“This isn’t Paris.” “I know.” Interview with Shelagh Carter, director of Before Anything You Say (2017)

Shelagh Carter is a Winnipeg-based filmmaker. Her feature film Passionflower, was a frankly autobiographical story – beautifully told – about growing up with a mentally ill mother. It won numerous awards. I interviewed Shelagh about Passionflower here. Her latest feature, Before Anything You Say, is an extremely intense hour-long film about a couple who have reached an almost total impasse in their relationship. Starring Darcy Fehr and Kristen Harris (both of whom played the lead roles in Passionflower), Before Anything You Say is an at-times hallucinatory look at what happens when things are left unsaid, when trust is broken, when the mere prospect of “breaking up” CAUSES the breaking-up to start occurring. A deeply unsettling film, beautifully written, acted, and directed, Before Anything You Say is making its premiere at the Madrid International Film Festival in July, and Carter has been nominated for Best Director, Harris for Best Actress, and Chad Tremblay for editing.

It’s a poignant and profound film, and it has a “mess” to its structure and approach (I mean that as highest praise) that is a welcome change to the easily-summed-up and easily-digested material that now passes for “adult relationship” dramas. What happens in Before Anything You Say is that as the crisis intensifies, as the words they use get more and more cruel (albeit truthful), you feel the fragility of any bond between humans, you feel wonder that anyone “makes it” at all. Will these two “make it”? Their connection is very strong. They have built a life together. That life is now threatened. Nobody faces such a situation calmly. Well, maybe sociopaths do. But these two – educated and articulate people – do their best to contain the situation, before completely surrendering to the chaos of the impending crisis. Fear is at the heart of it. Anticipatory fear of loss, regret, grief. Kristen Harris and Darcy Fehr both give phenomenal performances.

Recently, I interviewed Shelagh Carter about Before Anything You Say.

Sheila O’Malley: I was thinking about Passionflower and how Passionflower has a formal structure to it and Before Anything You Say does not. Before Anything You Say jumps around in chronology, fracturing the timeline of events. I wondered if you could talk about developing Before Anything You Say, and how you decided on HOW you would tell the story.

Shelagh Carter: The earliest film that inspired me was the famous Hiroshima Mon Amour, a collaboration between Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras. He always drove home working with writers and he wanted to see if cinema could tolerate language. I mean that in the best sense of the word, because as a cinema person I always think of the image, like Antonioni, for example. Antonioni would put all these pictures together and then put dialogue to the picture, and it was very sparse and much more traditionally what we conceive of as being cinematic. But I also felt that I had something to say, and so I took the story idea to Debbie Schnitzer. We had also just seen the Darcy Fehr play George in a fabulous production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

SOM: He must have been amazing.

SC: He was terrific. And at the same time Brad [Carter’s husband] had just gotten this opportunity and he was gone and here I was, in the prairies, by myself, in the place he wanted to move to. Our relationship was the springboard for me sitting with Debbie and talking about how painful it is when you miss each other, when you think you know the other person – to love someone is to know them – and then suddenly they take a Left turn. We wanted to mix some of the personal with fictional aspects.

SC: When it came to the structure of the script, I said I wanted to play with past and present. I wanted to experiment with memory. We were talking about where they might have traveled to, and it was Debbie who said, “Paris. Paris is usually the place of love and nostalgia, but for this couple they can’t find what Paris is.” All of those ideas were circling around and then Debbie went away, she watched Hiroshima Mon Amour, and she wrote. Then she sent it to me and we had a reading with Kristen [Harris] and Darcy. The two of them both said, “We’ve got to do this!” We knew it was going to be experimental in structure and we all needed to just trust that. It was 6 days of shooting. I trusted all the years of directing, I had to trust it, and I trusted these two actors. They really went for it. There was a little bit of fear, I think, to really go to those emotional places.

SOM: I wonder if a condensed shooting schedule helped with that.

SC: I think yes, it did. There was a claustrophobic sense of not being able to move on.

SOM: There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to ask you this question, because I like thinking about it myself. In the film, there are brief inserts of other people, younger women, the woman at the coffee shop, the woman at the bar, the couple walking on the street, seeing the girls out the window, shots of long-haired women walking away from the camera. I love this element of the film. You don’t have to tell me what it means, but could you talk about those choices?

SC: It’s tied to what hasn’t been addressed within the couple. The fact that she abandoned her daughter. The fact that she’s heard from her from time to time. The fact that instead Martin reaches out to her. The father takes care of everybody else’s son and can’t take care of his own. They’re both haunted. And then there’s the trafficking of women, the lack of respect for women …

SC: We wanted to gently touch on that without overkill, and we also wanted to deal with repetition. These people keep showing up. What world are they really in? Are they contaminating the two main characters? Or are they there to point out that they haven’t dealt with their shit?

SOM: The relationship is so toxic, they’re so trapped, so those moments where you step outside of it and the outside world creeps in, or they’re caught by something that they see – it’s like they’re stepping outside of their own dream.

SC: Interestingly enough, just by chance, I came across a book by a man in Edinburgh (Nikolaj Lübecker)- it’s called The Feel-Bad Film, and he’s done beautiful writing about Haneke and Lars von Trier and Claire Denis and Brian Da Palma, and how the movies by these directors do not try to solve everything to keep the audience happy. When we screened the film privately for my cast and crew, some of the people who were the extras showed up and brought their wives, and the next day I got a letter from one of the wives who said “You were talking about how we forget to be kind to each other in what we say. We don’t take responsibility for what we say. Either we’re too frightened or we have to win something.” She said she went for a long walk that morning because she really needed to think about it.

SOM: The film reminded me of how Clifford Odets would toss you into his plays where the characters would be mid-argument. You’d have to play catch-up as an audience member. Doing something like that was a revelation in the 30s and it’s still rare now. Cassavetes would do that too. Toss ’em in, they’ll sink or swim. When we first meet Jack and Isobel [in Before Anything You Say], they’re already at Level 11.

SC: I went to Toronto to do post, and Pete Soltesz – he’s the producer on my next film, and he supervised post-production for this one – he sits me down and says, “I have to talk to you about the film. We’re having arguments about who’s on whose side. I’m on the side of the husband. And Eric is on the side of the wife.” The post-production team were fighting about the film! And it was all men. “No, I like the husband!” “She’s a bitch.” “He’s not listening to her.” “Look how he treats her! He’s not telling the truth!”

SOM: You already had a working relationship with Darcy and Kristen in Passionflower where they played husband and wife – in a similar stressful difficult relationship. Could you talk to me about working with them?

SC: Both of them had something that scared them about it. It hit them in different ways. As soon as Kristen’s on a set, she’s there. Any anxiety leading up to that moment disappears and she’s just there. Darcy has always played these characters who need to seem to be good guys. And this character challenged him to be brave and to get ugly. And he did it, he went there. But we were all under stress about doing the film. I was wearing the producer hat as well. I had to say to Darcy, “You’re just going to have to trust me.” And – fantastically – being afraid, or whatever was going on, fueled his performance in a way that was fabulous.

SOM: He broke my heart.

SC: He really is so heartbreaking. I’m so grateful that I had their trust.

SOM: The music in the film is gorgeous.

SC: Keri Latimer is a local musician that I really like. I worked with her on Is It My Turn. Debbie and I sent the script to her to see how she responded to the material and she really got it. We didn’t want the music to be overkill. She just nailed it. It was the right person, right place, right time.

SOM: Let’s talk about the camerawork. there’s so much going on. You’re in a room with them, for the most part, and the two of them are all over the place and the camera is getting all of it.

SC: Ousama Rawi was the cinematographer – he’s so great, he has been such a great mentor to me. Sometimes he kicks my ass and I love it. He believes in me so he’s going to give me the straight goods. The bar is high. Why do we settle? No. We do not settle. I love that about him.

SOM: I love the shot – one of my favorite shots in the film – where the camera is at the bottom of the bed and she’s in the red negligee and she’s lying back and you can see her nose sticking up over her body and everything around her is white. You don’t linger on it like, “Here’s an artsy shot.” But the film is filled with beautiful-looking moments like that.

SC: This is [editor] Chad Tremblay’s first feature but he and I have worked many times now on short films. He’s one of my former students. He was in my class on the Tuesday of September 11th. Thats how long I’ve known him. He is a wunderkind. And we just get each other. He brings so much to the process. I’d say, “Let’s try some jumpcuts.” He’d say “Yeah!” And Debbie too – she’s this post-modernist poet – she would love the story to be even stranger than it already is! But anyway, the three of us would look at the film and think about rhythm. Chad has a musician’s background and that helps too. When we heard of the nominations we got for Madrid, I assumed it would be for acting and photography …

SOM: Anyone but you, in other words.

SC: Yes, exactly! And then I learned I was nominated, and even now I got goosebumps. But I was so proud of Chad for getting a nomination for editing. I called him and said, “Are you sitting down?”

SOM: Editing is always important but in something like this, it’s even more so. The film could have been static, but it’s not.

SC: David Mamet said that editing is like a dream – your subconscious is going to show you only what you want to see. And so I’d go away and I’d think about it, “What is the ending? I don’t think I want them in the shot. I think I just want their voices.” We worked with montages, and then we found it, we found the ending.

I’ve been rejected by a few festivals and one of them sent me the jury comments. The first guy was like, “These people, who cares, they live in a beautiful house, they don’t have any problems.” He missed the whole point. I’m not trying to lecture anyone. I trust that there is an audience who wants to talk about this stuff. I get that it’s not for everybody but every film isn’t meant to be for everybody. I guess this film is in the feel-bad category.

SOM: I found myself flip-flopping in allegiance as I watched it. It’s not like she’s a witch and he’s emasculated, or he’s abusive and she’s a victim. They’re people fighting for themselves and their relationship. I found myself thinking, “Oh my God, I would walk out on that woman, too.” But then I started to see how he was shutting her out of his decisions. There was a real sense of her abandonment issues. He is making a decision about his life and trying to involve her, but in her mind, he’s leaving her.

SC: Exactly. It’s there and we were trying not to flag it. It’s a feeling that registers. To be honest, it doesn’t register with everybody. My wonderful producer and production designer Taavo Soodor came to the screening and said, “There’s nothing out there that’s like this film.” I’m discovering in my next film – which has a more Chekhovian influence – that all of my work in some way is about aspects of betrayal. And abandonment. It’s something really deep in me from my own childhood, and it’s coming up in different forms.

before anything you say (official trailer) from Darkling Pictures on Vimeo.