5 Questions with Hallie Cooper-Novack
“Relations,” by Hallie Cooper-Novack, takes a complicated look at an sexual incident that occured between cousins 15 years ago. We asked Cooper-Novack how the project began, how she tackled the tricky subject matter, and what comes next for her…
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I'm from New York City, and my parents both worked in theater, so from a very young age I was seeing crazy amounts of theater (on one trip to London when I was nine, I was taken to five plays in three days). When I was in fourth grade, a teacher introduced me to Hitchcock films and I got completely obsessed. The feeling that I got from watching Hitchcock was unlike anything I had previously experienced. My favorite is Strangers On A Train. The moment where Guy goes to Bruno's house in the middle of the night to talk to his brother, and finds Bruno in his bed is one of my favorite moments in film history (spoiler alert?). I wanted to make things like that, that were surprising and twisty, but also grounded in characters. I made short film as my Film Studies thesis in college and another one right after college. Then I got an MFA in acting from Yale School of Drama, and dove head first into the acting thing for a while. I made so many incredibly talented friends, and learned so much about acting and storytelling there, but as I got out, I realized I was ultimately enjoyed myself so much more on the other side of the camera.
2) What’s the backstory here - the initial seed of inspiration, and how you went about building from there?
I like films that use your discomfort or embarrassment on behalf of a character to make you think about a larger issue. I was especially inspired by Rueben Östlund's Force Majeure. It made me so uncomfortable, which made me think why am I so uncomfortable--it has a distancing effect that is very provocative. Then in the year leaving up to the #metoo movement, like a lot of people, I was thinking about some of the nuances of consent. If sexual exploitation comes from an imbalance of power, what happens if both parties feel the other has power over them? I started from that question and the feeling of discomfort it elicited in me, and then began to get really specific about who those two people were. In adolescence your perception of those around you can be really skewed, so I knew that this event had to have happened when both Candace and Jesse were teenagers. I arrived at this idea that Candace is this eternal misfit and Jesse is a kind of golden boy. It was important that even though she's four years older than him, she still has her reasons for feeling that he has the upper hand. I wanted them to be family because it both bound them together for life, and also amplified the shame surrounding the sexual experience for both of them.
When a man says he lost his virginity when he was thirteen years old to someone four years older, it provokes a totally different reaction than a woman saying the same thing. Culturally, we've assumed for the last hundred plus years that all boys and men should want to have sex at any possible opportunity. We are recognizing more and more that the issues of age and consent apply to boys just as much as girls, but that they're often overlooked because of our assumptions about male sexuality.
3) It’s a tricky subject matter you’re tackling - can you talk about how you crafted the central issue into the shape you were aiming to achieve. I imagine there was some back and forth in deciding how the information was revealed and when. Can you remember scenes or lines of dialogue that were omitted last minute and why. And/or conversely, scenes or dialogue that were added last minute and why?
I knew from early on that how I revealed the information was going to be crucial, and I knew I wanted to try to play off of audience expectations around this subject matter. In the shooting script, the scene with Candace and her mother comes before the Jesse's speech at the party, but the editor Max Goldblatt and I found that it was much more powerful to withhold the information about Candace and Jesse being related.
And it wasn't a last minute addition, but a friend who gave me notes on the script, suggested Jesse say "I forgive you" as the first line in the elevator, which immediately exposes his entirely different point of view on what happened all those years ago. I think that line is really crucial to our understanding of Jesse, and it's also just great to see how it throws Candace for a loop.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
At the Ashland Independent Film Festival in the spring, I saw a really beautiful documentary called Pahokee about a group of high school seniors in a tiny town in Florida. It was really simply told, both subtle and surprising, and deeply affecting. You really felt connected to the specific-but-universal experiences of these teenagers, and it was beautifully shot as well.
5) What’s next for you?
I've got two episodic projects and one feature that I'm trying to get off the ground, a day job in TV development, and another short that I'm going to make for almost no money in the spring. I'm also continuing to convince myself that I don't eat dairy when I actually have cheese several times a day.
