. They’re often about the lives of girls and women; they suggest coming of age is a lifelong process. There’s usually some sort of dark element, someone missing for instance. People sing. Things float and glow. Perhaps all of the things that people love or hate aboutI live just outside of Chicago in the Northwest tip of Indiana, and my mother lives in Ohio, so I often drive out to see her, which takes me through these long, winding two-lane rural roads.
I imagine it wasn’t particularly easy in this economy to make a movie that is so beholden to its own vision, that takes its time to tell a story, that isn’t afraid of being oblique. Did you have difficulty securing financing?Yeah, honestly, it’s the reason I made a bunch of short films first. I knew that I wanted to make a film like this totally on my own terms. I started making films in the art world, not the filmmaking world.
Making the film and being satisfied with it myself is the goal, but I love it when you can disprove the doubters. I feel really fortunate, now people are like, “Yeah, let’s make your next film on your terms.” I’m not going to say it’s a gendered thing, but I do think there’s a kind of trust gap when a female writer and director goes into a room full of men and goes, “I want to make this kind of surreal girl-power film where people sing and things glow.” That’s not necessarily an immediate “Yes.
I thought, too, that it was an elliptical meditation of what ownership of the female body really means in a world dominated by men.