing to figure out what your values are as an independent person with an independent morality.
At the end of the day, it’s a movie about loyalty and relationships. In two-person relationships, there’s always a power dynamic, which isn’t bad, but it exists. I wanted to deal with ideas about “possessiveness” and ownership and freedom within relationships. Dash splits because she maybe thinks she will find freedom elsewhere. And in this particular world and situation, she finds out she was free before. Nora already knows this, so the way she deals with the betrayal is interesting… how she really does kind of treat Daph as a pet, like she doesn’t know any better. But she saves her and that’s what matters, she still makes sure she has a life. The idea was not that how all these people act is necessarily what I or we would think is correct or right, but in this world it’s what happens.
BF: Why did you choose to make your film a Western?
AM: Technically it’s not a western because it doesn’t take place in the Old West but it is a variation. I chose to place it in a broken down world after civilization for the reasons I mentioned above but I also really like Westerns and the things about people you can explore in those kinds of stories: what people get up to when there’s no real law around, when it’s just people deciding for themselves how to live and what’s right and wrong. I also really like how Nora is basically Clint Eastwood combined with my friend Jennifer Herrema (singer from 90s indie band Royal Trux); there’s no better character than that for me! It’s cool having her be strong in a sort of reserved, silent, resolved, and complicated way. A lot of the “strong” women in films these days, which seems to be the new thing, they are so annoying. I’m not saying people shouldn’t try to have more of those characters, but I haven’t seen one I really liked since Alien or Terminator, which is funny because no one was trying so hard then to make great female characters. That’s probably why there’s not a lot of them, but those two are such great examples and no one notices. Now they have the girls always doing kung fu or something; it’s so awful.
BF: Could you talk about your choice to make the women a couple in the film?
AM: I liked the idea of this sort of sensual relationship in a Blue Lagoon kind of way between the women in their undisturbed environment and how that gets disrupted and altered when the new element shows up.
Basically, they are a couple but that could be seen as being by default, as they are the only two people out there for years together… the idea was that it was a vague kind of non-defined thing where they were best friends and family and probably lovers in this kind of survivalist, futuristic way. When Mike shows up, it can be questioned whether or not Daph is necessarily gay exactly or if she wavers between attraction to the competing personalities in front of her at that moment. He is new, so is it the newness and strangeness that she’s attracted to, or the fact that he’s a guy? I wanted the girls’ relationship to be almost transcendent of a distinct type of relationship; they are every relationship to each other in a way.
BF: Could you tell us about the significance of the gun (the Lotus Gun) in your film and why you chose it?
AM: The gun itself is kind of like an Excalibur thing, since there’s none around… the idea is both guns and women are rare and therefore of value in this world. But the way they are ‘”valued” is as objects, commodities, things you need to stay alive. The gun is special because the backstory (which you’ll see if I ever get to make the feature or serialized version of this!) is that Dennis, the commune / cult leader, collects artifacts from the past civilization, and this gun is a particular rarity. He had it for some time, and during that time, he had his guys engrave over the original engraving to represent his world. Shotguns like that usually have ducks or dogs or other kinds of hunting imagery on them, really beautiful actually. A lot of those guns have some really amazing art on them. Anyway, so he has this guy crudely engrave his snake image and the Datura flowers they use in their drug ceremonies and weed leaves. Which alone is a cool idea, a shotgun engraved with hippie iconography is so cool. So that’s how it becomes the “Lotus Gun” and it has a sort of mythology pop up around it in this world when it supposedly disappears. When Nora digs it up, it’s a whole new world for her. She has something no one else has, and it’s almost like it was meant for her. No one else ever shot it that we know of, so it’s like Excalibur in that the gun was always waiting for her because she’s the rightful owner of it. Now there is a different balance of power that didn’t exist before.
BF: Could you share a bit about your experiences as a female film writer and director?
AM: I don’t really think about it much, so I can just say that being a writer and a director is great because as of yet, no one has ever taken one of my stories and ruined them, as I’m told will happen when someone finally buys a script from me! I know what you mean though. So far, I guess I’ve been very lucky to work with some very cool people because I hear there are difficult situations for women in this field, but I’ve really loved working with everyone I’ve worked with. I know there are definitely people out there who think maybe someone doesn’t know what they are talking about because they’re female or something, but I just wouldn’t be around that. As a director, for sure I wouldn’t tolerate it, so I just don’t think it would ever get to that. Because that kind of person wouldn’t even be around me anyway. Plus, I made this movie in school, so I had the ability to work with my best friends. Maybe I’ll have more to say on it as I progress through the profession.
I think women in this industry should remember that there are lots of different kinds of women and to not hold us to some idea about ourselves, because it will limit us. We ourselves need to be supportive of other women in a real way, which means supporting all different kinds of films and people. Not box ourselves into one way of thinking. I think women’s film festivals are a great idea because they show that women make very different kinds of films and can excel across all genres. At first, I wasn’t sure about the idea of separating films out based on the gender of the director, but actually I think they make an interesting statement that’s important.
Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
Two things that make Leyla Bouzid’s new film ‘As I Open My Eyes’ distinct from these other [portrait of the artist, coming-of-age films] are: the lead who resists family pressure by joining a band is a young woman and her parents have more to be concerned about than what the neighbors think. The action takes place in Tunis, Tunisia, in 2010, before the Revolution, so any kind of rebellion, even artistic, can draw the attention of the police and lead to arrest — or worse.
“My uncool parents won’t let me be an artist (or writer)” is such a common plot for coming-of-age films that a repertory theater could show a different one every night and fill at least a full month’s calendar. But girls and women usually need not apply as leads in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man genre. In these films, the wife and/or girlfriend of the main character rarely has a personality of her own. The male protagonist has a meddling (or mostly silent) mother. We see sisters as troubled or as comic relief, like in writer-director David Chase’s Not Fade Away, a lackluster semi-autobiographical account of a not very successful band in the 1960s.
Two things that make Leyla Bouzid’s new film As I Open My Eyes distinct from these other films are: the lead who resists family pressure by joining a band is a young woman, Farah (Baya Medhaffar) and her parents have more to be concerned about than what the neighbors think. The action takes place in Tunis, Tunisia, in 2010, before the Revolution, so any kind of rebellion, even artistic, can draw the attention of the police and lead to arrest — or worse.
But Farah is a teenager (she’s 18), so she doesn’t believe she’ll get into trouble with the authorities. As her mother (Ghalia Benali) tries to dissuade her from performing with the band, which includes Farah’s slightly older, manbun-wearing boyfriend, Bohrène (Montassar Ayari), Farah says, “Everyone’s scared for nothing.”
Her mother sighs as she tells Farah, “I used to be like you.”
Like girls and young women all over the world, Farah blithely lies about why she’s late coming home which sends her mother into paroxysms of rage and frustration and leads her to vow to never speak to her daughter again. But the fractured family puts on a good front for their other relatives during Ramadan Iftar as they talk of Farah becoming a doctor and avoid any mention of her musical ambitions.
Bouzid, who is from Tunisia, (she now lives in France) co-wrote the script with Marie-Sophie Chambon and they capture the balancing act required of those who live under a police state. Even the band discusses which songs are (and aren’t) safe to play. When one member asks, “Aren’t we censoring ourselves,” we can see how younger people chafe against the restrictions that have defined their parents’ lives.
A great deal of the film takes place during the band’s performances and rehearsals, the songs commenting on the political situation of the country, similar to Cabaret‘s juxtaposition of musical performances and increasing oppression. But the music is North African with a tinge of punk: Farah’s style of singing sometimes reminds us of X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene and Farah and her bandmates pogo to one song. Farah’s great curly meringue of hair (like her mother, Farah looks like a different person with her hair pulled back) is offset by an early-’80s-style “tail.”
Medhaffar is fully committed as a singer, sometimes seeming to be nearly moved to tears by what she sings, but she shines offstage as well. Too often, a teen lead is played by an actor several years older, a glaring discrepancy at that age. Medhaffar, if anything, seems younger than 18, perfect for the stubborn, determined, and love-addled Farah. Bouzid and Medhaffar expertly capture the intoxication that is a young woman’s first love and first (good!) sexual experience. Benali is also excellent, so much so that I wished the script added more clarity to her backstory. As I Open My Eyes is the second film I’ve seen written and directed by a Tunisian woman about a Tunisian woman becoming an artist (the other is Satin Rouge), a genre I hope we see more of — and not just from Tunisia.
I had the opportunity to talk with Leyla Bouzid, the director and co-writer of As I Open My Eyes, by phone last month. This interview was edited for concision and clarity.
Bitch Flicks:Baya Medhaffar is not just a great singer but also so good in the scenes that show her emotional and physical attachment to her boyfriend. Were there films that feature a young woman’s first love — and sex — that you were influenced by? Were there mistakes you’d seen in other films that you wanted to avoid?
Leyla Bouzid: We wanted to show the emotion. It’s her first love. The kiss at the start of the film is the first kiss and the time they make love is the first time she makes love, even if she doesn’t say it’s her first time. She just says, “It’s the first time I’ve seen a guy naked.” I was always thinking what was important for her. Because in other films, especially films from the Arab world, the issue would be she’s not a virgin anymore. This is not the truth; it’s not the real feeling this young woman would have. And I wanted the film to be very organic and very tactile, that we feel what you feel when someone is touching you for the first time. What I thought about were Jane Campion’s films, like The Piano. When the lovers touch each other you can really feel it. It’s a feminine way of showing love and attraction.
BF:I liked that the mother character starts out as seeming completely unreasonable, but then as the film goes on we see that she’s not. I’m wondering if you gave the actress Ghalia Benali [who is also a singer] any special direction.
LB: Ghalia was very afraid that we would think her character is hysterical. We talked a lot about the mother’s path. At the beginning of the film, she’s protecting her daughter so much that we think, “She’s crazy.” But at another point of the film we think, “She was right.” I pushed her to become this very protective mother. She trusted me. She said that how she was in the first part of the film reminded her of her own mother when she first started singing.
BF:Although the music is North African it also, especially in Medhaffar’s singing had a punk feel. And Farah has one of Patti Smith’s ’70s album covers hanging in her bedroom. What bands did you want Farah’s band to sound like or be influenced by?
LB: In Tunisia, there is not that much of a rock scene. There was when I was really a teenager but not during the period in the film. But there are a lot of Western bands that make rock and punk in Lebanon and Egypt and I was influenced by them. A band called Adif: it’s the band of the composer of the film [Khyam Allami]. It’s really rock but melancholy. I was also influenced by the Lebanese group called Mashrou’ Leila and by Maryam Saleh and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh. The idea was to have this mixture of traditional rock and traditional Tunisian music.
BF:The film takes place before the Revolution in 2010. Six years later, what do you think Farah would be up to? Do you think she would do as you did [Bouzid, like Deniz Gamze Ergüven, writer-director of Mustang attended the French film school La Fémis] and leave Tunisia?
LB: I think she’s still in Tunisia. She’s probably able to sing and has an audience and more of an ability to do concerts, but if she stays she’s probably disappointed — or depressed. When I was searching for the actress to play Farah, I met a lot of young women that were 22, 23 years old [which would be about Farah’s age now] and they were all kind of depressed. When I told them the story of Farah, they said, “Oh this is the story of my life, but I gave up and now I’m stuck with my family.” When watching the film, we can decide what happens. At the end it’s open, if she continues to sing or not.
BF:Your father is an acclaimed Tunisian director. Did you learn anything from him?
LB: The most useful thing I learned from him is: it is really hard in our country to make a film. In Tunisia making a first feature before turning 30 is unusual but part of why I could do it is because I had seen my father, how difficult it was every time for him to make a new film. Even though he was so famous in Tunisia it was still hard for him to get financing. I think when you start in cinema, it’s a dream and people idealize it. I didn’t. I knew it was really complicated.
LB: Yeah, I think really it’s just an empty, I don’t know how to say, a non-event. What the hell do you care about the clothes women wear when they swim? I’m relieved that the French courts stopped this. Politically, it was a very, very, very bad sign.
BF:Surveillance from the state, especially in the form of surrogates, like the “friend” of the band, is a big part of the film. Did you have experiences with state surveillance when you were in Tunisia? Did you know anybody who did? In the U.S., Muslims have been very much targeted in surveillance. Is the same thing happening in France?
LB: Yes, in Tunisia this event in the film, it really happened to me, but not in the same situation. When I was 16 and 17 years old, I was in a cinema club. We were all young. Some were 22 and I was the youngest I think. And we met every Saturday and talked about cinema and started to make our films. There was a guy who was the only one who had his own apartment, so we were always having parties at his house. If we were doing something we had to hide or we wanted to make out or whatever, we always went to his house. And after 3 years, I found out that he was a cop and that he was there to watch us. This is something that happened to a lot of people. Also, all the taxi drivers, they were working for the police, so every seventh person in Tunisia was a cop.
In France, let’s say the atmosphere has been really special for the past two years. It’s more speeches and the media and especially television are openly racist and Muslims are targeted in that way. There is more suspicion. I have a neighbor who’s Jewish but her skin is brown. She looks much more like an Arab than I do. And she told me she’s getting a lot of harassment every day. Individuals say to her, “Go back to your home,” and, “We don’t want Arab people here.”
BF:I’ve now seen two feminist films from Tunisian women writer-directors: yours and Raja Amari’s Satin Rouge, which feature women who find themselves through artistic expression. Can you tell me how you’ve been influenced by other women artists in or outside Tunisia?
LB: In general women directors are very inspiring, like Jane Campion, but also Tunisian women directors, like Moufida Tlatli. Also, other artistic women and singers, like Patti Smith. I really liked what she wrote in her books. And Bjork. And Frida Kahlo: these kind of women who are really creating things.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and The Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
When speaking over the phone, Sharon’s enthusiasm for this pioneering adaptation of a Caribbean Canadian sci-fi novel emanates as though this was a fresh and newly discovered idea. In fact, Sharon has been working on creating this film for the past 15 years (while also establishing herself as a published playwright, writer, actor and award winning director) and although the journey has been long, she strongly believes that now is the perfect time to transition this well-nurtured idea into tangible reality.
This guest post by Amanda Parris appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.
Interview with the filmmaker below.
I was in my first year of university when I first read Nalo Hopkinson’s critically acclaimed novel, Brown Girl in the Ring as part of a Humanities course entitled Cultures of Resistance in the Americas. It had never occurred to me to think of futuristic dystopias and sci-fi literature as part and parcel of a resistance culture that has sustained African Diasporic cultures in the Americas until I was introduced to this work. A few pages into the novel, I was hooked. Located in the city where I have spent most of my life, the story is set in Toronto, a downtown core cordoned off from the surrounding suburbia where the rich and wealthy have fled. In the opening pages Hopkinson sets the scene:
When Toronto’s economic base collapsed, investors, commerce, and government withdrew into the suburb cities leaving the rotten core to decay. Those who stayed were the one’s who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave. The street people. The poor people. The ones who didn’t see the writing on the wall, or who were too stubborn to give up their homes. Or who saw the decline of authority as an opportunity. As the police force left, it sparked large-scale chaos in the city core: the Riots. The satellite cities quickly raised roadblocks at their borders to keep Toronto out. The only unguarded exit from the city core was now over water, by boat or prop plane from the Toronto Island mini-airport to the American side of Niagra Falls.
Nalo Hopkinson
Seventeen years after the publication of Brown Girl in the Ring, Toronto was named the No. 1 city in the world to live in by The Economist. But who benefits or lives the reality of this status? The rise of condo-mania in the downtown core has also led to the rapid gentrification and resulting dislocation of numerous communities – the individuals affected fit a disturbingly similar profile to the ones that Nalo envisioned eventually cordoned off from health care, electricity and technology. Her description of The Burn, that walled-off section of Toronto, feels hauntingly familiar and it is this resonance that writer/director Sharon Lewis feels will hook people into the film adaptation of the novel that she is currently working on: Brown Girl in the Ring – The Prequel.
The Prequel puts the coming-of-age story of the novel’s protagonist, a young girl named Ti-Jeanne, front and center. The film will illustrate her first steps as she moves into the role of the heroine that she becomes in the novel. Beyond an exploration into the particular otherworldly gifts Ti-Jeanne possesses and her ability to navigate the dystopian landscape that defines her home, Ti-Jeanne’s character is also challenged by a more familiar narrative of conflict between her Caribbean and Canadian cultural identities. When speaking over the phone, Sharon’s enthusiasm for this pioneering adaptation of a Caribbean Canadian sci-fi novel emanates as though this was a fresh and newly discovered idea. In fact, Sharon has been working on creating this film for the past 15 years (while also establishing herself as a published playwright, writer, actor and award winning director) and although the journey has been long, she strongly believes that now is the perfect time to transition this well-nurtured idea into tangible reality. Last week Sharon successfully completed a crowdfunding campaign to support the film. Achieving this recent milestone has affirmed her belief that there is an audience out there excited for a story like this and that the moment is now for the film to be realized. She says,
Well I think we’re in the zeitgeist. I think that the novel and the film are coming to life in an appropriate time. I’m not sure if in 1998 we would have understood that this is so relevant to our present day lives. I think that with the rise of social media and technology we have a lot more access to those images so all of a sudden Ferguson, Baltimore, Detroit, all of those are in our consciousness in a way that it wouldn’t have been in 1998 because we didn’t have the same kind of access and the people living within those situations didn’t have the same kind of access. We see the rise of public videos being used in legal battles. That was never the case in the late 1990s. So all of a sudden police officers are being held accountable according to public videos. It doesn’t mean that they’re always being held to justice but they’re actually being held accountable which again is being used as a catalyst for people to riot. In the film that is the trigger for all of the things that happen. There is an economic collapse and the poor people are tired of being poor and they rise up. I think that if you look at why they are rising up it’s because there’s an access to social media in a way that they didn’t have before and then the only way to shut them down is to seclude them and cut off their electricity and cut off their ability to communicate with the outside world where their reality is going on.
Corporate and government decisions to seclude a section of the population following their mass politicized mobilization as a result of increased connectivity and communication feels eerily prophetic in the current era recently dubbed “Black Spring.” Sharon revealed that part of Nalo’s inspiration for the novel came from poignant observations of the harsh realities occurring south of the border:
When I talked to Nalo she was inspired by Detroit in terms of what post-apocalyptic Toronto would look like and this is 1998. So she was in Detroit and looking at a city that basically had an invisible wall around it. You had all the wealthy industrialists living in a particular area and then all the Black neighbourhoods were burnt out, abandoned, policed – heavily policed and the public school system was on its way down. So that’s the Toronto that you’re going to see in my film.
Although set in Toronto, Sharon recognizes that this story of economic flight and extreme disconnection and alienation is one that can resonate beyond the city’s borders. As a child of the Caribbean Diaspora, the extremes of wealth and poverty sitting side-by-side in an imbalanced yet normalized fashion is disconcertingly familiar for Sharon:
I spent a lot of my childhood in Jamaica and Trinidad and a lot of that reality is already there. There were already people that were cut off from technology or cut off from electricity who were having to make do. And right across the street they were seeing the glistening lights. I remember in Jamaica driving through Kingston and on the hillside you’d see people living in zinc shacks, still walking to the river to get water and then just a couple of feet down from them was this massive, beautiful house with satellite dishes and massive technology.
Sharon Lewis
Prescient in the film will be the way that these kinds of divergences in experiences create walls between people – sometimes physical but often subconscious – thereby separating them from each other in ways that enable the current world order:
There is a wall but like any ghetto there’s an invisible wall. There’s a wall that basically you don’t step into the other world because you don’t belong there. And you won’t see the wall in the film because again my whole point is your own psychological barriers are much more destructive than any actual physical wall that’s built.
The setting constructed by Nalo Hopkinson in her novel was, as are many dystopian landscapes, a prophetic warning of what will come to be if we continue to ignore the signs of the times. And yet it sets itself apart from other popular dystopian literary tales with a distinctly Caribbean Diasporic influence, one which director/writer Sharon Lewis is excited to push aesthetically in the cinematic adaptation. She cites Marcel Camus’ 1959 Oscar Award-winning film Black Orpheusas a key inspiration in imagining an aesthetic that is steeped with a heavy Carnival influence:
I’ve never seen a Caribbean set in a dystopia. I’ve never actually seen a dystopia that has a Caribbean aesthetic. For me it makes sense because what I saw in the reality of Jamaica or Trinidad where people had to adapt with little resources…it’s dystopia. Aesthetically it will be interesting because you’ll see Caribbean people and that will affect the way they dress and you know the food and all of that, but also in the way that they talk and the way that they relate to each other in terms of what those moral values are.
To step into the unchartered territory of Caribbean-Canadian sci-fi film, Sharon has cast a wide net in considering her aesthetic and story inspirations. She celebrates the rise of female heroines in Sci-Fi and Fantasy film such as Bella Swan in Twilight, Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. Although an avid fan of sci-fi, the unbelievable dearth of Black female heroines in the film genre has meant that Sharon has had to look elsewhere for reference points when conceptualizing the heroine Ti-Jeanne for Brown Girl in the Ring – The Prequel. She cites Julie Dash’s seminal film Daughters of the Dust as a key inspiration in seeing Black women as magical, full, and rich characters.
With the success of her crowdfunding campaign, Sharon has launched a Brown Girl Movement, led by women of colour who are coming together to tell this story in a new genre that will inevitably feel strangely familiar for so many: that of the Caribbean-Canadian sci-fi.
To learn more about Brown Girl in the Ring – The Prequel, visit the website.
Amanda Parris is writer from the 6ix who dreams of screenplays to come, has a couple of theatre plays under her belt and sometimes really geeks out and writes for “the academy.” In her spare time she is an actor, Critical Hip Hop educator, and producer of all things cool, creative, and disruptive that started from the bottom. You can follow her on Twitter at @amanda_parris
Director James Kent: “People offer me these projects and I’m immediately intrigued by the woman’s story in history because often I think women are written out of in history because they are the underdogs. Often it’s a better story than the one who’s king; he’s got it all his way. “
Alicia Vikander, who recently embodied female robotic perfection in Ex Machina, stars in James Kent’s circa 1914 drama Testament of Youth. The movie is adapted from the World War I memoirs of British pacifist and feminist Vera Brittain, who spoke for her generation when she chronicled her wartime struggles and losses. Brittain, contrary to the wishes of her family and what was expected of women at that time, pursued an Oxford education instead of a husband. Instead she fell in love with her brother’s friend, Roland (Kit Harington from Game of Thrones), and deferred her education to serve as a nurse on the French War Front. Sweepingly romantic and seemingly old fashioned on the surface, the feistiness and determination of the heroine gives the story a modern kick.
Vikander is having a moment, and the director, making his feature film debut, lucked out in his timing. At a recent press event to promote the film, he told me that if he had cast Vikander now he wouldn’t be able to afford her. The Swedish actress first came on everyone’s radar as Denmark’s queen in A Royal Affair, while the sci-fi Ex Machina propelled her to the next level. She seems to be everywhere with at least five other films scheduled for release this year. She will soon appear with Eddie Redmayne in Tom Hooper’s highly anticipated film, The Danish Girl.
Vikander is dating Michael Fassbender, whom she met when they made The Light Between Oceans, also scheduled for release this year. The 26-year-old actress was staying at the same hotel where she and the director were promoting the film. Now with her sudden celebrity, paparazzi circled outside the Crosby Street Hotel for hours in hopes of getting shots of Vikander and Fassbender leaving together.
Following are highlights from my interview with director James Kent about his film, his inspirations and especially his star:
Talk about the movie’s pacing and how you told the story.
James Kent: It’s not rushed, so you enter the film and you have these moments where you think, I’ve got a moment to think about what I’ve just seen. Otherwise it’s like plot, plot, plot, and you can’t stay in her head. And there’s a slightly reflective quality to the film that allows, hopefully, certain elements of the audience who get it to feel that it speaks to them singularly. Otherwise it could be boring.
Also I had never made a feature film. I made documentaries and television dramas, so this was my first feature I was obviously anxious to prove that I would be able to shed the televisual side, which is different, although it’s more cinematic now than it’s ever been. There’s a sort of different type of vernacular for television than cinema, and I wanted to make a film that felt like cinema.
You didn’t get the memo that audiences don’t want to see female heroines in film?
I didn’t get that memo and you know what, I think cinema isn’t getting the memo either at the moment. There’s Far From the Madding Crowd. There’s going to be the Suffragette movie. There’s Brooklyn with Saoirse Ronan and Mad Max: Fury Road starring Charlize Theron. I think, finally, they are waking up to the fact that most of the audience is actually women.
This is your first narrative film, but you’ve made television movies featuring women, including Maggie about Margaret Thatcher. Are you especially drawn to woman protagonists?
People offer me these projects and I’m immediately intrigued by the woman’s story in history because often I think women are written out of in history because they are the underdogs. Often it’s a better story than the one who’s king; he’s got it all his way. What’s a better story than Joan of Arc? And I also happen to be a gay man and I think that gay men also are underdogs, so maybe there’s a connectivity I feel is there between myself and the women’s experience. I also think women are much more psychologically alert and emotionally alert.
World War I is not an especially known subject for Americans. Were you concerned it would find an audience here?
It was a challenge, but what I’m hoping is that the power of Vera’s story and her pioneering spirit, which is largely in a love story but beyond that because Roland dies, it’s about a woman who powers herself and inspires herself to do what she always wanted to do, which is to become a writer. I think that’s a universal story. That’s not a World War I story.
Also the way I filmed it–because it’s filmed in a very subjective way–it’s very much her interior mind, and I think that modernizes that story. It’s not a 100-year period film. It’s a story about love and loss and rebuilding. You could have done that in modern dress.
Alicia Vikander
You have a wonderful supporting cast but your star, Alicia Vikander, is basically the whole film. Your timing couldn’t be better. You got her right after A Royal Affair and Anna Karenina and before Ex Machina. She has about five other films coming out this year.
What can I say? It’s her film. We were fated. God smiled on us. Alicia Vikander was free, available, affordable, willing. And it was my first film! What more could a first film director want? And then to have her and then to have Taron Egerton, who’s in Kingsman, also on the rise. And Kit Harington, who’s in Game of Thrones, phenomenally successful, but all fresh, all not seen in the cinema world by big English language audiences.
I think Alicia produces a very specific Vera. There’s a sort of gritty determination, powerhouse there. You know she was a ballerina with the Swedish Royal Ballet from the age of 9. Now think of Black Swan. There’s a particular kind of girl who has that fortitude to be a dancer. They’re ambitious. They’re also very determined. And they set themselves the highest standards. And that’s what Vera did, and I think Alicia immediately focuses us on those qualities. An actress, what they do is they allow the audience to immediately focus on a particular aspect of that person that the film’s about. Another actress will alter that. It doesn’t mean they won’t do a great role, but you’ll have a different impression of that person. Alicia brings out some of the core qualities of Vera really within the first few seconds of meeting her. You know. You sense because that’s what Alicia’s like.
The scenes where Vera and her brother and Roland and a friend are bathing in the pond are particularly effective because of what happens later to all of them. Were the water scenes as much fun to shoot as to watch?
There was no joking around. That water was 8 degrees. And we’re talking February in England. I mean that was a lot of production panic because of my desire to have them in the water. Luckily we shot that part late because we didn’t want to kill off our actress. But she has no body fat. I mean her body double for the close-ups, she could stay in there. But Alicia because she’s so slim, that water went straight to her bones and so she was in and out. She never complained. Incredible.
You came into the project rather late, in 2012 when there was already a script in place. Did you make major changes?
It shifted. My agent told me as a first time film director I would only have a certain element of power. If it goes well, the second film you’ll have a lot more power. And that’s how it works. You desperately want the film to happen. I’m also in love with the script and it so happened coincidentally a great friend of mine, Juliette Towhidi, had written the script, so I did love the script but there were things that I wanted changed. I wanted more internalizing on the script, more subjectivity from her viewpoint. I wanted the War to be clarified. I didn’t want to stint on the warfare and the suffering that the audience would have but I didn’t want it to be too much either.
The love scenes are so understated, which makes them even sexier. What inspires you?
I’m quite good at romance. Some of my television projects are about romance and I’m very good at asking actors to do follow my direction that less is more, but to do it with their eyes, and with their mouth, and with their hands. Like that scene in the café, where they touch fingers, that was straight out of David Lean’s Brief Encounter for me.
I was very inspired by that movie. That’s a movie with Celia Johnson and she has this sort of internal voice and it’s like a close up and it’s all about trains and separation. These are the things Testament has in it and I love the lavish amount of romanticism of Brief Encounter. It was radical for its time to do that, to have internal voices and the way it’s shot. It’s just so radical, and I found that inspiring.
What I do, I try desperately to look for film references because you’re trying to give your crew and actors something to watch and say, “Look, it’s got a semblance of this.” I find it really hard to find things that I love. I love movies but I find it really hard to find something specific for the one that I’m making, but that came closest. And also as you can tell, a bit of Gone With the Wind. Because I think there’s also something about Vera and Scarlett O’Hara, there’s something about her feistiness, she won’t be told what to do by men.
Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.
Bleeding Heart, written and directed by Diane Bell, stars Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet as two sisters who have never known each other. Biel plays May, a reserved and disciplined yoga instructor who has enlisted a private investigator to help her track down her long-lost biological sister, Shiva (Mamet). She discovers her younger sister is a prostitute in an abusive relationship with a boyfriend who is also her pimp. May feels protective and driven to rescue Shiva from her chaotic and dire financial and personal situation.
Bleeding Heart begins as a character study of two very different women and turns into a revenge thriller. The movie features two strong female roles by actresses who are usually typecast. A deglamorized Biel get a chance to show of her acting range instead of coasting on her looks, while Mamet is convincing as a hooker with a heart of gold trapped in a toxic relationship, a role world’s away from the whiny, privileged Shoshanna she plays in Girls.
The cinematography is particularly beautiful, especially in an early scene where May is practicing yoga and her body is framed by a gorgeous Los Angeles sunrise. In a shot that feels like it could only be directed only by a woman, the camera pans over every part of Biel’s body as she does her yoga routine and rather than sexualizing her, reveals her strength and power, something May is not even aware of at that moment.
Bleeding Heart recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, which screened 119 features, of which only 30 were by women filmmakers. Bleeding Heart was one of 12 narrative films by women directors screened. This is an improvement over the previous year but not good enough. (Biel, who is married to Justin Timberlake, had just given birth to a baby boy and was unable to make the movie’s premiere at Tribeca.)
Zosia Mamet
During the festival I met with Bell at a restaurant in the Meatpacking district to chat about her film and following are edited highlights:
Talk about the opening shot of the film, where Jessica is practicing yoga and the sun rises. The camera focuses on different parts of Biel’s body and it feels like only a woman filmmaker could get a shot like this.
This is why we need more female filmmakers, because it’s a different perspective. Everyone’s got a different perspective, and we have different stories and different ways of looking at the world. I feel that the stories we have on film just don’t reflect our reality; they also create it. They also change how we see things.
I was very blessed with Jessica that when she got onboard the film she probably had about three months in which she completely immersed herself in the yoga practice.
Jessica hadn’t done much yoga before the film?
She’d done some yoga but like I was very specific with this film that she’s an Ashtanga Yoga practitioner, which is what I taught and which I practiced, so she immediately started practicing Ashtanga every single day. And she started working out in the gym. She completely committed to it and she became vegetarian, and she went the whole way with it.
The thing that’s different with Ashtanga than with other kinds of yoga is you do a self-practice. You learn the sequence of positions and you do them. So when she came to shoot it she knew the sequence… I’ve done it every day for 15 years or something. We knew what it was that we were doing. And I think the thing that really comes across in those scenes is her level of concentration. She’s in that zone.
And Zak (Mulligan) and I, my DP, was just phenomenal, and we knew the kind of lighting that we wanted. The film both starts and ends with that moment of dawn, of the sun coming up. Ashtanga yoga is typically practiced in the very early mornings so ideally you’re practicing from when it’s dark until when it’s light. And that was something that was really important to me, so in the opening sequence it goes back and forth between her teaching a class and also her doing her own practice. When she’s doing her own practice, it’s just that cool light of like pre-dawn, before the sun comes out when it’s a little bit blue. And then when she’s teaching, it’s light and it’s just past the sun coming out. And that’s typically what Ashtanga teaches.
Diane Bell
Jessica Biel is usually typecast, especially in roles that focus on her looks and being sexy. In the film she hardly wears makeup and her hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail. Were you worried she’d be able to pull this off?
My concern when she was suggested was that she’s so glamorous. My impression was that she’s so perfect and glamorous and I didn’t think she’ll be able to do this, you know, and the first thing she said to me when I met her was, “I understand May because everybody thinks my life is perfect, but I’m a human being.” I asked her if she would be happy to have no make up and she said, “100 percent.”
What was your production schedule?
We shot the film in 19 days, 12 hours a day normally. As a director I will not go over time. It’s not fair to cast. 12 hours a day is plenty for everybody, and I’m absolutely rigorous, being lucky in both my films working with great first ADs, and then just absolutely rigorous about just keeping it going and keeping that momentum and getting our days every day. Talk about the chemistry between Zosia Mamet and Jessica Biel since that is crucial for the story since it focuses on their relationship.
Everybody connected and bounded very quickly. And I think a lot of friendships came out of the film. I know Zosia and Jessie became really close. They didn’t know each other before, but the moment they met, and this is one of those things, you just say, “Oh my God, I’m so lucky!” They really clicked. They somehow brought out something great in each other. On set, as human beings too, they just had that connection. They were just like sort of goofy together. There were lots of laughs and you could see they had a bound.
Did you test them together?
No. The funny thing about that sort of chemistry between people, like I feel the movie is partly a love story. It’s about these two women falling in love with each other. And I knew it had to have that chemistry. It’s just like a love story. There’s got to be that sort of spark and I feel they really had it. I felt it every day on set. The two of them together are so charming and sweet and funny.
In the film their characters are both controlled by men although in different ways. Shiva’s boyfriend is her pimp, and he is violent and abusive, while May’s partner is gentle and good to her, but he also tries to control her life. Talk about that.
It was just something that I was interested in. There’s explicit violence and then there’s sort of like another kind of violence, which is sort of implicit.
May’s boyfriend wouldn’t identify himself as being a controlling person and would hate to think of himself as that, and she wouldn’t think of herself as being in that relationship, but that’s what they are. Those are the mechanisms of their relationship and that was definitely something I kind of wanted to say of these two women. They’re two opposites, yin yang, but they’re really the same.
Zosia Mamet
In the production notes it says you are fascinated by violence. What do you mean?
There’s so much of it in our society. How do we actually deal with it? I don’t like violence at all. I absolutely detest it. I’m a complete pacifist. And for me one of the questions driving this film from my perspective was, okay, if you’re completely committed to peace, it’s easy to be peaceful if everyone around you is peaceful. It’s super easy, it’s great. But what if you have to deal with somebody who’s really violent? How far do you go to help someone, protect someone from someone who’s really violent?
In our society domestic abuse and the murder of women by spouses or boyfriends are epidemic. And it’s something we don’t want to talk about. I looked up the actual statistics of it before coming here because I thought, I better get it right. In my head I thought it was about 30 women a month are killed in America by their partners right? That was the figure I had in my head. I looked it up. It’s really three women a day. On average spouses or ex-boyfriends are killing three women everyday. That’s an epidemic! What is your next movie?
The next one I’m going to shoot in July. We’re Crowdfunding right now in a totally off the grid way. It’s a micro-budget movie. It’s called Of Dust and Bones. It’s about a widow of a war journalist and her husband was killed in Syria. She had decided to just retreat from the world. She lives a monastic kind of life in the desert where she wants no part of what she views as this crazy world, basically. Then her husband’s best friend and colleague, Alex, who actually sent her husband to Syria, comes to visit her. He has come with an agenda. He wants the rights to her dead husband’s last photographs. She feels very strongly that there’s no hope to be good in this world and every time we try to make things better we actually end up making things worse creating more suffering. The film is about what unfolds between them in the desert over these days. It’s these two wildly different viewpoints clashing.
Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.
The film also focuses on the relationship between Smith and Ma Rainey, who mentored Smith and gave her guidance on developing her stagecraft. Mo’Nique portrays Ma Rainey, known as the “Mother of the Blues,” in a rich and layered performance and has so much charisma she steals every scene she’s in.
Queen Latifah was born to play the Empress of the Blues. Queen Latifah stars in Bessie, the new biopic about the early life of legendary blues singer Bessie Smith. The film will premiere Saturday on HBO. Mo’Nique, who has her first stand out role since Precious, reminds us why she won the Oscar in 2010.
Directed by Dee Rees (Pariah) from a screenplay by Rees, Christopher Cleveland, and Bettina Gilois, the story is by Rees and acclaimed playwright Horton Foote, who died in 2009. The film focuses on Smith’s early years as she struggled as a young singer to eventually become one of the most successful recording artists of the 1920’s. She earned $2,000 a week – an unheard of sum – at the height of her career.
The film also focuses on the relationship between Smith and Ma Rainey, who mentored Smith and gave her guidance on developing her stagecraft. Mo’Nique portrays Ma Rainey, known as the “Mother of the Blues,” in a rich and layered performance and has so much charisma she steals every scene she’s in.
Both Queen Latifah and Mo’Nique received Critics Choice nominations the other day and the Golden Globes and other accolades are sure to follow.
The cast includes Michael Kenneth Williams (Boardwalk Empire, 12 Years a Slave) as Bessie’s husband; Khandi Alexander (Scandal) as Bessie’s abusive older sister, Viola; Mike Epps (The Hangover) as the singer’s bootlegger romantic interest; Tory Kittles (True Detective) as Bessie’s older brother Clarence; Tika Sumpter as Lucille, Bessie’s longtime lover.
At the recent premiere at the Museum of Modern Art, nobody worked the red carpet harder than Mo’Nique, who talked to all the journalists clamoring for her attention.
Bessie has many explicit sex scenes and Queen Latifah’s character has a nude scene that’s integral to the story but sure to get audiences talking. Ma Rainey was gay and Bessie Smith was bisexual, and the film doesn’t shy away from showing scenes of their characters having sex with both men and women. A standout is a scene early in the film where Mo’Nique and Queen Latifah dress up in drag, smoke cigars and do a song together to a boisterous audience.
Director Dee Rees
Here’s a red carpet interview with Mo’Nique, who looked terrific in a blue lace gown, and was warm and thoughtful in her replies to all the journalists:
Were gay women who performed on stage more open about their sexuality in the time of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith? (Of course they didn’t have to contend with social media.):
Mo’Nique: I think back then there was a strength that said I’m unwavering about who I was born to be. Don’t we still fight with it today? But figure what she had to walk through then? It was illegal. They got locked up. If you were seen with the same sex so to have that kind of strength back then is absolutely beautiful.
What was the key to finding her character?
Mo’Nique: Her music, (I found it) through her music. If you listen to Ma Rainey you’ll really understand Ma Rainey because she sang from her soul. She sung her truth and that’s how I really got to understand who that woman was because there’s really very little written information about this woman. She’s so hidden and now history, you have to dig really deep to get that little bit…. And she told the truth. And even back then, she was fighting for wage equality, so we’re still having that fight today but definitely she kicked open the doors so we can even go to the meetings to have those discussions.
They were friends. And she was Bessie Smith’s mentor and she was very motherly but she was that type of mother that knew when she had to let go and let that baby fly and go see it for herself. And when the bird flew back home she was right there waiting for her. That’s what that relationship what. And what I so appreciate about her, we don’t often times see those relationships anymore, you don’t see it where two friends go through it, they fall out, but they’re still willing to love each other through it and come back together.
Queen Latifah
What does she see as Ma Rainey’s influence on A&R and jazz?
Mo’Nique: It’s truthful. It’s very honest. It’s very from the soul. When you listen to those singers back then, they couldn’t pretend. They couldn’t fake it because the people would know it and they were those singers that when you sat there, you know how they say music moves you? That was that type of music that moved you and made you make a decision, may it be the right, wrong or indifferent, but when you listen to that music it was like you know what? OK, “I’m gonna finish this darn liquor and I’m gonna make a change.” That’s what that music was back then. Absolutely beautiful!
What were the key factors that made her want to take on the role of Ma Rainey?
Mo’Nique: It was Ma Rainey’s strength. Her integrity. You know when you read that script and you understand that the sacrifices that woman made for little girls like us, and she had no idea that she was doing it, it was just the right thing to do. So when you read those lines, and you understand that that woman is talking to me for me, off the pages, and she’s saying Monique keep pushing. Keep going in the right direction and don’t waver from what you know is right. Look at my story and when you look at that woman’s story it’s not like most of our stories, where we die broke, alone, miserable. When you look at her story she had a very full life.
Before she made her way into the theater, I asked Mo’Nique if she actually sang.
Mo’Nique: All day long!
Later at the after party I asked the 36-year-old director about how she discovered Bessie Smith’s music, she told me it was through her grandmother: “She played Bessie Smith’s records all the time.”
Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.
In recent years, web series have emerged as a platform for LGBT stories – so much so that that Bitch magazine named 2014 the summer of lesbian web series. Just as technology has helped to democratize other forms of story-telling, the falling price of video and audio production, and free delivery platforms like YouTube, have created a world where content that would be a tough sell for network television can find a niche audience online. The crowd-funded Australian web-series ‘Starting From… Now!’ provides a good example of how creators can connect with fans through content, despite their budget limitations.
In recent years, web series have emerged as a platform for LGBT stories – so much so that that Bitch magazine named 2014 the summer of lesbian web series. Just as technology has helped to democratize other forms of story-telling, the falling price of video and audio production, and free delivery platforms like YouTube, have created a world where content that would be a tough sell for network television can find a niche audience online. The crowd-funded Australian web-series Starting From… Now! provides a good example of how creators can connect with fans through content, despite their budget limitations.
Four corners of a love quadrangle
In terms of niche markets online, Starting From… Now! falls somewhere in the romance > lesbian > angst > love triangle > PG-13 category. Its central character is Steph, a young graphic designer who moves to Sydney, Australia, and immediately falls in love with her friend’s long-term partner, Darcy. Believing that nothing can happen with Darcy, she soon starts dating a friend from work, placing herself in the corner of what will shortly be a love quadrangle where everyone gets hurt.
The first (and slowest) season hangs on whether or not Steph and Darcy will have an affair – no prizes for guessing that they will. Seasons two and three, though, focus on the fall-out from that decision, and the dynamics between the characters. It isn’t clear how much of an age difference exists between Steph and Darcy, but there’s a sense of realism in the way that Steph, the younger of the two, is convinced that she and Darcy are at the start of an epic love story, and the careless willingness she has to burn her bridges in pursuit of what she sees as the great, forbidden romance in her life. There’s also a sense of realism as we discover that Darcy, the older of the two, is in the middle of an identity crisis that has nothing to do with Steph, and that she might be using Steph as a way to escape from having to face conflict with her partner more directly. It starts to seem less like Steph is someone Darcy could fall in love with, and more like she’s a way for Darcy to implode her existing relationship, without having to end up alone.
Starting From… Now! is at its most interesting when it explores Darcy’s motivations for behaving the way she does, and when it forces Steph to face the consequences of being careless with other people’s feelings.
Partly supported by crowd-funding from viewers, the series now has 18 seven- to 10-minute episodes and over ten million views, with a fourth season in pre-production. Bitch Flicks had the chance to interview writer/director Julie Kalceff about the series, her plans for season four, and the character development we’ve seen so far.
What has the interaction with viewers and fans been like?
The interaction with fans has been amazing. It’s been one of the highlights of making the series. What’s surprised us is not only how passionate some of the fans become about some of the actions and choices of the characters, but also how much the series has meant to some audience members. We’ve received a number of messages saying how having access to lesbian content online has made them feel less alone.
How has releasing Starting From… Now! as a web series shaped the content of the show?
There’s a certain degree of freedom you have in making a web series that you don’t get when making a television show. You have far more creative control when making a web series. What you don’t have, however, is the budget of a television series. This means that a number of your choices are affected by the amount of time and money you have in regards to both production and post-production. We’ve worked hard to try and overcome these constraints. The goal from the start was to try and produce a quality show that still looks good, despite the budget constraints. If you have strong, complex characters and you build drama through the actions of those characters, then you have a chance of creating a compelling series, regardless of time and money.
With the exception of a couple of office workers in minor roles, there aren’t a lot of male characters on the show. Is that a deliberate choice?
This wasn’t a deliberate choice. In fact, it wasn’t until we had our first male speaking role in Season 3 Episode 5 that we realised this was the case. The fact that there are very few men is just a reflection of the world of these characters. They are lesbians. They spend most of their time with women.
In episode 3.5, we also find out some new information about Darcy’s parents – her father cheats and her mother has a lot of unfulfilled ambition. It’s clear that she’s worried about turning into them. How much do you think Darcy’s like her parents, and how do you see that relationship influencing her decisions?
That’s spot on, Darcy is worried about turning into her parents. Some viewers are critical of Darcy and her actions but I really think she’s doing the best she can. We’re a product of our environment and Darcy came from a pretty toxic environment. At least now she’s trying to take responsibility for her actions and make choices that take into consideration those around her.
What can we expect from season 4?
Season 4 is darker than the previous seasons. We’re taking the opportunity to explore new topics and push the boundaries a bit in regards to this world and the world of online content.
All of the existing episodes of Starting From… Now! are available for free on YouTube and the series’ official website.
The fact that ‘It Follows’ is a horror film, and a surprisingly effective one, is almost secondary to the respectful way it develops its characters, particularly its protagonist, Jay, portrayed in a breakout performance by Maika Monroe.
The film is a huge sleeper hit, by low-budget indie standards. This week, it expanded to an astonishing 1,655 theaters nationwide. I spoke with Monroe and Mitchell recently by phone about how the film was made and what makes it so unique.
In 2010, writer-director David Robert Mitchell made his feature directorial debut with the charming and insightful The Myth of the American Sleepover. Unlike many contemporary coming-of-age comedies, Sleepover evinces nostalgia for youth, but shows tremendous respect and honesty in its treatment of its adolescent characters, male and female, and is beautifully shot, with the smooth camerawork tracking the teens, and a gradually darkening palette giving a sense of the potential trials of impending adulthood. The influences, notably George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, are evident, but Mitchell has his own gently observant style.
In a way, It Follows picks up where Sleepover left off. Poignant drama over a first kiss or a missed opportunity at love is replaced with the uncertainty of first sexual encounters and an underlying genuine terror at the responsibilities of adulthood. The fact that It Follows is a horror film, and a surprisingly effective one, is almost secondary to the respectful way it develops its characters, particularly its protagonist, Jay, portrayed in a breakout performance by Maika Monroe.
After what seems a lengthy courtship, Jay has a sexual encounter with Hugh (Jake Weary), who infects her with a kind of sexually transmitted poltergeist: a malevolent entity that can take the form of any person, and will stalk Jay until it kills her, or until she has sex with someone else, passing it onto that unfortunate person. Hugh (who turns out to be using a fake name) tells the terrified Jay that if the slow moving entity succeeds in killing her, it will move back on to him. Jay has to balance the immediate physical danger to her life with the moral quandary of passing along the curse. She’s lucky enough to have a support system: her tough-minded sister, Kelly (Lili Sepe), brainy pal Yara (Olivia Luccardi), sexually confident dreamboat neighbor Greg (Daniel Zovatto), and her friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist), who’s had an unrequited crush on Jay since they were children. Once she convinces her friends the threat is real, the group goes to great lengths to help Jay save herself. In a way, the film is sort of like a more thoughtful, slowed down, and thematically denser version of the Final Destination films, with a relentless, inexorable force pursuing a group of kids, as they desperately seek a way to put a stop to it.
The film is a huge sleeper hit, by low-budget indie standards. This week, it expanded to an astonishing 1,655 theaters nationwide. I spoke with Monroe and Mitchell recently by phone about how the film was made and what makes it so unique.
“Calm” is an odd way to describe a horror film, particularly one as chilling as It Follows, but that’s the word Mitchell uses, and it’s apt. This is a beautifully structured film.
“There’s a simplicity to it, to a certain degree,” Mitchell says, “and it’s actually quite complicated in other ways. It’s very simple and balanced, and calm most of the time, but there’s also a certain amount of staging and planning that goes into making it feel that simple and calm.” The film’s camerawork is intrinsic to its slow-burn paranoid terror. “We have a very steady, cool, objective camera a lot of the time,” Mitchell explains. “We often use a very wide-angle lens, and we leave a lot of space in the frame, so you can kind of see along the edges. If the characters are in the foreground, you can see into the background, and the idea was to actually place the audience within the environment that the actors are within. So that you are sort of an active participant within the film.” This effectively puts the viewer on edge, on the lookout for that slow-walking human-shaped monster on the edge of the frame. In one chilling sequence, when Jay and Greg visit a local high school looking for a lead on “Hugh,” Mitchell’s camera does a slow 360 degree pan around the pair, showing the entity moving slowly toward them outside the school, then unnervingly coming to rest on Jay and Greg, viewed through the window of a school office, and as unaware of the entity’s current location as we in the audience are.
“The goal is to be very deliberate,” Mitchell says. “Pretty much everything in the film was about being very precise and specific. Everything needed to be a choice. You don’t always hit this, but the goal is for everything to be a deliberate part of a plan. Nothing just happens because that’s what we have to do. I didn’t want to have to put a cut in a sequence unless I wanted a cut in the sequence. I didn’t want to have to move the camera unless I needed to move the camera. Everything had to be a very strong choice.”
For Monroe, in her first starring role, acting in the film was a strange, but intense experience. “It was just physically and mentally very demanding,” she tells me. “It was having to be in a dark place for almost the entire five weeks, which is not easy to do. Every day, screaming, running, crying. It’s not easy.”
Despite the intensity of the process, because of the way the film was made, Monroe had little sense of what its impact on audiences would be. “You’re filming it, and most of the time you just feel kind of ridiculous, or you’re just not thinking about trying to scare someone. I’m just more focused on the role and making it as real as possible. It only comes up with an audience, and seeing how an audience reacts, you think, ‘Oh, this might actually be scary!'” Having watched Myth before accepting the role of Jay, Monroe says, “When I was reading it, I wasn’t sure how it was going to translate into a movie, or how audiences would take it, but I had complete faith in David.”
Monroe also co-starred in another buzzed-about indie horror film, Adam Wingard’s The Guest and has a longtime interest in the genre. “Well, I grew up watching. I remember the first horror movie I watched was The Shining. My dad showed me that. And then Blue Velvet, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street. Those were all movies that I really loved and that really freaked me out. They scarred me for life. I really like them.”
Monroe remembers Mitchell asking the cast to watch David Lynch’s suburban nightmare, Blue Velvet, before making the film. A big fan of horror, he cites a number of other influences. “There’s a lot [of] stuff I like, and it’s probably entered into this, in some way. Creature from the Black Lagoon is probably my favorite horror movie. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the original, [and] the [Philip] Kaufman version from the ’70s is a tonal influence. The original Thing and the [John] Carpenter remake as well. I watched both of them religiously. The Shining. A lot of Cronenberg. Romero. Lynch. At least in terms of horror, these are some of the people that I love.”
Monroe was also struck by the setting of the film, a Metro-Detroit suburb that grows increasingly ramshackle and dilapidated as the characters approach the battle-scarred city.
“Detroit’s just a fascinating place,” she tells me. “So many abandoned buildings where nature has taken over. It’s quite cinematic, in kind of a darker way. It was very cool to explore. I probably never would have gone to Detroit if not for filming the movie, and I think it was a really cool experience. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a place like it in the United States. It’s pretty fascinating. I feel like everybody should go there at some point.”
Mitchell set the film in the area, as he did with Myth, in part because he grew up there and knew what locations would look right on film. But there’s an undercurrent of despair to the film that the location suits perfectly. “Within the story, one of the things that I wanted to highlight a little bit was people talking about the separation between the city and the suburbs, and how sad that is, and shitty that is, to be honest,” he explains.
When I asked Mitchell about the strong female protagonists of his first two features, he seemed hesitant to engage the question. “I write stories about all different kinds of characters, but these are the two that I’ve been able to make. I don’t know.” He went on to explain, “I guess it depends on the film. In regards to It Follows, it just seemed like an interesting perspective to take. I think we’re sort of playing on one of the cliches of horror films — this sort of female protagonist — and I guess I just thought I could maybe add something a little unique to that. I don’t know what to say other than I think it’s interesting to write a female character. It’s just interesting to me as a writer/filmmaker to try to see things from different points of view. When I write a character, I try to put a little bit of myself into their personality, or I try to imagine myself in that world.” Mitchell apologizes to me for that answer, but I think his empathy with Jay and the other characters is a salient and laudable feature of his work to date.
Despite the virtues of Myth, in a way, It Follows is a big step forward for Mitchell. It’s a more polished work and also one that lends itself to a wealth of interpretations. It’s a scary good time at the movies, for sure, but it also seems like the kind of film that will be studied and written about in thesis papers for generations to come.
“I’ve heard all kinds of interesting interpretations of the film,” Mitchell states, “some of which I intended, some of which I didn’t, but I love that. To me, this kind of movie is designed with that in mind.”
Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.
“We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”
The Athena Film Festival has grown more ambitious with each passing year, and this year, its fifth, is no different. The festival’s co-founders, Kathryn Kolbert of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, and Artistic Director Melissa Silverstein of Indiewire‘s Women and Hollywood, spoke with us about this year’s festival and the scant progress women filmmakers have made in Hollywood in recent years.
This year’s festival has gotten unprecedented media attention for its premiere of Dan Chaykin’s Rosie O’Donnell: A Heartfelt Stand Up and for Lifetime Achievement honoree Jodie Foster. The opening night film, Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher, is a documentary about Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute from Chicago who has turned her life around and devoted herself to helping other women and girls break free of the cycle of abuse and exploitation.
Rosie O’Donnell
“Once I saw Dreamcatcher and I saw this amazing woman, Brenda, I just knew that it was our movie,” Silverstein tells me. “It’s just one of these stories of people that are doing amazing work in their communities that you would never see. We’re thrilled to be able to share the story at its New York premiere.”
“We’re looking for films that are inspiring and that can demonstrate positive social change in ways that demonstrate women’s agency, their ability to make a difference,” Kolbert explains, “and I think Dreamcatcher really fulfills all of those goals. It’s a particularly inspiring film, and one in which individual women have worked together to make a difference in the lives of women who have lived as prostitutes and wanted to come out of that world.”
Still from Dreamcatcher
Dreamcatcher‘s themes fit perfectly with the festival’s unique goals and mission. “We’re a unique festival in that we tell the stories of women in leadership roles,” Kolbert says. “We show films that are made by both men and women, as long as women are the protagonists of the story.”
As the festival’s main programmer, Silverstein works at finding a balance between “movies that have been overlooked,” and “great stuff that might have been playing at their multiplex that they missed.”
Co-Founders of the Athena Film Festival, Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein
“What I try to do is curate a conversation,” she explains. “So I want to be able to have foreign movies, movies about women leaders in all different areas: in music, in science, in sports. It just shows the breadth and the depth of what women’s experiences are, and that’s what I try to do.”
While Silverstein is often frustrated by what studios will send to the small but steadily growing festival, sometimes she sees a film that she knows immediately they need to show. That was the case at the Berlinale last year, where she saw Athena’s Closing Night film, Difret, Ethiopian-born filmmaker Zeresenay Berhane Mehari’s drama of a teenage girl who responds violently when she’s abducted into marriage, and the bold young lawyer who takes her case. “The second I saw that movie, I knew that it had to play Athena,” Silverstein states, “and I have been like a rabid dog trying to get that movie.”
Difret
This year’s festival also includes some higher profile films, including the Centerpiece, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s underseen backstage drama, Beyond the Lights, featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Minnie Driver, screening Saturday with the filmmaker, who’s receiving an award from the festival, in attendance. Filmmaker Gillian Robespierre will also be on hand for Satuday’s screening of her bluntly funny Obvious Child. The racially charged indie comedy Dear White People and Lukas Moodysson’s buoyant punk rock coming-of-age film We Are the Best!will also screen this weekend.
Then there’s actor-director-producer Foster’s well-deserved honor, the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award. “Foster has been a quiet leader,” Silverstein says. “She’s been pushing the boundaries. She started to direct, as an actress before other actresses did that.” As an actor, Foster’s career highlights expanded Hollywood’s vision of the type of roles women could play. “The roles that she won the Academy Award for … The Accused was about gang rape, and that was in the late ’80s. That wasn’t a subject matter that was discussed at that time, and she really took that on,” Silverstein points out, “and then with Silence of the Lambs, she was really ahead of the curve. I think that’s what the Athena Film Festival wants to be, and Jodie embodies that.”
Beyond the Lights
As a director, Foster hasn’t made a feature since 2011’s The Beaver, starring her embattled friend Mel Gibson. Like many talented women directors, she’s turned to the small screen, directing episodes of Netflix’s House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. She has a new feature in pre-production, Money Monster, starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts.
I asked both Kolbert and Silverstein if 2015’s successful films directed by women, including Obvious Child, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and Amma Asante’s Belle, which opened the festival last year, offer cause for optimism. I pointed out that Michelle MacLaren had been hired to direct the upcoming DC Comics adaptation of Wonder Woman for Warner Bros., based on the strength of her television work, including several outstanding episodes of Breaking Bad. Neither was particularly sanguine about what these milestones mean for women in Hollywood as a whole.
Jodie Foster
“In the film industry, I don’t see a lot of progress,” Kolbert states, “except for the fact that now the paucity of women in film has become an issue that’s discussed.”
“The numbers have been really static for the last decade,” Silverstein points out. “We did a survey at Women and Hollywood from 2009 to 2013, and 5 percent of all the studio films were directed by women and only 10 percent of the indie films were directed by women.” She doesn’t mince words about the backward attitude those numbers reflect. “That’s just abysmal. We’re half the world. And we don’t get the opportunities. It’s not a lack of talent; it’s a lack of opportunities.”
Gina Prince-Bythewood
Silverstein agrees with Kolbert that at least people are talking about the issues involved, as in the Academy’s recent snub of DuVernay, which Kolbert bluntly calls “a travesty.” As Silverstein sees it, “The progress has been in this robust, wonderful, inquisitive, and actually angry conversation about the lack of opportunities for women. I will be very happy when the numbers move to where the conversation is.”
The Athena Film Festival is playing a part in moving things along. That’s why it also includes a practical element, with Seed & Spark’sEmily Best giving a workshop on crowdfunding, and industry leaders Prince-Bythewood, Cathy Schulman, and Stephanie Laing providing Master Classes in their respective fields. “We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”
Kolbert makes a similar point. “My goal for the festival is that over the long term, when you think of leadership, you’re going to picture women,” she says, rejecting the traditional image of “a white guy with a little gray hair at his temples.” She sums up the Athena Film Festival’s mission nicely, quoting Marian Wright Edelman: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.
‘Starry Eyes’ is a bloody, brilliant horror spectacle, about a desperate starlet who makes a dark deal for the promise of fame. Creepy, gross and well observed, complete with a complex female character and a crazy good performance from star, Alex Essoe, it is a film you have to see to believe, as long as you’ve got a strong stomach, that is. I spoke with writer-directors, Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer about their film, their inspirations and the universalities about struggling to make your way in Hollywood.
Poster for Starry Eyes
Starry Eyes was the kind of film that stuck with me.
It’s a bloody, brilliant horror spectacle, about a desperate starlet who makes a dark deal for the promise of fame. Creepy, gross and well-observed, complete with a complex female character and a crazy good performance from star, Alex Essoe, Starry Eyes is a film you have to see to believe, as long as you’ve got a strong stomach, that is.
As soon as I saw it, I had to write something about it, which I did in December for our Reality TV theme week. It stuck with me and I wanted to talk about it, I needed to share it with other people.
The great things about being a writer is sometimes, just sometimes, when you have questions about a movie, you get lucky enough to ask some of them. I spoke with writer-directors, Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer about their film, their inspirations and the universalities of struggling to make your way in Hollywood.
Bitch Flicks: Where did the story of Starry Eyes come from? What were some of you inspirations?
Dennis: I guess it came from us, Kevin and I, wanting to do a story about transformation, something about the metamorphosis in it. We always wanted to have a sequence in a film where a person slowly goes through a change. So we first approached it with that basic concept but then we also knew that we wanted to really focus on a strong character, a person who also just mentally goes through a change throughout the whole movie and that the mental choices and decisions and changes are just as big as the physical ones. So it really started there and then it was just about the decision of what she would be changing into. We decided, with the kind of scenes and themes that really interested us, that it might be a good Los Angeles story, and if it was going to be a Los Angeles story it might be really interesting if she began a star or celebrity and we could look at the industry. As filmmakers there’s a sense of being on the outside of the industry and scratching to get in, waiting for your big break. Actors often go through the same thing. It was really about having a message to the film and trying to say something, finding an exciting, really viseral way to tell that story
Kevin: As for influences, we were very influenced by Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession , that was a big influence on the performance, we wanted Alex [Essoe] to capture that raw energy that Isabelle Adjani has in that film. That and other things like Polanski films, such as Rosemary’s Babyand Repulsion, and things like Carrie and The Entity, even things outside of the genre like Boogie Nights were great, those rise and fall stories of people desperately trying to make it in the industry. They might do things in that situation that they never thought they would.
BF: Sarah is a fascinating and complicated character, even when we first meet her, she is not entirely likable. She’s vain and believes she is superior to a lot of the people around her. Can you tell me a bit about the character of Sarah?
Dennis: There’s an unspoken rule sometimes in screenwriting that you have write likable characters, you hear this a lot from people, and in recent years that rule has kind of gone by the wayside. What we feel is that you have to write interesting characters and if someone is interesting and compelling you’ll follow them through all the choices they make, as bad as they are. Look at a show like Mad Men or Breaking Bad and the characters those shows follow, people love to watch characters like those. Strangely in movies this doesn’t happen enough and it should, particularly in independent cinema where you can get away with a lot more and break more rules. So, we like the idea of pulling the wool over the audience’s eyes. At the beginning of the movie you think you’re watching the girl next door, the girl fresh off the bus, that she’s innocent and sweet and she’s going to be corrupted. You think that you’re watching that person and that all of her friends are just terrible terrible people out to get her, and it definitely seems that way because the movie is very subjective. But we are very conscious of that arc at the halfway point of the movie. As the movie goes along to start to realize that maybe Sarah, the person you’re following is not such a good person. There’s a trail of bread crumbs along the way and the choices she makes that start to define the person that she really is and you start to realize that you’re watching a person who is figuratively a monster and is literally going to become one. In the end, the friends that you perceived as being bad people are just, people who at the end of the day want what’s best for her. The movie cons you in an interesting way and every time we’ve shown it to people there’s usually a point where we realize that the audience is really on Sarah’s side and by the end of movie, no matter what she’s doing and how terrible it gets, they are always siding with her.
BF: In addition, Sarah may be a little unhinged–we see her fits early on and they serve as a prime for the grotesque things we will see happen to her later. Why were these fits important to the character? Can you tell me a bit about your portrayal of Sarah’s self hatred and her violent fits?
Kevin: It’s not that this company takes her and corrupts her. It’s like the company sees this in her, they see that she’s a little unhinged and there’s this rawness within her, that’s what attracts them to her. That’s what gets her what she wants in the end, by acting out this cult’s will. It was sort of like a statement of how a lot of people, in order to make it in these industries that are very dog eat dog, they’re willing to step all over everybody else and do whatever needs to be done, and sometimes they do some horrible things to people. In order to make that statement we wanted to show that the people who are willing to do these things might not be the best put together people. The cult sees this and exploits it to her advantage.
Sarah yearns for an Old Hollywood where she can be discovered
BF: Besides Sarah, many other characters are difficult to like such as Sarah’s boss and her friends Can you tell me a bit about this? Though you suggest character as “Hollywood types” we also learn they three dimensional human beings. Her boss at the restaurant ogles her, but later gives her heartfelt advice, her friends are catty but seem to genuinely care. Why was this important?
Dennis: I think the mistake that a lot of horror movies make is that they feel like if somebody going to be killed or if somebody’s going to be killed or if somebody’s going to be the competition of a villain, then they shouldn’t be three dimensional. We never approach anything like that, every character had to be real. When we were writing that ending of the movie, that violent climax, we really were very conscious of the fact that these needed to be feel like very real people that she was doing this thing to. Because the movie is very subjective, you’re siding with Sarah, she’s in every sense of the movie, Alex Essoe gives a great performance, so its very easy to side with her but if you stop for a moment as an audience member and put yourself in the perspective of any of the other characters, you really can see it from their side. If you put yourself in Erin’s position for instance, that’s the bitchy friend, she clearly likes Danny, the filmmaker friend, feels that Sarah is trying to move in on Danny or Danny’s trying to move in on her, they’re both actors, they’re both the same age, competing for the same parts, and she might be kind of catty to Sarah but Sarah is already standoffish and kind of cold to her. If you put yourself in Pat Healy’s shoes, the restaurant owner, this is a guy who’s just trying to run a business, it’s his dream, it’s what he believes in and he has this girl that’s coming in late, that’s talking on her cell phone, that’s bad at her job and she’s kind of disrespecting him, she quits, she comes back, she slaps him at work, she’s sick at work. It’s kind of funny when you realize that, though you’re in Sarah’s worldview the entire time, there are these moments where you can step outside of her world and realize that everyone is just caught up in her wake. So these characters had to be three dimensional to reinforce the idea that she’s not a good person and there are these people that seem bad but again, they’re just caught up in her wake.
Kevin: It was important that at the halfway point where she goes to the producer’s house and decides that she’s going to give up her pride or self respect in order to achieve her dreams, from that point on the tables get reversed. When she does this one big thing, it clues the audience in that, okay she’s actually not the best person, and from that moment on, watching her you notice these other people aren’t so bad. It changes your perspective. And she actually gets sick physically so you can see her friends are going like “OK, what’s going on, are you alright?” When things get serious, they turn off all their competitive little shots at Sarah and turn on their concern and Sarah’s just getting worse. So at that moment she reveals her true self.
BF: There is a great reverence in the film for Old Hollywood. Sarah has a collage of classic actresses on her walls and aspires to be just like them. Astraeus Pictures seems to have once had golden years and the Producer’s office is decorated like a scene from an old film. What is old Hollywood legend’s place in the story?
Dennis: It’s really about how Sarah is sort of naive. She’s a person who has talent but she’s also a person living in a very modern world where things are done differently but thinking that she can go about them in a very traditional nostalgic way. She’s probably the type of person who thinks she’d be on Hollywood Boulevard at Starbucks and think that she would be noticed by a producer and the producer would cast her in a big movie. So that was to make her feel like a little girl sometimes. She had these dreams of being like these old starlets from the golden age, but the reality is she’s basically being exploited by this company. We like the idea that she would sneer and look down at her friends who just wanted to go out on the weekends and make Kickstarter videos and would look at things and think I’m doing things the traditional way, I’m doing it the way that you’re supposed to do it, I’m paying my dues, and then the irony is that she doesn’t. She basically sells out and takes the easy way out.
Kevin: I would add to that that its sort of the idea that if you look at Hollywood in say the 1930s and whatnot, production companies used to have exclusive deals with actors, and they were like an MGM actor and they worked exclusively for MGM. We wanted her to have that sort of “I’m doing it the traditional way” feel because in the end Astreus Picture kind of owns her.
BF: The basic story of selling your soul for fame is not a new one. Do you feel this story particularly speaks to us today?
Dennis: We did that consciously. The Faustian idea of selling your soul is a very old idea and you can see it in basically any genre of movies. We definitely wanted a short hand to the concept so people were able to wrap their heads around it quickly and that wasn’t overly complicated. This freed us as filmmakers to really dig a little deeper into that theme. I think as filmmakers, especially with movies about movies, you don’t get into the grounded reality of the situation, we usually focus on the machinations of the studio system, the actual making of the movie. Whereas with Starry Eyes we wanted to show younger people today, working a shitty job and coming home to your apartment and crying with the door shut and you have friends right outside in your living room, and going to parties and hiding in the bathroom. We wanted to show a different side of that whole concept.
Gore is used to highlight the horror of Sarah’s transformation
BF: The film can be read as an allegory, for how someone might be corrupted by their desire for fame as Sarah makes a choice to sever her relationships with the people she believes are holding her back. Was this intentional?
Kevin: That was pretty much why we set out to do it. The whole point of taking a transformation tale and putting it in Hollywood was to make it an allegory. A celebrity’s not a kind of monster we’re seen in a horror movie. People ask us all the time, what was she at the end, what was that creature, they almost want some real world answer, like was she a demon, was she a vampire, something like that. And we say, no she got the role, she’s on her way to becoming a star at the end. Sometimes they walk away not satisfied with the answer but the answer works on an allegorical level. The allegorical level of the film is almost more important than what’s going on at the surface level of the film, it’s what’s actually wrapped up in the end, the allegory.
Dennis: I think if you watch the film a second time, you’re see that the film basically bookends itself. It begins with a girl starring at herself in the mirror in her underwear, kind of hating herself and really unhappy with her body, and she’s beautiful and talented and she should be happy but she’s not. She feels like she’s at the end of her rope and she needs to get discovered now before it gets too late. And then through out the movie you’ll see that she constantly returns to that room and kind of beats herself up, looking at the pictures of stars on her walls, and at the end of the movie its the same thing only she’s now gotten what she wants only she’s a phony version of it. Now she’s gotten the role but she’s this bald, shell of a person, she’s come full circle. If you look at the end of the movie she’s completely happy but if you look at her at the beginning of the movie, she’s not. So the movie might be this very bleak tragedy in some ways but not for Sarah, she’s gotten what she wants. As the audience, you realize she just didn’t get it the way you thought she would.
Kevin: The whole movie’s about choice and ambition and what people will turn into a weapon and what people will be willing to do to achieve their dreams. The second she looks in the mirror and likes what she sees, her journey’s complete
BF: This story seems so familiar to young actresses. Did any of the actresses you worked with have their own personal Hollywood horror stories? Did any of them inform the story with their own experiences?
Dennis: Nothing that bad but it seems like actors, men and women, women more so, there’s always this prevailing sense something that when you’re on certain sets or around certain people that there might be a sleaze factor. As far as competition goes? We had actors who told us they had best friends and roommates who were up for the same roles they were, who got the roles and they didn’t. LA is a very big town but it’s also a very small community, I think a lot of actors will relate. With a lot of the actors who came in to read, the second the looked at the script they had a story to tell us about something that happened to them or why it spoke to them so much. We had a guy who came to the premiere in LA and stopped me in the lobby and and told us it spoke to him a lot because he was up for a role and one day the producer took him out and started to kiss him and basically just molested him. I think that stuff, maybe you don’t hear about it as much any more but I think it still goes on.
BF: Why were you drawn to this story? Particularly as men when it focuses so much on Sarah’s experiences as a young woman trying to be a star?
Kevin: I think we knew beforehand, writing it that this was an issue women dealt with more in Hollywood. As far as someone struggling to start their career before they get to old or feeling like there’s a ticking clock, like they have to get going before it’s too late, I feel like that pressure is put on women a lot more than it is on men. You watch movies and you’ll have a 50 year old man and his wife will be played by someone who’s 23. I feel like male actors can continue to have a career as they get older, they can play character roles or even leading men roles and their female counterpart is two decades younger than them. I feel like that pressure to strike while the iron is hot or get your career going before you get too old is real issue that women in Hollywood have to deal with.
BF: What is the film’s stance on Sarah’s decision to perform sexual acts to get the role? Are we meant to judge her for this?
Dennis: It’s tough because if you look at the movie, every decision she makes is her own, this is not a person who is being corrupted. We were really conscious of the fact that if you look at the movie closely, you’ll see that Sarah is always in the driver’s seat. If you’re judging anyone you’re judging Sarah, you judge the people around her but you’ll see that they’re only presenting her with options and she’s choosing the wrong ones. We didn’t want her to feel like a victim, the people around her are victims. I think even from the opening shot of the film if you look closely you can see that something is not right with this girl and as it moves on, there’s a series of situations, like when the girl breaks her nose at the pool and she laughs, that she’s just not a great person.
BF: I enjoyed that Sarah was not coerced or tricked into her decision. Though she becomes a victim, with horrific things happening to her body, she continues to have some agency as she has made a conscious decision to do whatever she can for fame. Indeed, instead of killing random people, in the end, she kills the people who she saw as holding her back. Why did you feel it was important to give Sarah this agency?
Kevin: I think a lot of times women characters get exploited in movies like films like this, things are constantly being done to them and they’re helpless to deal with it, and that’s just a form of exploitation, which is fine but we weren’t really interested in dealing with that.
Dennis: I don’t think you see enough movies where a female character really owes her own decisions. She doesn’t have to be sweet, she can be terrible. There’s something kind of fun to make a character like this who makes her own decisions and allows herself to be corrupted, who allows herself to be exploited and is be fine with it in the end. There’s something a little bold about how Sarah does all that in the movies. It’s terrible and you can judge her but its her own choice in the end.
In Sarah’s job at Big Tators, she feels exploited each day.
BF: It was interesting that Sarah is already used to being objectified. She works as a waitress at a Hooters-like restaurant which invites customers to ogle her. Why give Sarah this particular day job? Because of this, there is minimal different between Sarah’s daily life and the initial creepiness of her audition process. Tell me about this contrast?
Kevin: It’s like what she says when she’s talking to Danny, “I feel like I’m selling my soul already, it might as well be for something I love.” It kind of helps push her in the direction she makes in movie and also kind of helps seal the believability of her making that decision, that she’s the kind of person who already in her life is taking jobs or doing what she needs to to survive and sometimes it’s not necessarily where she wants to be and she hates it there and feels exploited but she needs to pay her bills- we hear later in the movie that she needs to pay her rent- so it’s sort of like when she took this job at Big Tators you see already that she’s not like one of the other waitresses that’s happily singing the birthday song and stuff, so its clear already she’s not the type of girl who thinks its fun to work in a place like this. so she must feel like she’s exploited working there and that’s why she lashing out at the bosses. She’s doing what she needs to to survive and that job really sets out that character element that she’s someone who will do things that she might not like or might be below what considers her standard but she will do them to survive or if its to get what she wants.
BF: Starry Eyes is not a film for the squeamish, there are several scenes of gore and brutal violence. The film also employs body horror to show Sarah’s transformation. Sarah vomits bugs and disintegrates until she looks like a badly strung-out junkie. Can you tell me a bit about Sarah’s transformation and your use of gore to accomplish it?
Dennis: I think body horror is one of the most effective sub-genres of horror because there’s something coming from inside you that you can’t escape. With a werewolf there’s a way to kill werewolves, with a haunted house movie there’s a way to escape a haunted house but with body horror, you can’t escape your own body and I think because the metaphor of this movie was about this actress feeling like she’s at the end of her rope and she had to make it as a star or its too late, for all the reasons of why we chose to focus on a woman instead of man, if you add body horror into that equation it’s ten times worse, especially if you focus on a character who already has bod issues. You can see in the beginning scene of the movie that she thinks she’s too heavy even if she’s very thin. She pulls her hair out when things don’t go right, this is a person that already has a lot of psychological triggers so to introduce body horror into the movie and to hopefully do it effectively, which I hope we did, to us was just physically unnerving and psychologically unnerving. As horror fans, Kevin and I have seen a lot of what there is to see but there’s something about seeing a person pulling their hair out or pulling their nail of that never ceases to kind of skeeze us out.
Kevin: It’s also like when she vomits up worms that’s coming from inside of her, it’s almost like she’s dying from the inside out, so this whole idea of what we call selling her soul, is really her giving up her self respect and we’re just watching her old body crumbling, but in the end she’s going to be rewarded with this beautiful new body that doesn’t have any imperfections or concern for others. That’s sort of what the body horror was representing here.
BF: Starry Eyes was partially funded through Kickstarter. What is it about this story that people will relate to?
Kevin: I think it works as a Kickstarter film because the whole film is really about someone banging their head against the wall trying to get into an industry that’s very hard to get into and here me and Dennis have been working together for 20 years making films and this is the first one that’s ever gotten a real release. We put a lot of that in the movie, our feelings of trying to get into this industry, so I think this story was a great project to be funded, at least in part, on Kickstarter because everyone on Kickstarter is making films at an independent level or a crowd source level because they’re not getting that money or through the traditional means of the Hollywood system. That’s basically what you’re doing on Kickstarter, it’s people trying to make a film without the Hollywood system.
Is Sarah a victim or a villain?
BF: Part of the reason the film works so well is Alex Essoe’s knockout performance in the physically and emotionally demanding role of Sarah. Tell me about Essoe.
Kevin: Working with Alex was great. This is a film where an actor has to use everything in their toolkit. It goes from a girl being insecure and looking in the mirror at the beginning, insecure and emotional, to the monster she becomes at the end. She really goes the full gamut and does just about everything. It was really important when we were looking for somebody to play this role that it wasn’t about talent, we needed somebody who really understood the material and was game to do this. If you get somebody that is going to have to be in every scene of the movie and do the things that you have to do in this movie from four hours of make-up to crawling out of the ground to freaking out on the floor, there’s a lot of things in here that people might shy away from and if you’ve got somebody that’s not down to take on that performance or doesn’t understand the material, and they’re in every scene of the movie, you’re never going to make your schedule because in a low budget film like this, we really had a tight schedule. If somebody doesn’t understand what you’re doing or is going “why” or “I don’t get it” or saying “I’m not going to do that it,” you’re not going to make your schedule. So it was really important to have someone who really understood the material and was game to do it. Alex, she knew all the references, all the films we were going to tell her to see, she had seen them all already, she loved them all, she saw this as a chance to do the full spectrum of acting, like “why wouldn’t I want to do this movie, I get to do every thing that I’ve learned how to do as an actor” and we were like, yes, totally. So she was great, she never complained she was down to do everything, she brought a lot of her own stuff to the role, she really elevated the role. It’s tough when you have a script, you have a character on a page that you wrote, you look at people and there’s a lot of talented people out there and they may give a good reading but that’s just two scenes, you never know are they doing to come and set and be this character. And she just came and she brought her own ideas and added a lot of nuance to the character, she just became the character. I watch the movie now and think, yeah, Sarah Walker now exists through Alex Essoe.
BF: What is your next project?
Kevin: We are constantly writing every day. I like in the same apartment complex as Dennis and everyday we work on our scripts. We have a few things we’re working on but getting a film off the ground if very difficult and a lot of elements factor into it. We’ve got a few scripts we’re working on and we would like to do and its all dependent on everything falling in the right place to see which one comes together.
Starry Eyes comes out on Blu-Ray on Feb. 3.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
In so many ways, this film reflects the current moment, while also highlighting how things have and have not changed since the King family and their allies risked their lives to secure rights for all. Scenes in the film will jolt you into the present: watching Jimmie Lee Jackson’s mother grieve in 1965 for the son she will never see again made me immediately think of the family of Tamir Rice, the young black boy who was murdered by police officers this year for toting a toy gun in Ohio. ‘Selma’ is now.
This guest post by Nijla Mu’min previously appeared at Bitch Media and is cross-posted with permission.
Historical dramas often stick to a tried-and-true formula: Important figures face struggles, then they triumph, becoming the great people we know today. We can usually count on a scene from their conflicted childhood, scenes showing their romantic troubles, any issues with drugs or alcohol, and how they persevered through it all to deliver whatever divine message or artistic gift they possessed.
Ava DuVernay’s new Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, Selma, avoids this formula—much to its benefit. It is one of the most effective, well-crafted historical biopics that I’ve ever seen because it goes off the traditional narrative about the Civil Rights Movement, giving us a moment in history that feels immediately familiar to the moment we are currently living in.
Selma captures the tireless efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and a group of black activists attempting to secure equal voting rights for black people. These efforts led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The film takes its name from the series of marches that King and his followers embarked on at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. One of those marches was infamously known as “Bloody Sunday,” after police and deputized locals descended on the protesters with nightsticks and tear gas. DuVernay and Director of Photography Bradford Young capture that march in all its terror in a scene where young and elderly marchers are clubbed and chased by angry police on horses. Selma certainly doesn’t cast the history of the Civil Rights Movement in feel-good soft focus.
In a recent interview I conducted with DuVernay, she discussed the way she approached the humanity of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including his suspected infidelity. She was most interested in how this information affected his wife, Coretta Scott King, and how Martin Luther King would respond in the moment when questioned by Coretta. This emphasis on the intimacy in their relationship, rather than the scandal that the FBI sought to publicize, is something that informs the core of the film.
DuVernay is not interested in showing us montages of the unfaithful hero, his mistress, and the scorned wife, as was done in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. She is interested in the complex spaces of love and pain between two people. Coretta Scott King, played with an uncanny resemblance by Carmen Ejogo, takes on a central role in this film, not only as a wife and mother, but as a key player in the movement as she faces daily death threats made against her and her family. The attention and specificity paid to her character and her relationship to King is another gift that DuVernay brings to this film.
Further, there are so many ways this film could’ve become an extension of the Hallmark image that we see of Martin Luther King Jr., one that replays the same “I Have a Dream Speech” and tells us that nonviolence is the only way. While those elements are important, they are often overemphasized at the expense of the other work he did.
That is where Selma fills in the blanks. In this film, we get to know a methodical, intelligent, human Martin Luther King Jr; a man who just wanted to sit down at the end of the day and smoke a cigarette, or call Mahalia Jackson in the middle of the night to hear her sing a soothing gospel song. In the film, he invokes nonviolence but also cleverly provokes outward hatred in his opponents, helping people around the world witness this physical racism in the media. His tactics were risky, his negotiations with the likes of LBJ were grueling, and he was often put in positions of extreme discomfort, along with the many people he worked with.
This is not a film about a man and his followers, but about how a man’s work is informed by the respect he has for the people he works with—and even those he doesn’t. It reflects the movement by emphasizing distinct traits in each of the civil rights leaders it documents, from the youthful resistance of Jimmie Lee Jackson (played powerfully by Keith Stanfield), to the gentle persistence of Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch), who appeals to Coretta Scott King in a beautifully rendered scene. That scene and others completely reverse the rhetoric we’ve been fed about who these people were. The warring ideals between Malcolm and Martin aren’t the focus of this narrative, but rather how Malcolm X may have actually intentionally pushed many black people to follow Martin Luther King Jr., helping to strengthen the movement after all. Again, DuVernay utilized Coretta Scott King in a way that shows her role in the movement beyond being a supportive wife. She serves as a sort of peacemaker here.
In so many ways, this film reflects the current moment, while also highlighting how things have and have not changed since the King family and their allies risked their lives to secure rights for all. Scenes in the film will jolt you into the present: watching Jimmie Lee Jackson’s mother grieve in 1965 for the son she will never see again made me immediately think of the family of Tamir Rice, the young black boy who was murdered by police officers this year for toting a toy gun in Ohio. Selma is now. It lets us into the interior spaces of pain, progress, and movement that no formulaic historical drama could ever capture.
Selma opened Christmas Day in Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, DC, and Atlanta. It opens nationwide Jan. 9.
