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

I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina and I always needed to be creating something. I was really into acting and theatre when I was elementary and middle school aged. Then I hit puberty and therefore detrimentally self-conscious. The body is an obstacle. I dove deeply inward and into visual art and the internet. I went to college and studied sculpture and ended up doing bunch of stop motion animation. I needed to make things move! After school I moved to New Orleans and made those big sculptures that go on the front of Mardi Gras floats. The one I remember most clearly was a giant bust of Barak Obama with boobs that swung back and forth on a lever system. So weird. I also production designed some music videos and short films and continued making animations. I dropped out of the Mardi Gras biz after a couple of years and started doing social work in rural communities in South Louisiana which I believe lead me to learn to true power of people and their stories and how those stories can transform people. It wasn’t until after I moved to Baltimore in 2015 that I felt the need to really dig deeper into my own animation and eventual film work. I was so full of stories and very open at that time in my life, probably stemming from the openness required within social work. I guess I still am but that openness has now found its home within my filmmaking. 

2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?

I believe that we all need to begin shaking hands with our digital selves. Soon we are going to need them. I made a short film called “Hi I Need To Be Loved” using spam email that had been sent to me over the years. I hired actors off of craigslist to read the spam email off of a teleprompter. I then cast some of those actors and created these strange little vignettes using the emails as a script. What would the spam algorithm look like in the physical realm? How would it move about the world? One of the actors, Isobel Arnberg, had worked with me before. She’s my favorite actor. Dirt Daughter is a spin off of her character in Hi I Need To Be Loved. I wanted us to go deeper. We had turned an algorithm into a human. Now what if we turned that human back into an algorithm? 

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most, and the least?

There is a building in downtown Baltimore owned by a company called AiNet  that houses 16% of the world’s internet in it’s basement. In this basement is a giant 8-foot in diameter fiberoptic cable that shoots the internet across the Atlantic Ocean into Europe and parts of the Middle East. So cool. Many people think the internet isn’t a physical thing, rather an invisible, infinite resource. But it is physical and very finite. We were able to film Dirt Daughter in this building, somehow completely unsupervised unless you count a very friendly and sleepy security guard. So to be perfectly honest, the only challenge was an ice storm that messed up our schedule for one day, but it wasn’t a huge deal. Dirt Daughter was the first movie I made with an assistant director (Albert Birney) which really protected us from the scheduling issue. Get yourself a good AD. I do tend to romanticize things after they are over and just completely forget anything that was ever difficult or made me upset. So there probably were a lot of suppressed challenges but I’m not trying to work too hard here to dig them up. 

The editing process if difficult for me because editing means cutting. Every shot is precious to me and to cut something is hurtful. I’m getting better though. Nothing is precious, really. 

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

Oh man, I had seen it before when I was a teenager but Punch Drunk Love has still got it. What a beautiful love story. The Popeye song, those dreamy colorful Jeremy Blake animations, Adam reaching into the depths. I just watched it again recently and I really really love this movie. P.T.A. never makes me mad. 

5) What’s next for you?

I just finished my first feature film, “Crestone”. I’m actually on a plane right now typing this on my way to True/False for it’s premiere in 6 hours. We were going to screen it at SXSW the following weekend too… but… you know. It’s a film about my friends from high school who are SoundCloud rappers now and grow weed and make music in the desert of Crestone, Colorado. I went out there the summer of 2018 with my friend and collaborator, Corey Hughes, and we made a movie with them. It’s a hybrid-documentary. It’s pretty wild but also very tender. I’m also in development on a new feature called “Eternity One” about a documentary filmmaker who tries to save a sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay by sending it into space to orbit the earth forever. Mind-uploading and futurism stuff. Trying to keep it fresh. Trying to keep it digital.

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http://www.marnieellen.com

IG: @marnie_ellen