First-time director Anna Rose Holmer discusses The Fits and how working with the New York City ballet influenced her film. She also discusses using sound and editing to tell the story, and the shooting rules she set for herself.
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Director Anna Rose Holmer had a new idea for a coming-of-age story: tell it with movement and dance. Thus was born her innovative film The Fits, which screened in this year’s Sundance’s NeXT section — or as Holmer calls it, the “punk rock section”. The film follows Toni (Royalty Hightower) as she tentatively joins the girls’ dance team at the local community centre, leaving behind her days of training at the boxing gym with her brother. Meanwhile, the girls of the team are starting to break out in unexplained “fits”, a scary sort of bodily convulsion that seems like a metaphor for menstruation.
Holmer’s formal approach to shooting The Fits is fascinating. Using locked off frames and focus pulling to put us into Toni’s perspective, it’s a beautifully, confidently shot film — hugely impressive, especially for a first-time narrative filmmaker. Although the plot is a little thin, the film never wears out its welcome. It’s a visual delight and the debut of an important talent.
At Sundance, we sat down with Holmer to discuss how working with the New York City ballet influenced her film, how she used sound and editing to tell the story, and the shooting rules she set for herself.
7R: I understand you worked with the New York City ballet. How did that influence your filmmaking approach for The Fits?
Anna Rose Holmer: I’ve worked on two feature length films with them and some short content as a producer. In 2010, I worked on a pretty experimental piece called New York Export Opus Jazz, and there’s a feature length dance interpretation of a Jerome Robbins ballet from the 1950s of the same title. I co-directed and produced a short companion documentary to that called A Ballet in Sneakers. That was my first exposure to ballet.
Just watching the team making decisions about dance on film and the way they approached New York Export Opus Jazz, the narrative element of it, was to make really specific camera choices for each movement of the ballet. So one was completely static shots. One was steadycam; one was a crane; one was dolly. They really experimented with dance on film. It was really amazing to be able to witness that process, kind of tangentially attached to the film, but making my own work.
I learned so much from observing the choreography process. You get to be really in tune with dancers and dancers’ bodies. What was fascinating to me was watching dancers learn choreography and how there’s this body mirroring going on and unspoken communication that was happening only with their bodies. Something I thought about a lot during The Fits was communicating through dance and through movement.
Shooting the dance sequences in The Fits
7R: You use a lot of wide shots to shoot the dance numbers in The Fits. How did you conceive of how to shoot those scenes?
Anna Rose Holmer: Every single element of the film was considered as a choreographic choice, whether it was dance or not. Whole body thinking was more appropriate to Toni’s state in the dance because when you framed her whole body, you were actually able to see other bodies around her. So it was her body in the context of the group, which was more suggestive of her emotional state. If we had only isolated her, and you saw her crude movements, I think something would have been lost because you wouldn’t have seen what the other girls were doing. She was comparing her body to the other girls, so it was important to be able to open up in that.
We do isolate her in different ways. Instead of just framing her tightly, in the first dance sequence, we see them all in the same focal plane, the young girls, the crabs. The second time we’re in the group setting again, Toni is really close to camera. She becomes the only one who is in the focal mark. Everyone else falls out of focus. We did other lens choices to be able to isolate her without just doing a closeup of her. We were very conscious of making sure that all of the dance sequences were really articulating the narrative story about Toni’s mental state even though they were dance sequences.
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7R: There were a lot of interesting choices about where to pull focus and where the background was out of focus in The Fits.
Anna Rose Holmer: My first job on a set, I was a focus puller. I came up as a camera assistant. I was a first, then an operator, and then a DP [Director of Photography]. I’ve always thought of focus as a very critical tool because it was my job for a long time. It’s about that isolation of Toni.
We used really old lenses that were uncoated. They had a really beautiful way of letting detail fall. If she’s not in the centre of the lens, she’s out of focus. There’s some times in the big open gym space, where she’s throwing basketballs — that’s a wide shot. She’s should be in focus because of how wide we are. But we put her on the very edge of the lens so she actually starts to be distorted.
My DP Paul Ye and I played around with all of the tools that we had. It was always about how was Toni feeling and how can we express that cinematographically.
7R: I really liked how that really put you in her shoes. There’s a scene where she’s looking through the window at the girls dancing and it’s blurry at the sides and you really feel like you’re in her shoes.
Anna Rose Holmer: The whole film could be argued as her direct point of view. It wasn’t just about lensing. In the editing process, too, there were a few moments that we decided didn’t articulate Toni’s point of view in the story so they had to go. We were very, very rigid on that decision to make this movie about a single girl’s perspective. That kind of dictated all of our choices.
Sound design in The Fits
7R: The sound design is also very subjective in The Fits.
Anna Rose Holmer: My sound designer Chris Foster and I experimented with some medical sounds. We listened to sonogram recordings and surgery sounds through laser technology to see what it sounds like to be inside somebody else’s body. There’s also this kind of fogginess, where sound has to go through her [Toni’s] subjective layer to reach the audience. It’s being filtered through this kind of gauzy, meshy sound design.
We started to use that to exemplify her headspace. When she’s focused, when she’s exercising, all the sounds of the gym have to come through this gauzy layer to reach her. Everything becomes kind of dreamy and watery. That helped us make a distinction between her perception of reality and reality.
7R: The sound seems to play an important role in that. It’s very precise. You can even hear her shirt moving when she takes it on or off.
Anna Rose Holmer: We foleyed everything that we didn’t have. We had incredible production sound. Our sound recordist and our sound designer actually met before we went into production. They made a list of wild sounds. We did screen rooms in the gym locations, in the locker room locations, so those sounds really picked up the space that we were in. Then we enhanced that. We foleyed every time her braid flew in the air. We foleyed those to sound like wings. Every single breath she takes, we lifted in the mix, so that it pierced through, because breath was one of the big themes. All of that was to put the audience as close to Toni as you could.
Editing The Fits
7R: You have a lot of long takes in The Fits. How did you approach the edit to establish the rhythm for the film.
Anna Rose Holmer: Our editor Saela Davis cut a lot on empty rooms and then let people enter in, which is typically considered dead time. Or an empty frame, when she’s throwing a basketball, we cut in as she’s out of frame, and she rises into the frame. We chose to do that because the space itself started to become a character. We wanted to remind the audience of that claustrophobic tension of the building itself as a character. Every time we show an empty room, it closes in on Toni as she enters it. It’s a lot stronger, sometimes, to cut on action. But we would choose to let the action play out. The emphasis would be to return again to the building.
That was our standard rhythm, and when we broke that rhythm that we’d set up for ourselves, that gave us further power to make something immediate or urgent. When those critical moments came, we were always cutting on action. They became more powerful beats because they felt different from the normal rhythm we set up.
I wanted the film to feel like every scene could be an hour later or the next day or a week later — to play around with that sense of time, of being an adolescent. My memory of that time is exactly like that. The most important thing could be an hour, but it seems like it lasted a week.
Most of the girls wore the same costume throughout the entire film. Toni changes the most. That allowed us to blur the line between edits, whether it was the next day, or later that day, or a week later. There’s no concrete marker of time. That allowed us to establish our own pacing throughout the film.
Choosing shots
7R: A lot of your shots in The Fits are locked down and still frame. How did you choose to frame those individually and make that a way of shoot?
Anna Rose Holmer: That was always my vision of the film that it would be clear, choreographed camera movement. I think it allowed us to make stronger choreographic choices because we were also choreographing the camera. Although it’s a locked frame, we often utilize camera movement. We had a lot of steadycam or dolly movement, but it was always intentional and coming from the filmmaker’s side. Very rarely were those movements motivated by internal frame action. That allowed an unease, this sense of momentum that Toni is not in control of — that there’s some kind of drift, like gravity or time moving forward, that she can’t stop. For us, it was just establishing rules so that we could break them to emphasize particular moments.
Shooting rules for The Fits
7R: What were some of those rules?
Anna Rose Holmer: Some of the rules were just about how much of the scripted action took place off camera. If we could hold on Toni’s face, we did. We pushed that to the extreme that you could. When we did our first shooting script storyboard, there were entire pages of dialogue and action that I would circle and say, “This is off screen. We’re actually just watching Toni.”
Every time that we went outside, we wanted to keep Toni as contained as possible. There’s the overpass, where she’s outside, but she’s in a kind of cage. When there’s the pool, she’s outside, but she’s kind of in a room. So there’s never a relief or a release from the claustrophobic tension until the very end.
Read more: How does Frederick Wiseman shoot dance on film? >>
Download a FREE excerpt from the ebook Fiction directors: In their own words
Discover how the best fiction directors working today —from the famous to the quietly fantastic — approach making movies. An essential resource for filmmakers, and a great introduction to filmmaking for every cinephile.
