SF: It was always at the forefront to have women at the center of the story. I primarily write women-centered stories because that's what resonates with me the most. I did have a male character that I cut, not really for any reason, but budget [laughs]. We did not have the budget to extend shoot days to shoot coverage for this person. I was able to combine this character into what became Inez (Aarti Tiwari).
The main point of making all these characters women is to focus on the female bonds. The grief that not only comes from being a maternal figure, but a sister and a daughter, it's a very specific kind of grief. I haven't seen that sort of feeling in the context of any other relationship like a father or son. If you change any of [these] characters to men it would have changed the dynamics drastically. A lot of the story is contingent on the fact that Ada is [her mother's] only daughter and Wren is [her mother's] only daughter. They have very complicated relationships with their respective mothers. They felt like in a way they had to raise their mother, which is a whole other dynamic that is very complex. Very specific to eldest daughters. That was a relationship and facet of female friendship I wanted to explore.
ZY: One thing that really stood out to me was the way the film was edited to tell the story in pieces. Did you always have this intriguing editing style in mind when writing the film?
SF: When I entered the film industry, I was an editor before I was a writer. Yes, it was something that was written into the story. I basically write to edit so I already had those specific cuts in mind. In my post-production team I was the lead editor and I worked with two other editors, two colorists, and a sound editor working as a remote team. We never met in person. We would have daily [digital] meetings and one of the things we talked about the most was blending the past and the present and how do we distinguish the two.
The thing I love the most is the rapid cuts in the film. That was something myself, Sydney [Caba], and my other editor Kate [Rogers] talked about a lot was how rapid the cuts should be [incorporated] because a significant portion of the film we wanted to make disorienting. We wanted to make it feel like a surreal nightmare. Toward the end of the movie we wanted it to feel like a dream, or waking up from a dream. [Which is why] the editing style toward the end of the movie feels more fluid.
ZY: What was the process like to get the film made here in Seattle?
SF: One of the things I noticed about the film community in Seattle is it's extremely small. There's not a whole lot of us here, but if you know one person you know everybody. Everybody is willing to work on each other's projects not only because they want the work, but because they want the experience. A lot of my peers went to New York or L.A., but there's an oversaturation of people and not enough work. Having this community in Seattle we're in our own bubble where we all want to gain experience and we all want to grow together, so why not grow the community here?
I'm very proud to say that I'm a part of that with this film. Collaborating with so many talented and diverse people is super important to me. Something that was very important [working] on my film is that I wanted to have a diverse crew. Everybody [in our crew] is either BIPOC, Queer, disabled, or a combination of all three or generally from a marginalized community.
From the technical side we worked in conjunction with the Northwest Film Forum and also folks from Washington Film Works that helped us a ton. We had a budget of nothing for this movie [laughs]. We had about $10,000 for the budget and most of that money went to the crew because that was super important to me, to pay the crew for their work. We had to get really creative with the resources that we did get because we had nothing. A lot of us had just graduated from our schools' film programs. We took advantage of equipment rentals, a lot of us got equipment for free.
Something I've learned in guerilla style indie filmmaking, you really have to make use of the community and network you do have, because more often than not you don't have all the resources to make what you want. The fact that we were able to make what we made with what little we had is something I will be forever proud of.
