Body and Soul: FFC Interviews Natalie Erika James

by Walter Chaw Natalie Erika James doesn’t have a filter between herself and what she makes. She’s an artist. She’s working through the contents of her shadow with a palette of indelible images. She’s telling the history of her pain in passages that are often wordless, mapping the geography of trauma with a vocabulary of archetype. All of her work to date involves daughters lost and wayward, disappointments to themselves and their mothers. All of it is a cry to be seen without judgment in a culture where judgment is the only thing guaranteed young women. With just three features under her belt–her claustrophobic 2020 debut Relic, the Rosemary’s Baby prequel Apartment 7A, and her raw body-image/self-loathing treatise Saccharine–James has quickly become one of my favourite living directors. Not merely for the tightly-crafted scripts (which she also writes) or the technical beauty of her films, but for her unwavering determination to communicate an uncomfortably personal, uncompromisingly feminine, unapologetically other vision.

It’s not easy to keep one’s voice when everyone wants a scoop of the flavour of the month, but James has managed to do so in an industry hostile to women filmmakers and original thinkers. When she recontextualized Roman Polanski’s innate sexism as the fatal flaw of Minnie and Roman’s plan in Apartment 7A, well, you had my interest, as they say–now you have my attention. I spoke with Ms. James over Zoom upon Saccharine‘s theatrical bow in North America.

NATALIE ERIKA JAMES: (laughs) Straight to the light. Such a, you know, light, lovely subject.

FILM FREAK CENTRAL: (laughs) A couple of softballs to get us going, and then we’ll really dig into the dark stuff. Let’s broaden it out a little bit into the idea of expectations and disappointment. Grief and shame, perhaps.
I definitely can see that across my work. I would say that this film, Saccharine, in particular, is my most personal, as you can probably gather. It’s me wrestling with parents who kind of sat on opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to how they related to food and their bodies, and a lot of the messaging around body image that I internalized because of that. A lot of the process of making this film has even been unpacking what that is. The process was kind of liberating. To see those expectations clearly, to understand that kind of messaging for what it is. How foundational is the damage that it does.

What did you learn?
Really, I became more aware that it’s hard to know anything about why you do things. It’s hard to really understand, like, anything: where your ideas come from, where your beliefs come from. It’s so obvious, but it’s a tangle. It’s not simple to work through them effectively or dissolve them.

It’s even more complicated because your characters across your features, shorts, even your music videos and commercials, are often pulled in different directions by competing cultures. It isn’t one systemic issue. It’s multiple systemic issues. Are you consciously unravelling these knots?
I do think it’s conscious to a certain degree, but I think it’s both. It’s both intentional and inevitable because of who I am. In terms of the Asian elements… You know, when I first made Relic–I originally wrote that film with a mixed-race character in mind.

The Emily Mortimer character?
Yes, and at the time, making a film in Australia and getting funding and all of that, that felt like a harder sell for people. So I pivoted. I rewrote the characters in order to take the racial element out. I think it’s amazing how far we’ve come, really, in six years. We [are] at a place where a mixed-race hero can be seen as a strength and not something to work against or disappear. It was really important to me to have [Saccharine‘s protagonist] Hana have a Japanese mom and a Caucasian dad. It does add another layer of complexity, and I felt, like the culture surrounding it, that I was ready to tackle it fully. To look at how trying to please your parents or trying to be something you’re not is at constant odds [with] trying to be okay within yourself. How does my mother’s culture add an element of shame [to] being physically larger than a parent, for example?

I’m Chinese, and in my experience, the Chinese are really brutal about body image. My sister went to China several years ago. She was a size four, maybe–closer to a size two, 5’3″ in shoes, and everyone was calling her a fat giantess.
It’s funny, I used to live in China. I lived in Shanghai for about four years and Hong Kong for five years after that. I so distinctly recall a stranger coming up to me and my sister on the street when I was, like, 14. He was making conversation, and suddenly he says, “Oh, um, you guys look very similar, except you’re fatter,” pointing to me. Here, it’s maybe not so overt, you know, as in something that strangers would comment on necessarily, but your family would. Your family would. There’s less of a consideration of how deeply those wounds can cut.

Which brings us back to self-image and self-loathing, especially.
There are so many positive things about being across two cultures, but at the same time, I think, as you’re growing up, there can be a sense of not being enough of either. I think it takes a lot to reframe that into something more along the lines of not being a fragment of one or the other, but being able to say, “I’m absolutely whole, I’m both and not one half of something.”

Your music video “Fires” is a masterpiece in dealing with the destructive qualities of cultural expectations.
I haven’t thought about that music video in a while. It’s amazing that you bring that up in the context of my feature work. I loved that character. I’m just trying to think back… Because obviously there’s a projected virtual-reality element to it, where the fantasy of the character this person is playing says everything about what we’ve been taught to value. We talked a lot about the whitewashing of that, how she plays white. Why is your visualization of the Ideal a 1950s, white, suburban housewife? Where does that originate, and how do we exorcise it? And it’s not just the physical, but the performance of being a “perfect” mother as well.

I’ve tried to pass my whole life. I feel like a white person on the inside. I have always felt insufficient–a failure in all things. You touch on that in Relic, obviously, and Apartment 7A and now Saccharine. How do you avoid being pedantic?
You’re always aiming to be emotionally truthful at every turn, and I think the best thing you can do as a writer or an artist is use yourself as a compass or a truth barometer. You try and aim for something [and] if it moves you in the writing of it or feels truthful in some way, then you know you’ve hit on something. Obviously, there’s always a refinement process, but it feels like as long as the core of what you’re saying hits something in you, then that’s something that’s worth talking about. But I do understand what you’re saying in terms of being too prescriptive. I will say often it’s only through conversations like this, where you’re speaking to people who are very analytical about the film, that you even begin to start to understand your own underlying intent. You discover that there are themes working themselves out on all sorts of levels that you shouldn’t try to plan. You’re not thinking about all of it consciously. You’re guided by, “Oh, yeah, that, that feels right.” I was never verbalizing in my brain.

I think those two things need to be separate: the functions of the artist and the responsibility of the audience.
Things come through in images and motifs, and you can sometimes feel like you’re just channelling that. It’s something in the subconscious, and you let it take over.

Is that where body horror emerges?
I think body horror… There’s something in it that kind of allows us to, um, externalize what’s internal. And often it’s the perfect vehicle to tell a story in which a character is undergoing intense psychic change. Relic was very much about a character’s deterioration and the horrors of aging, whereas in this one, it’s so much about the very thin line between self-improvement and self-erasure. How is all of that strife externalized onto the body? Body horror fits perfectly into a visual medium because you can play those things out that are usually only felt internally. It’s expressionism.

Clockwise from top: Bella Heathcote in Relic; Midori Francis in Saccharine;
Julia Garner, Jim Sturgess, Dianne Wiest, and Kevin McNally in Apartment 7A; Natalie Erika James at home

What do your water images express? I’ve tracked them through nearly all of your work.
I haven’t really thought about that. Consciously, anyway. (laughs) I was a swimmer in my youth. I’m comfortable in the water. And there is something in water that relates to human consciousness, you know? The depths that you can go down. It has both the quality of life, but also you can drown in it. It can damage the physical, so it’s related to rot as well. To erosion.

It’s very religious, too. Cleansing. Baptism and the bath, and the womb, and passages over water, indicative of transformation. Our parents came over the water to bring us to this new place. Water separates us from our histories. Related to this, you seem obsessed with the horror of Chinese parties and their element of forced performance.
Yeah, you’re talking about the video for “Mine.”

(laughs) Yes–and Drum Wave, but it appears in all of your work.
I think what it comes down to is conditional love. I try to explore that in Saccharine and how maybe that relates to performance, because if love is conditional, then you have to perform for it. So many of my characters have anxieties about allowing their true self to be seen in some way, because they believe being true to themselves is outside of the rules that they should play by. In terms of Hana’s journey, it’s a lot about dismantling the urge to disguise a self you perceive to be ugly. She’s trying to find an okayness with herself; to demonstrate compassion for herself in a way that will dissolve the need to perform.

I used to be forced to play the piano and compete in recitals. Every time I’ve tried to play again as an adult, I actually feel nauseated. I saw that in Emily Mortimer’s character when she’s playing Für Elise while cleaning the keys. Can you talk to me about the origins of that scene?
I think you’ve hit it right on the head. The trauma of performance. I didn’t play piano for very long myself because I was a failed musician. I played seven instruments growing up, and the only one that stuck was hand bells (laughs). But certainly, there’s this requirement for perfectionism that gets drilled into you. If you fail, you embarrass your parents. In that scene, I wanted to show triggers: how music and memory are interlinked in the brain. And so it was a lot about her even trying to remember the notes of it, but it’s evocative for her of the past–of her childhood, complicated now by her mother’s disease. And then, in the wider sense, music also draws out the mother.

Is it a desire to be seen at last?
Yes. Definitely.

You employ frames within frames to that end, I think.
It’s twofold, I’d say. [T]here’s the physical quality of negative space, where your brain is scanning for a threat. If you decentre someone, your brain asks why. Like, why are they so far away, and what else is hiding in the corners? As a horror device, it works fantastically. In Relic, in particular, in the design of the spaces, we always wanted to have the sense that you couldn’t see the room in full. There was always something hidden from view. We wanted to make you wonder why you weren’t seeing the full image. It was also a good analogy for dementia. The shrinking frames, and here’s Edna, the grandmother, trapped in her mental state. We wanted that closing-in to be in the visual language of the film.

Polanski is a genius architectural director, and you are brought into that sandbox with Apartment 7A. Can you talk about the architecture in your films?
In Relic, the architecture kind of mirrors the mind. The halls that go to nowhere, the passages behind the walls. How the house changes as the film progresses and the disease progresses–the home as the deteriorating mind. It’s such a destabilizing metaphor for the family, too, particularly when the home falling to rot and ruin is the family home. With making a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby, there’s such a feeling we wanted to honour of the building being a reflection of the character and a character in and of itself. Not only because it’s such an iconic location–the Dakota as the Bramford, the audience already has a sense of it because of the Polanski–but less obviously, the building encapsulates that society, the coven itself. The walls of it hold such secrets, and the basement, of course, which holds the ultimate secret.

Lots of walls and basements in your other two features, too.
(laughs) I can’t escape it. There’s an oppressiveness to these spaces, apparently, inside and outside of the film, that you can’t escape. In Saccharine, we tried to create a cocoon-like quality to Hana’s apartment that at once hides her from the world but then is ultimately the thing that oppresses her as well. It’s a link to the ghost that is haunting her in the space. More, it’s the space where her dark passenger is allowed to flourish. Isolation is very bad for self-loathing. We really wanted to create a space in which it mirrored the body. My production designer Josie Wagstaff and I talked a lot about the tactile nature we wanted to achieve through the visuals, the feeling the walls were cadaver-like. Everything you see within her apartment, whether it’s the high gloss or… I’m thinking of the bed, and how everything in the film relates in some way to the human body. We wanted a more textural effect as opposed to clean lines. Organic.

You attracted some inevitably quick reads out of Sundance–easy reads. Let me ask you this way: Who is the villain of your piece?
I guess in my head, the physicality of Grace/Bertha isn’t the menace, it’s the shame and self-hatred that derives from how other people see you that is the real horror. For Hana, I think she’s a character who is at the start of the film dealing with whether her self-hatred is something she’s absorbed through the culture or something within herself deriving from an internalized fatphobia. Did she project that horror onto an external object? The figure of Grace and not the person. Hannah’s projection of her becomes a menace that just grows. It was my way of trying to… I think when it comes to eating disorders, there is this kind of sense of, you know, carrying a dark passenger of sorts. With any kind of addiction or compulsive behaviour, there’s a sense of carrying a dark passenger that is both yourself, but it’s also a monster in a way. That was really the idea behind Bertha.

You go to great lengths, I think, to portray Grace as a courageous person, a generous, loved, grieved person. She works with the disabled, and she, by the end, is clearly not the reason Hana does the things she does. Grace, by donating her body, has already demonstrated selfless vulnerability. You are never more exposed than in death. She’s given herself over for scrutiny in the pursuit of knowledge and healing.
I hoped that would come through. I hope by the end, once Hana has some clarity, she’s shown to be a real person: a loved person, a person of real value. I can understand the surface kind of connection to make, that if the menace in the film is large, then does that mean that largeness is monstrous? That’s certainly not the intention.

What it does, though, is reveal a difficult perceptual bias to overcome.
It’s good to talk about these things to start that process of understanding. This is a question that has come up in some of the Q&As as well. It’s a conversation worth having.

You’ve worked with DP Charlie Sarroff on all but one of your projects. His work feels liquid, weightless…
Charlie and I met just out of film school, and he came to pitching night, where we were all pitching our films. I was pitching a short film I shot in Beijing.

Burrow.
Yes–it was a student film, and we were holed up in a tiny apartment for five weeks, and suddenly it’s more than a decade of working together. Charlie’s an incredibly intuitive cinematographer, and I think we complement each other really well. Having a shorthand on set is the most gratifying kind of thing, where obviously there’s a lot of prep, but you can communicate through just looks, just making eye contact, when you’re close friends. Sets can be very stressful, and there are a lot of tough decisions that have to be made. Things that come up that you haven’t prepared for. But I think when you’re friends as well as collaborators, there’s a certain ease. And you forgive each other a lot, you know? In Relic, we wanted a sense of a slow creep. We wanted to create a sense of inevitability to what was happening. Then in Saccharine, there is movement, but we also wanted to create spaces that are arrested. We wanted unusual perspectives that trap Hana’s body within a space in-camera, so we can tell, visually, how she sees herself or feels about her body.

You described Hana’s room as a cocoon in terms of isolation, but a cocoon also suggests transformation and metamorphosis, doesn’t it? An incubator, a womb.
Ah, that’s true. The visual style for every film is different. There might be certain overarching sensibilities that you have.

And that might be invisible to you.
But generally with every film, we come up with a visual language that, you know, fits. The camera [and] the structure of these spaces become guardrails. They’re rules. Whether it’s down to lens choice or, yeah, how the camera moves. How we shift and transition and change as our environments change.

To that end, how do we pretend–perform–in order to “fit in?”
I think in a way the antidote to performance is honesty, but that’s hard and can lead to rejection, which is what we are most afraid of. Hopefully, what is captured in Hana’s journey is this tension, you know? Maybe it’s in her friendship with Josie that she’s her most real self, or is it with her mother? Is that where she’s her real self? With her trainer, Alanya, there is more Hana’s desire to become someone else, to perform someone else in order to be acceptable in some way, or just to be accepted in a specific, in this instance, maybe romantic way.

But does she love her, or does she want to be validated as conventionally attractive by her?
Right. You can’t know when you’re playacting. It’s only through honesty with others, but that only really comes through self-acceptance. You can only overcome that kind of deception through being comfortable with who you are.

How does this speak to you and how present you are in your work?
I think there’s always a certain… Filmmaking has always been an outlet for me, a space for frank expression. The way I was raised was with a sense that love for me was conditional, was based on achievement. Where you get an almost heightened effusiveness when you succeed in something, and that’s of course where I think a negative perfectionism can arise. This bleeds not just into performance at school or performance in extracurricular activities–it bleeds into how you perceive how you are appearing to others in your body, and how you are performing health. Your identity becomes wrapped up in ideas of success or failure. You can feel really, like, trapped by this conception of yourself.

The Buddhists believe there are two deadly states: fear of criticism and need for praise.
Yes. In my teen years, I felt like I lost my voice, and film was a way out of that. Maybe that comes through even now, twenty years later. Maybe that’s the core of my relationship with the movies. I really love Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love. I saw it as a teenager, and it has a quality I wanted to evoke in Saccharine. It’s a story of how we try to self-actualize and can–will–project desire onto someone in a bid to become someone else, or be this other version of yourself. And that can never work out. It never does.