How Lucy Kerr Brought Choreography Background to 'Family Portrait'
Kerr discusses her approach to movement, drawing inspiration from her old money Texan family, and learning to let things go.
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by Sebastian Zufelt
When Lucy Kerr first moved to New York, she worked as a choreographer. But her experiences frequenting art house theaters including Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry drew her to filmmaking. She went to CalArts, receiving an MFA in Film/Video & Art, and set about exploring the potential of image making.
After her short films Crashing Waves and Site of Passage played at FID Marseille, she took her debut feature film, Family Portrait, to the FID Lab, where the project won the Air France Prize. Shot in her grandparents’ home in Texas, over 10 days, Family Portrait follows an old money Texan family as they gather to take a family photo for their annual Christmas celebration. What seems like a simple task quickly proves to be more challenging than expected, with Katy (Deragh Campbell) taking the bulk of the responsibility for corralling the family and finding her mother while everyone else engages in idle conversations.
I spoke with Lucy following the film’s premiere at Metrograph last week. We discussed her upbringing, which inspired the film, as well as how her background in choreography influenced the film’s visual language, and more.
How did your choreography background inform your blocking, both of your camera and actors?
I think it all goes back to how we perform. In the South, maintaining an image of yourself or your family is very important, as is the performance of that image. I love Faulkner and these Southern Gothic writers whose work is about this crumbling image and these people trying so hard to keep up with that image.
And then there's how bodies are conditioned in everyday life to perform a certain way. I used to do a lot of writing about dance and disability in dance. In undergrad I wrote a thesis on that: how bodies are conditioned in dance to be this certain athletic body type, but all bodies can dance and move in different ways. That was something I thought about because when you walk into my mom's house during Christmas, they have ribbons all over the walls with all the parts and everyone is standing the same way, smiles, teeth. It's performance.
How did that background inform your collaboration with your cinematographer?
The camera and the body movement together was planned on the set. Lidia [Nikonova], the cinematographer, loves camera movement. She loves zooms. She had this huge zoom lens that she brought, and we used it for that shot where she's walking in the forest. That was such an amazing shot because the zoom is like 600 mm. Between my interest in choreographing groups of people in this interconnected way and her love for camera movement, it came together.
When a shot is on the steadicam, versus when it's on the dolly, versus when it's static, is all very considered based on what point in the film it is and whether you're in the house or outside the house. We were always thinking of having this more oppressive environment [inside], and then outside the house being more fluid. Also, as the film goes on, it starts wider and gets closer. It starts static and mobilizes more. We thought out all that stuff months in advance and then Lidia collaborated with the steadicam operator to think about that first shot in the film where Deragh is pulling at everyone. That was a performance thing Deragh and I were thinking about, then Lidia and the steadicam operator thought about how to follow her, then that translated into when we got close up, when she's soaking wet. We just took the same principles and got closer.
There's an inner logic, which is something I always loved in [my former teacher] James Benning's films. For a long time you might feel like, What am I watching? It might feel quite distanced, then something happens, or by the end of this you feel there's this profound existential element. Readers has different people reading a book, and the ages get older with each person. The first reader is a young woman. She's distracted because she's more fidgety and more restless. Then the last person is Simone Forti, who is a choreographer that has Parkinson's now. She's moving as well, but because she's trying to stay focused while her body is moving on its own because she has this illness, she's more distanced from her body. They're both moving for different reasons because of their age. I thought that was so beautiful.
The house in the film was your grandparents’ house. What was the process of asking your family to use the house like? And how was it living in that space in a work context?
I'm really grateful to my family for letting me use the house, because as you can tell it's a really amazing house. It's not just the family that uses the house, it's all my aunts and uncles and their kids, so there's a really strict calendar every New Years where everyone chooses their two weeks for the whole year. My parents gave me the house during their time and my uncle gave me some days too. I think it'll be a bit of time before I can use it again because I used it for about two weeks.
It's interesting how people grow further apart as generations grow on. When I was a kid, there were my grandparents and my aunts and uncles and us. And as more kids are born, people get more distant from each other and more people have to share the house. They're maybe not there as much together, and it gets more tense as to who has the house when.
For the shoot, the whole team was living there, which everyone was such a great sport for, especially the crew. The house has one big room with four twin beds and then another room. In that other room they were doing makeup, and the four twin beds were where the two ACs and gaffer were all staying. It was like a lost boys club.
I saw that Rob Rice is credited as your Directorial Advisor. I'm curious what that working relationship was like, and how that’s different from being an assistant director or a director's assistant.
I know there aren't many people called that… or any [laughs]. Rob came on as script supervisor initially, but he had given me some feedback a couple of times so it kind of naturally segued. We were both looking at the monitor, looking at the script, thinking about how the performers say the lines, the dialogue. Kārlis, my husband, was also watching the monitor. Kārlis always tells me what he honestly thinks of things, which I really appreciate because he always gives good feedback.
So the three of us were the collaborative minds behind adding new scenes. We had extra time to add new scenes, and the script was so short that we started to write down in a document all of our different ideas, as well as asking other people for their ideas. It became collaborative that way.
Rob and I both were thinking about the performances—Kārlis too, but it was me and Rob talking to the actors, sometimes together. Because there were so many performers, sometimes we split off and I would talk to a few actors and he would talk to a few actors. For example, the scene where they're all trying to take the picture, we discovered together that chaos can't just be people going crazy. Everyone needs to have different trajectories and it's helpful they don't know what the other person's trajectory is. Grace, who wears the blue striped jumpsuit, her story was that she was secretly really excited for the picture, and that's why she was dressed for it initially. She has this baby, and so she really wants to have her and this baby in the middle of the picture. But then, someone else maybe has another thing that's conflicting with her trying to be in the middle. So coming up with these strategies was something we did together.
Was Rob involved in the rehearsal process at all? What was that process like?
I talked a lot to Deragh beforehand, just us two. We had a couple days of rehearsal. It seemed crazy to me to just dive into shooting, since I come from theater and dance. We did a table read, then we discussed the different characters, because in the script there weren't a lot of details about Katie, it was more bare bones, so we filled that in. That also allowed me to work on these more complicated, choreographed group scenes. It felt almost like when I used to choreograph big groups of people. And thinking of them all moving like a landscape, that's how I saw this picture moment. It wasn't like they had specific gestures they were doing, it was finding the structure of where they move during the scene and they could fill [the gestures] in with improvisation.
Going into the next film, what's one thing you learned from making this film that you're going to take into the next?
I have so many things so it's hard to say.
It can be multiple things.
[Laughs]. They contradict each other, but for the next one I want to be more prepared with the script. I want the characters to be more fleshed out. Being a little bit more prepared with the tracking of the main character's journey and her motives and evolution over the course of the film so that when we're on set we can play more. We were able to play on the Family Portrait set, but that's also because it was so contained and it was a very short film.
Also I learned not to be too precious with the script. The script should be just one thing, and then shooting should be equally its own thing, and the editing equally its own thing. So that way you're not just thinking Oh, I'm just gonna shoot the script.
Something that has helped me over time is being okay with letting things go. Like with Crashing Waves, my thesis film, I did a shoot that was really involved, really difficult, and required so much work, but I actually didn't use that material, just because it didn't serve the project. I try to encourage my students that that sort of thing still serves its purpose in your journey. You have to go through that money you spent on it, the time. Failure can be very generative and very productive and enlightening. It's not a negative thing.
What’s next for you?
I'm working on this script right now for another fiction feature set in Texas, but set in 2004. I went to a residency in San Sebastian for six weeks in March and April, which was beautiful. The city's so nice. I'm still in residency so I need to get back to work a little bit before I go back in September for the San Sebastian Film Festival and to pitch the film. But it's early stages. Kind of just daydreaming a lot right now.
Do you see a lot of your work taking place in Texas? With being based in New York City, I'm curious how you navigate those different parts of yourself.
I've always wanted to make something about the culture I came from because it's such a strange culture to so many different people. Old money culture in Texas is very unusual for a lot of people. But it was a matter of being ready to make fiction projects. This next one is a little less autobiographical. It's about a debutante ball. I don't think I want to make a huge body of work about Texas, though. I think I will eventually move on. I think a lot of directors start very personal and then expand.
In my first class at CalArts with James Benning, who teaches the critique class for first years, all of the students come up and do a map of their life: where they started, where they went, what brought them to what as a way of thinking about the material in your life. Some of the stuff that I experienced growing up with sororities and debutantes and going to camp where we would shoot guns when we were eight years old, it's crazy for people to see.
Family Portrait is now available on Metrograph at Home, and will be screening July 12-18th at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago and July 19th & 20th at Now Instant in Los Angeles.
Sebastian Zufelt is a New York-based filmmaker from Seattle. His films have screened at festivals across the country, including NFFTY, and have won awards for writing, producing, and editing. His film Third is the first ever student production fiscally sponsored by Northwest Film Forum, and is set to begin a festival run this fall. He is a Nothing Bogus intern.
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