Laura Moss’s Birth/Rebirth is the second of three distaff takes on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein set for release in 2023. As the United States reckons with a series of strikes, the loudest calls for labour reform in recent memory, these new reads of the novel, notable also for seizing on the social progressiveness of the text, seem of a piece with a cultural zeitgeist pointing towards the disruption of our ingrained systems. Grateful for the opportunities the festival success of Birth/Rebirth has afforded them, Moss is as intelligent and energetic in person as their work suggests, and insightful about their creative process. The film itself is fresh, ferocious, and uses David Cronenberg correctly in a sentence, too, so when I was given the opportunity to talk with Moss, I started by asking them about the horror of the flesh:
LAURA MOSS: Oh my god, yes, at some point, I felt like we’re all trapped in these…meat bags that are in a constant state of decomposition, and that it’s all out of our control.
FILM FREAK CENTRAL: It’s why I find Cronenberg’s The Fly so romantic–that despite how we fall apart, maybe there’s someone who loves us anyway.
Aging was a huge part of the writing process for me and for Brendan, my writing partner. I also turned 40 on the set of this film, and because we wrote and really made this movie in our late-30s, early-40s, it was very much about confronting the limitations of your body, specifically when it comes to procreation. It seemed like it was something everyone in my life was facing in some way, you know? Choosing to have children, choosing not to, discovering fertility was more difficult than they thought, learning sometimes that the decision had been made for them.
When my wife and I were having kids, we were both a little repulsed by how biological it all is.
You know, I was really interested in a character like Rose who treats her body like a machine, so we could map how she is going to react when the machine malfunctions. It’s creepy. You lose any sense that you’re in control at all of your body. And I think a lot of this film is really about trying to retain some sort of bodily autonomy both in a system and in a physical process that forces you to give up control.
Tell me more about the systemic loss of bodily autonomy in the United States for women and how that may or may not have fed into some of the themes of your film.
Well, I never wanted… I mean, I’m very vocally pro-choice and have had abortions myself, and I’m not shy about talking about it, but I definitely didn’t want to make a didactic political statement in this film. What was interesting to me was how Rose wants to create something with her mind, and she has to reckon with her body in order to do it. Those things are not separate for anyone. Rose’s attitude toward her own auto-abortion is unsentimental and practical. Abortion can be a very emotional issue for a lot of people, and for a lot of people it’s a medical procedure–and I really wanted to be true to what I thought the character would feel about that process.
There’s a really fascinating and striking image where Rose allows the child to reach for her surgical staples.
That was one of the first images that was very clear in my mind when we were writing this movie. I also kind of knew it would be the most problematic to film. I mean, you were going to have an adult naked woman with a young child, so we had to figure out how to do that and ended up doing it as a composite, they’re never actually in the same room at the same time in the wide. I knew I was going to have to storyboard it to within an inch of its life, because I needed to explain how we were going to shoot this sequence to my actors and to my young actor’s mother. [B]ut it was primary and essential to the film, this image. I wanted it to evoke, you know–there’s this open question once real Lila is revived in the movie as to who her real mother is, or more specifically, what does it look like when there are two literal mothers? That image, of the reaching for the surgical site, captures somehow the trauma she’s experienced being revived. Maybe this is acknowledgment of Rose’s sacrifice. I mean, I don’t think it’s a conscious acknowledgment on the part of the little girl, but I really did want to find a way to sort of visually express all of this ambiguity: Rose’s growing ambiguity about her feelings, the monster she’s created, and what about the monster itself?
Talk to me a little bit about neurodivergence.
I think as a society we tend to sort of throw away the phrase “on the spectrum,” like, “Oh, on the spectrum,” and I really think that the fact it’s a spectrum is so important because I have neurodivergence in my family, so I consider myself on the spectrum, but I think I’m on the neurotypical side of the spectrum–although there are some qualities I have that I see maybe in more pronounced ways in my family members that, you know, are very similar to Rose’s qualities. She’s the one I identify with the most as a person. I didn’t want to diagnose her. I thought she herself wouldn’t have been diagnosed and wouldn’t have any use for that diagnosis. I think she’s just not interested in it. This is also true when it comes to her gender expression or gender identity.
Is that you?
I think so. I think Rose would find the conversation around gender expression tedious, too. She has better things to do, according to her. I did talk to Marin, the actress, about that a lot, you know, that this was my experience with me, with my family, with coming to a few realizations about myself. And all that was a part of coming to write the character Rose. So there is inevitably some neurodivergence in her creation for me, but I really wanted Marin to identify for herself people in her life, references that were useful to her in creating Rose, and I didn’t want her to feel in any way constricted by a diagnosis.
[Ireland] is brilliant.
She is. Maybe she and I have had some similar familial experiences, some shared life stuff. She locked in immediately to a close relative of hers who I think expresses Rose for her.
“I’ve been wrestling with this question a lot as a writer, really: How do I write outside of my own lived experience in a way that doesn’t appropriate someone else’s experience? And there’s not one answer to that question, but I do think you need a multiplicity of voices.”
Talk to me about motherhood as a trap.
I’m not a mother. I haven’t given birth to a child. I want to be really careful when making a horror movie that involves childbirth so that I’m not just making the birthing experience or motherhood inherently monstrous, but I was really interested in exploring sides of the birthing experience that I often see sanitized in film. Something funny: When Brendan and I were going to our individual computers to Google childbirth because we wanted to see live births, we came back and Brandon wrote a scene and it was… It was so saintly and, and idyllic and sanitized. And I went, “What? Didn’t you just watch a childbirth?” And he went, “Yeah.” We compared notes, and we realized we might be targeted, because of our search profiles or our demographics, but he was watching like PG, beautiful, serene birthing experiences and I was watching the, you know, the raw deal.
I still have trauma from being present for my kids’ births–including an emergency C-section.
It was meaningful to me to speak to people who have given birth. Our DP has gone through an emergency C-section. So, you know, that opening sequence, it was something that we discussed at length, and her experience of that sequence. [I]t was really important to me to bring those things to light, and/or to film it without making it romantic and soft-focus and such. I didn’t know what to expect from women who had gone through tough births, but what I’ve experienced is more appreciation. They’ll come up to me and say, “You know, I’ve been told that this is grisly and graphic. I’ve been told I might faint in the theatre. And really, what I just saw was a reflection of something I know well. And I was appreciative to see it on screen.”
When we had our emergency procedure, they put up this little curtain, and I was up by her head and she was so drugged up. We’d been in labour for over a day, and the OB started sawing and the motion of it was wobbling her head back and forth a little bit. So I’m actually having this weird image in my head of somebody murdering my wife as I’m watching, you know, and her asking me, “Hey, when are they going to start?”
(laughs) I think people forget the blood and the gore and like to romanticize the body and the experience, but from the clinical side, it’s just not very romantic. I don’t remember how much of it exactly made it into the movie, but we yanked the baby out of her stomach in the beginning. Plunging your hand in, which feels so violent, is, like, literally what happens in a C-section. That’s the job. It’s kind of crazy, the violation of it is so intimate and horrible.
The book itself, Frankenstein, is sort of the product of multiple parentage: multiple fathers and a single mother. Mary mimics all those styles. It’s as stitched together from literary corpses as the Monster is from literal corpses.
I loved Frankenstein because it was written by a woman and it wasn’t about girl-coded things, you know? It was finally getting to read an old book by a woman in school that is not about petticoats and marriage. It’s actually horrified by birth. The more I got to know about Mary Shelley’s life and her miscarriages and tragedies and how it feeds into the story of that book’s creation and its themes… I knew I didn’t want to do a straight adaptation, but it was inevitable that we would circle around to birth again and motherhood. The question of, what if two women raise this resurrected child? Unlike Victor, it doesn’t seem like two unnatural mothers would ever have the option to abandon it the way that the man does in the book. I was married to Brendan when we started writing this movie, and we are now about ten years divorced and stronger than ever in our creative partnership. But that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, you know, that this film is very much… We have joint custody of this baby, and it will also live beyond us. You conceive it and you give birth to it and now it belongs to other people.
And the world will do with it what it does with it.
It’s a terrifying thing to hurl your movie into the audience and pray. My big fear when the movie was premiering at Sundance was that no one would respond to it, that it wouldn’t resonate with anybody. And I guess I’m pretty thick-skinned about criticism or people who really don’t connect with the movie because I, I think that’s totally valid–not every movie is for everyone. But it’s been super meaningful to me when this movie does hit a nerve and does really mean something to them. It’s terrifying, but it’s gratifying, too.
You have described parenthood.
(laughs)
Tell me about guilt.
I wasn’t really thinking in terms of guilt, but I was thinking in terms of, like, each of these characters’ desperation to cling to what they’ve constructed as the core element of their identity. That’s something that I talked to Judy about a lot. I mean, there’s tremendous guilt when she has not spent the day with her daughter before she dies, that’s very true, but I think later in the film it’s less guilt than it is more about sort of a desperation to hold on to something that’s slipping away. But yeah, I mean, I think often mothers feel obligated to do their job, to parent, at a level that’s not realistic or maybe even possible but expected–and there’s guilt attached to that. And there’s a lot of guilt still about not being present for every moment of your child’s life. And so, as a single mother, I think Celia is in this impossible position of trying to provide for her child and support her child and also care for her child. It’s just, it’s, it’s really a losing battle, especially in a culture without social safety nets for working mothers. Judy plays it beautifully. She’s heartbreaking.
Talk to me about women’s support for one another.
I mean, it’s funny because the very early vestiges, the very early iterations of this movie–the initial concept was “woman reanimates a child and then has to confront the biological mother of that child,” and “confront” was the operative word. It was an adversarial relationship. They didn’t want to be together and they were in some ways literally trapped by these awful circumstances. But every time we wrote a draft of that, it was uninteresting to me or frustrating to me. Turns out, I wanted to figure out the ways in which these two women whose core identities are rooted in such different things are actually similar, who are in a lot of ways maybe even a reflection of each other. So that was not there at the beginning, but as it evolved, it became organic to its development. Not the conflict, but the support. Once we figured it out, we didn’t want to construct the relationship artificially–you know, “Hey, cool, us against the world!” But I really wanted to find for myself what it is that makes women find strength in each others’ stories. I really wanted to engage in the growth process: to find the ways these women could depend on each other. They feel like, you know, war vets. Like they’ve gone through this insane experience that no one else can understand.
Being women in this world?
(laughs) No, but I think speaking on the broader social thing, only women know what it’s like to experience certain things without this filter–all those sorts of romantic garbage.
Did you know Mary Shelley wrote in her journal right before writing the book that she dreamt her dead infant was only cold, and that she had resurrected it by warming it by the fire?
You can feel that everywhere in the work. I talked to Judy about that a lot, you know, we calibrated her grief from the first half of the film, and it was important to me that a real part of her believes that it’s not true–that her child, even though at that point she has no evidence for this, part of her believes that her child is not dead. I thought it was important to show grief and shock in maybe a non-conventional or unexpected way, too. People express shock in so many ways. For me, when I’ve been confronted with horrible news, I have generally gone into “how do I affect action?” mode, and then three months later, it will hit me like a ton of bricks, and I’ll be laid out flat.
Talk to me about how your approach to making this film replicates the partnership in the film, the multiple-parentage theory of the themes that emerge in Frankenstein.
For me, there’s certainly a holistic nature of filmmaking. Mali Elfman was my producer, she’s an incredible person as well as an incredible producer. We spoke at length about the themes of this film and treating them with empathy and sensitivity and how this film would not be a success if we didn’t also approach the process of making the film the same way. We wanted to respect and incorporate the feedback of crew members. We wanted to make sure that we had racial and gender diversity, both behind the camera as well as in front of the camera. We wanted the experience of making the film to be humane. We wanted the child not to be traumatized and to have a really positive experience. I think about that a lot, you know, that the majority of my life will be spent on the film set or in the editing room or in prep. And so I want to make sure that experience reflects the values that I’m trying to express in the film. I mean, I wish I could say that when a film is made conscientiously, in this case, that that shows up, and that when a film is not made conscientiously that that shows up–but unfortunately, I’ve been on many abusive film sets that turned into beautiful films. Anyway, certainly Marin and Judy’s voices are in this film. Their points of view fused with their characters. I’m proud of that. I’m proud of the fact that this is a collective effort. We weren’t a high-paying movie, people came on it because they cared about the issues we were discussing.
It seems obvious, but could you articulate the value of gathering voices?
I’m a white creator, and I get frustrated as a New Yorker when I see a really whitewashed New York City. I’ve been wrestling with this question a lot as a writer, really: How do I write outside of my own lived experience in a way that doesn’t appropriate someone else’s experience? And there’s not one answer to that question, but I do think you need a multiplicity of voices. The beauty of collaboration is how you get to pick the brains of people who are not like you, and if you listen, maybe you grow. And then, when you have voices in the creative process and on the set all the way through, they needed to feel free to correct me if I was mischaracterizing an experience, or expressing something in a way they thought was inauthentic. It makes the film better–it makes me better, because it makes the film more honest. Whatever your, your gender is or your race or your sexual orientation, it’s only when we collaborate in an environment of trust and openness that we can finally make things not only richer, right, but better.
