I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS tells the story of a teenage girl named Davina, who runs away from home with an older boy named Sterling – and their new life together is not the fairytale adventure they hoped for. Jack Toye spoke to filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff and sound mixer Joe Stillwater about their project. 

Jack Toye: In the UK I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS is probably best known as a children’s novel from 2007, by our much-loved author Michael Morpurgo – but your film is not an adaptation of his novel. Could you tell us a little bit about your film for the audience in the UK that won’t know much about it yet?

LM: Sure. It’s the story of a teenage girl named Davina. She is a very imaginative, dreamy, artistic, creative girl, and the film is told largely through her perspective. It is this dreamy collage, very hand-crafted aesthetic involving some stop-motion, fairytale, fantasy sequences with dragons and unicorns and fireworks and underwater acrobatics.

JT: And that’s where all the unicorns are hanging out in America right now?

LM: That’s where they’re hanging out, yeah. In this fantasy world. But I’m unfamiliar with the novel… I’d like to read it. In this film, the unicorn is a metaphor for her transition from childhood to adulthood, and it is simultaneously a very innocent, girlish creature, and also a sexual, phallic, mature, majestic animal. I think she’s grown up rather quickly. Her mother, who’s played by my mother in real life, is disabled, and she has grown up taking care of her mother. Never really had a childhood of her own, and wants to escape.

… adults often  remember their teenage years more fondly than they actually experienced them …

 

She meets this boy Sterling on the morning of her birthday and ultimately decides to run away with him and thinks that he is her unicorn. Or at least, she wants desperately to believe in him, or something to come and rescue her. But ultimately discovers that that sort of fairytale existence doesn’t match up with reality. And that that’s OK.

JT: Is the unicorn a useful device to look back on your teenage years, when you get to be an adult, and you attach some sort of mysticism or fairytale likeness to it?

LM: Yes. I think often that adults remember their teenage years more fondly than they actually experienced them. There’s a certain nostalgia and fantasy at play to our memories of what it was like growing up. If you talk to teenagers directly, who are currently at that phase in their life, it’s usually a pretty uncomfortable, unpleasant experience at times, and I think our memories can gloss over a lot of those memories. We focus instead on the magic.

JT: From personal experience, my teenage years seemed really serious, but this film has a distinct feeling of escapism. I found the film quite fun. It was lighthearted, and that made certain scenes all the more drastic when the mood flips around.

LM: That was intentional. I wanted to find the balance between the more serious, harsh, gritty elements to her reality – the more socially realistic moments to the film – balancing that with the moments of magical realism. So that it would appeal to a wider audience – particularly teenage girls and young women, who would be interested in going and seeing the film. I think you get a different audience to see a heavy-handed, highly socially realistic film, gritty drama about abuse, versus something that’s light and fantastical and a bit of a magical journey that also still subtly addresses those darker topics. That was purposeful.

JT: A film that’s doing the rounds at film festivals this year is a documentary called BEYOND CLUELESS, a British film that posits that in that particular time frame, there were more movies aimed at teenagers than ever before and since. Where do you think your film fits into the teen movie genre?

LM: I hope that I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS is seen as an alternative perspective to a lot of the current teen films out there. I think it’s fantastic that there is a resurgence in films about particularly teenage girls. I support the existence of films like TWILIGHT, THE HUNGER GAMES and THE FAULT IN OUR STARS, but I also think in many ways like most Hollywood movies they gloss over a lot of the realities of being a teenager. They have this kind of glossy surface to them where everyone is beautiful and everything is perfect and everything kind of just works out. I hope that UNICORNS speaks to teenagers who are looking for another new point on that experience and one, rather than being clean and glossy, is more gritty, textured, and cinematic.

… younger teenage audiences tell me “oh yeah, this feels very real.”

JT: You’ve had two short films out recently too?

LM: Yes. I made a short film called TWITCH. It was from before making UNICORNS, but it’s similar in that it was a story of a 16-year old girl and her first romantic relationship. And my mother also plays the mother in that film. I made that short film as a precursor to this one – a creative test to see how this might play out. Particularly the decision to cast my mother. It could have gone either way. It was a bold decision.

JT: I think when people get a chance to see this film, Natalia’s going to be on lots of people’s radars.

LM: Already it’s become quite overwhelming for her. I wish she were here to speak for herself. I know that the experience of making the film for her was quite wonderful. She wrote me a really lovely letter right afterwards saying that in many ways she came of age in a similar way to her character on screen. The process of making the film was this rite of passage for her. It was a dream. It’s a very brave performance and she’s really in every frame of the movie. She’s starting to become more comfortable with this idea of being in public. She’s still in school as well. She really is grounded in that way which I respect. Often you see child actors like the Culkins or the Olson twins who are discovered quite young and drop out of school. They just go right into Hollywood and that can be unhelpful.

JT: I found myself thinking, this is a fifteen or sixteen year old on screen, and I’m seeing more of them as an audience member than I would usually see. Is it easier for you as a female director to work with teenagers in this way than a male director?

LM: Yes, I think it is easier. For this film it was to my advantage to be female and directing the sex scenes in the film. And also, it being a somewhat personal story, I think I brought a certain sensitivity and vulnerability that created a really safe, emotional space for the actors. Whereas I think if I were a male director, it would not have been that same kind of trusting environment. I spoke at length with Natalia in advance about how we were going to handle the sex scenes, where her comfort levels were, where mine were. We were really in the sensitive territory of needing to abide by all the child pornography laws of how you film a minor. But also stay true to the emotional experience of those first moments. Because when you are a teenager, theres the vulnerability and emotional confusion that comes out in sex scenes. I think far too often in films it just cuts to black right away and doesn’t really cover it emotionally. I find it true, at least when I was a teenager at that age, I was sexually active, I think a lot of people are, and it’s not only a part of life but a way of communicating with each other. I found it easier as a teenage girl to make out with a boy than talk to him and have an adult conversation – it was kind of a crutch.

When we were filming the scenes, we would have a closed set, where it would just be the minimal amount of crew. We made sure that she felt safe and comfortable and had her parent on set. So the production of the film went very well and now that it’s out in the world, it must be difficult for her to see herself on screen in such a naked way. That’s probably the more overwhelming part. I know in BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR the actresses felt taken advantage of by the director – they said they’d been pushed past their limits. I would never do that with my film.

JT: In your film you don’t really see much more than exposed hips.

LM: Yeah, there’s no technical nudity, but it feels like it’s still much more graphic and explicit that you often do see. I have had reactions from audience members who have been shocked, especially older audience members who have children of that age. They often will be quite shocked by some of the sex scenes. Then younger teenage audience tell me “oh yeah, this feels very real.” So it’s been a mixed response.

For a lot of the scenes I felt like the best instrument I had was my face.

JT: So onto Joe, the sound recordist. We were having a chat yesterday about your job, and it sounds amazing to be able to go around different films and sit in fields and tree-houses. Could you explain the process in terms of what Leah asked you to do and then what you produced?

JS: It was unique. We were in a lot of different scenarios. It always felt like a laboratory. A very unique teenage laboratory. When I first started sound recording I didn’t do it for any particular professional reason. I started when I was twelve and you just go around and try to find things that you really like hearing, then cutting them together in ways and crafting a world of texture and fantasy.

JT: Did Leah know your work beforehand?

JS: Not really. Shooting on location there were two sections. There was the principal photography, where we were recording most of the dialogue in scenes. Then there was the fantasy shoot where we went up North to upstate New York. We spent a lot of time getting sounds that Leah wanted to use as part of the arsenal to lace around the edges of the film. Framing all of these wild, weird fantastic elements with sound. Elemental was something we talked about a lot. We had to figure out what the elements of the atmosphere in each scene were like. Was it fiery, windy, cold, hot, painful?

JT: I noticed that there are lots of bathtub and firework scenes in the film.

JS: Ha, yeah! For a lot of the scenes I felt like the best instrument I had was my face. There are a few parts where I put the microphone in my mouth and made these weird textural noises. I recorded it at 192k, basically like shooting 128 fps with film, which means you can stretch it way out, slow it down. I learnt that technique when I was recording a door hinge and I had accidentally set it to 192k and it was super slowed down and creaky. It had this rhythm to it. Almost sounded like an IDM track.

How did you decide on what a unicorn sounded like?

 

When Leah asked me to find all these fantasy sounds I thought of something recently where someone had recorded crickets. They had slowed it down to an equivalent that if a cricket’s life cycle was like a human’s life cycle, who you would experience that stretched out sound. They slowed down the crickets to the point where it sounded like they were singing an aria. So when I was asked to get these dragon sounds, wind sounds, the howling Antarctic sounds, I knew the approach.

LM: Essentially I gave Joe a list of sounds. Because we shot the film in stages, we had the luxury of having this fantasy shoot which was mostly MOS – shooting without sound or dialogue. Joe was there. I gave him a list of really abstract, creative sounds to collect on location that normally would be the kind of list you give to a foley editor or a sound designer to create in post-production in the studio. Because Joe collected a lot of these atmospheric sounds on location it really lent itself in the edit room to have these textured, visceral, atmospheric sounds of crickets in a field, or howling wind, or things on fire, things that were organic to the world of the film. They lent themselves nicely to the same hand-crafted texture of the fantasy sequences. We did as much as we could with the cinematography in-camera as possible in the 16mm film, so it made sense that we did a similar thing with the sound effects.

JS: It felt integrated. It felt like we were drawing the source materials from the same world. It felt like foraging.

LM: So the end result in the soundtrack of the film there are a lot more organic, real world sounds than something you may find in the cinema library off a CD.

JT: How did you decide on what a unicorn sounded like? What’s the creative process behind that? Did you think, “well it’s part horse so I’ve got to get a bit of that”?

LM: Yeah, it’s part horse and a little bit of magic. Joe followed around a horse and got those sounds and then also in the sound design we added elements of wind chimes and magical effects. It was a combination of the real world sounds and purely magical sounds created in post-production.

JS: When they used to hunt narwhales, the whalers would go up to them in their boats and when they got close, it sounded like they were singing to them. You can see from that how some of these mystical creatures came about in the public consciousness.

 This film felt like each department got to push the limits of their creative process…

LM: So the film is divided into different elements. The fire world is Sterling’s world. The water world is Davina’s. We came up with shorthand language to describe different characters in different scenes. That happened both visually and acoustically. It was a real collaboration between multiple departments. This film felt like each creative department got to push the limits of their creative process and experiment in ways that maybe they wouldn’t be able to on another film set. That was really exciting.

JS: That was one of the most unique elements for me as a crew member. I knew that everyone on the set was handpicked and really talented at what they did. Everyone had a sense of rebellion to them too.

JT: Can we talk about the film format? I loved films like this where you have 16mm, Super 16mm, Super 8mm. Did you use any VHS?

LM: No it’s all film, no VHS. It’s Super 16mm, regular 16mm, and Super 8mm. Within that there was multiple film stocks. We purchased old expired film stock online. So in a lot of the sequences, there are a lot of colours that are organic to the film because of the expiring film. It’s all how it came back from the lab.

JT: Is it the Super 16mm that has the look of the 1990s era?

LM: No, that’s the Super 8mm. It has this nostalgic feel. We shot not only on multiple formats but on multiple cameras often. One cinematographer might be operating the Super 16mm camera, and I would be on the Super 8mm camera. It was a real collage approach to filmmaking.

JT: Are you hoarding lots of this film stock for your next feature? Or are you going drastically different for your next feature?

LM: I most likely will go drastically different for the next feature. I couldn’t have imagined making this feature any other way though. Particularly as I made this film at just the right time. Polaroid has now gone out of business. Even the film stock we shot on was from a giant donation from Fuji, because they have now ceased making 16mm film stock. So we made it just at the edge of people viably shooting on 16mm. It’s becoming less and less possible which I find very sad.

JT: It’s a peculiar sense to be talking about this film stock in 2014 when it’s not quite extinct but you’re aware that given 5 years, you’ll think “how the hell did I come by this on eBay”?

LM: Polaroid film is now like $10 a pack when it used to be very cheap.

JS: It’s been superseded by something like Instagram.

LM: Instagram the modern polaroid! It’s interesting how it’s come back around. People who were teenagers in the 90s think about the Polaroid shots and see it as very organic. And teenagers now will think of those shots as an Instagram style. They don’t realise that it used to be a physical Polaroid. It’s interesting how every thirty years or so, there’s this cycle of aesthetic. It comes back, and I think people now are hungry for that time when everyone wasn’t always on their iPhones and everything wasn’t so clean and digital, with a bombardment of advertisements. There’s something comforting about this footage and aesthetic.

JT: You mentioned yesterday in the Q&A that you would find it quite hard to represent teenagers now. Can you foresee a way that mobile phone and tablet shooting will become an art form?

LM: I think that format lends itself more to showing multiple formats. It can be quite boring watching a film where someone sends a text. If you make a project that’s meant to be viewed on a small screen and incorporates elements of the small screen, actually that’s quite exciting. But it’s a whole new platform and medium.

JT: Do you have a similar release strategy in America as the UK with cinematic release, TV, and VOD?

LM: We’re doing it a little bit in stages. There’ll be the theatrical release first. Then the TV, and then the VOD, then the online download. The timeframes for those releases are not simultaneous, but they are close.

JT: Do you have more control over that than directors would have done in the past?

LM: Yes – which is very exciting. I’m hoping to work with Vimeo On Demand. I find that really exciting. It allows audiences to pre-order the film whilst you’re travelling around film festivals and then when it is released online, you can watch it on their website and good portion of the revenue goes to the filmmaker. It’s a much more direct connection between the filmmakers and the audience. I’m excited to be one of the first films that Vimeo are getting behind.

JT: Do you think platforms like Vimeo and Netflix are empowering new directors to have their films shown to a wider audience?

LM: Absolutely. Although it’s a blessing and a curse. These online platforms are democratising. They allow obscure films to reach a wider audience who might not see them at a film festival. But it also leads to an influx of the product. There are many more people making films now, so it’s harder to find the ones you want to find and sort through them. Curation is going to become much more important. Film festival play a key role in that. Being here in Edinburgh I know that if I go and see a film in the cinema, there will already have been a certain level of curation, I’l be watching a good film. If you just go on Vimeo or iTunes or Netflix, there are so many things to choose from that it’s hard to know what you want to watch. So it’s both a blessing and curse, but overall I find it exciting.

Every year at Cannes there’s zero or maybe one female director.

JT: Do you see more female directors coming to the fore? I know it was a big issue at Cannes this year, well every year to be honest.

LM: Every year at Cannes there’s zero or maybe one female director. I actually started a female film collective in New York called Film Fatale about a year ago. We’re a group of women writers and directors who meet regularly to support each other’s work and help each other make our films. That has spread and grown into almost a social movement in the past year. There’s a group in Los Angles, Austin, one is forming in London. If you look at the numbers of female directors, it’s not really changing. It’s about 5% of Hollywood directors are women, and maybe 15% of indie directors are women. So statistically not much has changed. But what is changing is the awareness of that figure. More and more people in the media are aware it is a problem.

JT: What’s the obstacle? What’s keeping that number down?

LM: More than anything I think that it’s a culmination of two factors. Film is a world of who you know and historically it has been male directors making films. Therefore it becomes a self perpetuating process.The financiers like to invest in filmmakers who are proven. Those statistically are more likely to be men. It’s institutional. People are less likely to take chances on new directors. And new directors are more likely to be women. That in conjunction with women directors being more likely to create stories about women, like mine and many other films. There is a misconception that audiences are more likely to watch films with male leads than female. I don’t think that’s true but that is the common language of film.

JT: If at festivals you have a female directors section, do you risk ghettoising that section of filmmakers?

LM: It can be quite marginalising, yet it’s also empowering at the same time. Hopefully we’ll get to the point where there doesn’t need to be that section, but I think that’s a long time coming and for now it is helpful. In this festival, I made a point of seeking out the other films directed by women and I saw HELLION by Kat Candler who’s a member of this collective back in America, then there’s PALO ALTO by Gia Coppola, and HIDE AND SEEK by Joanna Coates. I think we’re finally at a place where women directors can support other women directors, and that’s a step in the right direction.

I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS screens at Emmanuel College at 6:15 pm Sunday 31st August 2014