On an early morning in late August, Odessa Young is quick to warn me that her brain may not be fully awake yet. Coincidentally, her coffee grinder starts to click a little later. As a busy actress, she’s learned that not having any circadian rhythms these days is beneficial, and has instead developed a love of sleep deprivation. So far, it’s worked for the 26-year-old. Young has essentially been on a roll for the past 12 years, and her credits include Assassination Nation, One Million Little Piecesand the HBO series Stair.
Finally, with her puppy insisting on joining the conversation, we settled down and focused our attention on the task at hand—talking about Young’s latest project. My first movie. This is a gripping and heartbreaking semi-autobiographical story written and directed by Zia Anger, and will premiere on Mubi on September 6.
A one-time show in Brooklyn turned into a traveling performance art piece, My first movie is a reimagining of Anger’s feature debut 15 years after it began. At its heart is the story of a young woman who has an abortion and directs her first film, but the plot is complex, involving time jumps and a twisted timeline that blends fiction with real memories. Young, in a beautifully rendered performance, serves as Anger’s surrogate, an enthusiastic filmmaker whose inexperience and ego cause chaos in an already chaotic shoot. An examination of the DIY filmmaking process, the film is a testament to the collective energy required to create and what it means to create something that never comes to fruition.
My first movie came into Young’s life at the perfect time, as she was looking for a simpler way to make films. What she got was an eye-opening experience and a new perspective on what she wanted and didn’t want in the industry.
(Image source: Mubi)
How did you first hear about it? My first movie What’s going on and what really excites you about this project?
I saw one of them [Zia’s] the show, and I loved it. I love all of her music videos and short films. At the time, I was friends with Taylor Shung, one of the producers, and I found out through our friends that she was working on Zia’s film. Suddenly, I opened my email and there was a [message] from Taylor with a letter from Zia basically offering me the role. I didn’t even have a meeting with her before she offered me the role. I think it’s a nice progression in one’s career when like-minded creatives start [working together]. I’ve admired Zia from afar for years, and I never assumed she knew my work or who I was. It’s nice to think that the people whose work I care about care about me, that whatever I put out into the world attracts the right kind of people.
I’ve done some bigger projects that are less personal and less messy, and I feel really comfortable in messy films. That’s my favorite way to shoot. After working on TV, you start to worry that you’re only going to be able to work on TV. I was worried that I was going to be a little stuck in the episodic world. Zia’s film came at a time when I really wanted to confirm that there was still a world for this kind of film and something that was very organic and homemade and messy and all those good things but also had really good companies behind it and good money behind it and was given space and room to grow and breathe.
What was your first meeting with Zia like for the film and what was it about her approach to storytelling and filmmaking that really appealed to you?
She lived up north, and at the time, I lived in Williamsburg. She came down to town, and we had dinner. Part of the reason I loved her work and I loved her projects and I was really interested in this project was because it required an enormous amount of trust on my part. … I didn’t understand every part of it easily, but I knew that she did. Going into our first meeting, I didn’t know what her process was going to be. I didn’t know if we were going to rehearse or if she was going to explain anything to me or if she was going to let me interpret. We sat down, and she basically said, “I know you probably have a lot of questions. … I’m going to start at the beginning.” For the next six months, she basically just told me her life story in great detail.
What else did you do in the six months with Zia to prepare for filming?
Yeah, I shared a lot too. I think that’s what Vita, that character, ended up becoming. Not directly Zia, and not directly me, but she was a representation of permission. Vita gave both Zia and me permission to really address the questions and the discomfort that we had. Aside from her story or her sharing, a lot of that preparation was also me basically matching her transparency, which was great. It’s great to feel like art is justifying everything that you’re going through in life. We also had really complex, long weeks of rehearsals with Monica Mirabile, who was the movement director.
The part of the film that was in the black box of the studio—which was this weird space that represented Zia’s home office and where this incident happened for her—we knew that part of it needed to be a separate performance. We basically shot the whole film as a performance in a day and a half. It was the interludes that you see between the flashbacks when you’re making the film. I learned the monologue for the whole film and we choreographed it with Monica. … The editing process changed things and things were moved around. Sometimes the film itself ended up feeling lighter or happier than the monologue, so you’d have to re-record something. Otherwise, the voiceover would be sobbing and there would be a happy moment. It was basically a very complex performance learning process. Both Zia and Monica are performance artists, and I went to a performance boot camp with them for two weeks.
Awesome! It must have been a really cool experience unlike any other.
It’s true, and I’ve said this to Monica many times—I never want to work without her. She’s the truth-teller. If you’re not putting your whole body into something, she can tell right away, and she calls you out. There were times when I was developing that performance where I might have gone back to an old trick and relied on a representative performance style instead of something that was really coming from me, and she would see that and call it out and encourage me to do something more authentic. I find that there are aspects of my performance, especially in that black box thing where [Monica] worked closely with us, that I had access to things that I didn’t have access to before. That was a very exciting development.
Was there a scene that felt particularly difficult at the time or made you nervous at the start?
A lot. I was always worried about trying to maintain the energy that Vita has because I’m very sleepy and slow, and she’s very energetic and fast. I think the most challenging scene was the farewell scene in the woods with Dustin. … Phil [Ettinger]The guy who plays Dustin, he’s a great actor. Both he and I were scared because we felt bad and confused. When we did it, we felt like we were making a mistake. We were going to get away with it. [a] take, and we would go to Zia and say, “Are we doing this right? How is this supposed to go?” Zia was like, “Yeah, it’s going. It just feels bad. This is a breakup scene. It’s supposed to be really bad, and it’s supposed to be a mistake, and it’s supposed to be confusing.” I always get nervous about watching that scene because I really think I’m going to watch it and think we really missed the mark. I don’t think we did. I think it feels as messy and confusing and misguided as it should be.
It was one of those scenes where you see it come up on the cast sheet, and you know you’re going to have to cry and do this big thing and get a good night’s sleep the night before. There’s a lot of pressure on it, but you just have to trust that whatever that scene brings you is the right thing.
I really want to talk about the abortion scene because I’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s like a surprisingly positive moment in the movie.
It doesn’t exactly describe what happens in the script. I know that Joanna, who plays the nurse, and Sarah [Michelson]who plays the doctor, went with Monica for a while and developed this choreography and this really abstract but really beautiful performance from simple lines in the script. It was also one of our last scenes. We can shoot quite sequentially, so by the time we shot that scene, the whole movie had internalized for me, and there’s something really magical that happens when you’re in the last few days of filming, something that clicks and you finally understand what the movie is about. You have to think about everything you’ve done, and you start to worry. … Have I been doing something wrong all this time?
I think what Zia needed from that scene and what was so important to her—probably more important than any other emotion in the film—was that it needed to feel incredibly joyful and incredibly loving. It needed to be the antithesis of the abortion scenes in the film. … Even though the film is largely pro-choice and pro-abortion, there’s still a deep dive into the difficulty of that choice or that decision. I think Zia felt really unrepresented in those scenes. In her experience, it was the most succinct act of self-love she could do at the moment when this happened to her. It was a very emotional scene, and I think a lot of people understood it when we were shooting that scene.
I’m curious if making this film changed your perspective on directing and filmmaking?
I don’t know if it changed my perspective, but it certainly confirmed and deepened some of my truest beliefs about film, which is that it is a completely collaborative art form, and it can never be anything else, and it should never be anything else. … Ultimately, it serves something that is collective and greater than any of its parts. What I loved most about working with Zia is that she was raised in an anarchist society with socialist values. She had never been there in her life. She didn’t find it on her own. That’s just the way she is. She has this fundamental point of someone who is very committed to the experience, not the outcome. I just find that very inspiring and very aspirational. That way of creating doesn’t have to be this whole statement, doesn’t have to be this whole thing. It’s just for the moment that you’re creating something. I really hope that I can incorporate that into everything I do.
How has working on this film changed your perspective on future projects and/or roles? Has it changed what you expect?
I certainly don’t want to do anything that’s made for the purpose of making money. I think purpose is one of the only things that matters to me. I’ve started to develop a pretty good barometer for the purpose of a project. Some people make films for the joy of collaborating, and some people make films because they have to collaborate. I just want to work with the former. It’s something I’ve known throughout my career, but I don’t think I could articulate it as succinctly as I do now if I hadn’t had the experience of working on this film. There’s no other way I’d want to do it.
My first movie available on Mubi.
