Film maker Myrid Carten spoke to David Hennessy about her award- winning debut, A Want in Her which is nominated at both the IFTAs and BAFTAs which are coming up this weekend.
Donegal film maker Myrid Carten’s debut film A Want in Her is nominated for both an IFTA and a BAFTA at the ceremonies that take place this weekend.
Myrid is also nominated for the Risiing Star award at this Friday’s IFTAs.
The film has already won Myrid three British Independent Film Awards in November when it took Best Feature Documentary, Best Debut and the Raindance Maverick Award.
A Want in Her saw Carten turn the lens on her fractured family which was struggling with grief, a contested inheritance and her mother’s struggle with alcoholism and mental illness.
Carten studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London and Central Saint Martins UAL.
The film sees her return to Ireland from her life in London due to her mother’s disappearance.
The film has been noted for its unique style. There is no voice-over explaining anything which has the effect of throwing the viewer into the family and its issues.
Myrid took the time to chat to the Irish World ahead of the upcoming awards shows.
I doubt it was anything you were thinking about making this film but have you been pleased with the awards success?
“Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear I wasn’t sitting there thinking, ‘I’ll be at the BAFTAs next year’.
“My story is a very common, everyday normal people story.
“And also, I took a lot of risks in the film and I didn’t go the orthodox route at times.
“Therefore when we premiered it there was a sense of, ‘Is this going to work? Is this going to land? Are people going to get this?’
“But the response has been more than I could have imagined or dreamed really for a low budget film and something that felt very authentic to me and very singular to me.
“The fact that it has this resonance and not just across those big awards is great.
“The cinema release was really what I hoped for the film so having it picked up by Breakout was just incredible.
“We always spoke about it reaching people who had experiences like this and that being the measure of its worth.
“So although these awards are amazing, the point for me is still the message I get from an 18-year-old in Donegal who has experiences like this or wants to make films.
“Those are the things that really move me and those are the reasons I made the film in the first place.
“The recognition just means that it can potentially reach more of those people.
“A lot of people have said this but really the film is made in the mind of the viewer.
“It’s gone.
“It was my baby for a long time but then as soon as it was out in the world, suddenly it belongs to the viewers and they have their own relationship and it has its own life with them and I’m not the ultimate authority on what the film means, it means different things to different people.”
Those messages you get from anyone affected by issues like this, it must mean more than any award or review for the film to resonate in that way..
“Yeah because a film like this, you just want it to reach out of your heart and into somebody else’s and the reason you make a film like this is because you can’t really articulate- Well, I couldn’t really articulate a lot of the things that the film was able to open up.
“I just wanted to open up spaces for people to have their own experience and reflect on their own lives.”
Isn’t it true that the film started as something else before developing into what it became?
“Yeah, someone said recently to me, ‘The art knows..’
“I feel like you’re unconscious and the art has its own drive and its own impulses.
“I obviously felt I had this intuition that I had to make this film now because one of my mother’s siblings passed away and it just felt like, ‘Okay, it’s now or never’ even though I was quite young and I thought that maybe this big family project was something that would benefit from more maturity and more wisdom and being a bit older.
“But reality very, very much dictated that the time was now.
“I had centred it around this very Irish story at that point about an inheritance feud and the fallout over inheritance.
“That’s how it started off but then I was realising that I was really focusing on her death which was 20 years ago and actually the drama that was unfolding in front of me and at the time was far more rich but also more poignant and truthful about the impact of that.
“Instead of me going and interviewing people about something that happened in the past, I ended up just focusing on the present and the ripples of that past incident.
“It became far more about me and my mother and how the death of her mother had this huge impact on her, it then had this impact on me and it became about love and loss really and not so much about inheritance although that’s still there but that’s more of a symbolic thing.”
Is your mother happy with the end result?
“When we had the rough cut, we showed it and said, ‘Is there anything you can’t live with?’
“I was nervous around the scenes where she’s slightly compromised because usually I tried to not have her compromised at all but she really liked those because she said, ‘Look, that shows me, shows the nature of my bipolar and my mental illness and where it takes you’.
“And actually the thing that she didn’t like was there was a line in there that said that she wasn’t a Republican.
“She was like, ‘I am a Republican so you need to take that out’.
“So we took out the line for her.
“How does she like it? She’s really proud of the success and she knows that it’s really resonated with people but at the same time, she can never see it as an outsider would see it and neither can I and neither can anybody in it. We all have our own complex relationship with it.
“I think she just wanted it to be clear that her bipolar had such a big impact on the journey of her life.
“She’s in quite a good place now but she sees that time period being very much in the past, but she’s really happy with the success of the film.
“One of the things that’s really important is this idea that the unknowability of the other is sacred.
“I never made any claim that I knew why my mother was the way that she was or that this is the definitive guide of my mother.
“One of my favourite things in the film is the fact that she’s almost different in every scene.
“I just wanted to show these glimpses of the depth of a person and point to the depth and have an interest in the depth, but never claim to know it.
“I think she recognises that and she knows as well that she’s a character in a film the same way I am.
“It’s not her whole person.
“We made something that seems to have worked and it shows a chapter in our life.
“I just wanted to use that relationship as an example of loads of other relationships that everybody has.
“Every family has a story.
“I made this film dramatic and dramatic things have happened in our family, but not extraordinary.
“Most people know somebody who’s had an experience like this.
“It’s not that rare but yet, there wasn’t that many depictions of it.
“I just kept saying to my family, ‘I want to tell this story that I know affects loads of people. It’s not about us and it’s not about you and it’s not a biography of you or me’.
“It’s just about this dynamic that happens. You’re the next of kin and you have to deal with this duty of care but also, how do you love somebody without losing yourself?
“That’s a universal story.”
Your mother only had a problem with that line about her not being a Republican but were reluctant yourself about certain scenes like the one where you find her drunk on a bench in the city. As was your understanding with your mother if that happened, you walked away and left her..
“I suppose I’m immersed in this material for years and I’m thinking about, ‘How is this going to play, how is this going to land?’
“Also, ‘Why have I done this? Why did I do that?’
“I suppose when you’re the director, you have to stand by your work.
“I didn’t want people to think that I had this ‘gotcha’ moment at the end.
“The bench was more emotional but there’s a fight that I have with my mother and I didn’t want to put that in for a while.
“As the director I’m really happy with this confrontation but actually it was really difficult.
“I was really tired and emotional that day and I apologised and I regretted it.
“I was like, ‘Will people understand that I regret this moment?’
“But my editor was able to say, ‘No, this is that conflict scene. You can regret it but you’d also had to say it’.
“And then with the bench scene I think she, at the time, sort of said, ‘How could you have done this?’
“And that was really hard and I had this huge sense of shame and guilt.
“It was the one time in the edit where I was very emotional and I wasn’t fully in my director’s hat, I was probably more in my daughter’s hat at that time.
“But I really believe that part of my responsibility in this story was to show my mistakes and to show my vulnerabilities as much as possible.
“It’s very difficult.
“There was a time we thought we weren’t going to show it but we discussed whether to put it at the start, we discussed whether to just have us talk about it, we discussed whether not to show it and it felt right that we showed it where we did because by that stage, you know my mother.
“It’s not some voyeuristic, random experience.
“You know my mother.
“You know me or my character in the film, both of our characters in the film.
“You know what it means. You don’t read it as an outsider.
“There’s something about the medium specificity for this story is to bear witness and as a viewer to be put in between that dichotomy of the sense of me being responsible for her but her being responsible for me and how we both fail in that moment and how it’s not straightforward.
“I think it condenses a lot of the themes of the film and that’s why we had put it in.
“But it was a hard decision.
“I had to make the call.
“But the type of films that I like are the ones that do take risks and don’t patronise a viewer or try to make it more palatable for a viewer.
“I always have a sense when a film’s done that and I feel like it’s a great failure because I feel like the point of art is to challenge us.
“That’s why I decided to put it in.”
Collecting one of your three British Independent Film Awards in November you spoke about how many no’s you got along the way, a lot of emails that started with ‘unfortunately’..
“I felt like the film wanted to be made.
“We just had this sense that, ‘We are going to make this film by hook or by crook’.
“But that doesn’t make it any less difficult.
“I know it’s very Irish but it is very universal.
“I’m really glad it’s landed in England as well.
“It seems like it’s really landed with English.
“And also it’s done quite well with American viewers and things because I just wanted that universality to come through.
“And even it showed in places like Taiwan and India and all these different festivals.”
There is also the use of footage from your childhood, the home videos. There is the small girls acting out a scene about a man being drunk. At that young age it shows an understand of this issue..
“Yeah and again, the universality of it because they’re not me.
“And it shows that people have their own experience of it.
“One of the things in the film is like, ‘How do children impute what’s happening around them?’
“I just found that footage.
“I had already started this film and my father found those tapes and got them digitized as a Christmas present for me 15 years after I shot them.
“I didn’t know what was on them and there wasn’t that much tape to be fair.
“It was almost like excavating with these tapes and then you’d see little glimpses of my family at the edges because we were editing in camera and nobody gave us any more tapes so it was taped over with America’s Next Top Model or Blind Date and you saw then little parts bits of my family in between.
“I was like, ‘No, this stuff underneath would have been so good’.
“It looks like we had a lot of archive and we really didn’t.
“That was amazing.”
Has art always been something of an escape for you?
“I think it’s since being in that school in Donegal.
“We had this amazing teacher who was Miss Donegal 1970.
“She was a great woman and she really encouraged our creativity.
“One of my friends is an actress on Ros na Run and the other one is the singer Morgana, she’s in Saint Sister.
“And this is a tiny school, 30 people.
“There was only five people in my class.
“So there was only about five girls and a lot of us ended up going into those fields that we showed some promise in when we were that age.
“I suppose for me it’s always been a place where there’s a sense of something greater than yourself.
“Art had this sense of something sacred and sublime and magical and promising and then that’s kind of where I ended up going but it’s not an easy route.
“But then what is?”
Music was important in the film with artists like Lankum and Fontaines DC..
“I think that Lankum track does more in terms of pointing to the universality and the archetypal type of story that this is than any figures I could have put in about alcoholism.
“This story about somebody losing their house, being disinherited, roaming around, being a vagrant, being a drinker.
“That’s an old folk song and it’s been reimagined and builds and builds and has this chasm in the middle.
“I just felt like this is the type of work that I wanted to make and I wanted this film to feel very Irish and those two songs really do that in a way.
“One of them points to the past and one of them points kind of to the future.”
What’s next for you?
“I’m in development for a hybrid film that’s not so close to home but develops on the strategies that I found in this film, things that I think are interesting around the play between fantasy and reality but also home and homelessness.
“But I’m in the process of developing that at the minute.
“My dream was always to move more and more towards fiction and I do still want to do that but I think there’s a space between both that’s really alive at the minute and really interesting and I think that that’s what I want to delve into.”
The IFTA awards cwill take place on Friday 20 February.
The BAFTA Film Awards will take place on Sunday 22 February.
