SR: It is a huge pet peeve of mine in film when you see something that is extremely lit and it’s night and it’s like, where is the light coming from? We always wanted to lead with a sense of naturalism. So much of the film is lit naturally, to be honest. We shot at a certain time of day that we knew that the light was going to be the most beautiful. So we would start shooting the day a little bit later, around 9 or 10 a.m. because we knew around 3 or 4 was when we would get this beautiful dappled light on the walls on the outside of the house and that the way it would come through the windows would be very soft. We really let the natural beauty of that environment lead the cinematography as well. Maya is so skilled at finding those moments and is so confident as a technician that she can utilize that, but then add a little punch here, a little bit there, and craft it and shape the light rather than artificially creating it. When we shot at night, it was always at night. We were not artificially creating these environments. When the family’s settling into the home, when they’re eating these sandwiches on the floor and there’s no power in the house, it is lit by candles and there’s maybe a touch of light outside for the moon, but it was so minimal and we were pushing it to the very, very edge. It’s like, how little can we get away with, which was actually very complicated in the color correction. I was determined to have that naturalism in the performances, in the lighting, and the sound just across the board because I wanted people to feel that they were drawn in and to not have this superficial aesthetic at any point in the film.
AVC: Speaking of the family, most of the cast members are acting for the first time. How did you, as a first-time feature director, get such natural performances?
SR: A lot of that comes from the casting process. So much of the work is done in casting and making sure that I was casting actors that understood the way that I wanted to work, which came from wanting to build real chemistry between the performers so that the family had this dynamic that was not forced. That starts top-down from the parents. If the parents did not have that dynamic and the chemistry that I felt in the auditions, the rest of it starts to fall apart. So the two actors that we cast, I felt a sense of history between them and a sense of something that felt very honest, loving, but also complicated. I wanted that to permeate through the rest of the cast. A lot of it came from working with kids that were very self-motivated––and they were not child actors in the traditional sense where there was any kind of parental instigation in any of the cases. I was very careful to cast not only the children, but their parents, because it’s a big part of who you’re actually going to be working with as well. In every case, I felt that the kids were very self-motivated. My job was really to create a safe environment for everyone to feel like they can just be themselves.
AVC: After rewatching Still Processing, your short in which you rediscover your family’s photographs, I noticed there are a lot of homages to your dad and his photography in Blue Heron. What stood out when revisiting these images and recreating them?
SR: The way that my dad shot home video footage always felt quite cinematic to me. It inspired not only the visual, but also the sound design in a big way, because I was revisiting the footage, and I noticed that there was almost always music playing in the background, and it felt to me like a score. It actually felt like it was intentionally placed there, but it was always just coming from the background. I tried to emulate that same sort of formal approach with the music in the film. It’s always coming from a source, it’s coming from the dad’s computer oftentimes, or the car radio, or a radio in another room. I wanted the music to be a big part of the environment, but not be a soundtrack. I remember looking at these home video clips and [noticing] that there were very mundane things happening, but with really grand classical music playing over top of it. It creates a sense of importance, and I really loved that juxtaposition. I tried to write that into the script, but a big part of it was embedded in the sound design as well.
AVC: Were there certain classical pieces you gravitated towards to bring up these feelings?
SR: A couple of them were actually pulled from those home video clips. I actually was Shazaming them. Every song that’s in the film was in some way inspired by or trying to align with my memories of the kind of music that I grew up with or that my dad was often playing. I wanted the character’s personality of the father to come through his artistic choices that he makes in the film. So much of his character is at a distance, but I wanted him to still come across in the atmosphere that he wants to create in the household, which is very artistic, and maybe he’s struggling to connect in certain ways, but he has a way to connect. It’s through art, it’s through his photography, and it’s through music. It was important that comes across not just in dialogue, but also how the environment is set by him and by the decision to really foreground art in the house.
AVC: Speaking of the sound design, even certain soft sounds like whispers and sighs sound so deeply in the film’s audio mix, was that intentional?
SR: One of the main things I discovered in making this film is that sound is almost more nostalgic than visual in many ways, and it’s something that is quite universal. Everyone who watches the film at some point can remember laying on their bed hearing the lawn being cut across the street, the kids playing across the road, or sprinklers going, or these kinds of sounds have this really intangible connection to childhood, even though they’re still happening all through our adulthood. It’s interesting to see how much that is a link for us because I think maybe as kids, you’re paying attention to these things more. It’s newer to us because we’re newer to the world. I really wanted to emphasize the sound and the boredom of summer and the stagnation that you feel. Playing with sound off-camera was something that occurs a lot in this film. You hear something before you see it, which happens in so many films, but I think it was a Robert Altman film that somehow really inspired that. Obviously, he plays with sound in such an incredible way with the sound mix and what you’re hearing.
AVC: A part of that soundscape are the two languages spoken in the film, English and Hungarian. Coming from an immigrant family, how did you find the rhythm of switching between the two?
SR: Every immigrant family handles it in a different way. I thought about changing the origin of this family to create more distance between my family and this one, but I think it’s unique, the Hungarian language, and I had not seen it in a film set in another context, so I decided to keep that. The truth is that my parents, when they immigrated, were learning English at the time, and they wanted us to learn English. All my brothers were immigrants as well, and that was important to them, that we would be able to assimilate and go to school, and that kind of forced the language. They were trying to speak English to each other, but then of course, if [Hungarian’s] your mother tongue, that’s where you go when you get frustrated. That’s where you go when you want to talk about something that’s difficult, or maybe also moments of secrecy. I tried to use it in that way and give them moments of privacy that we don’t necessarily get access to. We don’t always see them when they’re talking. It’s funny because the film once played without the subtitles at TIFF, and a lot of people thought it was purposeful that we don’t get to see what Sasha can’t understand. But I would never purposefully withhold language in that way because I think it aestheticizes foreign language, and I just never would do that on purpose. It’s interesting that people still found that the film worked without that. There is so much that is said in Hungarian that is so important to the parents’ internal experiences.
AVC: You already mentioned Altman, but who were some of the other filmmakers or films that inspired you when making Blue Heron?
SR: There’s an obvious one, which is the shot from Jeanne Dielman when the mom is peeling potatoes, but I loved the idea of inserting a child into that very iconic shot, and that was purely an homage moment for me, but also an acknowledgement of that character and the struggle that she’s feeling as a mother in that moment. There’s also Tree Of Life, which I knew was going to be a reference point no matter what I did because of the content of that film, which is a film I absolutely love, but I also allowed that to be the case. There were a few shots, especially window to window—he loves to put characters on opposite sides of windows. So, when the mother is standing at the window, Sasha comes up to her, that was a direct reference to Tree Of Life. Celine And Julie Go Boating was a big one in terms of helping me with the structure of the film and how to allow time to jump without explaining it. Having this object, this keychain, be the means of transportation through time but not having any sort of narrative explanation—just letting editing be the time travel rather than any kind of machine or visual cue. All film is really time travel, you’re always cutting through time and going back and forth hoping that the audience will accept that.
AVC: In your CBC essay, you mentioned you were also reading Cassavetes On Cassavetes during production. What were some of the main takeaways you learned for Blue Heron?
SR: The main thing is the camera placement and not prioritizing technical precision, or not making the actors responsible for the technical precision, having that be our job, and giving them room to play––especially the children––and allowing us to follow the action rather than them blocking to the camera. Cassavetes developed an entire aesthetic just by prioritizing performance over technical precision. A lot of people try to emulate the style, but not the actual freedom that he was trying to achieve with the performances. From what I understand, he just barely cared about how the films looked. He cared about performance above everything else, and that naturally created an aesthetic with this telephoto lens. What it’s actually doing, it compresses space, but what I think he’s prioritizing there is distance between the camera and the performer, and to not have the camera in the face of the performer and to not have them feel intruded upon. Having the camera at a distance really allowed for that, so when I’m asking [the kids] to play a game or do this or that, they’re not playing for the camera, they’re just playing with each other, and then we’re capturing it. It creates a lot more freedom.
AVC: Since you’ve played between the ideas of fiction and nonfiction throughout your shorts, Blue Heron is like a culmination of that work. Are there still more concepts and ideas you want to play with in this space for future projects?
SR: It’s definitely a culmination at this point of my work, but also my life. It feels like a big release of all these ideas that have been percolating for so long. I feel like I actually finally achieved what I’ve been trying to achieve all this time. Not that I thought I couldn’t do that with my shorts, but I think I needed to make those shorts in order to make the feature. So much of what I was playing with in the short films lent itself to me having the confidence to make this feature in the way that I did. I’m always going to be drawn to playing with the form or expectations. I don’t really see myself just pivoting to some kind of pure essential genre. I think I’m always going to find ways to incorporate some sort of hybridity, but what I really like is using different tools to achieve a level of perceived authenticity. Maybe you would call this documentary, maybe you would call this fiction. I don’t know, but I’m just trying to use whatever tools from the different modes of filmmaking to achieve something that feels real.
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