On this special episode of Design Matters, we take a look back at the collective brilliance of the filmmakers interviewed in 2023. Best of Design Matters 2023 with Siân Heder, Sarah Polley, and Kyra Sedgwick is live!
Siân Heder:
No deaf family would ever set up their living room this way.
Sarah Polley:
I mean, I think at first I felt tremendously guilty.
Kyra Sedgwick:
I think that they understand intrinsically that that’s something that I understand.
Announcer:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode to mark the end of 2023, we’re going to hear excerpts from some of the best interviews with filmmakers that Debbie did in the past year.
Kyra Sedgwick:
I think it’s a sweet movie.
Siân Heder:
You got to be in the silence that wasn’t actually silence.
Sarah Polley:
And then the most astonishing thing happened.
Debbie Millman:
Over the past 10 years or so, it’s been wonderfully gratifying to see how many more women are making movies and prestige television shows. We have a long way to go to get to parody, but at least things seem to be moving in the right direction. In 2023, I interviewed several women who have been forging remarkable careers as writers and directors. In this end-of-year episode, I’m going to play excerpts from three of those interviews. Sian Heder has written for TV shows like Orange Is The New Black, and she’s written and directed two films, Tallulah and more recently CODA, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2022.
Here’s an excerpt from my interview with Sian. When you were first approached to direct CODA, you hadn’t seen the original 2014 French film, La Famille Belier the story CODA is based on. What made you interested in this particular story?
Siân Heder:
I think it’s always striking when you’re presented with something and you think, “Oh, I can’t think of a film with a deaf family at the center of it”. And the fact that that doesn’t exist in the world felt like a driving force to put it in the world. When I did watch La Famille Belier, the character of the CODA at the center was very interesting. CODA as a child of deaf adults. It’s very interesting to me that most deaf people have hearing children, and most deaf people are born to hearing parents. And so there’s kind of this cultural divide that happens where a lot of times CODAs who are growing up with deaf parents in a way grow up more embedded in deaf culture than a lot of deaf people did as kids because they had hearing parents that maybe didn’t sign or live within the deaf community.
So that idea of someone who was part of these two worlds and also part of neither and living in this limbo where they culturally felt connected to a community that they actually aren’t a part of, which is the deaf community. And I had a beautiful thing that a friend said to me the other day when she was trying to talk about being a hearing person growing up in a deaf family.
And she said, “I lived in the oppressor’s body.” So even though I was their child and I was this, I also represented the world that had been oppressive, and horrible, and exclusionary. And holding those things and holding that duality was a really complicated thing to grow up with. So that was very intriguing to me in that character and exploring what that was. And having a teenage girl at the center where her feelings were not marginalized, her feelings were actually the stakes of the movie was exciting to me.
So all of those things, and then really the deep dive that I got to do with the deaf community, it’s changed my life. It’s changed my life, not just as an artist, but it really has changed my life, period. There is this idea of who should be writing what which I think is very real, and those conversations need to be happening. I was fully aware that I was a hearing person coming to this deaf story about a culture that was not mine.
But what that meant is I had to come in as this very pure listener and know what I didn’t know and really put a team around me of deaf collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera. But these moments that are almost embarrassing when you have them where my production and designer and I set up the living room of this family. I remember Ann walking onto set and going, no deaf family would ever set up their living room this way.
Deaf spaces are circular. Everybody needs to see everybody else. The living room is not centered on the TV in the same way, it’s centered on having a conversation with each other. The couch would be facing where they could see the door. They would want to know who was coming in and out. So there were all these moments where you kind of went, “Oh, shit. I’m such a dumbass. What was I thinking with the furniture?”
But I had that push and pull. I had the people there as a team to go, “Hey, no.” And it was a really powerful, amazing experience to make that film not just in the writing of it, but in the way we sort of re-imagined what a set could be, the way we shot it, put it together. Even the year-long press tour, I think it was a very transformative experience for everyone involved in the film, especially me.
Debbie Millman:
One of the really remarkable things about CODA was the way in which deafness was portrayed. In the past, hearing characters spoke out loud the entire time. And you talked about Marlee Matlin in the 1986 film Children of a Lesser God, a movie that she won an Oscar for playing the role she played. William Hurt’s character speaks all the lines out loud. And you look back at a movie like that, or even other movies that are much more recent, where the hearing character becomes the dominant character just because they are reciting or sharing the reality that the non-speaking person is having.
Instead in CODA, you provide the audience with the experience of what it’s like to really watch an ASL conversation taking place with the various sounds that you hear, the clothing, the fingers moving, slapping. I know that you put a mic on Marlee Matlin who was surprised because she’s usually not mic’d because you specifically wanted that physical experience.
Siân Heder:
I think sound is very important to hearing people. And you watch people who haven’t encountered an interpreter and a deaf person together before, and you will watch hearing people look at the interpreter as they’re talking. As the deaf person is signing, they will look at the interpreter and then they will address their question or their answer to the interpreter because they’re sort of drawn to the sound. It’s like, “Well, this is the person who’s talking, as opposed to this is the person that actually should be the interpreter’s there to voice the deaf person.”
So I’m watching it and I think it’s almost like it’s a process people have to go through to go, “Okay, let me become comfortable in this moment, giving my attention to the person who might not be actually speaking.” And so I knew that if Ruby voiced her parents or if Ruby talked too much in the movie hearing people would glom onto that. Or it’s almost like a safety net. Like, “Oh, I feel safer in this scene because I have this touchstone of this person speaking.”
So silence was a really big part of the movie for me and figuring out, yes, an audience will be uncomfortable for the first couple scenes, a hearing audience will be. And they are going to have to get into a different rhythm and a different way of watching and listening visually as opposed to actually listening. And that’s cool. Let me force the audience into that experience gradually. I was careful in the early parts of the movie to make sure that there would be an ASL scene and then there would be a music scene or a dialogue scene, and then we would… Then towards the back half of the movie, I think there’s six scenes in a row which are all silent ASL scenes because at that point I think the audience is fully immersed in this family and you don’t even notice.
I loved that audience members came up to me after the movie and was like, “I didn’t even notice that I was watching ASL.” And someone even said to me, “I felt like I was hearing Frank’s Boston accent.” And I’m like, “Yeah, he does have a Boston accent, but he has it through sign.” And sound was so important in the intimacy of an ASL conversation where if you’re angry and you say “Stop,” and you hit your hand really hard with the side of your other hand, which is the sign for stop, it makes a noise.
I really wanted the sound mix to allow the audience to really participate in the intimacy of the language and the physicality and the sound your hands make when they brush up against your clothes when you’re saying excited or the little verbalizations that come out or sounds that come out, which are so important. And so, yeah, I really worked not only to mic and my sound department on set, but then as we were working on the sound design to elevate and bring up all those small intimate sounds to fill those scenes, so you really didn’t have to fill them with music. You got to be in the silence that wasn’t actually silence.
Debbie Millman:
Sian Heder. Sarah Polley was a child star on Canadian TV, and she starred in many feature films including the remarkable film, The Sweet Hereafter and The Weight of Water. Since 2006, she’s been directing films and her latest in 2022 is Women Talking about sexual abuse in a Mennonite community. I spoke with her about that movie, but in the excerpt you’re about to hear, we talk about her remarkable 2012 documentary, Stories We Tell.
Sarah Polley:
I found out when I was 27 years old that the man who raised me, my dad, who I’ve been talking about was not my biological father, and that my mom had had an affair with a man named Harry Galkin in Montreal in 1978, and they had conceived me. I was raised as part of my family with my siblings not knowing this. There had always been rumors that I was the child of some actor in some play maybe, but it was kind of a joke. It never was really serious. I mean, what was interesting was that after this happened, there was this revelation and my dad found out, my siblings found out, I would start to hear people tell the story to others.
And the stories that we were telling bore very little relation to each other, even down to the details of how I found out my biological father was my biological father. Everything had been shifted or changed or details were missing or added in many ways I felt in order to help fit into the context of the narrative that that particular person in our family had about our family. So I became really interested in the idea of capturing all of the competing and conflicting and sometimes complimentary narratives about the same event in a family and this idea of a story told not by one voice, but by a chorus of voices.
So I was just interested in looking at all the different ways we fictionalize and shift and change the details of our narratives, not willfully and not intentionally, but out of some sense that there is a narrative we are somewhat attached to. There’s a story, there’s a meaning we’re attached to that everything must slot into and the way we do this unconsciously. It just got its talents into me and I got so excited about the idea of capturing my dad’s version, capturing Harry’s version, capturing all of my sibling’s version and having them tell the story in these conflicting ways.
Debbie Millman:
What did making that movie help you understand about the nature of truth and memory, whether it be others’ versions or your own?
Sarah Polley:
I mean, it’s a good question. I think I became less dogmatic about truth and more interested in what people need emotionally to survive. People were telling the stories that had meaning to them, and sometimes they weren’t right, but it didn’t make it not okay from my point of view for them to live alongside that story that they were telling. It was a lot of, I think staying out of the way. I think one of the things that I loved about the process was I had to sit with each of my family members and really listen. When you’re making a documentary, a really great tip I got from another documentary filmmaker was when someone finishes answering a question, don’t jump in with your next question because it’s entirely possible they’ll want to fill that space.
And in that space, what they might give you is far more potent and unintentional than what their constructed answer might be. And how often do we do that with our family? If they tell a version of events we don’t agree with. We jump in, we correct, we argue, or we say… Actually, I remember it this way, but actually have to listen. And to hear people go to the end of a story and leave those silences, and let it be their version, and not impose my own.
You learn a tremendous amount that you’ve missed about how people think and feel and who they really are. I think there’s so much about our families where they have remained strangers to us in a way that so many others wouldn’t because we’re imposing layers and layers of years and years of small interactions that build into one kind of monolithic narrative that we then ride like a bull around that relationship. And so to have this very delicate space of listening and finding out where you’ve just been entirely wrong is really interesting.
I actually had a really interesting experience with a family member recently, which for me shone a light on this whole experience where I talked to a family member recently about something that was happening to me that was kind of exciting. And then I was inviting them to come stay at my cottage, and they were giving me responses that I’m used to over the years of, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” And in my mind, I knew exactly what was going on in this person’s head. What was going on in this person’s head was, “Why do I have to hear about this great thing that’s happening to you? I don’t care. And yeah, yeah, sure, I’d love to come to the cottage.” This person was never going to come to the cottage, and they were sort of humoring me.
I could just feel the cynicism and the judgment dripping. It’s someone I actually have a very good relationship with, but I know that there’s parts of me that irritate them, and these were present in the conversation. And then the most astonishing thing happened. They hung up the phone, but they didn’t hang up. And I was just about to hang up, and I realized they hadn’t hung up. I suddenly heard them call out to someone else in their household and say, “I just talked to Sarah.” I thought, “Oh, God. I’m going to hear all the criticism that I’ve always known is there, but they’ve never said out loud. This isn’t an openly critical person.”
What they did was they conveyed to this person how excited they were for me about this thing that had happened to me and how excited they were to come that summer to my cottage. It was so palpable, the joy in their voice and the pride and the excitement about seeing me. I realized that I had for my entire life been reading a narrative into this person’s tone of voice and gesture that did not exist. And it was so horrifying. I’m not somebody who’s constantly reading in negative things to the people. I know, but this was just something I knew from probably 800,000 misunderstandings built up over decades.
I had created a narrative that wasn’t true, and the only way I would’ve ever known that would be to have been able to hear this thing I wasn’t supposed to hear after a phone call they hadn’t hung up on properly. And so for me, that’s actually sort of in many ways what stories we tell is about, but it was an amazing moment for me to realize I’m still doing it. I’m still mapping and projecting stories about relationships onto people that aren’t real. And we all do that every day in ways we don’t get to have the big reveal that we were wrong.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. How did the realization about who fathered you biologically impact how you felt about your mother and your father?
Sarah Polley:
I mean, I think at first I felt tremendously guilty for finding it out, and it actually took a close friend of mine after months of just feeling terribly guilty for finding this out, to say, “Do you understand that by finding out this information, you didn’t cause anything to… You didn’t actually make this happen? You’re not responsible for your mother’s affair? This isn’t something that you did or that you’re responsible for that is in any way bad?” I didn’t know that. I thought by finding the information out that I had somehow hurt my father. I didn’t tell my dad for a long time. I actually didn’t tell him until a journalist threatened to print the story who had heard it from somebody else. And so that was actually the impetus for telling my dad in the first place.
I think with my mom… I mean, oh my God, my mom was one of that generation of women who was expected to do all of the housework, all of the cooking, and cleaning, all of the childcare and provide half of the income to the family. So she worked crazy hours in a profession that was incredibly dismissive and horrible to women. She had absolutely no support at home. We didn’t have help in anything. So she’s running around vacuuming and cleaning, and dusting, and trying to get meals on the table and doing all the grocery shopping because my dad also didn’t drive.
She’s waiting hand on foot on kids and a husband. I just think any joy that woman got in her life, I feel no judgment for. So if she went away and did a play for a couple of months in Montreal and got to feel herself and have joy and not have to be responsible for everybody in the world for five seconds, I find that really, really hard to judge. I’m a big fan of monogamy in my own life. I live a very different life than my mother did with a lot more freedom and agency and support and an equal partner in everything.
So I just think it’s like I can’t find it in my heart to judge her on any kind of moral grounds that she had a beautiful affair and kept that for herself. I think that many people would’ve just snapped and not been able to care for their kids with that kind of pressure. If this was what helped her get through, good for her. And she lived a short life. My oldest brother always says that. He always says, “She only lived till she was 53, and I’m so glad she had some fun while she was here.”
Debbie Millman:
Sarah Polley. Kyra Sedgwick is now officially a multi-hyphenate. After years in front of the camera, including many years as Brenda Lee Johnson on the hit television show, The Closer and several film collaborations with her husband, Kevin Bacon, she recently directed her first feature film. I asked her why the change?
Kyra Sedgwick:
Well, I think there were a couple of things. I mean, I think that I had reached critical mass in seeing work that I had done as an actor, not cut well, not shot well, not written well. I think I had gotten to the point where I was like, “Why is my best stuff on the cutting room floor? Why did they edit it that way? Why do I not have any coverage in this scene?” Honestly. And I think I just got to the point where I was like, “Well, if you want something done right, you got to do it yourself.”
I mean, when I look back on my career, I had worked with so many great directors for so many years, like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then I think that kind of fell away it felt like. And so I was like, I think becoming increasingly frustrated with what was coming to me and also what ended up on screen.
Kevin actually, again, featured prominently and my eye for the way something is directed became more and more keen. He would always say, “I don’t know why you’re not directing. You think of things directorially, you see things directorially, you always… When we leave a movie talk for a long time about the way things were shot and the arc of the character, but also arc of things visually and you should think about it. And I was like, “No, no, no, I’ll never direct.”
And I used to say, “I’ll never direct. I’ll never direct.” I think that honestly, a big part of that was because I thought I would never be great at it as if one has to be great right out of the gate. But I think that ultimately what happened was I had this script that I had been trying to produce for 10 years called Story of a Girl. It was a book that I had optioned with my friend. I was meeting at Lifetime with Tanya Lopez to talk about producing stuff for them.
I was sitting outside in the waiting room and there was a little video that they had done about female directors. I watched the video, wasn’t thinking much of it, but then when I went in to speak to her, she said, “Hey, listen. If there’s something that you are interested, we’re doing this mandate here where we’re only hiring female directors for a certain amount of time if you have a passion project.” And I just blurted it out. I have Story of a Girl and I want to direct it, and turned around and was like, “Who the hell just said that?” And realized that was me.
She read it that night and said, “I want to do this with you, and I’ll give you a little money.” And that’s how that came about. But I think that it was one of those things where my soul was ahead of my brain at that moment, but it was daunting and scary and wonderful and turned out really well.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You said this about directing actors. I think that every actor is ripping themselves open and leaving a piece of their soul on the floor for you, so you better honor what that is. I feel like I know that intrinsically. That’s not something I had to learn. That’s something I deeply understand. Kyra, how do you best create a space for an actor to rip themselves open like that?
Kyra Sedgwick:
Well, I think that simply by virtue of the fact that they know that I know how it feels to be so vulnerable and to have this giant piece of machinery, this camera between you and the other actor, all you’re trying to do is tell the truth and you have to do it between action and cut. I think that they understand intrinsically that that’s something that I understand. Having said that, I just try to be incredibly kind and loving and celebratory and create a really safe place for them so that they can fly without a net and give them whatever they need to get there.
Every actor needs something different, but I think that you learn their instrument and then do what you can to try to help them play. And I help them try to play their instrument the best that they can.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk with you now about your most current project, your first narrative film project, a theatrical movie titled Space Oddity. Your production company, Big Swing acquired the rights to the story, which in many ways is a love letter to the planet, but it’s also an intimate portrait of family connections and disconnections, and hope, and sadness, and grief, and new love. What drew you to this project?
Kyra Sedgwick:
Well, all those things you just mentioned. I mean, I’m like, “Sign me up. I want to watch that movie. I want to live in that movie.” There were so many themes that were in the script and that we spent a lot of time cultivating with the writer that were just like of primary importance to me as a human and as an artist. I think that storytelling can change you. I think that storytelling can help you to exercise your compassion in such a beautiful way. And only humans get to do that, although there are some mammals that feel compassion as well.
But learning about ourselves through art, whatever that art form is, is just a critical part of living for me. And so all of those themes feel critically important to me and more important as I get older, that idea of there’s no place that you can go, that you’re not going to be hurt, that people aren’t going to die, that there aren’t going to be struggles, and the way through it is with connection with others, and there’s no other option.
And being present means you’re going to get hurt, but it’s worth it. And the journey of it, the movie was so entertaining I found it on the page. I was flying through the script just thinking, “I love these characters. I don’t understand them necessarily, but I want to stick with it until the end. The payoff felt so beautiful. I love the book-ending of the movie of like, “I’m going to go to Mars. No, I’m going to stay on Earth.” And then everything in between is that, is how do you be that person who wants to check out in the ultimate sense because things are just too hard? And then you become that person who goes, “No, I’m fully immersed and planting myself in the soil.” I just love that journey.
Debbie Millman:
I do too. I also was so impressed with the way in which the decision-making was shown. So many times in a movie where there’s this sort of cataclysmic moment or this cinematic climactic moment of awareness, it sort of pops up. And here you sort of see the process of struggling through it. And that’s one of the things that I enjoyed the most about. It was really feeling like I understood the inner dialogue of this journey without it being a surprise to discover.
You felt like you were going along in that decision-making. I love the movie. It’s a beautiful movie. You said it was really hard to raise the money for this film. Why?
Kyra Sedgwick:
I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, I think there’s no question I’m a female director. And even though I was nominated for a DGA award with Story of a Girl, it’s not like it made a lot of money for people. It was a respected movie on Lifetime, which is not going to win you a lot of financial support for your next gig. I think it’s a sweet movie, which I think that in the world where it’s just so hard to get people to go to a movie, often they want it to be possibly about a true story or a horror movie or something that you look at it and go, “I know what that’s going to be.” And I think this movie demands more of you than that.
I do think that there’s something weird about Sweet Tales even though I feel like what we need so much is sweetness in the world right now. I mean, not saccharine like, “We’re going to take you on a ride and we’re going to give you some pain because there’s definitely some pain in this movie.” But ultimately it’s going to be hopeful and you’re going to feel good about life afterwards.
I think that’s something that we’re having trouble selling even though I think it’s what people crave. And I also think that what I heard a lot is execution dependent which just means, “We don’t know if you can do it. We don’t know if you can cast it. We don’t know if you can do it.” And I find that so shocking because I think everything is execution-dependent, but I think it means something else in Hollywood that I didn’t know at the time. But we have 15 executive producers and we made the movie. And I trust that it will find its people. You know what I mean?
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
Kyra Sedgwick:
Which is the good thing about, “Yeah, it was only in the theater for a week because that was the deal. It was only going to be that.” But the fact that it’s going to have a long life on streaming and that feels good about what’s happening in the world right now in movies, but even though it’s kind of painful that we’re not all together having an experience in the movie theater.
Debbie Millman:
Kyra Sedgwick. You can listen to the full episodes on our website, designmattersmedia.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you in the new year, hopefully a peaceful one, soon.
Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.