Director: Shatara Michelle Ford（S）

Producer:  Pin-Chun Liu（P）

Interviewer: WMWFF Program Manager Huei-Yin（H）

H: This film has its world premiere at the Black Star Film Festival, and won the Producer Award. The festival is a very important platform for people of color. What does it mean to you?

S: We all understand independent filmmaking is very difficult, and so much of financing for films comes from investors who can see a direct mind for profit and therefore people rely on movies they know they can have celebrities, stars in. They think people will go to theaters to actually see it. And if it’s not a movie that has lots of stars in it, it has to be a very specific genre like horror for someone to feel confident in spending money or investing in a film. I see that because there aren’t very many African American stars, black stars in America. That means that if you want to make a story about any one, and you can’t write for Morgan Freeman, or Will Smith, or Viola Davis, then you probably won’t get your movie made if you want that story to have a black character in it. That’s the first little thing why Black Star is important.

The second reason why Black Star’s important is because I think that Hollywood also encourages stories about people that they understand. And so I think there is an assumption that if you make a movie about a black person, it has to be about a black person struggling because they are poor, some sort of gang issues and violence. It’s all of these things that we’ve seen constantly. Also, these films tend to be very straightforward, so it’s like ABCD, good guys, bad guys, it’s all very clear. I don’t think that leaves a lot of room for subtlety and nuance in filmmaking. It’s difficult to actually tell a universal story about the human experience when you spend so much time focused on what certain types of people are supposed to do and what they’re not supposed to do. So when I write scripts, I have black people in mind, but not because I want to make a human story, I don’t just want to make a story about a black person, but because I’m black, and I know that I feel the same things that you feel. Why not put someone that looks like me in that role?

So what black star does is that they look for and validate stories that aren’t those typical things that we see all the time that Hollywood expects black people to make. And so I’m grateful to them for having a space where our film could actually live. Without them I’m not sure it would have been so easy.
 

P: It’s important to have a festival that gives us space and especially that gives out awards. We’re very grateful that we got the award, because we can really start making the movie and having people pay a little more attention, so an award like this is actually very helpful, like now you guys remember.
 

H: In the film, there’s a lot of numbers mentioned, like there’s one-third of women who have been sexual harassed, and 80 percent of which has been traumatized. During the field research, was there anything that really stuck to your minds and like really impressive?

S: I care about these issues, so I’m always reading articles and stories when they come up. Probably 4 years ago I learned what a rape kit was, and I learned that in most states in America, if you ask for a rape kit, and you go through the process, it’s a forensic package, they take your skin cells and it’s supposed to be tested in a lab. And a lot of times, they don’t get to the next step of actually testing those rape kits. And that was horrifying to me, to think that there’s all of these boxes somewhere in a room, and no one is doing the work to actually figure out their connections between people who have done this multiple times and actually help victims find justice that way. So that got me thinking and reading a lot about just rape kits in general, and I learned after that, that there are a lot of places that just don’t even have them, or they charge for them, which they’re not allowed to do. Something like this could happen to you and you don’t even know to even ask for.

When I did the research about this as recent as it is, it was 2 years ago, that number has changed, and as awareness and anxiety grows, people actually revise and do more research every day, it might be better, it might be worse, I don’t know. But I know that if you just look at any forensic exam website any kind of sexual assault awareness website in America, these numbers tend to not change, they’re pretty consistent with each other. In terms of what stuck out to me the most, it’s the fact that there were SO many articles; in New York, in Washington, in Oklahoma, in Arkansas, in Missouri, in Louisiana, in Texas, accounts of women who were turned away from hospitals and weren’t able to get a rape kit when they asked for it, or were charged excessive amount of money for a rape kit. That’s what got me thinking about these things. And that’s why I knew this is a story that’s worth telling.

H: When we saw the film, it really connected with our “After #MeToo” program. It’s true that after #MeToo movement, certain awareness arises, so we do see a certain amount of films that talk about related issues in this category. At the same time, in the United States, there are some abortion issues going on as well. At such specific time, a lot of things echo with your film, especially how you portray the emotions and the interaction between the different characters, can you talk a little bit about it?
 

S: I think that, again, to talk about Hollywood. If this were a Hollywood movie, Renesha would be white and blonde; I think that this person would have had a much obvious and straightforward situation happen to her. She may have not been drinking, and doesn’t take drugs, and was at a club, and a scary man who was really not attractive and mean and was watching her in the corner and he grabs her and rapes her in a corner, and then her boyfriend knows exactly the right thing to do and knows exactly the right words to say and sits next to her, and takes her to the hospital where they have all of the resources and they fix it, and then they go to the police and the police, “Oh we found him, he’s caught!” End of the movie! You know that is what they would want, and what I read in all of these stories, everywhere in America is that, that’s not what happens to us.

On top of that I think what was going on when I wrote the script, I drafted the script a week before the Harvey Weinstein story broke out. And then when that happened, everyone that I knew had some sort of story or started to think again the interactions they have had with their bosses, or you know, other people in their lives, a lot of things that were happening to them in college, and me and my friends and their friends and their friends were all talking about it. A few months later, there’s a short story in the New Yorker called “Cat Person.” It’s not necessarily about sexual assault, but it’s about power dynamics between men and women and expectations that men have on women in romantic or sexual relationships. And again, that got people talking, and then something happened, and people were like, “Is he evil or is he not evil?” Still, what happened to that girl made her feel uncomfortable, and now we all need to talk about it because we’ve all kind of maybe felt that before on either side.

So as I’m working on drafts, I’m hearing all of these conversations and again it’s reminding me and pushing me to go closer and closer to nuance and further away from the straightforward Hollywood thing, because we clearly need to talk about it and we need to take the time to know what that looks like.

As a filmmaker, I care very much about exploring what it feels like to be a human, and I think one of the greatest most wonderful but also really difficult thing about being a human is that you’re constantly holding many conflicting feelings at once. And when you’re holding these conflicting feelings, sometimes it forces you to do things that are out of character from you, or it pushes you into inaction. Because all of the stuff is here and you don’t really know the best way to react or you just shut down because it’s overwhelming. And that’s what I was most interested in writing about this relationship. I wanted to think about how a heterosexual relationship is already at a basic power of dynamics that are at play at all times. Whatever society you’re in, it’s a male-dominated society. Therefore, there is inherent power given to men and also concepts of what courtship and companionship look like. And there’s also expectation of sex. So I wanted to use these two people as a way to examine that.

What is important to me is my academic background and my identification as a feminist leads me to understand a really key concept within feminism: intersectionality. If you are a marginalized identity, you do cross the same experiences, and sometimes your experiences might not exactly the same, but there are alliances within those things. So it’s recognizing the difference but also identifying as still part of the larger group. What’s most pertinent with this constant intersectionality with Renesha is that she’s not just a woman, she’s not just a straight person, she’s also black, and all these things interact with how she moves through society. And these three things have its own special concoction of trouble and pleasure, but her boyfriend’s things are different. He’s a white, straight man, and he’s not necessarily thinking about how her experience could be different to his. And I think that’s where extra layers of tension and conflict come, because he makes assumptions for her without actually thinking this has to be different because of the other things.

This is exciting to me because I think that obviously #MeToo is important as a feminist. Obviously, I care about issues of sexual assault and reproductive justice, but I think what really makes this film stick with people is the fact that it almost could’ve been about anything, and it’s about the kind of ways that we interpret and misunderstand each other and exert power over each other, knowledgeably or unknowledgeably. I think that’s why it stays. It makes them feel sick is where that added issue of sexual assault, that added issue of how our political system dictates who gets healthcare and who doesn’t; how our political system dictates how police treat certain people over others.

H: I overheard some people they have different reactions to the film in terms of the role setting. For example, some people really cannot understand why the female protagonist is kind of upset, like why the boyfriend is so nice and like offers help, but why she is kind of holding back. But I’ve also heard of other perspectives, your film has provided these dimensions that are realistic. Another question is that you mention elsewhere that your film has been influenced by Hitchcock, and especially the role of nurse is also related to Vertigo, can you elaborate more?

S: I love Hitchcock movies. Hear what I said. I love “Hitchcock movies.” His movie was a very good example of the thing that I love examining in movies most, which is power. So you have this very talented, intimidating man with all the power, who also clearly has some sort sexual repression in need, and pushes that on his actresses. And Vertigo is my favorite movie, and I think it’s absolutely frightening. It’s very beautiful, and all Hitchcock movies are slightly scary anyways, but I think as a woman, Hitchcock movies are especially scary because there’s always some sort of relationship between the demise of women and the presence of men. And Vertigo especially, this man is obsessed with someone he barely knows, and then goes out of his way to put his trauma onto another woman and force her to become something that she’s not for his own satisfaction, and that is scary. It’s NOT romantic.

And so Armani, the woman who plays the nurse, is also a really talented singer/songwriter. We were walking through San Francisco one day, and she was telling me about how she wanted to make a music video for a song that I really liked of hers, and the themes of the song made me think a lot about that movie. Or maybe I’m just very obsessed with that movie and wanted to find an excuse to play with it. But either way, we made a music video that is like a feminist reimagining, I’d say it’s almost a black woman’s imagining black identity, black visibility, and the concept of what the male gaze’s desire could be for a woman. That’s where that came from.

But more generally, in terms of technique and process, I don’t think there’s anyone better than Hitchcock, and I think that as this current generation of filmmakers explore genre, people like to take tiny bits and pieces from Hitchcock but they forget what actually made a Hitchcock movie a Hitchcock movie, that’s the fact that a Hitchcock movie always starts out as something else. We think about Psycho, we we’re thinking this is a crime, a heist, not some psychotic, psychological thriller, also murder mystery. To think about Vertigo, we think this is just a typical mystery, and there’s this extra psychological thriller horror element, and the protagonist is also very romantic and it gives you whiplash sometimes because you don’t know what movie that works so well.

When I watch Hitchcock movies, I feel much closer emotionally to real life. We never feel just one thing. In this day, there will be moments when you have felt yourself in a coming-of-age movie. You feel yourself kind of learning something, growing in a really wonderful space of your friends, and then you turn a corner and you feel very scared and uncomfortable, and you don’t know if something’s calling you, or you don’t know if you’re about to die, and then the next minute you’re incredibly sad because you’ve just gotten terrible news about a job or a friend or a partner or your dog, and so all of those things can happen and even in a certain moment you can have all of these feelings. So I think that movies, or the Hitchcock structure serves the internal human experience very well.

What scares me is watching a movie where a woman doesn’t feel like she could fully be her autonomous self. And guys are just kind of like after her or making her do things, and I get really upset. And I think the first time I kind of had a nugget of an idea about what this movie could be is when I watched Darren Aronofsky’s Mother, and I thought about what he was going for, and just his very over-the-top experience that the protagonist was having, and I thought, I don’t need to do all of that. Knowing these things that I’ve known, these things that I’ve read, I want to make a movie about sexual assault, how do I apply Hitchcock to that approach? How do I make you feel like you’re watching a romantic comedy and all of a sudden it turns into a very complicated, dark psychological thriller and then come out again feeling like a drama? How do you do that and still achieve the goals that you’re trying to reach?

H: There’s a point when the female protagonist and her friend are sitting in the bar and talking about politics. And it’s very rare to see female characters talking about politics in movies. They are talking about Trump and are also curious about why putting this scene.

P: Before we answer, I just want to say, now that I think of it, it is very rare to see women talking about politics in movies. Wow you just taught something about my own movie.

S: I appreciate the question because that scene is really important to me. And it’s one that I went back and forth on it. I didn’t know if I should keep it, I didn't know if it was too much. And I still don’t know. I think that part makes me cringe the most, out of everything in my movie.

I thought very carefully about what to say. I wanted it to sound like the conversations that I have with my black girl friends, or the conversations that I overhear my sister having with hers. And I think that after Trump was elected, there was a sentiment for at least half of the country that his presence was frustrating, and so a lot of times when you hear conversations, it’s more of just a kind of a complaint about him as opposed to kind of having a debate about this is a good thing or a bad thing, or what are the details of what somebody is doing. It’s more just like “I hate him and I hate everything he stands for!” “So I’m just angry, and there’s always something he’s doing that I don’t like.”

And again, I don’t know how helpful of an insight that is into the political situation that America is in. Because they’re not really the same much in this specific concept of Trump. I want to separate that because of the next thing I’m going to say. It doesn’t matter what president we have, police are killing black people, and they’re getting away with it. And the conversations that they were having at that bar were about the majority of people who were killed in Texas. And I know that’s a question that a lot of people here had of why it was set in Texas. And it’s because the frequency of those racially charged violent events, and we just had another one in El Paso very recently. It wasn’t against African-Americans, but it was against the brown people, people who are not white. So clearly Texas has a problem. And I don’t necessarily think that their law enforcement is set up to be supportive to people of color. So if you are a black woman in Texas, and you don’t feel safe, would you call the cops? And that’s why I put that there. I wanted people to… if they didn’t already live with this, didn’t already feel this, I wanted them to think about it. If they’re talking about these things, it’s very much in their mind, that might influence how they reach out for help or how they understand some sort of trauma or conflict.

I think the most important thing that I think people need to understand is that black experience in America has always been very very difficult. And there are times when it gets better and there are times when it gets worse, and I don’t really know if we’re in a better or worse place right now, I don’t. And I know that can sound very naïve to say when I’m sitting here with you, having made a movie, but I recognize my own privilege here, and I think that all Trump has really done in my opinion is reveal how people actually feel about non-white people and immigrants, but primarily non-white immigrants in America. And I think it also… the fact that this man has his own victims of sexual assault who’ve come out and said something about it while he was in an election year, and he still won, says a lot about how we actually feel right now. And I don’t think if Trump weren’t president, that feeling would be different, it’s just more hidden.