Josephine Deck­er: ​‘I was afraid of show­ing men­tal ill­ness on screen’

A main­stay of the US inde­pen­dent cin­e­ma scene, Josephine Deck­er first made waves with her exper­i­men­tal psy­cho­log­i­cal twofer, But­ter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Love­ly from 2013. She’s just fin­ished shoot­ing a biopic of Amer­i­can author Shirley Jack­son, star­ring Elis­a­beth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg, but it’s her most recent film, Madeline’s Made­line, that real­ly hits home for Deck­er. The toast of the 2018 Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val, it fol­lows a trou­bled teenag­er (played mag­nif­i­cent­ly by new­com­er Hele­na Howard) who finds an out­let for her emo­tions when she joins a the­atre troupe.

LWLies: In mak­ing the film, how much were you inspired by your own expe­ri­ences in phys­i­cal the­atre and performance?

Deck­er: Very! I put myself into the­atre school to pre­pare to make movies. I signed up with Pig Iron The­atre and did their inten­sive three week sum­mer pro­gramme. It was excit­ing to think about this per­for­mance as some deep­er self-ves­tige. I thought, ​‘When are you find­ing your­self, and when are you find­ing a total­ly oth­er per­son? What hap­pens to you when you go into this oth­er per­son­al­i­ty?’ So I was think­ing of a film that’s total­ly immer­sive, where you become the actor as they become some­thing else.

You dis­cov­ered Hele­na Howard by acci­dent. What did it feel like when you first saw her perform?

It was this teen arts fes­ti­val in New Jer­sey, and when she did her mono­logue, I was speech­less. It was so shock­ing to find that matu­ri­ty of per­for­mance in an actor that young. It wasn’t like I saw the whole movie ahead of me, but I thought, ​‘We have to make some­thing togeth­er’, so I pret­ty much chased her down and told her that. When we had the shoot dates up, the financiers asked, ​‘Can we push pro­duc­tion a month and a half?’ It would’ve required recast­ing her, and I said, ​‘I’m not mak­ing this with­out her.’ This movie is so deeply forged from our union, friend­ship and collaboration.

Was Hele­na involved in shap­ing the role of Made­line with you?

Yeah, to some degree. It was also based on some­one close to me with men­tal ill­ness who was hos­pi­talised while I was incu­bat­ing this film. It’s inter­est­ing – the char­ac­ter Made­line in the movie is def­i­nite­ly a cre­ation of Helena’s. When you hand some­thing to an actor, they do some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent with it than what you have in mind, or what you think is even pos­si­ble. That’s the beau­ty of col­lab­o­rat­ing. I didn’t realise how spe­cial that was until this sum­mer when I made Shirley. We script­ed it, we cast it, we had one day to rehearse with the actors, and then we shot the movie. It’s a real­ly dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence when you don’t have that incu­ba­tion time.

How did the chal­lenges vary on Shirley com­pared to Madeline’s Madeline?

I had been able to spend so much time on Madeline’s Made­line, with all those actors, so there was this shared under­stand­ing of the work before­hand. This one felt like we were real­ly thrown into it much faster, so we devel­oped an under­stand­ing over the course of shoot­ing it. I think the biggest thing was that I need­ed so much more time every shoot day just to rehearse, and that’s hard on a shoot because you des­per­ate­ly need time to actu­al­ly film. We hadn’t explored these char­ac­ters, these scenes, these locations.

I had a much big­ger bud­get, but I felt like I’d nev­er had so lit­tle time. Such a strange thing. When you have a larg­er bud­get and crew, you don’t just shoot some­thing. Every movie I’d made before, you just picked up the cam­era and if some­thing cool is hap­pen­ing you’d shoot it. When I would call cut on Shirley, this whole slew of things would have to hap­pen, so maybe I got three takes. It was real­ly, real­ly hard adjust­ing to a whole dif­fer­ent style of film­mak­ing. I grew up in very low-bud­get film­mak­ing – this was like work­ing in a dif­fer­ent medium.

The film very rawly address­es men­tal ill­ness. That’s some­thing a lot of peo­ple still strug­gle with see­ing on screen. Were you ner­vous about show­ing it?

I was def­i­nite­ly afraid. I’m not per­son­al­ly diag­nosed with any men­tal ill­ness, though I think to some degree every­one can relate to the expe­ri­ence of strug­gling with anx­i­ety or depres­sion – but there’s oth­er things about men­tal ill­ness that maybe I haven’t expe­ri­enced at all. Who was I to tell this sto­ry? But since I grew up with a very inti­mate expe­ri­ence of being near some­one going through men­tal ill­ness, I think that was part of the obses­sion of mak­ing the film – want­i­ng to know what their expe­ri­ence was like, and what they were going through, and how that was affect­ing the peo­ple around them and their fam­i­ly dynamic.

There are a lot of cats in the film. Are you a cat person?

The irony is that I’m aller­gic to cats! I loved them so much as a kid. When you’re study­ing with Pig Iron you do a lot of ani­mal work, and that’s present in the film with the pigs and tur­tles. But there’s some­thing about cats; they’re incred­i­bly con­fi­dent, incred­i­bly hard to pin down. I had been embody­ing one in the­atre school, and there was some­thing real­ly manip­u­la­tive and mis­chie­vous about being a cat, but also sen­su­al and liberated.

They just felt like Madeline’s hero ani­mals so deeply, they’re just like her! They have this ease and poise, but can also be real­ly ter­ri­fied and ter­ri­fy­ing and neu­rot­ic, and it can be real­ly hard to devel­op inti­ma­cy with them. I think that’s some­thing about her char­ac­ter, that she’s not close to any­one real­ly. That’s what she’s deal­ing with over the course of the film.

Madeline’s Made­line is released 10 May via MUBI. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.