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Im a looser tongue than most.
I joke that that only makes my job easier.
She looks self-conscious for a moment as I put the recorder on the table.
Oh my God, I have to be careful, she says.
Then, seconds later: you’ve got the option to put it closer.
(In addition to its streaming release, the soundtrack is nowavailable on Spotify.)
There are people who are like, Im watching it for the fifth time!
and traveling from festival to festival to see this thing, she says.
Its just insane to me.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
In a sense, youve been waiting to release this film for 25 years.
So that in itself was a thing.
It was a really strange instant family.
And I enjoy building bridges in that strange way, just suddenly bringing very disparate people together.
They felt it was their story.
And I was like,Okay, thats really nice, but strange.
But, you know, its ironic because its such a specific story.
Specific to a forgotten episode in my life.
So thats nice, I guess.
There are people doing animated fan art from Portugal, and then people in Peru and Colombia.
It feels like a great example of finding the universal in the specific.
The graphics and the music and the atmospheric stuff.
And the images, and the collage aspect.
We worked at it backward.
And I have to credit Enat Sidi, who editedThe WolfpackandJesus Camp.
She came and looked at my archive, and she was the one who told me its aboutme.
Like, I was a completely different person.
I mean, it iscrushing.
And then you venture to regain that.
That word stultifying it stuck in my head because thats exactly how I felt about Singapore.
And you just had to make your own things, your own rules.
And the Coens were also inspired by that stultifying environment the same way you ended up being.
All these friends that did production design were people I wanted to capture some aspect of it.
And I was completely aware that this was a very, very brief period.
That we would all fade into adulthood at some point really soon, in different countries.
Like we shouldve waited a year for everything to be perfect.
But theres no way everything was going to line up.
We just had to grab and go, so we did.
Somehow they chose our school in Singapore.
Also, we had American and British teachers.
It was not that kind of thing.
I walked into everything with my eyes open.
We were really wised-up kids, maybe even too wised-up.
But we were used to doing elaborate, ambitious things in theater.
But there was no opportunity to makefilms.
But it was never gendered.
The only way it was gendered was, that world around us was very gendered, I guess.
We want to just play with film and just experiment, and were just trying to learn filmmaking.
Can you just, hey, throw us a few cans?
It was because we had Georges.
In some ways we were knowingly using him as well.
Right.So, its more complicated than just the male person coming in, which I like about it.
Because its … life is messy.
I think thats one of the most interesting aspects of the film.
I mean, thats how shit gets done, man.
He thought that I should be an actress, blah, blah, blah.
All that kind of stuff.
So I guess, from there, going to Georges it didnt feel like a leap.
I just thought of myself as me.
I know it was tough, especially with Jasmine, during the shooting of it.Yeah.
When were here in New York, Sophie comes to support it.
When were in Asia or in England, like when we were at Sheffield, Jasmine came.
It was really hard to get the three of us in the same place again.
For Sophie, its just been thrilling.
Not like in a creepy way … like inThe Ring.
But they were authentic.
I was really proud of the fact that I caught them as they were.
Ive never cried on anyones shoulder, neither of theirs.
Its just more prickly and more difficult than that.
Its prickly, but its friendship.
And she loves it.
Because thats my … Im such a bad friend.
Im not somebody who can talk easily to people.
I need the intermediary of this film.
A project.Yeah, as the excuse for me to reach out to them.
And its like … its the excuse.
Because over the years after his music was stolen, I just never believed him.
We havent really grown up.
It was really important for me to capture how they are, body-language-wise.
Ben just seems like this fragile boy still, and hes older than me.
Whatever you did wasnt that great.
And I just never took him seriously.
I never did, and I feel really bad about that.
Which I didnt realize was so traumatic for him.
You have to edit around a performance, and a lot of it was just me being me.
It wasnt acting because it wasnt a role that could be acted.
I mean, I wrote a role that was not playable.
Not everyone has the ability to look back on their former self in such vivid detail.
I was the master of the stink eye, and I caught myself doing that several times.
At people off camera?Probably, like Jasmine, you know?
And I caught myself.
I think I was just determined.
