Sarah Friedland on Familiar Touch, working with older adults and casting Kathleen Chalfant
Almost two years ago, writer-director Sarah Friedland premiered her debut feature film, Familiar Touch, in the Orizzonti (Horizons) strand of the Venice Film Festival and walked away with the Best Director and debut film prizes, while her lead Kathleen Chalfant scooped the award for Best Actress.
Despite that auspicious start, it has taken a long time to make it over to our shores in the UK. But now the time has come and UK cinemagoers can enjoy this beautiful, moving and subtle film and appreciate why Friedland and Chalfant won those awards (as well as other wins and nominations).
To celebrate its release, I recently spoke to Friedland about the long journey to make the film, how that worked in their favour when casting Chalfant, and how they involved the residents at Villa Gardens assisted living facility in Pasadena, California by hosting a five-week filmmaking workshop before shooting the movie there.
I read that you worked as a care companion for artists with dementia. Is this where the idea for Familiar Touch was born and the reason why you wanted to tell a story starring an older adult?
It was definitely a part of it. The inspiration was a combination of personal experiences and that work. The starting point was my paternal grandmother. She had dementia and spent the last few years of her life in the memory care wing of an assisted living facility. And she was someone who couldn’t be further from our tropes of cute little old ladies; she was ferocious and a brilliant intellectual. That gap between the narrative of older women receiving care that we normally have and the older woman closest to me going through it was a big part of wanting to make this film. But then that job as a care companion really changed everything I thought I understood about ageing and care work and our relationship to memory and sensation as we age. I worked as a caregiver for about three and a half years part-time and that led to me training to become a teaching artist for older adults and starting to make intergenerational films and do filmmaking workshops for older adults. All of those experiences kind of got woven together in the impetus to make Familiar Touch.
So how long ago did you start writing it?
I wrote the first draft in 2012. It’s been a long journey. I was still a student when I wrote the first draft and I didn’t start trying to make it a reality in earnest until 2016.
‘Cause you did quite a lot of shorts in that time, right? Were you always working on it in the background?
Yeah, before I became a caregiver, I was working as a production assistant and assistant. I did every sort of entry-level job you can do on a film set so it was a lot of late nights and weekends that I was just sort of slowly revising it. And then in the years that it took to get it off the ground, I kept making experimental dance films and video installations which are this other part of my practice. Making those definitely influenced Familiar Touch because I was developing this way of making films centred on movement and gesture. As much as Familiar Touch doesn’t appear as a dance film on the surface, I was thinking about it in how I approached the screenwriting and the direction.
I was also fascinated by the workshop you did at Villa Gardens before the shoot. Why was it important to you to do that and get everybody involved?
A number of reasons. I was thinking (that) the making of our film could disrupt the ageism that is so predominant in our society. One of the ways in which we see it show up is that as soon as older adults need care, we see them as no longer talented or capacious. And the reality is that if you walk into any care setting or any community with older adults, you’re walking into a space that is full of talent and insight and experience.
So I wanted our film that is honouring older adults to put them to work and to use their talents to bring it to life, especially because they know this story better than any of us. I was interested in the idea of using the occasion of film production to kind of change how older adults are siloed away from younger adults. So our “professional crew” was mainly millennials and pairing them with older adults to bring this to life felt like a way to turn a care setting into a space of cultural production rather than what we normally see it as – a space where people go to wait to die, which, in my view, is furthest away from the reality, which is that these are spaces where people are continuing to live and there’s care given and received to support that.
So when you were actually rolling on the film, were the residents the background artists?
Yes, and more than that. Part of the other impetus (of the workshop) was kind of wanting there to be a familiarity between the residents and the staff and our crew before we started filming because so much of how films shot on locations work, it’s almost like this invading army that comes in, does what it need to and then rolls out and leaves devastation in its wake. I wanted everyone to know each other and feel comfortable with the partnership and the residency we were doing, because it was almost like being a film crew in residence in a retirement home.
And so in the five weeks of pre-production, we facilitated a five-week-long filmmaking workshop for the residents to learn filmmaking soup to nuts. And every week, a different department head from our crew taught their craft. So a cinematographer taught cinematography, a production designer (taught) design and Carolyn Michelle (Smith), who plays Vanessa, taught acting. The second session of each week, the residents would make a short film of their own creation, and then every week, people rotate roles, so if you were directing one week, you were acting the next. That meant that by the end of those five weeks, not only did they have proficiency in all the areas of filmmaking that make up a crew, but they had a sense of what they were interested in and good at.
So everyone then signed up for whatever department they wanted to work on. So many residents were background actors, some were supporting characters, but just as many joined our crew. There were two women who did a lot of the background casting, one woman who joined the AD department to help run the set, someone else worked in the art department, the camera department, so it really was both in front of and behind the camera that they were collaborating.
Did any of them get speaking parts?
Yes, Bernie, who plays the man who’s sunbathing, he’s a resident. The women with the magnifying glass in the library, she’s a real resident. I’m trying to think who else spoke. We made it three years ago… and now blessedly I don’t not know every line by heart but yes, there were a few roles that were speaking parts that the residents performed. And the staff too – other than three of the caregivers, all of the other caregivers you see on-screen are real care workers at Villa Gardens that performed.
I’ve got to talk about Kathleen. She is extraordinary as Ruth. Was it about her that made her perfect for Ruth? How did she become involved?
She’s as extraordinary a person as she is an artist. She has so much integrity in terms of how she treats her collaborators. I’ve learned so much from her about filmmaking and just about life. Kathy, I’ve been a big fan of her work for years, particularly because of her collaborations with Yvonne Rainer, the choreographer and experimental filmmaker. She had been on my dream list for a long time but the movie took so long to get off the ground and get funded that when we first started casting, she was too young for the role.
We were introduced by our casting director, Betsy Fippinger, and we just hit it off. It was one of those love at first sight moments. I think what makes her perfect, Kathy, she has such a relationship to detail, both in how she relates to language but also to physicality. For me, coming from a background making dance films, being able to talk about a character in terms of her body, it’s sort of the language I speak, and she speaks it too. I think having that shared language was crucial for us. But she’s just an extraordinary actor, I feel like she alone could have done this, which is the best way to feel about a performance, like it had to be that person. And it had to be Kathleen.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Familiar Touch will be in UK cinemas from Friday 19th June