Eliza Hittman: ​‘I sat down with abor­tion providers to try to under­stand the sto­ry I want­ed to tell’

Eliza Hittman uses quiet­ness, shad­ow­ing char­ac­ters dur­ing their pri­vate down­time in between sto­ry beats. Her debut fea­ture, It Felt Like Love, is a mes­meris­ing female sex­u­al com­ing-of-age tale, yet it was 2017’s Beach Rats, star­ring Har­ris Dick­in­son as a clos­et­ed Brook­lyn teen, that put her on the map.

Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Hélène Louvert’s immer­sive, heady shoot­ing style has drawn admi­ra­tion, and the two have col­lab­o­rat­ed again on Nev­er Rarely Some­times Always. Star­ring new­com­ers Sid­ney Flani­gan and Talia Ryder, the film fol­lows two young women on a bus from small-town Penn­syl­va­nia to New York City to secure an abor­tion for Flanigan’s Autumn. LWLies spoke to Hittman about deep research, her ​“method” style of writ­ing, the woes of deal­ing with the Screen Actors Guild and her next project.

LWLies: You start­ed research­ing Nev­er Rarely Some­times Always after read­ing about the trag­ic case of Savi­ta Halap­panavar, who died in 2012 in Gal­way after being denied an abor­tion. How did your inter­est in that evolve into storytelling?

Hittman: After her death, I bought a book called ​‘Ireland’s Hid­den Dias­po­ra’, research­ing and read­ing for my own curios­i­ty the jour­ney women would take from Ire­land to Lon­don and back in one day. I start­ed to think, ​‘What would the Amer­i­can equiv­a­lent of that jour­ney be?’ because I didn’t think any­one would let me make a movie in Ire­land. I start­ed to think about the jour­ney that women in rur­al areas take to urban areas when they can’t gain access. I start­ed tak­ing lit­tle road trips. I went to small towns in Penn­syl­va­nia and thought, ​‘If I was a young woman here where would I go?’

I walked into a lit­tle cen­tre, run by old women who vol­un­teer. I took a preg­nan­cy test and sat down and had coun­selling ses­sions. These lit­tle cen­tres are high­ly con­tro­ver­sial and prob­lem­at­ic in the Unit­ed States because they’re fed­er­al­ly fund­ed but there’s no licensed doc­tor on site, they’re just vol­un­teers, lay peo­ple. They don’t offer any med­ical ser­vices, they just redi­rect you to adop­tion cen­tres and try to offer you hand-me-downs and dia­pers. There’s – trag­i­cal­ly – one in every town in America.

Then I took the Grey­hound bus from that town in Penn­syl­va­nia into New York City. I want­ed to see what the char­ac­ter would real­ly see. I roamed around Port Author­i­ty and decid­ed that if the film was set in win­ter then maybe the char­ac­ters wouldn’t leave because it’s warm and safe. Port Author­i­ty became a bit of a micro­cosm for the city. Then I met with Planned Par­ent­hood in Penn­syl­va­nia and in New York and oth­er clin­ics that were not affil­i­at­ed with Planned Parenthood.

I would sit down with abor­tion providers and clin­i­cians and social work­ers to try to under­stand the sto­ry I want­ed to tell and play out dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios for them. Like, ​‘If I was a minor, what would your con­cerns be?’ and ​‘How would you inter­act with that minor?’ That was the bulk of the research. It was a lot of infor­ma­tion. I didn’t set out to make a doc­u­men­tary or a pro­ce­dur­al dra­ma. I want­ed to make a poet­ic odyssey, so it was a bal­ance of tak­ing all that infor­ma­tion but try­ing to fil­ter it through Autumn and Skylar’s eyes.

How did you decide which ele­ments of the abor­tion pro­ce­dure to show?

The clin­ic scenes with the coun­sel­lors were the most impor­tant, because this was where Autumn would open up about her­self. I chose to make so much of her back sto­ry a mys­tery, so here was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reveal more; I knew in the writ­ing process that I want­ed to pri­ori­tise the scenes with the social work­ers over the sur­gi­cal aspects. Based on how far along Autumn is, it’s a two-part pro­ce­dure and for the sec­ond part of the pro­ce­dure she’s not awake, so I didn’t need to show all of it.

Did you always know that you want­ed to make the title an ele­ment of the sex­u­al expe­ri­ence ques­tion­naire at the abor­tion clinic?

No, it was some­thing I dis­cov­ered through the research process.

Did it have a dif­fer­ent work­ing title at any point?

Yeah, just the let­ter ​‘A’ – like abor­tion as the scar­let let­ter. But I knew it wasn’t gonna stick, that it was a temp title, that I was searching.

Going back to your process, it sounds like you didn’t just walk a mile in Autumn’s shoes, you walked 100 miles in them.

It’s a fun way to work. I like it. It’s active. Writ­ing at a com­put­er is kind of stag­nant. It’s inter­est­ing to be out in the world hav­ing an expe­ri­ence, rather than suf­fer­ing at a com­put­er. I would write and then I’d hit a wall and then I’d go back out and try to meet some­one else, and then I’d come and write again. It keeps the process mov­ing for me.

I was hor­rorstruck by the VHS ​‘Hard Truths’ that the vol­un­teer plays Autumn.

It’s a real video. It’s real­ly used. I didn’t make it myself.

What were the logis­tics of shoot­ing on the crowd­ed streets of New York, and on the subway?

It was fine. I have to say the biggest chal­lenge that we had was deal­ing with the Screen Actors Guild, because they didn’t under­stand that we’re a small pro­duc­tion and not clos­ing down streets and fill­ing them with back­ground. It’s easy to shoot on the streets of New York, it’s allowed as long as you don’t put equip­ment down and you’re hand­held, but SAG was always show­ing up and fin­ing us for not fill­ing the streets with SAG back­ground, which we couldn’t afford.

Why are they allowed to fine you for not fill­ing the frame with SAG background?

They think of it as job theft. By shoot­ing peo­ple on the street you’re not pay­ing background.

I can just about get my head around that…

I can’t get my head around it either, but they were real­ly shak­ing us down, like the mob.

How much were you fined in the end?

I think like 30 or $40,000.

What per­cent of the bud­get would that have been?

I don’t know. I think we’re still lit­i­gat­ing it.

What’s next for you?

I’m think­ing about a project about death and sur­vival. It’s about a fam­i­ly that’s cop­ing with the end of the life of the matri­arch of the fam­i­ly. She’s in her late 90s. Even though she’s so old the fam­i­ly is total­ly unpre­pared emo­tion­al­ly and logis­ti­cal­ly for her death and they have to hire a home care work­er to be with her in the last years. You think it’s this mid­dle-class fam­i­ly dra­ma about her death but once they hire this home-care work­er and hand her the keys to the apart­ment the film changes point of view and goes into the strug­gle of being an immi­grant in New York.

Nev­er Rarely Some­times Always is released dig­i­tal­ly on 11 May. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.