There was a lot to unpack as Callie Hernandez began to go through her late father’s things. The actress didn’t know there was a movie in her midst, but her father Dr. John Hernandez had been a showman, often appearing on television as a medical professional to give credence to alternative therapies, becoming a regular on late night informercials where stress relief equipment of dubious efficacy. However, the gadgets were far from useless, at least for Callie, who with age could have a new understanding of how certain illusions were created while having others shattered from her childhood.
There’s a mix of fact and fiction that runs throughout “Invention,” Hernandez’s collaboration with the noted nonfiction adventurer Courtney Stephens (“Terra Femme”), with the filmmakers’ sly humor about how they’ve blurred the line revealing itself in as early as learning that they’ve adjusted Callie’s name to Carrie Fernandez for the purposes of the film. However, Hernandez’s real life experience of putting her father’s affairs in order after his passing leads to a story where the truth emerges the further removed the narrative gets from its initial inspiration as Carrie is obliged to settle in to her old home and meet with the eccentric company that her father kept to learn more about him, a responsibility that may not require her to travel more than a few miles but pushes her well out of her comfort zone and covers far more ground when it seems as if visits to antique dealers and mechanics (mischievously played by other filmmakers such as James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Joe Swanberg and Caveh Zahedi) evolve into a survey of a country where everything has become strange territory.
Filmed on 16mm, “Invention” feels in a tactile sense like an artifact from another time, but it is eerily prescient as Carrie’s trip into her father’s past seems to foretell a future in which science and history are being questioned as they never have before when people no longer share a central reality. However, if the isolation in front of the camera foments an atmosphere of dread as its heroine walks a lonely road, the partnership behind it is cause for celebration when it brings together two of the more daring filmmakers around who have prized collaboration as a means to push themselves and the form itself further. Whether it’s Hernandez working off the grid on genre-defying efforts with Pete Ohs (“Jethica,” “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick”) or Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (“The Endless”) or Stephens teaming up with Michael Almereyda (“John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office”) and Pacho Velez (“The American Sector”) to unearth hidden histories that have shaped the present, thetheir work has actively demonstrated how a whole can be can be greater than the sum of its parts.
After premiering last fall at the Locarno Film Festival, “Invention” is starting its U.S. run this week at Metrograph in New York, getting the event treatment it deserves with Hernandez and Stephens in attendance for post-screening Q & As over the weekend and going the extra mile when programming the complementary series “Weird Medicine,” pairing a new restoration of Robert Kramer’s 1988 drama “Doc’s Kingdom” (April 18 and 21) and an afternoon of documentary curiosities (April 20). Shortly before the two headed east, we were fortunate to catch up with the dynamic duo while they were in Los Angeles for the film’s U.S. premiere at the L.A. Festival of Movies where they spoke about a project a long time coming, managing a process that was open to discovery and releasing the film into this particular cultural climate.
How did you join forces on this?
Callie Hernandez: Courtney and I go back way back and we both were involved in Terrence Malick movies…
Courtney Stephens: The godfather of our friendship.
Callie Hernandez: [laughs] Sorry Terry, but you are the godfather of our friendship. Then flash forward ten years later in New York City and we ran into each other at a Hong Sang Soo screening at Lincoln Center, which are where our film is playing [New Directors/New Films]. We just started chatting and I had rented a house that I knew I wanted to make a bunch of films in and [Courtney] felt like we should make something together.
Courtney Stephens: We have a lot of shared interests, [particularly in] esoteric American stuff, so it was fun. And I mainly make nonfiction films, so I was excited to try to do something with performance and fiction because it was not what I was experienced with. But the terms were so free when we started. We were really just brainstorming, spitballing a lot of different impulses and ideas and things that we found fascinating and it all was play until it was on set and then we had to make it happen with no crew and not a lot [in terms of resources]. The two of us were the whole crew with our cinematographer Rafael [Palacio Illingsworth, director of “Between Us”].
How did he come into the mix? I remember his feature directorial debut, but I was interested to see him work as a cinematographer here.
Courtney Stephens: Yeah, Rafa and I went to graduate school together at the AFI, but it was his first time [as a cinematographer on someone else’s project]. He was like, “Sure, I’ll shoot your movie, but only if it’s on film because that would be fun for me” and we wanted to, but it definitely made it more difficult. in the end, the limitations of that helped form the grammar of the film, so it was really fortunate.
Callie Hernandez: Right before [this interview], we were watching a few minutes of the film and I was just flashing on Rafa when we were seeing the shot of the machine. We were in this woman’s basement in Albany, shooting this machine and we were gaffing our own things. We had no lights and we just had to make shift lighting. It was o e of the most strenuous things because we had a very limited amount of time in this poor woman’s house, and looking at [this shot], [I thought] “Wow, Rafa did such a beautiful job just [creating] this light from literally a lamp and foil and the bag in which the reflector came in that you had to poke a hole through. I was like, “Dang, I’m so glad Rafa is here because even watching it now, that looks perfect.” Thank God for Rafa.
You actually have a surprising amount of archival material from Callie’s father’s TV appearances. Was that a foundational building block?
Callie Hernandez: Weirdly no. It’s funny because my dad had passed away maybe a year prior and I always knew about his archive when my sister and I rediscovered it in a garage full of stuff. When we were going through it, of course she was like, “I don’t want this,” and I was so grateful that I get to keep this. I knew there was this machine of his, an electromagnetic healing device that he owned but didn’t invent. It’s four feet tall and I was talking with [my sister] yesterday and she was talking about how she remembers how obsessed I was with this machine. I just knew I wanted to do something with that, but when we first got together, I kept saying we should make a dead dads movie because we had that in common and it was fresh on my mind. But we actually initially started with an idea from film called “Dick at the Dump.”
Courtney Stephens: It was full fiction.
Callie Hernandez: There was this guy Dick who worked at the local dump in my town and he’s really fascinating.
Courtney Stephens: And we went and tried to talk to him.
Callie Hernandez: And he wanted nothing to do with us! [laughs] Absolutely not interested. And then we had a quiet ride home and I said, “I guess we’re not making that movie.” Then I shared my dad’s archive with Courtney and that was the jumping off point to say, “Okay, I knew I wanted to make a film, but I didn’t realize it was going to be this film, integrating that stuff with my dad until it was.
Courtney Stephens: [That material] made me feel like something could be made in in post because I’m much more comfortable as an editor, trying to puzzle things together. It definitely felt like it opened this huge door, not just to Dr. Hernandez’s archive, but also just to archival material in general and this time of infomercials [with] the way media can propel us into these other periods even if it’s not directly home movies, but just media in general. It can really put you back in your childhood.
One of the incredible elements of the film is how you’re able to foster that nostalgia while exposing the perils in it when Dr. Hernandez is someone who captures the imagination, but particularly as a child who grows up you realize may be out of touch with reality. How much did you want to make this a film about myth making in that way?
Callie Hernandez: There’s actually a whole scene of talking exactly about what you’re talking about that didn’t make it into the film, but it was in our minds for sure.
Courtney Stephens: Yeah, we were always thinking about this realm of belief and of course on the surface, the film is about medical systems and medical belief and healing modalities, but we’re talking a lot about having a parent who challenges your ability to fully believe in their world, but also that you understand that in order to be close to this person you have to buy in. We talked a lot about having fathers with this really powerful centrifugal force inside of them, and what it is to doubt that and struggle with that. But in terms of myth-making on a larger level, we’re certainly thinking about the country and the big daddy of belief and a grand myth that isn’t really holding its own – these American mythologies that were designed to be broken and I guess we’re seeing them fall right now. That was all on our minds, and the way the world is, it’s only accelerating into the world of the film that we were experiencing in real time with a lot of the people we were finding.
Returning to the “Dick at the Dump” idea, the film does find a loose structure in these very interesting places and people you’d find in them. Did that shape the narrative or was it pretty loose in creating scenarios?
Callie Hernandez: It’s a combination of a couple of different things. Location was definitely there and I had spent the winter by myself in that house. I’m certainly not from New England, but I am a small-town girl in that I like to know all my neighbors, whether it’s Dick at the dump or Paul who works at the antique shop. So there is a little bit of that that informed it, but between Courtney and I’s shared experiences and characterizations of eccentric people that were in my dad’s life or Courtney’s father’s life…
Courtney Stephens: Or just in this town…
Callie Hernandez: …the deeper we got into the filming process, the more this conspiratorial material was just coming toward the film and that was just total coincidence and an interesting surprise.
Courtney Stephens: We had a full storyline in this film about someone stealing the machine. There was a thriller element to the film when we initially outlined it and it was going to be higher stakes in terms of plot, but as we started doing it, we realized these encounters and getting to know a parent through other people’s projections and memories was actually the point of the film. We actually let go of some stuff that we thought would tie it into this narrative bow…
Callie Hernandez: And we did shoot some of it, but it was sculpted out of the edit. Certain things didn’t work and it felt forced.
Callie, that’s usually a part of the process I imagine you’re not a part of when you’re an actor. Was it interesting being in the edit, knowing that was another way to sculpt the performance?
Callie Hernandez: I wasn’t really, but I approached this not really as an actress, but more like someone who just makes films with a collaborative spirit. I shot a couple movies with Pete Ohs and he’s an editor, so the way that he shoots and the foundation for the structure of making [those films and] this film was just nightly visitations of what happened that day [talking about] what was working and what wasn’t and then preparing for the next day. I picked up that you edit as you go in a certain narrative form and [as far as the performance] I knew I wanted to be stiff in the beginning because it’s an uncomfortable position that she’s not quite sure what to do and then as we got deeper into filming, I knew that there was going to be a blossoming.
What’s it been like to start getting it out into the world?
Callie Hernandez: We’re at the beginning of it now, this is the first U.S. screening [at L.A. Festival of Movies] and we will be back in New York at Film at Lincoln Center, which is where it all started.
Courtney Stephens: But it’s been a while since we’ve seen it and we just sat in [the screening] for five or ten minutes. We were just going to check the sound level and leave, but it was really electric to hear people really be with the film and that it’s playing it for an American audience. It’s like so different than playing it for a European audience. There’s something in the pathos of some of the stuff going on that’s just so American and I was just thinking oh, it feels really good…
Callie Hernandez: And the timing is so different now. It’s hitting a different spot, so it’s very interesting. There’s a lot of laughs.
Courtney Stephens: People are feeling it.
“Invention” opens on April 18th in New York at Metrograph.