The funny thing is I always thought I’d have to make a living doing something else. When I was younger, I actually wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be an orthopaedic surgeon, and then I thought I could be a writer on the side. I didn’t grow up in a family that was in the arts so it wasn’t something I thought about as a career – or anything you could make money doing. I just suddenly decided I wanted to go to film school; I wanted to make films. When I started out, after graduating, even though I made films and acted in them, I still took jobs as a seamstress and a nanny, so I thought for a long time that I would need another job to support my habit.

I really enjoy writing long format for television and directing long format – but it takes so much time to develop it, process it, get it off the ground and shoot it. And you live with these things for, you know, two years or so. I wanted to do something I could condense into an hour; I could do quickly; I could play around with and overcome in one ‘jump’.

Yeah, I feel like, even today, we still only have access to performances like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (1976), in which a man is allowed to confront his existential anxieties. I think part of my responsibility in making this film was about allowing women to have these existential crises on screen and allowing them to question things that are beyond the tropes of motherhood and being a wife.

In this movie, in particular, I wanted to look at something that transcends beyond gender, which is death, something that happens to all of us, and I wanted to allow women to be at the centre, at the core, of it. And so, with Kate – well, I put her in everything – I think she’s brilliant, and she’s able to perform these ideas beyond what I imagine them to be. She can perform me better than I can! I guess I should say that concerning the feelings, the emotions, the intellectual ideas of the film, Kate was able to emote them and perform them in such a transcendent way that there never was a question about her playing Amy.
And then with Jane, she’s also a dear friend, and she was involved in the inception of this idea about anxiety that the film explores. Both Kate and Jane are two people, in my real life, that I call when I’m having an existential meltdown! So, it seemed perfect because a lot the conversations that take place in the film are conversations that Jane and I actually had in real life. And so, it’s just one of those things where I have the luxury of being friends with really brilliant actors. I had to put them in there!

Well, as a filmmaker, I think about this a lot – and then I forget it. Do you know what I mean? I think about this concept in terms of how it feels to be a woman and then I absorb it and try to make something entertaining. But at the same time, I have to think about myself as not just a female filmmaker; I am a sum of all my parts. I’m not just a white female from Florida; I am how I was raised too. And sometimes a project has something to do with being a woman, and sometimes it doesn’t.
There are times when I’m creating, I think about being a mother and being a partner to someone – but, then there are times when I’m thinking about myself as a human being, and I have other things to worry about. And, in response to your question, I don’t spend my days worrying if I or my characters are likeable or not. I just try to be as true to myself as possible; and so, for me, it’s refreshing that we are getting to see more women behaving in these incredibly human ways. And even more so that it’s being done diversely. We’re able to see Black, white, Asian women in these roles. We’re in a time when people get to be people, and it’s not just white men getting to do that.

Oh, I would definitely watch James Benning’s work because, when I was younger, I thought I was definitely going to just make art films - and he was one of the filmmakers I watched a lot. I watched a lot of the California Institute of Arts crowd. I was a big fan of his work, and what I love is that his movies are very much studies of the environment, and I take a lot of inspiration there. And I guess Barbra Loden’s Wanda (1970) would be a good one to add.
Two films in particular really really brought out my love of absurdity and surrealism: Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and Belle De Jour (1967). I love Claire Denis, High Life (2018) would also be one – even though I was in the process of making my film when I saw it. I thought there was something very similar that we were both, like, scratching at – so I like to align myself with Claire Denis as much as possible! (I flatter myself by saying that). And then you have Twentynine Palms (2003) by Dumont because in my film I’m dealing with the desert and that movie is so iconically scary. In my film, I’m pulling from Dumont’s film the idea that these vast, open spaces facilitate the notion that something bad could happen and no one would know. The list goes on and on, really.
Oh, but I would also add Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Last Night of the World (1951). It’s about this couple that knows the end of the world is coming and they don’t know what to do, so they make a cup of tea and go to bed.

We danced back and forth between – and I don’t want to say ‘mundane’ because that makes it sound boring – the domestic and the anxious. Jay Keitel, the cinematographer, and I were always talking about showing the audience a domestic look – something that looks normal and creates a stillness so that it feels like you are in a home. And then mixing that with what it feels like to go through a panic attack. It was about conveying what is happening internally, which is so bombastic; but if you were looking at it from the outside it’s incredibly boring.
And also, at the time, we were reading about near-death experiences, and about when you die and how your body releases all these chemicals. And there’s this flood of every emotion – fear, excitement and curiosity that courses through your body. That, I think, is where the inspiration came from.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Mondo Boys on several projects. I worked with them on The Girlfriend Experience (2018), and, from then on, I’ve discovered that they can do pretty much anything! For this film, I wanted to use the requiem because it is a song that mourns death. And so, I handed it over to them and asked them to come up with something and, in the space of a few days, they gave me back something workable, something that our sound mixer, Marilyn Morris, could really play with.
The sound of this film was always something that we were adding to as we went along – it wasn’t left to post [production]. And [the composers] really helped make that happen.

Yeah, the response has been really unexpected because it’s not something that we intended when we were in the process of making the film. It’s happened organically, and it is very interesting.

The thing is I don’t see myself as actively producing work that goes out of its way to challenge topical issues. When I’m making a film, I try not preach to my audience. Instead, I try to give them some space to explore and think I want to cross social boundaries, you know, question what’s inappropriate – and, for me, that’ll always be about creating tension.