“The Lovin’ Oven” may be an upgrade to the room that Rose (Lucy Fry) planned to have at The Crown Inn, the kitschy hideaway she seeks out for refuge in “I Live Here Now,” but it becomes a sad reminder of the various things that the young woman is carrying around with her. A crib in the corner of the suite is an especially frustrating part of the accommodations for the fix she’s in when she’s looking to unburden herself of an unwanted pregnancy she just learned of as well as the accompanying anger she holds towards her flippant partner Travis (Matt Rife) and his domineering mother Martha (Sheryl Lee), who has insisted on an abortion when she doesn’t want Rose, an aspiring actress, to be a part of their bloodline. The room may generally be reserved for couples on their honeymoon, but it couldn’t feel any more lonely with the eternal Valentines’ Day decor making it feel as if all love is artificial.
If Rose checked into the Crown as a way of getting away from reality, it would be the rare part of her life that wouldn’t be considered a disappointment in Julie Pacino’s trippy debut feature which tracks her heroine’s descent into madness and pushes past any rational line of thought to burrow deep into the subconscious. Although the film’s provided tactility by the director committing the psychological thriller to celluloid where all its grit and scratches become part of Rose’s restlessness within the frame, it also captures how she feels the ground crumbling beneath her feet, disillusioned when the idea that she is unequipped in any way to become a mother, not only emotionally but practically when she was led to believe that from an early age that such a thing wouldn’t be possible after a procedure she had as a child. Being stuck at a resort off the grid in Idyllwild where only the communal dining room has wi-fi, Rose is plunged back into the trauma she experienced then when it felt like her body was just as much of a prison and a pursuit of the arts hasn’t provided an escape when she’s been told to lose weight to book jobs and the timing of her pregnancy couldn’t be worse when she’s only just landed a a much-desired meeting with an agent (Cara Seymour) who could finally jumpstart her career.
“It can get pretty dark in here,” a fellow guest (Madeline Brewer) at the inn tells Rose, but as bleak a situation as “I Live Here Now” illustrates, it does so in bold, fluorescent colors as its main character’s mind runs wild and while the film finds Rose in her weakest moment, it allows Fry to show considerable strength in a fearless turn as someone who’s long been subject to others’ whims and realizes that her survival will depend on how much control she can take over her own life. On the eve of the film’s premiere at Fantasia Fest in Montreal this week en route to Locarno and Edinburgh, Pacino and Fry spoke about how they created a solid foundation for the character with a fragile psyche, how the director took control over her own destiny in order to make such her daringly delirious feature debut and ultimately how the two gave each other the confidence to see the unnerving character study through to its natural end.
How did this come about?
Julie Pacino: I just wanted to make some art. I had made a bunch of shorts and I felt like I wanted to start tackling my first feature, so what better way than an extremely personal, fractured horror film about a woman in trouble? [laughs] I wrote the first draft, which was a short film called “I Live Here Now” [as well] that I wrote during the pandemic. At that point, it was really an allegory for being stuck in Los Angeles. I’m a New Yorker, and I was stuck out here, and it grew from there and got legs. And I met Lucy Fry, and we worked closely on crafting the character.
Lucy Fry: When I met Julie, I came in with a lot of ideas about it, because it was speaking to a very deep part of myself and that’s a good thing when you read something and it makes you feel afraid in a way that’s challenging and means it’s igniting something true. It’s a very emotionally intense story, and I was pretty scared and intimidated by it, because as an actress, it would require going to really deep places, and I think Julie had that experience, as she was casting, of finding that this role would be requiring a lot of bravery. And when I spoke to Julie, our conversation was what made me really want to do it. I was like, “Oh, wow, her vision, her openness to talking about things, to collaborating, to figuring out the story together, it became like I got to bring my ideas and my truths to it as well, so it grew into this new thing that fused both of our experiences.” So it was like making art and that’s every creative’s dream is to get the chance to make art that’s meaningful to us and we got to do that.
You really bring the internal out externally in so many ways and beyond the performance, what was it like to have this incredible production design to work with?
Julie Pacino: It was like a dream come true. We built the whole thing on a soundstage, which was really important to the story because the location is absolutely a character in the film and it was the first time I’ve ever made something on a soundstage. I’ve always just shot on location for my short films and I guess when you upgrade, you get to make stuff on soundstages. That was really amazing because I could fill the space with things that mattered to the story. I love being able to plant little details in the viewer’s subconscious. From the wallpaper that we used to the lampshade, everything has an intention and a purpose and Hannah and Lucie, the production design women from Lunah, were incredible. I don’t know how they did what they did because I threw some pretty wild ideas at them, but it was really like stepping into an alternate universe. It was quite a world that we built out there.
Lucy Fry: It really helped me go into the state of the character in this being in that subconscious liminal realm where she’s realizing things and stuck in this nightmare, but also, she’s inside of aspects of herself. Her room being so womb-like was very, very intense to interact with and I really enjoyed the way that the space was like a scene partner because there’s a lot of scenes where Rose is there by herself. There wasn’t any lack of stimulation to help me reach the states that were needed for the scenes because I could just look around and be surrounded by such an intense, emotionally charged room.
Lucy, were there any choices about this character you were particularly proud of to have made when you could go as far as you wanted with it?
Lucy Fry: Yeah, in order to make the story grounded, I knew that I had to really delve into my own subconscious and do a lot of dream work, which I had done with this amazing coach, Elizabeth Kemp, many years ago. She taught me this method of using your dreams in acting and that really brought things to life. Then Julie was great at holding space for me to really go to this deep, deep place that the character needed to be in.
When it comes to choices that I’m proud of, there is the final scene that Julie wrote and I was thinking, “How am I going to do that?” And then Julie [said], “Maybe we should get rid of it. And I was like, no, no, no, no, we shouldn’t get rid of it. It’s going to be good.” And then I came up with this whole somatic idea of how to do that scene. Right before we were going to shoot it, I said to Julie, “Maybe we don’t need that scene. Maybe we should delete it.” And then Julie was like, “No, no, no, we’re going to keep it.” So we both were scared of it and then would egg each other on to do it, and I’m really proud of that scene.
Julie Pacino: Me too. That last scene is something I’m extremely proud of and I’m proud of Lucy for the depths that she went to with that. It was an incredible experience. We loaded the camera with an 11-minute mag because we shot on 35 millimeter and we all just tuned into the present moment. It’s my first feature, so the mantra for me and all of my collaborators was let’s just not pull any punches. This might be the only time we get to do this. We don’t take this opportunity for granted. So if it’s scary, like to Lucy’s point, let’s just embrace it and go for it and not shy away from that and I’m really just so happy with what we were able to capture on film. The rawness of the movie is a thing that I set out to achieve just to preserve that raw artistry of my first time making a feature and I think we did that.
What’s it like getting it to the point of sharing it with the world?
Julie Pacino: It’s really a lot of things. Obviously, [we’re] super excited and nervous. Fantasia is an incredible festival. The programmers have been wonderful and really understand this movie. That feels nice just to be seen in that way and I’m super excited about the audiences there. I make art because I love connecting with people and I love conversations around cinema. so there’s a lot of excitement to finally be able to unveil this film and connect with people and hear their thoughts and what it meant to them.
“I Live Here Now” will screen at Fantasia Fest on July 24th and 25th at the Salle J.A. de Seve. It will also screen at the Locarno Film Festival on August 9th at the Palacinema 1 at 3 pm, August 10th at PalaCinema 2 at 4 pm, August 11th at La Sala at 5:30 pm and August 13th at 2 pm at the Cinema Rialto 1.