5 Questions with Chloe Xtina ("The First Taste")

1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

Oooo gosh! I've always really loved stories and I've always really loved telling stories. So I don't know if there is so much of a moment as to when I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker as there was a childhood discovery of storytelling! Theatre has always been a kind of first love for me. I didn't have the language for it yet but it was the collective power that drew me to it. When I was 14, I won a teen playwriting competition at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Even though I already had done lots with theatre, this was the production that drew me into collaborative storytelling. I saw storytelling as being something so much stronger when multiple perspectives came together. There is something healing about it too.

I have loved movies forever. Movies made sense to me and the ability to visually express internal feelings felt comfy. I grew up watching a lot of genre films with my father. Stuff like Forbidden Planet and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. After being introduced to magical realism, I started to bridge my love of genre to all these inside feelings I felt I couldn't put exact words too. My emotions could be monstrous or so forbidden that they floated in outer space. My confidence in my directing abilities came in college after a few directing courses. My professors and TAs started to pay attention to my work with intimacy and I became so fascinated with actors. It was like this remembering of when I was 14 -- here are my keys to empathy laid out in front of me! Here is how I explore all these weirdo silent feelings with artists who are just as passionate about unearthing them.

2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?

Half way through college, I realized I was obsessed with my teenage self. There was a lot of rage inside me that I didn't understand. It took me a while to process that my rage stemmed from experiencing an early sexualization that I had no power over. I felt in many ways I didn't have a "teenage" transition and that sometime in my adolescence I went from child to sex object in the blink of an eye. It's hard to remember when I was a child and what moment made me a sex object. This wasn't so much of a specific feeling as it was a general one for people socialized as women. I kept thinking about what if there was a way to immortalize this transition? I wanted to pin-point the exact moment in-between being a child and a sex object. Then I thought that maybe the only way to immortalize this moment would be to make a body monstrous. A monstrous body would not be able to be held within a male gaze. That's when I started imagining Michayla becoming some sort of vampiric version of herself to live in the in-between.

I set this film in an all-girls Catholic high school because I felt so powerful within my own friendships with women as a teenager. But within this disguised matriarchy, there is a greater male gaze they are about to encounter. In Catholicism, it's a patriarchal foundation and the looming male presence of Jesus. Within the film, their first reconciliation of a greater male gaze is an oblivious Jamie. And for Julia, her passion for theatre is interfered with by a crush. That's something I felt so consumed by in high school -- trying to be immune from a male gaze that is impossible to outrun.

This film to is an ode to many things and people I love. It is a love letter to my passion for theatre and to my friendships with women. I named this film after a Fiona Apple song partly because her music got me through being fourteen. In many ways, this film is a love letter to my teenage self.

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?

We shot this film the weekend before everything shut down. We got really lucky but the aftermath was overwhelming. There were a few scenes we wanted to shoot after that weekend and we kept pushing them back until eventually our editor noticed that we didn't really need them. Going into post during COVID19 was strange but we ended up finding a groove. There were circumstances we hadn't experienced before like our composer losing access to her usual recording equipment but she improvised using only her piano and computer to make her buttery dreamy score. Our sound designer coached actors with earbuds and iPhone apps during ADR. Editing during quarantine ended up giving us a project to look forward to and plenty of time to work on it.

The easiest part was actually assembling our cast and crew! I had the most amazing team of collaborators for this project. Initially, I had been pretty nervous to reach out to folks about joining the project but they all said yes and went above and beyond. The crew was entirely women and genderqueer people (save for one sweet man PA). I set out for a no "film bro" environment from the beginning. I was sick of questioning myself based on snarky comments from film bros on past sets. This being my first film as a director, I wanted to make sure I could trust my own instincts and that my collaborators could feel free to offer up their own. And it worked! The environment on set was that of complete respect and appreciation for one another because we had all experienced being underestimated before. We operated so much like a collective in the way we communicated and collaborated together. Now I feel vastly more confident in myself as a filmmaker and eager to support the future of my collaborators.

Casting was one of the most exciting parts of making this film! It was awesome to work with both young women and high school students, they had so much to learn from each other. I had done all this reflecting on my teenage self years after the fact but our cast of teen girls were having conversations about the trauma of adolescence in the moment they were going through it!! They were creating their own vocabulary to something I had never been able to voice at that age. It became a lot easier for the women on set to tap into girlhood and in return to the teens, they offered up their own advice and friendship.

4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

Butter on the Latch! Butter on the Latch! Butter on the Latch! I have never been more in love with a filmmaker than I have with Josephine Decker and her collaborators! I've spent quarantine collecting movies that are made on super-small budgets and value communal experimentation to refocus my energy onto collective-based filmmaking. I can think of no better teacher than Josephine Decker. Because the film is stripped back by a three person crew and a DSLR camera (the footage is so cool!), it is crazy immersive in story. There is something so romantic about the intimacies and terror in friendships between women. I feel like my platonic love for friends can be just as intense as my romantic relationships but that its complexities are not usually explored in the same way. There is a real sinister and haunting nature about eroding friendships and it is explored so magically (literally!) in Butter on the Latch. It makes me excited for the future!

5) What’s next for you?

I'm directing my first ever music video for my friend, Mikaela Jane! I'm working on a new short about a teen girl who is hot for a sheet ghost and a feature film with a collective of filmmakers. I also have some theatre projects going on -- a radio play and a playwriting residency! And in the Spring I'll be graduating college which brings forth a lot of gushy and exciting feelings.

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chloextina.com | IG: @chl0extina, FB: Chloe Xtina.