Movies

Marina Rice Bader on moving beyond coming out stories with “Ava’s Impossible Things”

Loved for her work on films like Anatomy of a Love Seen and Raven’s Touch, Marina Rice Bader is back with a new movie, Ava’s Impossible Things. The film looks at the life of Ava (Chloe Farnworth), who’s been taking care of her mom who has Huntington’s disease, which Ava’s also inherited. Stuck at home, she’s seen her older sister flourish and her high school best friend and crush, Jessa (Lauryn Nicole Hamilton), move away. But with her mom’s health worsening, they’re both back to offer support. A shocking announcement, however, ruins the happy day and sends Ava into a tailspin and on a trip to a fantasy world of her own creation.

We recently spoke with Marina ahead of the movie’s world premiere at Outfest. We talked about Ava and Jessa’s history, the challenges she faced with funding and shooting, her plans to open up her future films to general audiences and more.

Warning: Slight spoilers ahead

AfterEllen.com: Ava’s Impossible Things is the first film to receive an investment from Vimeo’s “Share the Screen” initiative. Can you explain what that’s about and its significance?

Marina Rice Bader: They launched this amazing initiative at Sundance this year called “Share the Screen” and it’s all about helping deal with the incredible imbalance in the filmmaking world. They want to lift up female filmmakers and they want to help make sure the female voice is heard via filmmaking. So they created this wonderful filmmakers fund. I was lucky enough to be the first recipient of that. They’re doing that for other female filmmakers, they’re starting to do some original content, and highlighting the female filmmakers on their blogs and when they send out to their members. It’s really amazing and I wish more businesses would follow suit because it would be very easy for the other video platforms to follow suit and do such a thing.

AE: The film was also partially fan-funded, correct?

MRB: Yes, it was. There was some crowdfunding involved. We had one executive producer who invested a large chunk of money—that’s Jan Miller Corran. I had such a hard time raising money for this film, which is why starting with the next film it’s going to be a completely different model, a completely different kind of film with a little bit of a wider net to cast as far as my audience. I had to spend some of my own money on this film.

As a filmmaker who’s giving so much time and energy to the whole thing, you want that to be your investment. You don’t want to have to freaking cash out your IRA to make a lesbian movie when there’s so many lesbians who are wanting content, who are feeling that when they go to rent a movie or watch a movie there’s not enough choices for them. I don’t understand why all lesbians don’t donate $10 for me to make a movie. But they don’t, so I’ve kind of come to the realization that I’m not going to be able to create film for my community based on support from my community, and it’s really heartbreaking. There was a time during all of this when I thought, “Wow, I wonder if this is going to be my last film?”

AE: You mentioned casting a wider net—does that mean loosening the focus of the films? Like not as lesbian-centric?

MRB: Exactly. It makes me really sad to say it, but it’s just the way it is. Actually, what I just said to you I’ve never said to anybody else before because I just kind of went, “Oh yeah, I guess that is the state of the situation.” But the next film is going to be an action film. It’ll still be female-led, the protagonist will still be a lesbian, but it’s going to be a female ensemble action film with a very, very strong protagonist who basically is—she’s going to be the next true American hero. But this is what I’m talking about with casting a wider net: everyone can understand what an action film is.

In general, men aren’t going to understand what is Ava’s Impossible Things, what is Anatomy of a Love Seen. In terms of investing. “How am I going to make money back?” But a really, really well done action film with incredible fight choreography and stunts and just end to end with action with a wonderful personal journey at the core, with a hero that we really fall in love with, everybody can understand that. Everybody can understand patriotism, everyone can understand saving their country, saving their family. And that’s what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about stepping away from my lesbian audience. I’m talking about creating a film that honors them, but at the same time allows more people in.

I got my eye on somebody. I can’t talk about it right now, but she is such a badass. She’s amazing. And so I’m just really visualizing her this whole time for the project and hopefully that will all work out. My audience will be insane if I can get her. So that’s what I’m working on.

AE: You’ve mentioned that Ava’s Impossible Things was your most ambitious project yet. In what ways did you mean that?

MRB: It’s my most ambitious in that I am the writer and the director and the producer and I’ve never been all three before. And this was our largest budget film to date and we had a very large cast originally. But what happened was a huge chunk of money fell out at the last minute and so I had to completely rewrite the script to turn 15 days of shooting into nine. You can imagine how much I had to cut out. It was insane. Every night after we finished filming I was rewriting. It turned out to be quite an event. It’s the largest set I’ve ever worked on, it’s the biggest production value we’ve ever had.

AE: I read you also had some issues with the weather while you were shooting.

MRB: Unfortunately after we had cut from 15 days to nine days, as we’re out on our location in Santa Clarita, we had the Santa Ana’s just kind of come in. We were keeping our eye on them, but they came in a much bigger fashion than they were expected. Basically our last two days of exterior filming we had to shut down the production. Which was horrible, considering the cuts we were already making. And whenever you have to start all over from scratch, you’re spending so much money. So I had to spend the next two months raising enough to go and completely recreate our exterior set on a protected soundstage.

That was a little bummer, but there’s pretty much always a silver lining. More things have happened on this film than all the other four films combined in terms of challenges, but the good news is even that, even having to spend all our post money getting these last few days on a soundstage, it was that happening and my having to go out and start yet another fundraising [campaign] for postproduction that Vimeo saw what I was doing. I never would have had this honor, had this happen. Yes, I have to pay them back. Yes, that would be great if that money was going directly to the investors and myself, but the fact is I get to be part of this amazing thing, this amazing initiative, and the first film to receive it. And there is something to that and that’s what I’m focusing on.

AE: You mentioned this film had the biggest budget yet. Now you never want to tell a creative person to be less ambitious, but do you think a smaller budget would have made a difference in terms of crowdfunding?

MRB: Not really because the thing is nobody knew what my budget was. You’re doing everything you can do as a filmmaker to raise funds. You’re giving things away, you’re connecting on a super personal level, which is what I do. And I think that’s why I’ve been blessed with a great fan base so far. I mean, I answer every email. Nobody else posts on Facebook for me. I am very personally connected with my audience. That is one of the things that’s really worked in my favor and I love it. And they know my commitment to them. People come on board as they want to. Things are getting more expensive these days. Except Anatomy of a Love Seen, which was a very specific case, the other films I’ve made have hovered around $200,000. Going up by $50,000 is not a huge leap in terms of a feature film. It’s like minimal.

It’s just I think in this day and age with all the crowdfunding platforms and the GoFundMes—everybody’s asking for something. I don’t want to say it’s over, but it’s not what it once was because there’s too many people asking for things now. And even something that I’m super passionate about, that I know my audience is looking for, everybody’s kind of getting to the point where they’re like strapped and they’re keeping their money to themselves. And I get it.

The other tough thing is it’s very difficult to get women to support the films. I just found out that one of my friends who had a film last year, like hardly anybody went to her screening. Like hardly anybody would spend that money to go support a lesbian film that was scheduled at Outfest. But the boy films are all super packed. The women have to come out. When the films come out, go support them. Spend the $5 to rent it or the $12.99 to buy it if you want to or go to the screenings that are put on. There’s lots of ways to support.

AE: Let’s move on to the film’s content. I was wondering if there was a specific reason why you chose Huntington’s disease as being what essentially held these women captive. Do you have a personal connection to the disease, or what was your thinking there?

MRB: Everyone knows about Alzheimer’s and a lot of people know about Parkinson’s, but Huntington’s is a disease that a lot of people have never even heard of. I kind of wanted to shine a light on it a little bit, but it’s familiar enough that people recognize it because it has a lot of the same specific issues that dementia or Alzheimer’s has. So it’s recognizable but it’s something different. In my own demographic, a lot of people are caring for their parents. I think maybe Huntington’s is something that people aren’t necessarily looking out for because the symptoms are so similar to other things. It’s a horrible, horrible disease. There’s no cure for it. And the most frightening part of it is that if you are an adult, by the time you find out that this is what you have, you’ve already had your kids. Because it’s not diagnosed until, generally, forties, sometimes into fifties. And guess what? It is a 50 percent chance that your kid will have Huntington’s as well.

AE: The film also tackles euthanasia and in doing so goes into controversial waters. Why that choice?

MRB: Because I believe it’s a viable choice for people with no way out. In this particular situation, I made it a choice that a lot of people will understand, especially people who are parents. If you’ve never had kids, you can make the choice to stay or go and it’s your choice to make. But man when you have kids, everything changes. Faye is laying there day after day seeing her daughter give her life to caring for her. Faye knows that everyday that Ava’s there taking care of her is a day that Ava is not living her life, and she does not have a long life in front of her. What else would you do? I clearly made this choice on what I would do if I was in the same situation that I created for Faye. I would never let my kids do that. I created a situation where it was a clear and understandable choice. Even for people that don’t believe in it, in this particular circumstance, I would have to think everyone would support her choice.

AE: So outside of the fantasy world you created, what is your intended setting for the film? I noticed the three related women have English accents, but the other characters don’t.

MRB: Any town, anywhere, any place. That is my goal. We never name it, we never talk about it, we never show an exterior. And the reason, of course, we do that is because Ava is trapped in her world. So I wanted to keep her world very small, which means inside the house. And so it could be anywhere. It was in my mind that the location is here in the States and this where the family lives. I created the film around Chloe, who was an actress I met when I was casting for Anatomy of a Love Seen. She sort of loses a little bit of her magical thing when she does an American accent. So I just decided let’s just let her be a Brit, but then, of course, I was locked into casting native Brits for the mother and the sister. I got very lucky with those two because they’re both amazing and they all look like they could certainly be part of the same family.

AE: What is it about Ava that makes her place her life on hold for her mom? Her older sister, Anna, for instance, doesn’t.

MRB: By the time Faye was sick, Anna was already out of the house. Anna was already onto her successful life. Ava was on her way, but then her mom got sick. Originally it was manageable just with Ava moving back into the house and taking care of her mom. She still had a little bit of a social life at that point. But then it continues to downward spiral. So eventually they have someone who comes in and helps them with some home health stuff. But this is one of those things that happens little by little.

For Ava, she stops going out as much, she’s home more, she’s taking on more responsibilities. And before she knows it, she’s lost her outside relationships and she’s giving her life to her mom. It’s what a lot of children choose to do. And then Ava’s pretty soon seeing on a daily basis what her future looks like and so she’s getting more fearful and more, “Well, what’s the use? I might as well just be here. I have my mom.” Who is now the only close relationship that she has, so then it becomes even more difficult to sever that tie. What’s she going to do? Send her somewhere? And then she’s thinking, “What’s going to happen with me when this happens to me? Is someone going to send me somewhere? Are they going to take care of me? How would I want to be treated when I’m at my mom’s stage?” It’s like all those things play into it.

AE: Staying with that, having witnessed her mom’s pain and her poor quality of life, why is it harder for Ava to let her go than Anna, who didn’t witness a lot of this but is able to be at peace with her mom’s decision a lot faster?

MRB: Ava’s entire life for the last three years has been her mother and their relationship. They have been incredibly close her whole life. And now Ava considers her mother wanting to kill herself doing it for her, doing it only for Ava. She doesn’t want that responsibility. She doesn’t want her mother deciding to end her own life so that Ava can have a life. That’s a huge thing. That in combination with losing your sole support, the person you see every day from dawn till dusk and who depends on you and you’ve come to depend on them even though in a bit of an unhealthy way—Ava’s not all just a saint, though. The fact that she kept these things from her sister. Ava’s taken on a little bit of a martyr role as well. There’s a bit of a selfish thing happening there.

AE: I want to talk about Ava and Jessa now. It’s not fully spelt out in the film, but were Ava and Jessa lovers in high school?

MRB: They were not lovers, but Ava was in love with her and Jessa was in love with Ava in sort of that innocent “we don’t know what’s going on yet” way. Like I said, I went from 15 days of shooting to nine, so a lot of these things that were going to be further developed had to leave the story. But they were in love with each other. They were best friends who were planning on moving away together. In my mind, they would have discovered that romantic love. Then when Ava wasn’t able to go, that relationship didn’t get to evolve in the way that it naturally would have. And Ava is still carrying a torch for Jessa and Jessa’s still carrying a torch for Ava.

AE: At the very beginning of the film, we see Ava dreaming about making love with a mysterious brunette. Later in the film, she escapes to a fantasy world. Are these dreams common for Ava, or was it your intention to show that they all happened in one day?

MRB: My intention was that she does not escape to this fantasy world every day. It’s because her mother makes this declaration and Ava has to make this escape. But having that little snippet of the love scene upfront—I wanted to establish a little bit that Ava does have a very rich dream world and imagination, and she very often dreams of Jessa. And it’s the only time she can let go, in any way, and allow herself anything, any sort of pleasure, or put herself first, is in a dream or fantasy world.

AE: This fantasy world you created—is it because you like the fantastical, or because you believe in the power of dreams as a processing tool? Or is it maybe both?

MRB: It’s a little bit of both. There have been many times that I have woken up from a dream and remembered a lot of the details and it’s changed the way I feel about something or look at something. But more than anything, I really do believe in magic and fantasy. There was going to originally be a lot of magical realism involved in dream world, but I had to cut all of those aspects out because there was no time to film them. But I very much believe in sort of like alternate universes that people can exist on even for a short amount of time. I don’t feel like everything is so black and white as is presented to us on a daily basis. I do believe in flights of fancy and I do believe in impossible things and I do believe that letting our imaginations run wild, whether we’re awake or asleep, is a healthy thing. It needs to escape. Everybody needs their escapism. And this is Ava’s ultimate form of escapism, is this very rich life that she created when she was a child.

AE: Finally, you’re about to have your world premiere in front of a largely LGBT audience at Outfest. What are your hopes for the film’s big day?

MRB: Well I hope the theater is packed and I hope that everyone enjoys the film and walks away with something. They’re all universal themes, especially for women. Every woman out there is a mother or a daughter.

Trying to create universal themes that everyone can relate to on some level and wrapping it in an intimate journey and staying true to my audience—it’s always an interesting challenge. Because I don’t want to do coming out stories. I don’t want to do that. We did that with Elena [Undone] and I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s always looking for stories that are universal but still remain true to my lesbian audience. I don’t want to leave them, at all, and I hope I don’t have to.

Ava’s Impossible Things premieres at Outfest in Los Angeles on July 16 with Marina and the film’s cast in attendance. The movie will be available to rent on Vimeo on July 17.

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