"This is where Mommy works," Vera Farmiga says to her childen, seated in a twin baby stroller pushed by her husband, Renn Hawkey. Farmiga lingers briefly with her family before entering a conference room for a round of interviews in Dallas, Texas. Farmiga has been traveling around the country to promote her new film Higher Ground, which opened in New York and Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago and expands into Dallas and other select markets tomorrow.
Farmiga was five months pregnant with her second child when shooting began on Higher Ground, surely a testament to her determination to get the film made. She describes it as "a very particular kind of film. It's not plot-driven, you know what you're in for when you sit down. It's a character study. It really is like looking into someone's photo album over the course of three decades, and being made privy to the intimacy of a journey during the course of one woman's life as a mother, as a daughter, as a sister, as a friend, as a community member, as a devotee."
"This is what it means to be human."
As we began our conversation, I noted that Dallas, like much of America's heartland, is a religious city, but it's something that's not talked about very much outside the religious community. Higher Ground is very open and welcoming to people from a variety of backgrounds, whether religiously-inclined or not. I wondered how it might be received outside of New York and Los Angeles.
"The great power of the film to me," she says, is that "it's a testament to the reverence of my approach. I didn't want to pander to any community, either the ones that have a bone to pick with it or to the Christian community. You know, Christian films are made so that Christians see reflections of who they want to be, and I'm portraying a person as she is, and a spiritual path in all its endeavors, in dizzying heights and 'the valley of the shadow of death,' and in doubt, because it's all a part of it, the ups and the downs, the ebbs and the flows.
"The power of the film, and the great surprise to me, is how many different experiences people have. If it's possible at all not to infuse a film with bias, to just say, this is what it means to be human, a human on a quest, which we're all on that search, no matter where we look for God, or how we view God in our lives, whether it's a concrete spiritual force, whether it's a concept, or a drug, we all have definitions, and we all have a relationship to that god.
"Even as an atheist; your god is love, maybe god is a more abstract definition. But the thing is, we're all on that path, and we're all looking within all these relationships to have a passionate and an intimate relationship."
"The yearning is kind of a holiness."
The film feels very specific, but at the same time it's not exclusionary, and that's what I liked about it too; it allows you to bring your own interpretation to it.
"That was the great challenge in directing, to portray a community, whether you're in it or outside of it. It's about the insiders on the outside, or those on the outside who are not accepting of those on the inside. There's such a dichotomy between fundamentalists and relativists. There's so much in between that pendulum. That's why films about spirituality are so important. A positive tolerance, not a negative, not one that says, 'This is the way we do our thing and that's the way they do their thing.' So I think it was very tricky to do that as a director.
"And also because Carolyn [Briggs, co-scripter and author of the memoir that served as source material] and I approached it with our quirky sense of humor. If we're going to examine something, why not do it through the bi-focal lens of, yes, gravitas, but also humor. Isn't it a quirky thing to be human? That was the great challenge as a filmmaker, to see how big of an audience I could reach with the film. I wasn't interested in making a film for the Christian community, I wasn't interested in making a film for people who question, or a film for the non-believers. I wanted to see who I could reach.
"This character's yearning ... to question herself, in that community ... the yearning is kind of a holiness. It started innocently enough as a way to give myself a meaty role." Farmiga laughs at the thought. "That's how it started!"
"I approached it in a very instinctual way."
Obviously the material was something that touched you; you wanted to explore that, and then after spending all that time on developing the script, it turned out you would be directing it. The press notes cite the influence of Almodovar, Cassavetes, and others. As a director, what did you want to bring to it visually? What were the influences on that aspect?
"These are afterthoughts, at being asked who were my inspirations. I didn't really approach it in that way. I approached it in a very instinctual way. I haven't studied many films. I actually haven't seen that many films. I'm trying to catch up. I grew up watching television, not films. My film history sucks. Marty's been a big help. I would get FedEx packages by the day, satchels of DVDs, citing Ukrainian directors from the 30s, Korean filmmakers from the 80s ..."
That was my question: Favorite Ukrainian directors?
"I don't know! I have to catch up!"
"All of that was a wild ride for me."
As far as seeing tremendous amount of films, and then deciding 'Oh, I want to make my own films,' since you came to directing from a different perspective ...
"It came from my instincts as an actor, the way I approach each character, and the way I try to layer it, the way I treat it as a court-appointed case; I'm that lawyer defending that person. Not judging it, but just stating a case for that character. That was my approach as a director.
"Visually, my one contingency was that I work with Michael McDonough, who I'd worked with on Down to the Bone and Quid Pro Quo, and Sharon Lomofsky as a production designer, who was going to help me create a visual that -- again, when you're working with the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they're so colorful and saturated and [such] quirky stylistic eras. We shot in Ellenville, New York. My character Corinne's house in New York was untouched. That orange shag rug, that daisy wallpaper, that's there. But it's almost like ... it becomes cartoonish, because it's so saturated. Even tonally; I had to, in post-production, tone the color down a little bit, so it wasn't so zany. That also affected a tone of a scene.
"The surprises as a director, in terms of what I wasn't prepared for, as far as editing, and post production, all of that was a wild ride for me, to see how you can affect a film's tone, and message even, either heightening it or lowering it, by playing around with the colors."
"The film directed itself."
So as you went through the process, learning on the job ...
"Learning on the job, it really was."
... did you go back through the film at some point, and say, 'Oh, that earlier stuff ...' I'm not asking for regrets about your own film. Obviously you had to be happy with it.
"There's not regrets, but more like, 'Oh, I wish I had another shot at that.' But not any big boo-boos, it was more a question of time and production values being low, just because it's the nature of having a small budget. I was just learning on the job and approached it in a real 'roll up your sleeves' fashion."
I think that's great.
"I don't have much time to think [during filming]. I'm just kind of working from the gut, from what I find compelling or idiosyncratic. More than half the battle is choosing your fellow soldiers. John Hawkes and Dagmara Dominczyk and Bill Irwin and Norbert Leo Butz. The whole film hinges on Norbert's performance. Joshua Leonard ..."
Awesome cast.
"Impeccable. So nuanced and honest. They say so much with silence. I'm just so awed by all of their creative capacities. The power they possess as storytellers. The film directed itself. In the editing room is where I found the surprises, and I made the most of my mark [as a director], just by choosing the best actors. There was a reverence and kind of a holy attitude" that the actors brought to their work.
"I watched 'Dallas'!"
If it wasn't films you watched when you were younger, you watched a lot of TV, then? Was it just whatever was on at the time?
Farmiga's face blushes every so slightly as he recalls with humor: "I watched 'Three's Company' with my grandma! I watched 'The Love Boat.' I'm sure Higher Ground comes directly in a line from 'Three's Company' to 'Love Boat' to 'Little House on the Prairie'! I watched 'Dallas'! Those were my big influences. Michael Landon was a huge influence as a prodder / storyteller / director."
[I keep my love of "Get Smart!" and "The Addams Family" to myself and our conversation turns more serious again.] The other side of watching so many movies when you're younger is that you end up with filmmakers who are so indebted to other filmmakers that they don't necessarily display their own style.
"My big formative experience was Deborah Granik [her director for Down to the Bone]. That was school for me. It was the first time anyone had given me the responsibility of a protagonist, and to work so closely with her ethics and her tenets about her filmmaking, and her honesty. I was persuaded through the Deborah Granik School.
"I'm probably slightly more sentimental than her. Certainly I think the films are very different. Higher Ground has a sense of humor that allows it to go into the surreal, and I didn't back away from that. That's probably my 'Gilligan's Island' / 'Fantasy Island' influence," she says, laughing again.
"It becomes really lofty. But we had more laughs at Sundance than any comedy that was there. People were able to giggle, not at the characters, but at themselves."
Portions of this interview were previously published at ScreenAnarchy in slightly different form. Check the official site to see where Higher Ground will be opening next.
Photo Credits: Photos by Molly Hawkey, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.