Well, a couple of things really helped. One was seeing a number of films that were made in New York City in the 60s and 70s that were very personal filmmaking; subject, camera, room, people, artists. So films like Shirley Clark’s Portrait of Jason, and a film by Jim McBride called My Girlfriend’s Wedding, and Chantal Akerman’s early work. Andy Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl, which has Edie Sedgwick in the Chelsea Hotel. These films of which a lot could be said in very minimal ways. I saw in them the use of ellipses that happened because the film rolled out, or they cut between something indoors and outdoors. Those films gave me the permission to create ellipses in something that didn’t necessarily have them. That was really freeing.
Ultimately we worked for a couple of weeks with stand-ins. And Alex Ashe, my cinematographer, and I shot these two figures in various spaces at various times in the location. Suddenly I ran into a sense that I was making a movie much more about portraiture than I had imagined…. I realized that there was a story in photography inside the film. Which was pleasurable obviously because of the subject, but also was pleasurable to me because that’s what I am interested in, in part, when it comes to cinema: What emotion does an image convey separate from the language or from the text?
Where did you shoot this?
I was lucky enough that a friend of mine had recently become the executive director of Westbeth Artists Housing, and he saw the project as aligned to the mission of Westbeth, which is an artists’ housing space that’s been around since 1971. Its mission is to support and encourage artists—their domestic life and their creation of their work. We were doing all of that, so he gave us this space for a couple of months, gratis. That allowed us to really explore the images we were going to make with a kind of freedom that would not be usual in film production. Merce Cunningham had his office in that building. Many, many artists have been there and are there. The ghosts of other artists were in the building while we made the film. That was resonant to me.
There’s a real energy to these last two films of yours, between Passages and this one, amid a difficult climate for independent filmmaking. I’m curious, taking a step back: How are you feeling as an artist these days?
I feel like I am making hay while the sun shines. I feel fortunate that I met and started to work with [producer] Saïd Ben Saïd, and we’re now working on a third feature together to shoot this summer in New York. Careers seem like they’re made by caveat or by faith, but they’re often made by a certain few people. Truly, if Saïd hadn’t taken interest in my work about six or seven years ago, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to sustain.
Since the pandemic—and this is also where I look back at the artists of the East Village in the 70s and 80s—I feel that risks must be taken. We’re going to die, so you might as well try. My husband, Boris, says this to me occasionally, when I get kind of nervous that I can’t make something: “If you don’t make it, it won’t exist.” That alternative creates something that encourages me to go forward. I feel like I’m in a forward-moving phase. I really do continue to get inspiration from people who were savvy about the business or the industry or the art form, but they weren’t craven to it, and they found ways of making work that was deeply personal. That’s kind of the needle that I continue to try to thread. There’s some advantage of getting older: I feel like that’s the only needle I’m interested in.
This interview has been edited and condensed. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive Sundance 2025 coverage.
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