5 Questions with Zoe Bullock
The deconstructionist “Two or Three Women,” by director Zoe Bullock, presents a press interview between two women and an offscreen male voice, intended to discuss a recent theater project before it devolves into a statement on the impossibility of language and skewed power structures. We asked Bullock how it began, and about its layers of performance and self-awareness…
1) Can you talk a little bit about your background, and how you first got interested in movies?
I grew up in the 90's with a single working parent, so the television set was frequently my babysitter, with a collection of VHS tapes I could watch with an endless attention span. Children are the most incredible storytellers. My whole life was a series of stories, told to the TV, between my barbies, with my friends. Make believe is improv.
But then in 6th grade I received a lead role in a play. Opening night was a complete revelation, I was never to return from that singular place I found in my little body. I kept thinking, oh, this is it! This is everything! I recognized my life for the first time as a vehicle that the world would pass through. The ability to be fully present and to be alive as myself through others. My world revolved around theater until it was time to go to college, and then I panicked because I was scared of committing to a life where your role is determined by other people (acting.) It took years to understand that this was indeed only life itself. No matter which space I occupied I was already predetermined. So I studied painting, drawing, sculpture, critical theory, and I winded up in video classes. I still hold theater up on a pedestal, because nothing can replace being in the same space as the performance, in front of bodies speaking directly to us. Like a conversation it cannot be reproduced, each night is a relationship built and ended. But of course film allows us a subtlety that mimics reality much closer, and we are offered an object to create. Film and theater each do something the other refuses.
All that said, it is only an compulsion. I need storytelling, my body needs performance.
2) What about this project? Where did it come from? How did you get it rolling / how quickly did it come together / how long did it take to film / edit?
2 or 3 Women was an idea I had had a year before I wrote it down. I spend a lot of time watching interviews with actors, late night TV, actors studio, press releases, etc. There were a few things that I saw, consecutively, that finally sparked the setting: an interview with Shelley Duvall at Cannes about the film she had just finished called Three Women; a banned episode of SNL with Louise Lasser where we witness a scripted(?) "mental breakdown" in her monologue, based off her "real" mental breakdown on her show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (an incredible show;) and finally there was a certain recording of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett I stumbled upon on youtube. The dialogue came together in an hour when I finally put pen to paper.
I kept thinking about our idea of reality vs. performance, what we accept as real in a world where we must sell ourselves to live.
Filmmaking takes an unbelievable amount of money and a great deal of people coming together. So there is a ladder to climb (always.) Most anything I do for money is something I don’t want to do and don’t agree with, but there is no exemption from the corrosion of capitalism.
So I think living becomes a tragicomedy in my head in the best of times but more often I am just depressed.
Anyway, this film was made with just under $500, and $200 went to sound. It was the first time I had a crew, and we shot it in six or seven hours. Editing took about a few weeks, it was hard to balance continuity with what I thought the best takes were with enough room to leave the mistakes that took place in real time.
3) I’m curious how you went about structuring this piece. It has all these layers, and all this self-awareness, and keeps folding in on itself. It’s kind of hard for me to imagine how this was written. It was all written, or was it partly improvised?
It is a fully written script, with blocking cues and everything. Katerina and I worked out how the words fit best in our mouths, manipulating anything that felt stupid, but I also encouraged mistakes. As in calling out for or messing up a line, pausing, breaking character, etc, wanting to push it between narrative and document as much as I could. I told the cinematographer to film everything, each take was a full run through from beginning to end. I could have a conversation about each line, and what I meant by those words, what they represent.
4) Katerina and yourself have this really interesting way of performing and interacting with one another. It goes back and forth between supportive and dismissive and contentious, which is both funny and compelling. Can you talk a bit about your working relationship, and how it’s developed over time?
The script calls for this relationship you are describing. They are caught between having to perform for the world, holding each other up and bolstering the other in front of the interviewer who is the one supposedly holding the most power in the scene, the invisible or faceless voice who "directs." He gets to ask the questions, but all the while the actors keep building their secret worlds that allow them to survive in this scenario (where alternate forms of power are constructed and the interviewer is left behind (even then he can still interrupt and reconstruct their bodies, which is why the claustrophobic feeling comes across, there being no inside/outside of.)) Resentment is felt between them when Actor 2 doesn't hold up her end of the bargain, or loses track of her position, when the work falls on Actor 1 to keep the interviewer and the cameramen satisfied, but Actor 2 also directs anger towards Actor 1 for being so good at playing the game in the first place. They depend on each other in different ways for relief.
Katerina and I have been friends for over 13 years, so of course this relationship is semi autobiographical, as much as the whole scene is a representation of life lived within capitalism.
Katerina is insanely talented behind the camera too. She has an impeccable sense for how things should be arranged, which way they should flow, what is off, missing, or what can be better. Taste is an enormous component for what allows people to work well together, and in that way I see her as a collaborator, even though she'll never admit it.
5) What else are you working on at the moment?
I just released a book with a small/slow imprint called Huner Francis, consisting of the scripts, images, treatments and ephemera from my last three videos. This is available through their website: Huner-francis.info. I have wrapped up post production for another short filmed titled Bread, to be released soon. Finally, I have been writing a feature length script for the past few years, so I am workshopping a short film version for which I can hopefully start preproduction this summer.
Contact Info:
Email: zeliseb@gmail.com
IG: @zeliseb
Vimeo channel: https://vimeo.com/user14085948