Family Portrait – Interview with Film Director / Co-writer Lucy Kerr

The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity:

Hi, I'm Connor Winterton of Borrowing Tape, and I'm here today with Lucy Kerr, the director of the drama film Family Portrait. Thank you for joining us today, Lucy.

Thank you for having me.

So firstly, I'd like to talk about the production process. How long did principal photography take, and what was the experience like?

Yeah, it was quite quick. It took about two weeks, I think maybe a little bit more than two weeks, a couple [of] days of rehearsal, about 12 days of shooting, and about a couple [of] days off during the middle. And that was in late May to June 2022. Yeah, it was a really amazing filming experience that I think allowed this kind of unusual film to come to life in the way that it did because we were at my grandparents' house in Hill Country in Texas, their old house that they started in the 60s and then started expanding a little bit, where I would go for summers with my cousins and my parents and my aunts and my uncles.

And now, my grandparents have passed away. So we go there sometimes with the family, but because the family is so big, the schedule for the house is divided up into a couple [of] weeks throughout the year. So it's scheduled very rigidly. And not everyone can fit there at the same time. It's divided based on families. I was lucky to be able to get it for two weeks. I don't think I'll have access to it for a while. Yeah, so it was special shooting there — this place I grew up going to — that was so special to me, where the river is really beautiful next to the house, and it was really hot. It was like 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So after shooting, we would all go swim in the river, and that connected us in a really powerful way. And, [it] also allowed us to stay at ease during the process, being in this heat together.

And most of us were staying on the property, people were sharing rooms and everything, so it's had this really stomach summer camp feeling to it. And then, it allowed people to get to know each other better, and I think that allowed a lot of the actors who were playing family members but hadn't met before to feel more comfortable with each other, and being contained like that also allowed us to improvise. So, some scenes where you see one or two people in the shot at different places on the property, in their doing their own thing or having a moment by themselves, a lot of that was added to the script on set.

Your portrayal of family dynamics is intimate and complex. How did you work with the actors to develop these nuanced relationships on screen? That was my question. But I feel like you've already started to answer that through some of the stuff you've already said, but it's anything else you'd like to add?

Yeah, I think it was also like being very particular about the casting. I cast it over like two years. I did the casting myself. And I wanted it to be a bit more open. I didn't want to just go through people's agents and work with people who have had a lot of experience in film or were big names or something like that. I really wanted to feel the energy of that specific character in that actor and also, like, discover people I wouldn't have met before. So, I did an open call. And yeah, they were amazing. It was really wonderful working with all of them, like, particularly working with the sisters, because I have three sisters, I think those four women got to know each other there on set and exploring young women growing up with other young women, there's these tensions you feel as how you support one another, but also how it might suppress one another and I think we were all interested in that and exploring that together.

In the writing, I think it was important to create this believable family or this like family, how people might talk when they're just hanging out [at] this place on vacation gossip and things like that rather than the language and the dialogue just driving forward in a narrative. Instead, it creates the atmosphere. Creates the texture of those characters in whatever specific things they talk about, even if it seems random and not relevant to the story — it creates that texture.

Yeah, definitely. And the realism as well. I was gonna say that some people have a theory that if you do get bigger-name performers in a film, that sometimes can detract from realism, and having perhaps people that you don't know so well adds to a sense of realism. And it's interesting to hear you talk there because I was gonna ask about how, if you like autobiographical the film is, or if not that, your connection to the themes and the narrative.

Yeah, I think it's definitely. Let's say we have auto-fiction, or it is inspired by my own family, but the characters do diverge away from people in my family. The mom is quite different than my mom, and it was more her character was serving this particular story in Family Portrait, rather than being an imitation of my mom or something like that. But it was a starting point because my family makes this Christmas card every year that's always very extravagant and very clever. Even people in my mom's social circle every year are like, oh, what's the Kerr's Christmas card gonna be this year? And so, it has a joke and these things, but on the back, there's always a picture of everyone smiling together, and the picture that they were supposed to take on this holiday that never gets taken.

So, and then the book that they have in their hands, the red book with all the Christmas cards, that's my family's book as well. So yeah, it's inspired by this need to represent the family each year to show that there's been this lack of conflict or showing that everything's good. And that, as an image representing that, and then what can happen when something undermines the process of taking the picture, then that representation crumbles. So, that came from my family a little bit in terms of the Christmas card. There are anecdotes throughout the film, such as the World War II picture being appropriated; it was from Vietnam. That's something that happened in my family, my grandfather's picture and little things that the sisters say about things that have happened to them in their life, or remember this, or remember that. So that's peppered in there, but there are elements that dramatize this family and make the film its own thing rather than just being a picture of my family.

Yeah, I thought it felt like there was this connection between auto-fiction and then these intellectual cerebral elements, right? So you're saying about the representation of the family, representation is like something I'm really interested in generally, and the politics of representation; what representations do.

So that was interesting to hear you say what undermines that process and then what might undermine that representation. And for me, I think this idea of a family portrait and what you were talking about there is so bound to American culture. For me anyway, because in Britain we don't do those kinds of Christmas holiday cards. It's something we see a lot of the time in American films, so I thought it was a connection there as well to American culture, so there's quite a lot of intellectual themes there.

That leads me to a couple of questions that I've been really excited to ask you really. I thought the film had quite a unique take on the concept of time and temporality. And the film's temporality, in a way, reminded me of something like Twin Peaks: The Return. It was almost kind of subtly Lynchian. Even though the film is, I don't really think it's broadly Lynchian; just that aspect reminded me of [David] Lynch's work. Could you elaborate on how you conceptualize that element of time and temporality and what you hope to convey through that?

Yeah, I think that what brought me to film in the first place was time because I was doing dance and choreography, which is a time-based art as well. But it's more immediate, like right there in front, and you can manipulate time with performance, but it's sort of like with film; it's more possible to play with time. And I think that's why I was always interested in more time-based art in general. I tried to do some drawings, I tried to do some sculptures at some point, but it's really how things unfold that always compelled me.

And so, yeah, when I saw Beau Travail just sitting in the theater after it was over, it was just like, wow, what just happened? Where was I through all that? You feel like linear time, which is what we're conditioned to experience, that we have our past, present, [and] future, and we carry our past mistakes into the future. It's rooted in [the] Judeo-Christian perception of time that we get judged, [and] we keep continuing our life until we are judged at the end of the life or what we've done in the past. So when I studied with this philosopher in undergrad when I studied philosophy, she was writing a book about how music in a time-based art form can lift that burden in a linear time, and you can experience time differently in cyclical time.

So that's what I've always been passionate about. And then with Family Portrait, early on, talking with my collaborators, Lidia [Nikonova], the cinematographer; Karlis [Bergs], my husband, and also additional writer, Rob Rice, the other additional writer, we're talking about this feeling of stupor. And it came through because it seems like time is passing in real-time, because there's like this realism, and it's like, okay, it's the morning, and we're leading to the picture and having these conversations.

But then as this continues, and people continue to resist, Katy's telling them we need to take a picture now, we start to wonder what time space we're really in. And if time has become suspended like into purgatory. So yeah, that was really exciting for me. And that was something I tried to keep from the very beginning of writing the film to the end of editing it. That helped the film because it obviously doesn't have much of a plot.

So that was sort of my structuring thought. And then on set, sometimes I wondered, I was like, oh, is it okay that we have this shot here, and the baby's there, and then the next shot in this film, this person also has the baby over there, and the baby can't be in two places in once. But then we were sort of like, well, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we'll shoot it so that it doesn't totally make sense how the baby got there, from there to there, or why it's in two places at once, or it that I think helps contribute to this dream logic. But David Lynch always inspired me so much with his use of dream logic, which wasn't just for the sake of weirdness but felt rooted in its own logic also. And yeah, definitely a fan.

So you mentioned Beau Travail; I got very excited there because my next question actually mentions Beau Travail. But I was going to say that the dream-like feel that the temporality adds to, very similar to David Lynch's work, is that I actually have those dreams where you're trying to do something, and something doesn't happen. It reminded me of that; I think one reviewer would call it a "low-key fever dream." And it definitely has that feel. But on the topic of feeling, whilst I was watching the film, I was reminded of a concept that was associated with Claire Denis' Beau Travail, which is the "cinema of sensation," which the Criterion Collection had said in a piece that I've read recently.

So it's like the amplified sound of wind in the fields and the trees, the people talking over each other, the summery aesthetic, talking about food seen in the kitchen. And it feels like a very cinematic film, but obviously not in the way that an action blockbuster is seen as cinematic, like Lord of the Rings, moreso in its particular combination of certain sounds and images. Jordan Mintzer, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, stated the film is "highly cinematic" and also quite "intoxicating." I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about this. What kind of affect and feeling, that idea of sensation, is a desirable outcome for you?

It's definitely a desirable outcome, and I'm happy that it came through because I don't think it's something you can intellectualize, like, oh, if I have this element like this and this element like that, it will make it sensorial. It comes through in all the elements together and this intuitiveness of how to combine them. And I think that, yes, I'm really happy people are picking up on that in the reviews that it feels sensorial and intoxicating. I think it can also feel a bit frustrating as well, but not many people, but that's part of the point of it is this continued soup of time, like why they can't come together, how she moves with them when she's taking them down to the river, they all always fall back out away off of her, so she tries to pull one down, and they pull back. So, that kind of water is like a flow of water that she's trying to pull in the direction that they can't go in.

Very metaphorical as well.

I'm happy it all came through and then sound — when I saw La Ciénaga in my very like first week of grad school or something, I was blown away because it is so sensorial and it's so tactile, and the sound, of course, is such a big part of that, but also the bodies and how they're sort of laying horizontally and arrested in a way.

Yeah, so I think, and then Beau Travail as well, the bodies and the movement, and then, so combining that body's sound and then also a language that suggests things that you don't see. Like the picture, you never see it, but you hear someone describe this picture that brings images into your head as you watch it, and then you become more physically involved in the film because you're also imagining things, and this all creates a more like three-dimensional physical experience, sensorial experience of it.

I thought I really came across as well, whilst I was watching it in that combination as a set of images and sounds and I was reading an interview; I think it was a BFI did with Claire Denis when Beau Travail came out, and she said a really similar thing actually about this idea of not intellectualizing something, and they're actually approaching a film in a way that's like, right I'm going to make this art film, perhaps doesn't always actually work if you approach it in that way, so it's interesting to hear you say a similar thing.

Moving on to future projects, which other themes and subject matters interest you as a filmmaker? What might we see in the future?

Yeah, I have a couple [of] films right now. One is based in Texas in 2004 [and is] about the same milieu of people in Texas about a debutante ball into Houston. A college sorority girl who is soon going to make her debut in a Houston country club ball, where they wear wedding dresses [and] they bow down to the floor; the father presents them or being married, but even though the original purpose is like presenting the woman as if she's ready now to be married, people ignore that, and they just keep it up for the sake of tradition and having a party. It frames the ball as more like occult and devotional and almost like religious things, and that's what I'm interested in bringing to that environment. Also feeling the body and the weight of the body bowing down the sensorial aspect of it. In the film, the main character and her cohort appear to have become possessed or something.

That and another film that's more DIY, like smaller film, that's going to be based more in the Northeast, actually, in kind of a rural area. But I won't say too much about that one. And yeah, it's such a privilege to be able to travel so much with Family Portrait and for the film to have such a long life after finishing it, after its premiere last year in Locarno. So I'm going to LA soon for screenings there. And yeah, enjoying eventually closing the circle on that film. And it's really beautiful. So I'm happy, very, very grateful.

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