Interpreting the Unfamiliar, with 'Familiar Touch' director Sarah Friedland
Writer-director Sarah Friedland joins us to discuss 'Familiar Touch,' her debut feature that follows Ruth, an octogenarian woman navigating memory and desire as she transitions into assisted living.
We explore how the film reclaims the coming-of-age genre for older characters, with Sarah describing it as a "coming-of-old-age" story that emphasizes how Ruth remains herself even as her world transforms. From the lengthy development process to working with Kathleen Chalfant in the lead role, Sarah offers insights into bringing this Venice Film Festival award-winner to life while challenging both cinematic conventions and societal attitudes toward aging.
(Photo credit: Anna Ritsch)
Transcript
You are listening to the we need to Talk About Asker podcast and this is our conversation with Sarah Friedland, writer, director of Familiar Touch.
Speaker B:So I wasn't thinking so much about broad relatability as I was thinking about the precision of who Ruth is, how she is experiencing herself and the world around her in this moment of transition, trying to get that incredibly precise.
Speaker B:To me, that level of precision actually is what enables the feeling to come from a place of almost of kind of sensation and affect rather than kind of melodrama, which is what we normally get with this subject matter.
Speaker A:I was actually in Venice for the world premiere of the film and.
Speaker B:Amazing.
Speaker A:Which I'm really proud of and just rewatched it yesterday and just as beautiful as I remembered.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker B:I'm so glad you were there.
Speaker B:It was a great.
Speaker B:What a great room.
Speaker B:That is kind of a dream.
Speaker B:Dream cinema to premiere in.
Speaker A:It was incredible.
Speaker A:And yeah, to begin with, I love this little twist on the genre coming off old age, which makes total sense since.
Speaker A:Since it's essentially a play on one of the most popular themes in cinema.
Speaker A:And yet I must say, it's bafflingly unexplored.
Speaker A:Why do you think that is?
Speaker B:I think it has a lot to do with ageism in our society.
Speaker B:You know, that we live in a sort of industrial market, neoliberal society that sees people as no longer valuable when they're no longer productive.
Speaker B:And so because of that, older adults are.
Speaker B:We not only sort of silo them away from kind of so much of our kind of social life and the infrastructure around social life, but we culturally perceive them as sort of diminished versions of younger adults.
Speaker B:And I think that ageist bias is not only reflected in our.
Speaker B:Our care systems, but also in our cinema that, you know, how many coming of age films come out about young people a year?
Speaker B:I mean, if you look at any film festival program, that's going to be like, what, at least a third of the program and much less attention given to the sort of subjectivity and selfhood of older adults.
Speaker B:So I think it's a pretty kind of clear expression of that ageist bias.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Because I'm more than happy to watch as many coming of age films as possible.
Speaker A:But on the other side of things, it becomes also especially hard to stand out with one.
Speaker B:But I mean, that's, that's.
Speaker B:I also, I love the coming of age genre.
Speaker B:This is, you know, no shade against the coming of age genre.
Speaker B:And that's kind of part of why I was feeling, in some ways, both playful and political about the idea of the coming of old age film.
Speaker B:Playful in the sense that, you know, it's almost a cliche that, you know, an early career filmmaker, a young filmmaker's first feature will be a coming of age film.
Speaker B:Like that's, you know, it's a wonderful cliche, but a true one.
Speaker B:And so I thought, why not, as a young person myself, sort of co opt the genre for an older character and had a lot of fun kind of playing with how that genre would, would appear for, for this older woman.
Speaker B:But then, you know, on the political side, I think, I think part of the potency of the coming of age genre in terms of telling the story of an older woman is that one of the beauties of the coming of age film is that you watch a character change, you watch them become a new version of themselves.
Speaker B:And yet we never say that character is no longer themselves.
Speaker B:We never say that character has disappeared.
Speaker B:We, the film, that genre kind of speaks to the continuity of a person as they go through changes.
Speaker B:And so I think that for me was the intervention in thinking about this as an anti ageist film was to see this older character go through this transition, you know, be losing her memory and yet is still Ruth, she's still herself.
Speaker A:And now that you mentioned Ruth, can I ask how you pitched or even described this role to those in contention for the lead role of Ruth?
Speaker A:Or on a side note, should you even be talking about contention or was it always going to be Kathleen?
Speaker B:I mean, the, you know, a casting process is kind of a long, a long and complicated one.
Speaker B:You know, this film took so long to make that Kathy was too young for the role when we first started casting.
Speaker B:So, you know, she's someone who I've long admired and has been on my dream list to work with.
Speaker B:So it really is she, it had to be her.
Speaker B:It just took a while to find each other because this process was of trying to get this film off the ground was, was a long one, close to a decade.
Speaker B:But I described it as a coming of age film, as a coming of old age film, and said that it was a character study of a woman in transition and a woman also a character study of a woman's shifting relationship to her own desire.
Speaker B:I think it's, you know, the expression of older adult sexuality is, is usually the butt of a joke.
Speaker B:And it's something I saw as, as a care worker and working with older adults that sexuality is a part of our lives from birth until death.
Speaker B:And I knew that Ruth's sense of desire was a really important part of this film to me and something that I also described to.
Speaker B:To Kathy, or not even described to her.
Speaker B:It was there on the page, you know, and something that we were able to, I think, was a place of mutual interest for us.
Speaker A:I'd love to quickly deconstruct the opening scene with you and cover how you figured it out, because the scene you're talking about is the one where Ruth is.
Speaker A:Yes, she mistakes her relationship with her own son for something else.
Speaker A:And it could have so easily turned out awkward, and yet it comes across as endearing, heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once.
Speaker A:Now, somewhat in hindsight, with, I'm sure, a great number of feedback under your belt, what do you see as the key to getting that one scene and this entire tone right?
Speaker B:Hmm, That's a great question.
Speaker B:I mean, I think, you know, that scene is one of the first ones that I talked about with H.
Speaker B:John Benjamin because, you know, the idea of your mother coming onto you is so deeply uncomfortable.
Speaker B:And so it was one of the first scenes we discussed in terms of how I wanted to honor Ruth's desire, as I wanted to sort of honor the fact that Ruth has desire without shaming the fact that it's expressed to the wrong person.
Speaker B:And this is actually incredibly common, that people with memory loss will mistake one of their children for their spouse or partner who has passed because there's a physical resemblance and think that it's them when they're younger.
Speaker B:I think the reason why the tone works is because we're with Ruth.
Speaker B:And so I think the fact that it's not the first first, that it is, you know, part of the opening sequence, but that we see Ruth alone in her home, comfortable in her body, we're with her in the minutia of her morning routine, of cooking, of getting dressed, that my hope was that a viewer in those quiet opening shots of her day would start identifying with Ruth and start kind of attaching themselves to her perspective.
Speaker B:And then in that scene, really be kind of close to Ruth and her experience of the scene and then get clues about Steve's experience, but not be rooted in his perspective.
Speaker B:So I think it's the staying with Ruth that helps tonally, and that's true for the whole film.
Speaker B:That I think the kind of tonal type rope of it is achieved by remaining with Ruth.
Speaker B:But that working is, of course, a testament to our actors.
Speaker B:I mean, Kathy and John just, you know, I knew on set that we were getting it right because of watching their performance with each other.
Speaker B:And their ability to capture a sense of tenderness in that interaction without the taboo of an Oedipal eroticism feeling sensational.
Speaker B:So I think really the kudos go to them and they're the kind of the extraordinary nuance and humanity of their performance together.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:Another thing is, as something we all have in common is that we are all sons and daughters and there is something deeply relatable about Ruthie's story with the additional perspective of his son.
Speaker A:Because this isn't just about aging, our parents aging.
Speaker A:It's about family dynamics and.
Speaker A:Yeah, how we might see ourselves versus how others see us, whether that be at a young, middle or an older age.
Speaker A:And this is going to be an extremely hypothetical question, but what did you.
Speaker A:And how did you think of the relatability aspect of the story?
Speaker A:Like, did you have to intentionally shape it in a way that pretty much everyone can connect with it or knew that it was going to be like that?
Speaker A:Not either way, but more than likely.
Speaker A:And rather had to veer away from doing so because that would just, I don't know, make it feel unnatural.
Speaker B:You know, the fact of so many people relating to the film is something I've learned while screening it.
Speaker B:It wasn't something I really could predict or was kind of calculating while we were making it.
Speaker B:I think, in general, it's true that the more kind of specific a film is to an emotional or human experience, the more relatable it is.
Speaker B:So I wasn't thinking so much about broad relatability as I was thinking about the precision of who Ruth is, how she is experiencing herself and the world around her in this moment of transition, trying to get that incredibly precise.
Speaker B:Maybe the relatability comes in is that I think we're not often positioned in films to relate to older characters.
Speaker B:We're positioned to spectate them.
Speaker B:And that's very different.
Speaker B:So I think a lot of the choices that I was making at the level of the script and then also with our department heads and production and posts was everything was in service of attuning to Ruth and her experience.
Speaker B:So it's a great joy that people are relating to it.
Speaker B:But it wasn't.
Speaker B:The calculation wasn't kind of around that rubric.
Speaker A:And somewhat in a similar way, as far as research goes.
Speaker A:I saw just yesterday on your socials the number of notebooks you filled for this project.
Speaker A:And I'm sure that's just the iceberg, which I'm guessing serves the purpose of authenticity.
Speaker A:But even though just before bringing up the opening scene, I was a little Hesitant to discuss it because what if I'm spoiling something?
Speaker A:But at the same time I realized these aren't the spoilers we usually mean because the film is fundamentally about feelings.
Speaker A:And feelings, like they can be spoiled, like plot points can.
Speaker B:Very well said.
Speaker B:I agree.
Speaker A:Because film is.
Speaker A:And yeah, art's purpose in general is to make us feel.
Speaker A:But at the same time, if you want to get it right, you can't skip the research.
Speaker A:Can you talk a little bit about this to a point contradiction between the importance of extensive research and at the same time, the focus on pure emotions?
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, I think they're not in contradiction.
Speaker B:For me, the more preparation and the more meticulous the kind of thinking around the form of the film, the more that it can be experienced, as you say, as pure feeling.
Speaker B:Because I watch it and I don't experience pure feeling.
Speaker B:I see sort of this, these kind of precise mechanics around its construction.
Speaker B:I mean, there's, I think, two kind of main strands of research.
Speaker B:One was the kind of character research, which I wasn't doing as research.
Speaker B:I was just doing it as a day job.
Speaker B:I worked as a care worker part time for about three and a half years and then started teaching filmmaking to older adults.
Speaker B:And I wasn't doing that specifically as research for the film.
Speaker B:It kind of comes from a same place that the film does, which is an interest in working with older adults and intergenerational relationships.
Speaker B:But those jobs meant that I spent eight years working very closely with aging individuals.
Speaker B:And so there was no way in which the kind of lived experience of that didn't kind of inform the writing.
Speaker B:So that time in that work taught me enormously about aging and self identity and care labor.
Speaker B:The other part, I mean, it's the notebooks.
Speaker B:There's more coming.
Speaker B:I'm just going to have a whole series of like prep documents that I'll share online.
Speaker B:But I, you know, myself and my cinematographer, Gabe Elder, and our production designer, Stephanie Osin Cohen, we've been working together for a decade and we were thinking a lot about how to create a sort of grammar for the film that would position us with Ruth, but not in her perspective, that was ocular or cognitive, but in an embodied perspective.
Speaker B:And we're thinking about how do we.
Speaker B:How do we do that through the production design and the cinematography and then largely in the sound design as well.
Speaker B:So that meant that plus the fact that we had to shoot this in under 19 days meant that we had to be incredibly economical.
Speaker B:So the way that the three of us work is I usually will sort of roughly describe, you know, the blocking of how I think the characters will be moving.
Speaker B:And then from there, we'll write a first draft of a shot list.
Speaker B:Then Gabe and I will together make a second draft of a shot list.
Speaker B:And then Stephanie will give us the sort of architectural drawings for each set.
Speaker B:And then we kind of diagram the scene both from where the characters are moving and where the camera is.
Speaker B:All of that in advance.
Speaker B:So the entire film kind of exists in these diagrams before we shot it.
Speaker B:So to me, that level of precise planning in terms of space and image and also sound.
Speaker B:I had a kind of script that I wrote that was outside of the screenplay in terms of what background sounds we're hearing and how close they are to Ruth.
Speaker B:To me, that level of precision actually is what enables the feeling to come from a place of almost of kind of sensation and affect rather than kind of melodrama, which is what we normally get with this subject matter.
Speaker A:Beautiful.
Speaker A:Beautiful.
Speaker A:This, to me, just exponentially elevates what I see on the screen.
Speaker A:Beautiful.
Speaker B:Oh, that's great.
Speaker A:And there is a fascinating dynamic of being aware, of not being aware, and Ruth clinging onto what she really knows, which for her is cooking mostly in the form of memorized recipes and food in general.
Speaker A:But primarily this instinct for catering to others.
Speaker A:What was it about both her professional background and this essential human trait that made her situation especially fitting to the setting?
Speaker B:I mean, in terms of the being aware and not aware.
Speaker B:I think it was one of the most kind of fun parts of this process for me.
Speaker B:Or interesting parts of this process of collaborating with Kathy.
Speaker B:And there are some parts of the script where it's very clear what version of Ruth is showing up, what age she is.
Speaker B:And there are others where it's more of this sense that Ruth is kind of all ages and no ages.
Speaker B:To borrow a term from a writer named Lynn Seagal, who I love, who writes about temporal vertigo in this sense that older adults can access all the prior ages they've been.
Speaker B:And therefore are in this place of all of them kind of converging.
Speaker B:So one of the biggest parts of our process together was kind of shaping that oscillation between clarity and lack of clarity in terms of where Ruth is, in terms of her being a cook.
Speaker B:You know, I knew that I wanted her to be creative, individual.
Speaker B:And I had played with kind of different professions that she might have.
Speaker B:Was she a writer?
Speaker B:Was she a visual artist?
Speaker B:In part because I was thinking a lot about this generation of feminist women and feminist artists who paved the way for my generation for whom independence was not something they took for granted politically.
Speaker B:And trying to imagine what it would be like for those women to experience the need for care later in life and how they might relate to their independence and autonomy in that moment of shifting care needs.
Speaker B:The food, though the choice to make her a cook was because I wanted us to get to know Ruth and her sense of self through all of her senses.
Speaker B:And I think cooking was a way to see Ruth have a relationship with taste, touch, smell, gesture.
Speaker B:Kathy likes to say that the last.
Speaker B:The last thing to go for her will be her knife skills.
Speaker B:So cooking was a way for her to be a creative individual that had a practice that related to all of these senses.
Speaker B:So that's how I came to cooking specifically.
Speaker B:And then I also think, I mean, back to that kind of feminist lineage, female cooks, I think feminist female cooks are fascinating to me because cooking, on the one hand, is sort of seen as women's work and can be diminished in that way.
Speaker B:And on the other hand, it's an incredibly male dominated field.
Speaker B:So I think Ruth is this wonderfully kind of bold and confident feminist and imagining her kind of relating in some way to the sort of gendering of food work.
Speaker B:Yeah, it was something I was curious about.
Speaker A:Love that.
Speaker A:Sara, thank you so, so much for your time.
Speaker A:And personally, I absolutely cannot wait to see what you do next.
Speaker B:Oh, thank you so much.
Speaker B:Thanks for the thoughtful questions.
