Seventh Row

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In Her Chair

Female-identifying directors reflect on their experiences making films and leading creative teams.

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María Paz González on Lina From Lima

Lina from Lima is one of the best acquisition titles at TIFF19. Director María Paz González talks making the film part realist drama about the immigrant working experience and part flamboyant musical.

Magaly Solier and Emilia Ossandon in Lina From Lima
Courtesy of TIFF

Lina from Lima may contain several musical numbers, but director María Paz González insists it’s “not a real musical.” That’s not because the musical numbers are lacking: they’re colourful, bombastic, creatively staged, and well performed by star Magaly Solier. However, the musical sequences are starkly separate from the film’s actual narrative. They’re the daydreams of Lina, a Peruvian immigrant working as a housekeeper in Chile. Lina’s escape from life’s boredom and disappointments is to imagine herself as a musical star, singing melodramatic songs that are a world away from the rest of the film’s stark realism.

At TIFF, I spoke to Paz González at about why she chose to tell Lina’s story with the help of the musical form. She was accompanied by producer Giancarlo Nasi, who aided with some translation.

Seventh Row (7R): What was the genesis of the project?

María Paz González: I began this project researching the powerful and colourful immigrant world in Chile. At the beginning, I wanted to make a documentary. I really wanted to tell an intimate story about a woman who lives far away from home. At one point, the film became fiction.

7R: At what point did the musical element come in?

María Paz González: For me, it was from the beginning, but maybe the producer will say that it wasn’t until nearer the end.

Giancarlo Nasi: She lied to me for many months, for years!

María Paz González: [laughs] In the screenplay, it said “Musical” but nothing else, so it was a mystery. It was kind of a secret. But to me, it was the most important part of the film. It’s the heart.

7R: From the beginning of the film, before there are any songs, the sound design feels very musical. It felt like you were bringing out the rhythms of everyday life.

María Paz González: I was trying to find a way into this intimate world. [Lina is] a character who is around a lot of objects. There is a sofa. There are plastic bags… there are a lot of things around her. For me, there was a very interesting relationship between musicals that are super bold and this normal world that’s very detailed. We worked with an Argentinian sound designer called Sofía Straface. She makes very careful work of trying to find the little details of the film.

7R: What musical films inspired you?

María Paz González: The films of Tsai Ming-liang were completely an inspiration: The Hole, The Wayward Cloud… These films have musical episodes, so in the middle of the reality, you can find these episodes. Lina from Lima is not a real musical, because other musicals are talking about reality through the music, but here, we are not.

It wasn’t just films. Peruvian music was a big inspiration. People often see immigrants as an ‘other’, as if they are not like us. I would like to change that point of view and see the story from the inside. That is why I tried to reconstruct this powerful and colourful place, because I know that they are like that.

7R: What was the process of writing the actual music?

María Paz González: The music was quite complex. We worked in a big team: me, Magaly, and the composers Cali Flores and José Manuel Gatica, who’s also my partner. I would make some of the lyrics, Magaly would make some more, and then the composers wrote music. We shot with very rough tracks, but then in the post-production, we worked with some amazing musicians and [sound technicians] to bring out the power of the music.

7R: How did you cast Magaly, and how did the two of you work to develop the character of Lina?

María Paz González: I didn’t really want to make a “casting”. I needed to find a person who had a strong personality. I came from documentary so I know how to work with people who have this power already inside, not reconstructed technically.

So I wasn’t sure about Magaly at the beginning because, to me, she was so beautiful, so power, and I was a bit scared about that. I didn’t really want to make an exotic or too glamorous character.

But then, when I met her, I discovered that she was amazing. She has a very strong relationship with the character’s life. She is a worker. She works far away from home. She calls her mother all the time to talk about money. That was part of her life.

7R: When you cast her, how did the character change from what was in the script?

María Paz González: It changed a lot. I think it’s the same character at heart, but it grew. Magaly’s gaze was so powerful, she had such a powerful look, that in the editing process, we erased a lot of the text, and we just left space for her face on the screen.

7R: How much were the actors allowed to improvise?

María Paz González: At the beginning, it was a very fictional film without much improvising. But I worked with another actress who plays the cousin of Lina, who uses her real name in the film. She is a person who inspired the writing of Lina.

I used a lot of real experiences. For example, the pool worker is a real pool worker, and he always has affairs with the women in the houses. When he talks about different kinds of women in the film, those are his real words.

7R: What are you working on next?

María Paz González: I’m making a kind of thriller with some absurdity and comedy. It’s around the figure of a father, and it’s a film that happens in the south of Chile. It takes inspiration from thrillers and also from real life. The main character is an actress who works in a hospital…

Giancarlo Nasi: She is an actress and her job is to act as if she is a sick patient in front of doctors just to help them practice how to deal with extreme patients. It’s an actual job.

Lina from Lima screens 9/14 at 12:30 p.m. (Scotiabank). Tickets here.

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TIFF19: Maria Sødahl, Andrea Bræin Hovig, and Stellan Skarsgård on Hope

Norwegian writer-director Maria Sødahl discusses her remarkable second film, Hope, with lead actors Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård.

Stellan Skarsgård and Andrea Bræin Hovig star in Maria Søhdal's terrific sophomore feature, Hope, at TIFF19.
Stellan Skarsgård and Andrea Bræin Hovig star in Maria Sødahl’s terrific sophomore feature film, Hope, at TIFF19. Photo by Manuel Claro, copyright Motlys.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s proves a crucible for a married couple’s relationship in Maria Sødahl’s smart and sensitive drama, Hope. Unlike most dramas about cancer (including Ordinary Love also at TIFF19), the film is not about the initial diagnosis and treatment; instead Anja (Andrea Bræin Hovig) has already survived lung cancer, but just before Christmas, she discovers the cancer has spread, and surviving this is unlikely. The first bout of cancer is what kept the marriage together after a rough patch; the second diagnosis threatens to split them apart, as Anja starts to unleash all of her pent up anger — not helped by the medication the steroids she’s on, which alter her behaviour. 

Throughout this tense but never sentimental film, Anja must reckon with the life she’s chosen and feels is about to lose, worrying most about how her passing will affect her children. At the same time, her husband, Tomas (Stellan Skarsgård) is going through an entirely separate journey: coping with what becoming a single father of six will mean, dealing with his wife’s lashing out without escalating things, and, of course, his own grief. They start on divergent emotional paths, but slowly find their way back to each other. Yet Skarsgård and Hovig imbue their characters with such history and love that even when they fight, you can feel the strength of their marriage and the weight of their years together. Their apartment also feels so full of history, from the books that line the walls to the bits of mess throughout, that you really believe they’ve lived here for more than a decade.

Hope is the second feature from Norwegian writer-director Maria Sødahl and perhaps her most personal: it is based on her own marriage, and she chose Skarsgård, a longtime family friend, to play her onscreen husband. Sødahl never puts a foot wrong, immersing us in the stressful situation the couple find themselves in, and allows us to feel empathy for both partners while also giving voice to the extra emotional labour that burdens women. After the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, I talked with Soøhdal and her lead actors Hovig and Skarsgård about crafting this rich central relationship and telling this quietly devastating story.

7R: Where did the idea for the film come from? What made you want to tell this story?

Maria Sødahl: It’s my story, so it came from this body, this mind. I got this cancer threat nine years ago. Four years ago, I started working on it, but quite reluctantly because I’m not into tear-dropping cancer movies myself. I don’t like to watch that.

I was trying to find a way to make it personal and not private, and studying myself through my family members when I was at that stage, with high steroid doses. So that’s how it started out: finding the most honest and raw and naked ways to find the situation and the memories which came to me, and not doing any censorship of what was shameful or not good behaviour.

7R: How did you think about structuring the film? It takes place over the course of a week. Was that the actual timeline for you?

Maria Sødahl: Reality was a great help. It was so much help that, actually, some people said this is too plotted because you have marriage and birthday and New Year’s Eve: it looks fake. 

I tried actually to do something different at the first stages and made several things different. I tried not having her not have cancer spread, but have cancer for the first time, which would be much more potentially stronger for the storyline. And then in reality… You know? There’s all the emotions and mechanisms that became different, and then it became untruth, and then boring. I realized that anything that is interesting had to be real, in a way, and to not waste time on fictionalizing that part of the work: the medical story and the dates, Christmas, and there’s lots of things that are not in the final film, which was too much. Because reality is often too much.

Stellan Skarsgård: Life is too much.

Maria Sødahl: Enough life was the goal.

7R: And then how did you two get involved with the film?

Andrea Bræin Hovig: I had a coffee with Maria first, and she told me about the project. I had a lot of questions. We started little by little getting to know each other. And then, we did this camera test. I thought her direction was so accurate. I could immediately see that she really knew what she wanted, and she could express it. That’s when I knew I really wanted to do this.

Stellan Skarsgård: I’ve known Maria for 25 years. Her husband is a film director who I’ve made five films with, so the families knew each other. I knew the story, of course, not the details, but she sent me a couple pages synopsis. It was so fresh. It was so funny. And it was so bizarre. 

The danger in doing something like this would be that you are too close to the material and you become indulgent in it. But already, in that synopsis, I saw that Maria had enough distance to be able to see herself and her own behaviour and the relationship from outside enough while able to still be inside. And I knew she was a very good director because her first film, Limbo, was a great film.

7R: You mention Maria’s direction was really precise. Can you talk about what you really loved about?

Andrea Bræin Hovig: I don’t think I ever once felt that I had to play Maria. We both agreed we wanted to build this character together, and we fought very hard for this, both of us. It was not easy. It was quite hard for both of us, and Stellan, as well. 

But Maria has this seriousness about her that I really love. I really felt, and still feel, that I’m doing something important here, something of great importance for humanity. Probably not millions of people will see this, but still it has some value. This seriousness I really, really admire, and I wish more directors had this quality.

Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård star in Hope, written and directed by Maria Søhndal. Photo by Agnete Brun. Copyright Motlys.
Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård star in Hope, written and directed by Maria Søhndal. Photo by Agnete Brun. Copyright Motlys.

7R: You know the real people that it’s based on so well, so I’m wondering what was your process for building these characters together and preparing for the film?

Andrea Bræin Hovig: She’s very proud, which I tried to keep up in every scene. She’s so much prouder than I am, so just to get married, for Anja, was humiliating because she was too proud. That was the main goal, to keep up with that pride all the time, because I have no pride whatsoever.

Stellan Skarsgård: That’s wonderful. I’ve never thought about that, but you’re right. Absolutely right.

Andrea Bræin Hovig: It becomes a wonderful day for her, this wedding day.

Stellan Skarsgård: It’s a shock.

Andrea Bræin Hovig: Yes. And I felt really awkward in that I myself love weddings, and I cry. But when I was getting married as Anja, I felt so awkward, which was very nice for the scene. That was the only scene that I did not cry. I was totally in shock.

7R: How did you think about the aesthetic for the film? There are these wonderful long takes and a lot of two shots.

Maria Sødahl: Manuel [Alberto Claro], the DP, is a Chilean-Danish guy, and we went to the same school in Denmark — not at the same time, but we have the same kind of background. We did Limbo together, and he’s a wonderful, wonderful handheld DP.

I love the way he makes things breathe, and he never forces to tell the story. He’s always seeing what’s there and never doing a fake move. It’s like acting or directing to be really, really not forcing into something. He doesn’t intellectualize stuff so to find this raw, organic way was the goal. It’s about people and not trying to find a conceptual way to do it. 40% was shot in studio and the car scenes, etc, etc, you know.

The movie, both the visuals and the sound design, and editing even, we tried at certain points to manipulate it a bit, and you couldn’t do much before it just sucked. You could do so little before it was manipulative. To make this moment when they are in the church and the gaze, and then suddenly you feel like it’s scored. It’s not scored; that’s just the sound, but that’s really a lot. It becomes powerful because it’s being so, I wouldn’t say naturalistic, but…

Stellan Skarsgård: Restrained.

Maria Sødahl: Yeah. And it’s unsentimental, also in the DP’s work. That’s maybe the quality that it ended up being emotional, because it is not sentimental, because we don’t decorate. The house is decorated, but you decorate the surface, and not the inner parts.

7R: How was it for you two to work in this way with the hand-held camera and long takes?

Andrea Bræin Hovig: I loved it. I think he (Manuel) was great to work with. Stellan is much more aware of the cinematographer than I am. Stellan is very smart with the camera, and I’m more like, sometimes, I forget [the camera is there]. Stellan is still true in front of the camera, but he is still aware of it. I’m more all over the place. But Manuel is moving around with us, and he breathes with us, and it was a very nice experience.

Stellan Skarsgård: I worked with him on a couple of Lars von Trier films. Like Maria says, to me, the camera is another actor, and you dance with the camera. If the camera is not a part of the scene, especially if it is a moving camera, then it becomes really strange and artificial and horrifying. 

A good cameraman, who is part of the scene, never asks you what will happen so I can follow with the camera, or can you hit that mark, or things like that. He is physically, as another actor, a part of the scene, and that makes something truthful when you work together. I love that kind of style.

Maria Sødahl: It’s also fun, because he’s not very conservative. He’s very mothering. Also, there’s no rules, so at the same time that you said that he wouldn’t ask somebody to do something for the camera, he’s not dogmatic in that sense. He can also do that. There’s no rules. That’s the mother thing about him. He’s the least stiff guy I’ve ever met behind the camera.

Stellan Skarsgård: It’s lovely. To say he’s not intellectualizing, he’s very prescient and open to it — that yes, we could do that, too. Every scene has a billion possibilities, and half of them are right, and half of them are wrong.

Maria Sødahl: If you are an actor, director, DP, whatever, I always search for people who immediately think of the movie and not of their specific work, and that’s him. So if you suddenly lose $1 million, he’s not like “Oh, then I can’t do my conceptualizing!” He’s very practical.

Stellan Skarsgård: I want my frame to be hanging on the frame in MOMA!

Maria Sødahl: No, really, but that’s also the sickness of a lot of DPs.

Stellan Skarsgård: Their ego. Actors, too. Some directors.

Maria Sødahl: And pride is not a good thing, in general. It stands in the way.

Andrea Bræin Hovig: Well, it can be good.

MS: We don’t need that much of it. It becomes a problem, as you can tell with your character. It’s a challenge.

Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård star in Hope from Norwegian writer-director Maria Sødahl . Photo by Manuel Claro.
Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård star in Hope from Norwegian writer-director Maria Sødahl . Photo by Manuel Claro.

7R: How did you think about the design of the apartment and shooting in it? Also, how was it for you to inhabit it? How did that help with the characters?

Stellan Skarsgård: When I came into that apartment, I became so happy. They have six children; I have eight children. They live a very similar life to me, and when I came into that apartment, it was one of the first sets that I’ve entered ever that felt like home. It has layers of time in it. You can see a relationship that has been going on for years, and every single thing has a history. It was fantastic. It was a wonderful apartment to work in.

Maria Sødahl Yes, 350 square metres, which is quite a good size.

Andrea Bræin Hovig: And I actually live in that area myself, that part of Oslo. Sometimes I stood watching out the window, and I thought I was there and not in a studio in Sweden. It felt so real, and every detail was perfection.

Stellan Skarsgård: It was also populated in a wonderful way because those kids we had, they were fantastic. And you got them together and went away…

Andrea Bræin Hovig: We went to a cottage.

Maria Sødahl: We went for a weekend together to get to know each other.

Andrea Bræin Hovig: We played games.

Maria Sødahl: Actually, what I remember the most, and it’s interesting, because when you get down to the core of the movie, it’s about family. It’s a love story, but a lot of it is about the existence of a family. 

So the first meeting we had with the kids, none of them knew each other. I started talking about what kind of family I came from, not my present family, but as a child, and being quite honest, and then we took them out. They have such different backgrounds. Some of the kids don’t have siblings, and one of them didn’t know his own father, and then some of them had siblings, and to be part of this group was so nurturing. Part of the story was that they actually became a group of kids.

Stellan Skarsgård: It was fantastic to see them between takes, when they were hanging out together. It was like my kids.

Andrea Bræin Hovig: They kept playing between takes.

Maria Sødahl: Again, with the cinematographer, while preparing, we talked a lot about mess. We were searching on the streets, buildings, homes, taking pictures of what is nice messiness — good life, not too organized — and what is shabby, shitty messiness that is destructive, bad. Also, the kids when they were doing the family sculpture thing on the floor, that’s also a kind of messiness. 

The structure of the apartment is like a heart [the living room/dining room/kitchen at the centre], and you have different rooms [linked to it with the hallways, like arteries], and the idea of not knowing exactly how the apartment looks. You know that there’s three rooms [the kitchen, the living room/dining room, and the couple’s bedroom], and you know there’s a hallway, and this backyard. But apart from that, you don’t really know what’s where. That was very consciously designed. 

We had a goal of tactility, to have a feel of the wood and the heavy doors and not the studio feel. If we couldn’t do that, we didn’t want to make the movie.

7R: The fact that they feel like a family and a married couple with history is such an important part of the film. What was the process for developing those relationships?

Andrea Bræin Hovig: As Maria told you, we went to this cabin together and I got to know the kids quite well early on. I wanted to have an individual relationship with each of them because that’s what it’s like being a mother, each relationship is different. I have three kids myself, I don’t have six, but I know that it’s very different and they need different things from you. I worked a little like that to find what can I do for you and that was really interesting and I love them all so much. Even the grown ups. I love them too.

7R: Stellan and Andrea, how did you work together to build your characters’ relationship?

Stellan Skarsgård: Well, we shook hands and went to bed together. No. We had a week of read-throughs and talking about each scene and what is important in the scene and got all of those discussions out of the way. At the same time, we got to know each other better. And also, we are actors. We’re pretty good at imagining a relationship and getting in there quickly. Actors can adapt quickly.

Maria Sødahl: They did not cast together in front of the camera before they had their roles. So when we met for the first time, the three of us, all frightened I think, who could know if the chemistry would work out.

Andrea Bræin Hovig: I was nervous.

Maria Sødahl: It was risky. I tell this to people, and nobody believes it that we didn’t have you in the same room together. It’s like if you have an arranged marriage, and those marriages might be better than the love marriages.

The very first two days were all the bedroom scenes. It was practically a necessity because of several things, but also, I think it was good because they go there, and then it’s over, and voila.

Stellan Skarsgård: When you work with a really good actress that is not obsessed by being brilliant or by being beautiful, and is just interested, as good actors are, in the scene, in the film, in the material, it’s easy. You immediately find terrain where you can meet and create a relationship.

7R: Can you tell me about the sound design?

Maria Sødahl: The movie was finalized four days ago. I saw the movie for the first time yesterday, so I have a very fresh memory. As with everything else, I thought, from the very beginning, the sound was one element where we could stylize and make the story more subjective. But even there, [even if what you did was] so little, it became a totally different genre. 

The sound is very raw edited. When she’s on steroids, I think that sound becomes very present instead of very quiet. The dynamics in the movie are very much made by the sound. There’s the town, very much sound present, then to the bedroom, the car, where the notion of time is endless, as opposed to when you are in the hospital, when it’s like bang, bang, bang. Finding when you stop and when you go ch-ch-ch. That’s pacing, helping the dynamics. 

Also, I was very into, as a storytelling choice, not giving the audience too much time for breathing or for reflection within the movie, because there was no time for that. That’s what I remember. There was no fucking time for anything. I wanted that to be a part of the story, so that when the movie is over, that’s when you can reflect, that’s when you can think about your own life. Experience it through your guts more than your head and heart. 

It’s a physical experience, which the sound helps with a lot. You can get close to the characters, through breath, in some parts, and then, in other parts, to get distance. Because it could be a comedy, in a way, if you wanted to treat it like that. It could’ve been a cancer comedy. Next time!

Hope screens again 9/14 at 2:30 p.m. (Scotiabank). The film is still seeking distribution in the US, UK, and Canada. Tickets here.

Read our review of Hope >>

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TIFF19: An interview with the creative team behind the film Rocks

Director Sarah Gavron and her team of collaborators discuss the making of their film Rocks, collaborating with teenage girls to develop the film’s characters, and the importance of music. Rocks is an acquisition title still seeking distribution in Canada and the US.

The cast of Rocks, a film directed by Sarah Gavron and written by Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson. Image courtesy of TIFF.
The cast of Sarah Gavron’s film Rocks, courtesy of TIFF

Sarah Gavron’s chaotic and energetic new feature, Rocks, captures the indomitable spirit of the 15-year-old girl who gives the film its name, as well as her London group of friends. When the film begins, Rocks receives a letter from her mother informing her that she is leaving for a breather, and that it is now Rocks’ responsibility to care for her little brother, Emmanuel. Her mother has done this before — disappeared and returned — and Rocks is optimistic that she’ll keep her word to return. But her mother’s absence becomes increasingly difficult to manage when the electricity in their apartment goes out, and Rocks is forced to find temporary refuge with friends as she tries to prolong the inevitable. Relationships get strained because Rocks won’t divulge the details of her situation, as if to do so would mean admitting to herself how bad things really are.

Like Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood (or Bande de Filles, a much more à propos French title) before it, Rocks is a celebration of female friendship and communities — how women get through trauma by taking comfort in each other. But unlike Sciamma’s film, which deliberately avoided a social realist aesthetic, Gavron’s Rocks embraces handheld camera, and the script was developed in collaboration with the non-professional actors. This has mixed results: the characters feel like they’re positively popping off of the screen, but this deliberate chaos can, at times, be disorienting, and get in the way of a clean narrative arc. 

Nevertheless, it’s such a joy to see such a diverse cast of young women on screen in a British film. This kind of thing is commonplace on Canadian TV, where Degrassi has, for years, sported a multicultural and multiracial cast, as well as characters from a wide array of socio-economic backgrounds. But this feels quietly radical in Rocks, hailing from such a class-conscious country, in part because the girls are so tightly knit yet unbothered by their differences. 

On the eve of the film’s World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it opened the Platform competition, I talked with the creative team behind the film: director Sarah Gavron, co-writers Claire Wilson and Theresa Ikoko, Associate Director Anu Henriques, and producers Ameenah Ayub Allen and Hannah Price. We discussed how the team collaborated with the non-professional actors to craft the script, the joys and challenges of shooting with such a large cast of young people, and the importance of music in the film.

Seventh Row: How did the film Rocks get started? I know you were collaborating with the actors in the film. Did you have an idea for the story first? Did you cast it first? What was the process?

Sarah Gavron: The process was that we, as a team, all decided to make a film about young people, and we wanted to make the film with the young people. The very first part of the process was to go into schools, meet young people, sit in the back of classrooms, and have conversations. Out of that, we assembled a group of about 30 [girls] who would write improvisers. They wanted to be part of the process. They stayed with us. Then, we started this workshop process where [co-writers] Clare [Wilson] and Teresa [Ikoko] were in there, and so was Anu [Henriques], who’s the Associate Director, and [Producer] Ameena [Ayub Allen] was kind of in and out. The process was about finding out what the film was going to be?

Claire Wilson: We came on board to write a story about young girls growing up in London so we spent time with different girls at schools, remembering how it was to grow up and all that stuff. Then, we started to develop a story around them. As the group became smaller and smaller, casting became clearer. Then, Teresa found the narrative which we worked into a script.

Theresa Ikoko: I had been working on something that was dedicated to my sister and other young black women in London. It was very much about sisterhood and female friendship. During the process of working on this film we had developed a sisterhood amongst the creative team. We were watching these young women develop a sisterhood, and between us, it was like a big sister/little sister relationship. 

It just seemed really appropriate to bring this story that I had worked on for my sister to my new sisters and see if there was something bigger than what I had envisioned that we could create. We describe it now as a love letter to all of us, to all the women who contributed to this film, and to all of the women that we know and love.

7R: How did you decide that the story of the film would be centred around the main protagonist, Rocks? And how did you find the actress?

Theresa Ikoko: I think that came from the narrative I had thought about for my sister. The character came from a lot of workshopping, a lot of conversation, a lot of contributions from the girls themselves. I think the magic of Rocks the character probably comes from the magic of Bukky Bakray as an actor. She is [an] amazing [actor], and also just [amazing] as a young woman.

Sarah Gavron: Bukky was in these workshops, and it was becoming apparent there was this weird synchronicity that Teresa’s story and Bukky met in a way, and we found our protagonist. She fitted the storyline, and she fitted the world, and around her were these great friendships, like Sumaya, the character played by Kosar Ali. Through that, we built the world around her.

7R: What was the workshop process like for developing the film and the character of Rocks?

Anu Henriques: We got to know the girls over a long period of time, so you didn’t feel that you had to force anything when you first met them. It was a lot of just very general — not pointed, not trying to find anything — conversations. We were really lucky that they were very generous girls, all of them, and they gave so much of themselves: their experiences, their stories, but also their energy. A lot of it came from the energy that was drawn from them. The other thing that was incredible, was that they all had this amazing ability, which I think actors train for years and years to do, to improvise. They were able to riff off each other and bounce off each other, even in [the] very, very early stages. So by the time we got to set, it felt like a very natural way of filming it because it had always been like that since the beginning.

Theresa Ikoko: I think the workshops didn’t feel like the typical workshops. It was really just people who enjoyed being around each other being around each other. It was really fun. It never felt like work because there is such a genuine friendship among them and such a genuine love that they have for them and for us, as well.

It was very much about nurturing relationships, spending time together in order to develop these relationships, and the trust that is necessary to share stories, share secrets, and to share all the things that really made this film.

7R: To what degree did you have precise dialogue for the film? What did the script for Rocks end up looking like, and how did that compare to what happened during the shoot?

Sarah Gavron: We did have a very rich and beautiful script. We had something very concrete and solid to work from, but we also wanted them to live in the moment and make the words their own. They didn’t learn the dialogue exactly so they could free themselves up. It’s such a difficult thing to deliver dialogue as if you are thinking it. For them to find those moments, and find the thought, was a really useful process for them to absorb themselves in the moment. It was a kind of mixture [of written dialogue and improvisation], but they really owned it and found ways of expressing themselves and found ways of behaving within the structure of the scenes.

Claire Wilson: And we were on set quite a lot, so a scene would run, girls would improvise, and Sarah would come back to us and say, “Is that what you needed to hit story-wise?” There was a lot of continued collaboration throughout.

Sarah Gavron: Yeah, we were all touching base [with each other] and with the girls themselves: Does this feel truthful to you?

7R: To what degree did the girls end up playing a version of themselves versus characters that were completely different from themselves?

Claire Wilson: I don’t feel that they are playing necessarily themselves, but I feel that they brought themselves to the characters. The characters we see on screen are not the girls, but they are from the same part of town, the same age, the same kind of culture surrounding the school. But the experiences and journeys these girls go through are completely different from their lives.

Theresa Ikoko: They are very much actors. Everything we see on screen isn’t because they necessarily have things in common with their characters, but it’s a testament to their skill and their hard work and the absolute commitment they put to developing this craft that they didn’t even know that they wanted to be a part of before we started. And to all the people around them that helped mould them. The magic is all theirs though; we didn’t write that.

7R: In addition to Rocks, the film follows characters from a whole bunch of different socioeconomic backgrounds even though they are all at the same school. How did that evolve and develop?

Sarah Gavron: That is so much London and you go into these schools and that’s the makeup of these inner city school and that’s what we found, those are the friendships we found. It wasn’t us engineering that makeup; it existed.

Anu Henriques: The film is so much about friendship and love, not romantic love, just that time when you are 15. It’s such a special time in your life, and those friendships are so dear, and the resilience and the joy that we haven’t seen enough of on screens in cinema generally, but especially in the UK.

Claire Wilson: To begin with, we did think about going down the route, where you come in and see a girl’s life, and the reason she changes was because some boy walked into their life. But we didn’t want to make it about their reactions to boys and that being their story. There’s so much drama with being 14 or 15 anyway, among your girl friends, that you don’t need boys to walk in. You’re already having all this stuff [happen]. There are men in the film, but they are all to them just background. They are not important.

The cast of Rocks, a film directed by Sarah Gavron and written by Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson. Image courtesy of TIFF.
The cast of Sarah Gavron’s film Rocks, courtesy of TIFF

7R: There are a lot of scenes in Rocks with a lot of characters in them, which I know is one of the biggest challenges for a director. How did you approach how you were going to film those, working with all of those people at the same time? And keeping track of all those characters? Because we do get to know quite a few of the girls.

Sarah Gavron: Obviously, it is Rocks’ journey at the heart of it, but the ensemble feel was something that was really important to us because that’s their dynamic. They hang out in groups. But what was it like on set? It was chaos.

Claire Wilson: Beautiful chaos.

Ameena Ayub Allen: It was a mix ‘cause you had the girls who were first-time actors, and you had some really great adult professional actors mixed in with real teachers playing teachers — or going to cast wider, for instance, the British-Somali family. And then sometimes the non-professional actors would make their own roles bigger, which was very unusual, particularly the uncle in Sumaya’s family scene.

Sarah Gavron: That’s a great moment. It’s one of my favourites.

Ameena Ayub Allen: He took it and became a contributor to the music, as well.

Sarah Gavron: Yeah, he’s now got a music credit, and he’s very chuffed about it.

Hannah Price: And because they weren’t professionally-trained actors, you wanted to take the pressure off them by having a few girls in each scene so that, if one of them, over the course of filming, wasn’t always competent, or needed to drop out for whatever reason, then the film could continue. But actually, they were all amazing, so we never needed that. 

Claire Wilson: But that is because of the long workshop process, definitely.

Theresa Ikoko: We also had Emmanuel, let’s not forget. There’s a seven-year-old boy in it.

Ameena Ayub Allen: That was most challenging for him, because it was a different level of understanding.

Theresa Ikoko: I think it made the girls’ mature, as well, because the whole thing felt like a family. While we felt big-sisterly with them, they immediately felt big-sisterly with him, so they worked really hard with setting an example and making sure he felt safe. I feel like all films should be made like this: everyone should just like each other, and then it’s easy.

Ameena Ayub It was a very complicated structure of chaperones, and the kind of structures we have to work with made it more complicated and time consuming, so it was a longer shoot than a normal low-budget film would be. Together, it was 40 days.

Sarah Gavron: But we were working with child actor hours. And it was shot in story order.

Ameena Ayub Allen: So for all the moving parts we had…

Sarah Gavron: Yeah, changing locations, lots of young people to chaperone…

Theresa Ikoko: A frog

Ameena Ayub Allen: Crowd scenes. So in every way, we made it a lot more complicated.

Hannah Price: That’s why it’s really inclusive, and that’s why it was really real. Even the girls who played supporting roles in the classroom are of that age. Everything, we took a lot of time and effort to get it really right but also seem invisible.

7R: Can you tell me a bit about the music in the film Rocks?

Sarah Gavron: I remember saying to Teresa early on, when we were meeting about her writing with Claire, “Is music important?” And she said, “Music is everything.” And I wrote that down in my book. 

She’s not young, but she’s much closer than I am to these girls, and to these girls, music is everything. They kind of live and breathe it. 

And Anu spent hours and hours logging their playlists and working the music along the way. We had some music supervisors who were pre-clearing music. We were trying to find what fitted, and we had a little bit of score.

Hannah Price: We had some songs that they sing in the film and that had to be cleared before we could shoot so if they broke out into song…

Sarah Gavron: We wouldn’t have to keep stopping them.

Ameena Ayub Allen: It didn’t always work out.

Hannah Price: They sing to each other all the time to communicate, don’t they.

Anu Henriques: And they all have very different music tastes, as well. There are a lot of overlaps, but they are very unique in what they listen to and what they enjoy. I think that is reflected in the soundtrack: you have soul, you have bashment, you have Afro-beats, you have some jazz, you have a Somali love song, you have everything. And I think that’s a nice reflection of them; they are not all listening to the same stuff.

Theresa Ikoko: That’s a real reflection of what London sounds like. If you watched from my estate in the summer, with all the windows open, you hear everything. I recently heard someone playing a saxophone in my council estate for hours, and it was like, “This is what it is to be in London.”

Ameena Ayub Allen: And the fact that the girls absolutely loved the soundtrack. That was a real accomplishment that they really, really loved it when they watched the final film because there were hundreds of tracks to distill it down.

7R: Was that part of the writing process, thinking about the music?

Theresa Ikoko: I think there was just always music around, in the workshops, when we spoke to the girls.

Sarah Gavron: We were sitting in a workshop, and you guys said, “Let’s do an exercise with them,” and I think you’ve done this with a lot of young people, where they listen to some music, and they wrote down thoughts and diaries and notes about their characters. They were doing it to their own soundtrack, which would feed them. So it was kind of integrated.

Rocks is an acquisition title still seeking distribution in Canada and the US.

Discover more of the best acquisition titles at TIFF here >>

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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.

Discover more great Canadian films

The last year was one of the best for Canadian cinema in history. Discover these great films through conversations with the filmmakers, guided by the Seventh Row editors in our inaugural annual book, The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook.

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