SUNDANCE CHANNEL INTERVIEW
TRANSCRIPT

FILMMAKER: Hope Hall
TITLE: This Is For Betsy Hall
TRT: 6:30
GENRE: Short documentary, personal, experimental

When Hope Hall was in the graduate program at Stanford University, she made a very personal film about her mother's struggle with anorexia and bulimia. Using a taped phone conversation as the soundtrack, she cut together a montage of still photographs, projected video, and underwater footage all set to music by her brother to create THIS IS FOR BETSY HALL.

Hall is a documentary filmmaker in New York City. She has a Master's Degree in Communication from Stanford University in Documentary Film and Video. Some of her recent projects include directing multi-channel installation videos for the Guggenheim Museum's "Art of the Motorcycle" exhibition in Las Vegas and shooting video for MTV's "True Life" series. Next for her is a photo and film project documenting the lost history of the New York waterfront.

THIS IS FOR BETSY HALL airs on Sunday, May 11 at 8pm as part of MOTHERS WE LOVE SHORTS

QUESTION:
How did you decide to construct a film around actual phone conversations with your mother? And what challenges did that present for you as a filmmaker and as a daughter?
ANSWER:
The phone conversations between my mom and me have been the primary way for me to get to know her since she left when I was seven. Since I rarely see her more than once a year, and letter writing comes and goes, the phone has been my constant connection to her. Especially through my twenties, I got to know her through epic phone calls. The few times I have really presented her with the scope of my feelings, especially the more difficult ones of sadness and abandonment, have occurred over the phone.

Being in her presence has a completely different quality, a hyper-real kind of facing of the actualities of her mental illness, of her separation from the world outside of her own mind and heart. The phone allowed me to enter her world without actually sitting in her dark, crazy world. On the phone she was present, and we could both ignore the reality of her illnesses and of our separation. But then the question became, where was I in this set-up, especially since she did most of the talking? I soaked her up but rarely managed to take up anything close to half of the conversation. Even when I did manage to speak about my experience, I wouldn't feel that she was hearing me. There is a very clear example of this dynamic toward the end of the film, when she asks me if I am crying, I say I am, and then she goes on to say, "Well, I'm crying too..." launching in to a story about her experience.

When I finally told my mom (over the phone) that I had always wanted to make a film about her, she responded by saying, "Well, I'm ready...the question is, are you?" That left me free to try to finally express my experience and feelings to her in a way that might get through. I wanted to try to get through to her the experience of being her daughter, of being one of the closest people in the world to her, and of trying to love her while maintaining my own selfhood. Film, being so experiential, seemed like the right choice.

As a film student, I had the space and time to take on this project. I had a mandate to try the hardest project I could imagine and to stretch myself to my limits in the name of formulating my own, specific voice and style. I also had the necessary structure and constraints: an assignment with specific parameters, a due date, and the input and support of my peers and professors. Yet even in this ideal environment, I was scared, mostly of making a film that was too self-indulgent. The only way to mitigate that fear was to imagine myself giving the film, as a gift, to my mom. So I structured and conceived it as a film for an audience of one. In the edit room, I staved off paralysis and self-doubt by conjuring up the image of my mom watching the film. Then I knew exactly what to do. The phone conversation helped so much, providing the baseline narrative for the film: I recorded and transcribed it before I shot anything, and I edited it before I cut a single strip of film. As it is the basis for our relationship, it is the basis for the film.

QUESTION:
How did your mother view the film and your relationship?
ANSWER:
I could honestly answer that no aspect of my family life or of my mother's life is the same since making the film. She puts it best: The film is like a small stone your throw into a pond, the ripples just keep extending further outward. My mother and my relationship may be better addressed in the next question, and as far as the rest of my family, and even my community, I could summarize: my siblings and I have shifted as to where my mom fits into the family story, my father and I have had to face some long-bypassed stories, my step-mother and I have faced some emotions around fitting my mom into the story of my step-mother raising me, my friendships have shifted to reflect the reality of part of my upbringing, I have spoken with countless audience members who relate to the mother-daughter, abandonment, mental illness or eating disorder issues, and I have presented the film in the educational context of schools, treatment programs, and eating disorder organizations such as the Eating Disorder Coalition.

As for my mother, she has had so many firsts in the years since the film was finished. She showed it to one of her best friends from childhood, and spoke of her illnesses with her for the first time in their 50 year friendship. She sought out treatment for the first time, eventually enrolling in a four-month inpatient program this winter. She is in care for the first time in her life, supervised by a psychiatrist, a general practitioner, and a dietician, and is accepting home health care after a life-threatening fall a year ago.

For a long time, my mom simply loved watching the film. It took a long time for it to sink in, that I was trying to express what it was like for me to be in her life. The first time she saw it, before anyone else did, I was so nervous. But she exclaimed with joy throughout the whole film, oohing and ahhing at the long-lost pictures and thrilled at the experience of seeing herself on the silver screen. She came to Sundance and did Q&A's in her best finery, stayed after in the lobby to talk to audience members individually, and generally played the role of the film star. It was only after four or five public screenings, the morning after the film won an award at Sundance, most of the family and public having returned home, the screening room only half full, did another reality seem to sink in. At this screening, a woman down the row started to sob, audibly, as soon as the film got going. My mother was visibly annoyed, and she kept huffing and shooting the woman long glances as if to tell her to stop ruining the moment for her. My mom eventually calmed down, and by the end, the unbelievable happened: she gripped my hand, started to cry, and told me, "I think I hear you now." Of course, that's really the beginning of the story more than the end, with years of counseling, phone calls, treatment and changes ensuing, but that's enough for now.

QUESTION:
Your brother did the music, how did he feel about the project and the film?
ANSWER:
From the beginning, my brother supported the project with time, ideas, and much-needed photos, along with my sister and father. He and I had tried without success to collaborate on a few of my films before, but this time seemed right. He used to play the guitar long into the night when I would come to visit him on weekends during grad school. He would serenade me while I fell asleep with exactly the music you hear in the film. There was never any doubt that the music came from the same sad place as the film, and recording and editing in the music was one of most seamless and joyful parts of the whole process of making the film. He has never told me outright how he feels, and I am ashamed to say I may never have been brave enough to ask. But he has been so supportive of me during the production and the aftermath, and has even come to film festivals with me. I think his feelings about the project and film come out in his music, and I hope that's not a cop-out...

QUESTION:
The film has a beautiful, dreamlike quality to it. How did you achieve the unique look? Since it's a documentary, why did you go after that approach?
ANSWER:
When I wrote [in an above answer] that the single sustaining image of the production process was that of giving the film as a gift to my mother, I think I was really talking about the issue this question addresses: tone. I tried to make each choice based on the tone of this gift, and the effect, though originally done to mitigate my fear of making an overly self-indulgent film, was that the form and the content were pretty much drawn from the same tonal pool. I had a lot of help with these choices on the part of my classmates and professors, and I attribute much of the clarity in this realm to their help.

I would like to elaborate on some of the specific stylistic choices. Spike Lee's FOUR LITTLE GIRLS inspired the treatment of the photos. I hope he sees imitation as flattery...As for the video footage, I projected the hi-8 footage onto moving surfaces, such as velum, the reflective part of a flex-fill, and a billowing white sheet. I re-shot those projections with 16mm. I felt like a straight video-to-film transfer would be inappropriate, as the video footage documented a really rare time, when my brother, sister and I were all together with our mom. The elusiveness and preciousness of these moments seemed better served by a fleeting, pulsing, moving projection surface than by a two-dimensional one. The underwater footage recalls some of the first moments in my life when I remember having my own thoughts on solitude and beauty. It was also an attempt to address some of the fragility of my own body image, and suggests the split between the real world of my regular life (in real air, on solid earth) and that of my mother (silent, otherworldly).

It helps me to think of my work as situated in the world of creative non-fiction, rather than in the industry of documentary film. I don't watch television, I am not drawn to documentaries as a genre, and I find myself most specifically interested in the personal, in the subjective, in the beauty of the endless interpretations of that thing called reality.