Seventh Row

A place to think deeply about movies

Establishing Shots

Promising emerging filmmakers discuss their first feature film.

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TIFF19: Writer-director Rose Glass on Saint Maud

Writer-director Rose Glass discusses her first feature, Saint Maud, making a thrilling and funny horror film, and getting comfortable working with actors.

This is an excerpt of the essay which appears in the ebook Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and The Struggle for Female Agency. Get your copy of the ebook here.

Morfydd Clark stars in Saint Maud, directed by Rose Glass
Morfydd Clark stars in Saint Maud, directed by Rose Glass

One of the best surprises at TIFF, Rose Glass’ Saint Maud is an effective thrill-ride of a horror film that is as funny as it is terrifying. The feature debut centres on the young, extremely pious nurse, Maud (Morfydd Clark), as she moves into the mansion of celebrated retired dancer Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) to take care of her. Maud is good at her job, but soon cannot help judging the liberal ways of her mistress; the dancer — much more of a social animal than the shy Maud is — can immediately tell. Amanda initially takes great pleasure in poking fun at the extremely conservative behaviour of her young employee, and it’s easy to laugh with her. But the film thankfully does not go down that predictable route; Amanda’s mockery soon turns into genuine concern. 

As Maud progressively loses her grasp on reality, her actions become more unpredictable and extreme, and the mild chuckles of the film’s earlier moments make way for sheer hysteria. Although we may be laughing, we cannot help but empathise with Maud to some degree, simply because the film does not give us a choice. Through thick and thin, Glass stands by her lead character even at her most unhinged. It is this kind of faithfulness to its protagonist — this kind of humanity — that makes Saint Maud stand out from most genre fare. Where the large majority of horror films are too cynical to stick to their premise, Rose Glass’ impressive debut follows through with unwavering devotion. 

I talked to Glass in Toronto about the process of writing the film, the choice of its perspective, the question of tone, and the challenge of not losing the audience in the film’s most unexpected moments. 

Seventh Row (7R): Can you tell us about the genesis of Saint Maud? 

Rose Glass: I started thinking about it just around the time I was finishing film school, so about five years ago. The initial scenario I thought was interesting was about a young woman — I think she was even a nun, at the beginning — who hears the voice of God in her head and falls in love with him. So it was going to be this weird, sort of kinky, sadomasochistic relationship between a nun and the voice of God in her head. I thought that sounded fun. 

It developed from there, and obviously, we spent the last few years working on it. A lot of that stuff ended up falling away, and it turned into something quite different. But I guess the core remained — having something that is set in a very interior kind of world.

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7R: It’s interesting that she was initially a nun because I feel like the aspect of her being a housekeeper or live-in nurse adds a grittiness to Saint Maud, which adds to the horror of it.

Rose Glass: Oh, good! As soon as you get into stuff which has any kind of medical groundings or connotations, I find that kind of stuff — bodies, medicine — very interesting. And anything that makes people a little squeamish is good. 

I think the nun fell away pretty quickly; I think it was even set in the 1960s. We’ve kept a sort of timeless feel. But that was the idea that I was initially attracted to. And then it felt a bit too on-the-nose, if she was a nun. A big sort of progression was getting rid of her growing up in a really intensely religious background. 

As soon as I knew that it was set in the present day, that she was a nurse, and that she didn’t have any sort of religious background at all, then we decided the fate business was actually something she’d come to herself in her own way. Her version of Christianity is quite warped; it’s like a weird form of self-care! 

Morfydd Clark stars in Saint Maud, directed by Rose Glass
Morfydd Clark stars in Saint Maud, directed by Rose Glass

7R: How did you work out the perspective for Saint Maud? Why did you choose to always have us with Maud throughout? Her ideas and her religious interest are strange; the number of people in the audience who would completely side with her is very limited if not inexistant. How did you think of the audience’s alignment and perspective throughout? 

Rose Glass: I’m always interested in anti-heroes and characters who are deeply flawed. I’m interested in stories where you see characters doing seemingly unacceptable, or kind of crazy, bad, monstrous things, but hopefully, through the experience of watching the film, you kind of put the audience in their experience enough to realise that maybe there’s something more universal in the motivations behind it. Maud’s behaviour may be sort of monstrous, and she does terrible things, but the hope is that you present her as a real person: she’s funny; she’s arrogant; she’s vulnerable; and she’s all these other things. Even though a lot of stuff that happens is very strange, it comes from a misguided place of just wanting to connect with people, to not be lonely, to feel valued and seen — all these very fundamental, normal things that I think, I hope, everyone else wants.

She obviously goes about it in an unhealthy way. And she needs help. But she’s the hero of her own story. I thought if it were too naturalistic or realistic, then we’d sort of see her a bit too much as a victim, a bored and lonely girl, so depressing… And I’m sure some of it is a bit down, but it was important to me that it’s a really fun experience for people to watch. She experiences these ecstatic highs, as well as lows. 

Want to read the rest of the interview? Order a copy of our ebook on feminist horror beyond empowertainment here.

beyond empowertainment preview

Want to read the rest of the interview with Eskil Vogt on Thelma?

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‘Violence can be very subtle’: Director Hinde Boujemaa and actress Hend Sabri on Noura’s Dream

Director Hinde Boujemaa and actress Hend Sabri discuss their collaboration on Noura’s Dream, which makes visible the invisible everyday violence women face. Read our review of the film here.

Hind Sabri stars as Noura in Noura's Dream, the first feature from director Hinde Boujemaa.
Hend Sabri stars as Noura in Noura’s Dream, the first feature from director Hinde Boujemaa.

Director Hinde Boujemaa and actress Hend Sabri describe Noura’s Dream as a modern-day Greek tragedy in which a flawed, complex woman must choose between her children and her lover. Set over the course of just a few days, Noura (Hend Sabri) sees her life turned upside down when, just as she’s about to divorce her abusive and imprisoned husband and marry her lover, her husband gets out of jail — and starts infiltrating her life in subtly violent ways. Like Medea and Electra, she must respond instinctively and quickly to the situations she finds herself in. 

What makes the film so remarkable is that it makes visible the invisible violence and indignities that women are subjected to, especially by men. And yet, Noura is never a victim: she has agency and grit, but no good choices. As Sabri describes, all of Noura’s choices are “lose-lose,” so she becomes a victim of her own choices. Of course, the reason her choices are limited is because of the patriarchal structures that guide her life. 

At TIFF, I sat down with Boujemaa and Sabri to discuss why they wanted to tell Noura’s story, the importance of complex female characters who are neither idolized nor victimized, making visible the invisible violence women face, and how they collaborated to tell this story.

Seventh Row (7R): Where did the idea for Noura’s Dream come from? What made you want to tell this story?

Hinde Boujemaa: The idea came from observing different lives of different women in our society. It’s an observation of our society. Things that touched you, and that you want to put in the story.

Hend Sabri: We spoke about it maybe two years before filming. She had that idea, and she thought about me, but she also thought about other actresses. I did not live in Tunisia, so we did not meet very often. But we happened to see each other many times and test each other, try each other. She asked me to come and audition for the part, which I had never done…

Hinde Boujemaa: Because she’s a big star! And I told myself, Are you crazy? You’re asking Hend Sabri to audition? What are you doing!

Hend Sabri: And she came!

Hinde Boujemaa: Yes she did! It was great. I was pretty sure, you know?

Hend Sabri: That I would say yes?

Hinde Boujemaa: No, of me, of my choice. There was a really strong attraction with her as a human, as a woman, as an actress. 

Hend Sabri: Yeah, we have the same sensibility. We discovered that we have the same approach to social causes, women’s status in general, in Tunisia, and the Arab world. We have a lot of affinity and communicate easily.

Hinde Boujemaa: And respect for each other. Even if we have different points of view, we discuss.

Hend Sabri: We talk a lot.

Hinde Boujemaa: We do. It’s important to talk.

Hend Sabri: And we talked a lot before this film. We had it already talked out before going on set. When we went on set, we already had a certain idea of what she wanted me to be and what she was expecting of me, as an actress.

Hinde Boujemaa:. We were sharing everything. It’s important for me to be that way with all the actors. They are smart, so you have to use their intelligence.

Hend Sabri: Yes, she has no hierarchy. The way she works is very democratic. She listens a lot. She puts her actors, not only me but also Lotfi [Abdelli] and Hakim [Boumsaoudi), the two men in the story, in a collaboration mode where everyone comes with their luggage, but also their ideas. Everybody put something from really deep inside into this film, and she knows how to collect that from us.

Hinde Boujemaa: Yes, and I want to take the best of all the actors. They are here with me to give me something to use.

Hend Sabri: She knew how to raise my interest, because this is not an uncommon story.
It’s a very common story but untold in our region, especially from the angle of love and adultery. Women are, in general, either sacralized or victimized. But women who are human, and have all aspects of being human, I like her approach to that. 

Noura is not a perfect woman. She’s a woman with all her flaws, with all her fears. Sometimes, she can be empowered. She can act in a cowardly way. That is what I liked because in all our region, women are either heroes, totally supernatural beings, or victimized, lower-than-men beings. 

This is a film from the point of view of a woman who’s in love, but who also cherishes her children, who also has very noble values, but at the same time, also has her fears, and she makes mistakes. So that’s what made me really go for this film with my heart. We need more universal stories about Arab women, not necessarily stigmatized with all the luggage of an Arab woman. I like this freedom of approach she has, which is a very human approach, not a cultural approach.

Hinde Boujemaa: Yeah, I think that adultery, for a woman, is a weird problem. Even in Sweden, or in the north, or in more developed countries, it’s not the same [as for men]. There’s something totally unfair between [how we think about] a man who has a mistress and a woman who has a lover. Even here, they don’t have the same glaze. So that’s why this story is more general. It begins in Tunisia, in a small village, but it’s a universal problem.

Noura (Hind Sabri) and her lover in Noura's Dream, the first feature from director Hinde Boujemaa
Noura (Hend Sabri) and her lover in Noura’s Dream, the first feature from director Hinde Boujemaa

7R: What was the process for embodying Noura and to prepare for the shoot?

Hend Sabri: We had maybe two weeks of rehearsals. We had talked for hours and hours and hours before, and I had already references in mind and fictional references that we spoke about a lot. She gave me films to watch — references to the character, the female characters that she liked in other films, and that she wanted me to get a glimpse of to incorporate them into Noura. 

I found Noura inside, just as I found her in Hinde, just as I found her in my mother. We are cutting into a special time in a woman’s life where I think every woman goes through these moments of self-doubt. What’s my priority: is it me or my children? Is it staying the course of this life or changing totally? It speaks to me a lot because every woman goes through these moments, but we are not allowed to expose them as men expose them in films.

Hinde Boujemaa: Or you are a slut. And it’s international.

Hend Sabri: And we’re judgmental. I think women are even more judgemental about women’s issues that are discussed on screen. They try to hide a certain guilt of feeling this way by just refusing to see it on screen. We have been raised for generations and generations that you should sacrifice yourself for your children and your family. I know it’s not just in the Middle East; it’s everywhere in the world. So that’s what I found of her in me. 

We cried for hours talking about our personal experiences. We shared a lot of our lives, and we had those moments on set where we could just look at each other and have a tear at the same moment, or share knowing that women all feel certain things that they are not allowed, that they do not allow themselves to feel. Noura is this embodiment of the times that we do not allow ourselves to feel.

Hinde Boujemaa: She’s the kind of actress who’s really involved in the projects that she chooses to accept to do, and she’s so curious. She observes everything.

7R: One of the things I really loved was Noura seems really smart about how she navigates this world, how she navigates the power structures and the men in her life. She chooses her battles: when she is going to fight back and when she knows she can’t win. How did you think about writing that?

Hinde Boujemaa: It’s kind of a survival instinct. There’s something unconscious, and you have to find a solution in one second. You are in front of a solution with warning, warning, warning, so I don’t have the time to reflect about the solution and to tell myself what I’m going to do now. No, it’s instinctive behaviour. 

We all have emergencies in our life. For her, the first thing is the children. Instinctively, she does all the necessary things to protect her children. We worked on the instinctive, animalistic kind of womanhood, not only motherhood, but the instinct of woman is usually very protective, and she tried to protect her lover…

Hend Sabri: Except for one situation.

Hinde Boujemaa: When the husband threatens with the children. So it was love or children, and she decides.

Hend Sabri: We’re not being judgmental. In another story, she could have chosen her lover; we wouldn’t have judged. But this Noura, in particular, as Hinde wrote her, imagined her, created her, she worshipped her children. She really wanted to preserve that, and she betrayed her lover. She had a Greek dilemma between her children and betraying her lover.

Hinde Boujemaa: A dilemma of split seconds. She didn’t have the time to reflect.

Hend Sabri: And I like that, as an actress, nothing is really thought of. The film is over less than a week, four or five days. Everything happens to the spectator as it happens to her. There is no reflection over what she is going to do or say to husband. She always reacts with the audience. We discover he’s out of jail when she discovers he’s out of jail. He comes home and tells her to follow him; she goes after him just as the audience is going. We never know what the next step is. 

For actors, it can be liberating, because you are so much in the present scene and present moment. You don’t have any reference to the scene or what’s going to happen. I think that kind of tension is very important in certain scenes because the spectator is living with the character. There is no delay between what the character is living, feeling, right now and what the audience is living, feeling, right now.

7R: Part of what I mean is you can feel there’s history there. She’s dealt with versions of this situation before, or men like this before. She knows how to handle her husband. When she’s in the police station, for example, and that police officer says to her, “You can put the husband away,” you know that she wants to do that, but she knows the other police officer is corrupt.

Hinde Boujemaa: She’s stuck between the children and the lover. She’s stuck always. She’s always in this dilemma.

Hend Sabri: As every woman is. You always have to make a choice where you lose or lose; it’s what you lose. Whereas men don’t go through the same kind of dilemma.

Hinde Boujemaa: The path of least resistance, she chooses that.

Hend Sabri: I think what’s interesting is, if we changed the angle or point of view from Noura to the husband, you would find a totally different approach to what a choice means to a man and what a choice means to a woman. A choice, in a woman’s situation, even when she makes the choice, and is proactive about making the choice, is always a lose-lose situation. Whereas it’s much easier for a man to make emotional choices, life-changing decisions. 

That is a very interesting part of the film. She never complains or cries in the film. She always looks confident. Even at the police station, she’s keeping her head high. But at the same time, you feel something else, or at least she broke my heart so many times in scenes. But she takes it because she can not allow herself not to take it. This is the strength and vulnerability of every woman in the world: we can not allow that vulnerability to show at crucial moments in our lives. We can maybe allow it offscreen. Maybe she allowed it, but we did not keep that on camera. She wanted a strong woman; she did not want a self-loathing woman.

Hinde Boujemaa: I didn’t want a miserabilistic woman or a victim. She is a victim, but she’s a victim of the big system. And she’s the victim of her decisions. She’s the victim of her fear.

7R: How did you approach the mise-en-scène of the film? The framing is so meaningful and beautiful.

Hinde Boujemaa: It was important to me to feel the five senses of my actress — the smell, the touch — so that’s why I decided when I am with her, to be really close to her. With the family scenes, it’s another thing because I needed to have this energy that you can find in each house. I focused a lot on her because she has this gift to say without doing anything and to tell a lot. 

Before shooting, I was working on different ways of mise-en-scène, but when she came in front of me, and the other men, too, there is something of an instinctive way of working. I abandoned all my ideas and obeyed my personal vision, and that vision was to be near.

7R: There are a few moments where violence happens, and it happens outside of the frame. How did you decide to do that?

Hinde Boujemaa: I was afraid of the cliche because everyone is expecting it. There are easy things to do when you do a movie. It’s easy to hit; it’s easy to shout. I think that we are all conditioned by a kind of dramaturgy that we’ve learned, and now we are in a point that people know exactly the scene because they all know the typical tragic structure. 

They have to be surprised by the story. They need something else. It’s the reality of the human being: we are full of surprises and unpredictable. It was so easy to show violence, but the characters are more complex. Humans are more complex than that.

Hend Sabri: And violence can be very subtle. It doesn’t have to be beating, it doesn’t have to be shouting. There is violence that can be felt in silence. If I may add something, I think that just showing the physical part, or just the big parts, discredits other forms of violence. And I think we are playing a little with this in this film, as well.

I’m sure the audience will have mixed feelings about how violent is violence? What is the threshold that a woman should accept, and when or where does it become unbearable? Which should be subjective. I like how she played with that. There are no limits. Violences can be just not liking the smell of someone you are sleeping next to.

Hinde Boujemaa: Exactly. In the scene after the rape, he came back to the house and told her, “Now I’m sure that you love me.” That’s super violent.

7R: Yes, it feels like there are so many little indignities that just build up and build up. They start small, but before you know it, they become a really big problem.

Hend Sabri: And we, as women, are preconditioned to think that, if he doesn’t beat you, then it’s fine. That’s what the mothers say, the grandmothers say.

Hinde Boujemaa: Yeah, exactly, that you have to accept your husband.

Hend Sabri: So we learn to deal with that and even to make concessions with ourselves.

Hinde Boujemaa: Yeah, that’s why she never quit him before. And that’s why a lot of women in this world never quit their husbands, even if there’s this kind of violence.

Hend Sabri: Because there’s nothing justifiable. And I’m sure many men would say he’s not that bad because the violence is not on-screen.

7R: I feel that’s what the film really does, is it makes visible…

Hinde Boujemaa: The untold violences of everyday.

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TIFF Establishing Shots: Heather Young on her first feature, Murmur

Writer-director Heather Young discusses Murmur, her feature film debut, making the transition from shorts to features, working with animals and non-actors, and developing the film’s formal aesthetic. We also interviewed Heather Young about her short film Milk here. Listen to us discuss Murmur on the podcast here.

Shan MacDonald in Heather Young's Murmur
Shan MacDonald stars as Donna in Heather Young’s Murmur

Halifax-based filmmaker Heather Young first came to our attention in 2017 with her remarkable short Milk, which was part observational animal documentary and part low-key drama: the story of a woman on a dairy farm, who spends her days milking and tending to cows, who discovers she herself is pregnant. The film was particularly sensitive to the relationship between humans, animals, and technology, as well as the sounds of animals and technology.

At TIFF this year, Young makes her feature debut with Murmur, which treads similar territory: a solitary middle-aged protagonist, Donna (Shan MacDonald) starts working at an animal rescue, and ends up taking many of the animals home to fill the companionship void in her life. Shot with pale tones — grey and “the colour of concrete” were Young’s references — that reflect the bleak story on-screen. Donna has no close personal relationships, and whenever she talks to others in the film, usually authority figures, Young keeps them off-screen to emphasize Donna’s isolation.

Before the world premiere of Murmur, I spoke to writer-director Heather Young about telling a story about a single protagonist, working with animals and non-actors, and developing the film’s formal aesthetic.

Seventh Row (7R): What was the genesis of the idea for the film Murmur? How did you decide this was the story that you wanted to tell with your first feature?

Heather Young: It started with a small short film that I made in 2014 called Howard and Jean about my mother and her relationship with her elderly chihuahua, Howard. It was a documentary/fiction hybrid with my mother playing herself, but with some narrative fictional elements that I added in that were about her taking comfort in this little dog and being isolated, but using him as her social outlet.

After that film, I started thinking about what if I took that idea to the extreme? What if an older woman started using pets as her comfort but was never quite satisfied? It never quite quenched this thirst for companionship that she had, so she just keeps getting more animals, and it ends up becoming an addiction.

7R: How did you write the script for a film like Murmur? Part of what’s so unique about this film is for the most part we’re just following this one woman.

Heather Young: I had a traditional script written out for the Telefilm application, although there wasn’t a lot of dialogue written in. I did many drafts of the scripts. Even though I did have a normal script written for the schedule, and all the things based around the script, the difference was no one memorized lines. Some of the performers read it, like Shan [MacDonald], my lead. 

None of the performers had ever acted before. One of the things that I find can be intimidating for non-professional performers is having to memorize lines. A lot of times, when they have to say lines that they memorized, it just doesn’t feel authentic because they are trying to act. When I’m working with non-actors, I try to make sure that they are not acting at any time. That’s the most important thing for me: just letting them speak in their own words.

Shan MacDonald smoking a cigarette in Heather Young's feature film debut Murmur
Shan MacDonald smoking a cigarette in Heather Young’s feature film debut Murmur. Image courtesy of AlphaPr

7R: What made you decide you wanted to work with non-actors?

Heather Young: We kind of debated it at the beginning. Martha [Cooley], my producer, and I talked about potentially using real actors. But in my last three short films, I used non-professional actors; it was what I was used to at this point. I’d worked out a way to work with non-professionals that I felt was going okay and that I felt was working for my films. We decided for my first feature there’s already so many big changes going from short [to feature] so I didn’t want to change my working method too much.

7R: What is that process that you came up from? How do you approach working with them aside from you don’t have them memorize dialogue?

Heather Young: That’s the main thing, that they don’t have to memorize dialogue. It’s a lot to do with casting. I try to find people that are emotionally available or very able to easily access their emotions, which I’m looking out for when we’re doing auditions. Or [someone who] isn’t embarrassed to talk about personal things or isn’t embarrassed to show emotion in front of people. 

When working with non-professionals, I just try to make them feel comfortable and that there’s no pressure on them. I don’t rush them. I just encourage them to be themselves and not worry too much. We can do this as many times as we want; there’s no pressure. 

We work through a scene, and I tell them the different story beats that we have to cover and things that their character has to get across in the scene. I encourage them if there’s two people in the scene to have a real conversation with each other. I always say, if you’re being asked a question in a scene, and you don’t know the answer, just answer from your real life. 

For instance, there’s several scenes in the film where Shan, playing Donna, our main character, is seeing an addictions counsellor, and the addictions counsellor asks her a lot of questions. [Shan] was really brave. She would bring parts of her own life into the story. She would often just answer questions really honestly just as herself. She brought herself to it, which was really great.

7R: For the most part, the other characters that Donna interacts with in Murmur don’t appear on screen, or we just see their backs. Even in scenes where she’s having a conversation with somebody, the way you frame it, she’ll be in the part of the frame that’s closest to the person she’s talking to, but there’s a lot of the frame that’s empty: we’re not seeing the other person, and it’s very clear that it’s a choice that we’re not seeing the other person. Where did that idea come from? How did you decide when somebody would be in the frame or when they didn’t belong there?

Heather Young: I hadn’t planned that I was definitely going to do that, where I wouldn’t show the secondary characters. As we were shooting, I had the idea I would like to try that. I think it comes from the idea of this being a portrait film of a specific person. I really liked the idea of always having our focus be on Donna because it’s really about her experience. I really want the audience to empathize with her and what she’s going through. 

As these things are happening to her, I want people to look at her face and see her reactions to what they are saying. It became kind of unnecessary to complicate it with other people’s faces. I wanted to focus on her face.It [often[ seems like she doesn’t have a say in what’s happening to her in some ways. I liked the idea of these anonymous characters that feel like they know what’s best, but it’s impersonal. Without seeing them, it emphasizes the impersonal nature of her interactions with these authoritarian figures.

7R: Murmur has a very striking aesthetic. How did you work with your DP and production designer to create that colour scheme and aesthetic for the film?

Heather Young: My director of photography, Jeff Wheaton, and I planned it out quite thoroughly before we started shooting, which was great. He gave me the courage to do things that I was thinking of, but wasn’t sure about. I would be like, “I have this idea,” but then I’d be doubting if we should do it or if it was possible but he’d be like, “We can do that.” He was really encouraging. 

When I first suggested shooting in 4:3 aspect ratio, because I feel 4:3 really frames the face nicely, I was like, “Well, you’re probably not going to like this, but I was thinking maybe we can shoot 4:3, but not if it’s too much trouble.” He just immediately was excited and enthusiastic about it. We started doing all this research on 4:3 films and photographers who shoot in that format. We got a lot of great inspirational materials gathered. It was great how enthusiastic he was about that whereas some people would be like, “No, I think we’ll stick to the usual 16:9.” 

In terms of the framing, I like to have a restriction or a rule of some kind, not in everything I do, but when I’m lucky enough to have an experienced DP, it’s kind of fun to challenge ourselves with a rule. It makes you think about different ways of doing things and pushes your creativity a bit more. So we decided on a rule after watching Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2013) where the camera doesn’t move. It’s also a 4:3 film, and I really liked the framing choices in that film. We were talking about that film a lot, and he’s like, “What if we also didn’t move the camera?” I was like, ”Oh, we can’t do that! That’s crazy!” But again, Jeff encouraged me and showed me that we could actually do that. I thought it was a great idea, but I wasn’t sure it was possible. He showed me that it was. 

We ended up implementing that restriction that the camera can’t move. It was locked down for every shot. It really makes you think about the frame. You have to really like your frame because you are committing to it for the whole shot. That restriction really helped me focus on the detail and the aesthetic of every shot that we had. That was really helpful to bring out some ideas and originality we might not have had.

Shan MacDonald holding a dog inside a kennel in Heather Young's Murmur
Shan MacDonald holding a dog inside a kennel in Heather Young’s feature film debut Murmur. Image courtesy of AlphaPr.

7R: How did you decide on the colour scheme for Murmur?

Heather Young: I generally have some sort of instinct for what I feel the film should look like when it comes to colour, but it’s usually a very depressing palette. My producer Martha loves bright colours — her favourite colour is turquoise — so she was very disappointed with our dull, kind of depressing colour palette, but I just felt it fit the story. There’s some sadness and some struggle there. 

My general rule when it comes to colours is I want natural — nothing too exaggerated or over-saturated. I didn’t want any bright colours, nothing too cheery. My reference colour for the film was grey. I wanted a lot of grey. I remember saying, “the colour of concrete.” That’s also influenced by the locations: the industrial atmosphere of an animal shelter, an animal clinic environment. It’s very sterile, very cold. Where these animals are housed in a shelter environment is not a homey place. It’s practical; it has to be easily cleaned. Just a lot of glass, plastic, and concrete, and these kind of things that can be washed down easily. I did include a bit of colour. We use a little bit of pastel pink and pastel blue in some of the towels and wardrobe, which was nice, but I liked the idea that any colour that we used was desaturated to a certain extent, so the pastels were all a bit desaturated and nothing is vibrantly pulsing with life.

7R: Obviously, there are a lot of animals in the film Murmur. And this is not the first time that you’ve worked with animals. There are some things that feel like almost documentary footage, and there are also lots of scenes of dogs and cats with the main character. What was the process for doing all that because I imagine that there are a lot of challenges in working with that many animals?

Heather Young: It as definitely the big challenge of the film. The main dog in the film, Charlie, is owned by a woman named Gail who runs a dog rescue called Home to Stay in Halifax. She was just the most wonderful, generous, and kind person, who helped us so much with the film. We really couldn’t have done it without her. She not only provided the star dog, but she brought in several of her own dogs as Donna gets more and more animals. 

For all the dogs that are appearing together in the film in the apartment, I wanted them to be dogs that already knew each other so it felt like these are dogs that have lived together, spent time together. Also, that way we already know they are going to get along; they are not going to be scared of each other. 

What worked out well is Gail is friends in real life with Shan. Shan also has four dogs in real life. She’s a huge dog lover, and Shan has adopted dogs from Gail’s rescue. It worked out that Shan’s dogs and Gail’s dogs already knew each other. We brought in some of Shan’s dogs and some of Gail’s dogs and combined them for the large number of dogs in the film. Otherwise, it would have been too stressful trying to introduce dogs that had never met before. 

We did have a dog wrangler on set so there was always someone there to specifically care for the animals, make sure they were taken out for pee breaks, and had water and beds. We only had a couple days where we had the full amount of animals on set. It was usually just Charlie.

Gail has a lot of contacts in the dog community and a lot of friends in the dog rescue community here in Halifax. We needed more dogs than they actually had in the dog shelter where we were shooting, and we needed to film a lot of dogs in their kennels. Gail was like, “You need dogs? No problem.” She reached out to a bunch of people she had adopted dogs from so, by the next day, we had ten people bringing in their dogs for us to film in the kennels in the shelter. She was amazing. 

The documentary/veterinary footage, I have a good friend named Susan who is a veterinarian. We are from the same home town, St. John, New Brunswick; she actually plays the veterinarian in the film. She was kind enough to introduce me to her boss at the veterinary hospital. He actually has his own reality show on TV so he was used to cameras being around. He was open to the idea of filming at the clinic. It was kind of a run and gun type of thing. We were filming actual procedures as they were happening. That was a real spay surgery on a female dog, and it was a real dental cleaning on the other dog. It was pretty great, but it was hard because it was all happening quickly. They weren’t going to slow it down just because our crew was filming it. So we had to work fast and make decisions very quickly about what we wanted to film.

7R: How did you think about sound in Murmur? I know it was a very important aspect of your short films.

Heather Young: There were several interesting sounds that came about when we were filming. We mentioned the teeth cleaning and that horrible sound of the instrument grinding against the tooth of one of the dogs, almost like a scream, which I found very interesting and knew I wanted to include — that idea of machine versus body and what kind of sound comes out of that. There were a couple other interesting sounds around cleaning and labour. 

I was very interested in filming the labour that goes on in an animal shelter. A long time ago, when I was in my early 20s, I worked in an animal shelter, and I learned there that your job is cleaning mostly. People think that, in an animal shelter, you must just hug and kiss kittens all day long, but really, people who work in these places are pretty much cleaning eight hours a day. 

There were a lot of interesting sound and visual elements when it came to the animal shelter: the high pressure sprayers, the squeaks from the squeegees, the drains and water running. We were shooting in an animal shelter that was open to the public, and the employees were just going about their routine. I saw an employee grinding off the sharp pieces of these plastic dog bones. It made an interesting sound, but it was also interesting in that it was such a monotonous, repetitive task. I decided to put that in the film because I wanted to show what labour is like at an animal shelter, and it is very repetitive. And the sound was this horrible grinding between this metal file and these cheap plastic bones. That was a sound that I thought, “This represents what I’m going for!” That was a lucky find.

7R: How did this play out in the editing process for Murmur? Between shooting these real procedures and working with non-actors, I imagine that would pose some challenges to getting the pacing that you want.

Heather Young: The edit was really challenging. I do the editing myself and had been editing my shorts. But I found it a huge leap from editing shorts to editing a feature. It was totally overwhelming. I actually felt that I couldn’t do it, especially at a few points when I first started because I didn’t have anyone helping me. It was just me watching everything by myself. It was quite overwhelming and just the sheer amount of footage, even though we didn’t have an extraordinary amount of footage; I think we shot around 49 and a half hours, which was a lot to tackle alone.

But once I got to an assembly stage, even though it was very long even then, three hours or something, it was like a weight had been lifted. It just started moving a lot faster, and I was able to cut things out quite easily. I remember the first day after I had finally cut every scene and placed them one after another onto the timeline, and it was three hours long: I was like, “Well, OK, there you have it.” But the day after that, I just started cutting. In one day, I cut an hour off the film. Everything just started moving a lot faster once I got to that point. 

For me, watching everything for the first time and cutting off the heads and tails and trying to pick out the good parts but seeing the same take over and over again, that part is agony, just agony. Once I finally slogged through that stage, it was much easier and much more enjoyable to edit.

Once we got to a decent rough cut length, I started getting feedback. I would send a link to people that I trusted and that I thought would appreciate the film. I couldn’t have done it without getting feedback from the edit; it gets to the point where you’ve seen it so many times, you can’t be objective anymore, and you need fresh eyes.

Murmur has its World Premiere on 9/6 at 8:45 p.m. (Jackman Hall), and will screen again 9/7 at 3 p.m. (Scotiabank) and 9/15 at 3:30 p.m. (Scotiabank). For tickets, visit the TIFF website here.

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