On the ferry ride over to Gabriel Island in “Seagrass,” Stephanie (Nyha Huang Breitkreuz) makes sure her younger sister Emmy (Remi Marthaller) doesn’t run too close to the edge of the ship, though soon enough it looks like everyone in the family treading water as their parents Judith and Steve (Ally Maki and Luke Roberts) have signed up for a couples therapy retreat, dressed up as a vacation for the girls. The two find themselves amongst other kids who are mostly none the wiser about the group sessions that the adults partake in during the day, content to run amok on the sandy beaches and recreational areas that the getaway has to offer, but far from home, they can’t help but feel a bit unmoored, particularly when it comes so close to the recent loss of their grandmother on their mother’s side, unaware there may be even more of a feeling of loss coming should their parents separate.
In her arresting debut feature, Meredith Hama-Brown comes to envision the sprawling island as a place of stasis where less clarity comes from the exercises that Judith and Steve participate in to work on their marriage than from actually having to engage with others besides one another, from the couple they become closest with during therapy (Sarah Gadon and Chris Pang) to more intense time with their children, who may not know why they feel uneasy but can sense their parents’ discomfort. Judith, who is having a particularly difficult time dealing with the loss of her mother, is wondering whether she is repeating history as she thinks of her mother, but can be further frustrated when she also feels she only knows half of her story when her mother was among the generation of Japanese Canadians sent to internment camps during World War II and rarely spoke about anything from that time with her, including her marriage.
Memories and regret come to ripple throughout “Seagrass” like the waves along the beachside property, and with cinematographer Norm Li’s floating camerawork at times, Hama-Brown even suggests the presence of ghosts, but the film vibrantly captures its characters actively processing what’s happening to them and trying to decide when they start needing to put their own self-interests ahead of what they owe to their loved ones when to do the latter might do even more damage to the family as a whole. Although the ruminative drama is naturally pretty moody, as apt to capture the rolling fog in the morning as it is the gorgeous sunsets off the water, there’s a constantly enlivening playfulness throughout formally to mirror the family which continually finds ways to surprise one another when trying to entertain each other. After premiering at last year’s Toronto Film Festival where Hama-Brown took home a much deserved FIPRESCI Prize, “Seagrass” is opening across North America on both sides of the Canadian-U.S. border and the writer/director generously took the time to talk about the bewitching drama and finding fresh ways into time-old tales, as well as working hard to get both sides of a relationship into the same frame and learning the unexpected talents of her cast.
How did this come about?
When I was writing this film, I was really trying to think about what I was trying to capture and what I knew was essential and from the beginning, I wanted to talk about uncertainty, [which] you see play a part in all of the main characters’ lives. It certainly manifests in so many different ways for them, and from there, everything just began to develop further. The film talks about a lot of themes, looking at Japanese, Canadian and American identity and the experience of being mixed race, but it also looks at motherhood and grief and loneliness, [all of which] I was just really interested in exploring.
The idea of a couples retreat is really inspired, where everyone is removed from home and it’s this sprawling property where each of the different places can reflect different relationships. Did that setting come immediately to you?
Yeah, I knew that would be a very intriguing setting to explore this type of family drama and it’s familiar enough. We’ve seen these films where people go on these horrendous vacations together, but there was something that really appealed to me about them being in this enclosed space where so much can surface, and, of course, this retreat is also set on a remote island, so that aspect also plays a huge part in them feeling away from everything else and a bit trapped.
I didn’t have any specific locations in mind, but a year before we shot, I started to get very worried about locations because, as you can see in the film, it’s almost like its own character and I went searching along with the cinematographer Norm Li. We went to a whole bunch of different types of retreats and looked at so many different seaside caves. There’s only so many, but we even kayaked to an island to find one and went on a lot of hikes, eventually landing on these incredible locations. But they did take a lot of digging to find them.
Norm Li has been doing really incredible work for some time, particularly in how the camera relates to characters so intimately in such films as “The Body Remembers When the World Breaks Open”]. What was it like working with him?
We’ve worked together so many times before, we definitely have a shorthand and I knew that he would bring so much to the project. The visual language for the film really started quite conceptually because we really wanted to think about why we wanted to shoot things a certain way. In the parent scenes, we decided that we wanted to shoot them really objectively in these wide static shots as often as possible or with very controlled camera moves because we wanted to capture the stagnancy and this feeling of them just not feeling alive in their marriage or in themselves. Then with the children scenes, we talked about wanting to be with them because they really are the heart of the story in a lot of ways, so we decided to shoot that handheld and a lot closer so that we would feel what they feel a bit more subjectively. Of course, there’s some ethereal scenes in the script as well, something that we call the ghost cam and that was something that we wanted to find a unique visual language for that felt fresh and different. We wanted it to feel eerie, but also beautiful and not too scary.
There’s a great visual motif throughout that’s really captured in one shot where Judith is holding up a mirror to Steve during one of the group therapy sessions and you’re able to show the distance between them in a single frame. What was it like to find that framing in this?
Specifically, with the group therapy scenes, we wanted to make sure that we shot them a little differently each time and we thought an interesting way to do it would be that we start closer with them, almost inside of the circle and they always sit in, and then as the scenes progress, we get outside the circle. But a lot of the shots where there’s some more elaborate camera moves like the one you’re bringing up, that was just a lot of sitting down and shot listing together and discussing who we want to be with. We could’ve have just cut a little bit more, but we [thought], “Okay, maybe for these scenes, doing a really kind of slow camera move would be more interesting,” so there were a lot of conversations and we probably went through the shot list three times in its entirety before we got to set.
How did you find your family for this?
That is a great question because one of the most important parts of making the film is casting the right people, especially for this film that is so character-driven and has such demanding roles of all the actors, but especially for young kids. We started with [the role of] Judith and our casting director Jenny [Jue] found Ally Maki, as well as Chris Pang [for Pat], and then from there, we started to cast other family members and our Canadian casting directors, Cara Ide and Chris Waz were incredible. They wrote to every single acting school in Canada to find the girls [to play the daughters] and and we found them very last minute, but in the end, we were just so lucky to have found the two we did and Luke Roberts was also found from this casting process and I was just blown away by what he was bringing to the role. Our Canadian casting directors also wrote to Sarah Gadon and she agreed to do it, which is amazing.
One of the best actresses around, in my opinion.
She’s incredible and so supportive, too. She often does bigger parts than this in bigger films, but she just read it and she literally replied the next day. I was just so moved by her support for a small project like this. It meant a lot to me.
Once you get it in the hands of the actors, is there anything that changes your ideas about what this could be or who these characters are?
The actors bring everything to life, and of course, there’s certain things that are core to the film that are important, but all of the actors t really understood the part so intuitively that once we all started to work together, what they were bringing just felt so appropriate. It’s really elevating and it makes it all become very real, where I’m like, “Oh, I’m actually seeing what was written now.” It’s different in some ways, but that’s great, especially with the right people because they’re not bringing it off course in any way. It’s more like they’re adding to it [and that’s true of] every key position, really. I was very fortunate to have a wonderful team that just understood the story really well and brought so much to it.
You give the actors some pretty juicy moments like having Judith sing or the kids performing “Seasons in the Sun” for their parents. Were those touchstones for you?
Yeah, it absolutely was. love scenes like this in films and I’m personally very drawn to scenes where someone’s singing or dancing or even those silent, expressive moments, so it was wonderful working with all of the cast on that. And I was really lucky because I didn’t know Ally could sing so well. The priority was just to find someone who could play the part extremely well, but it was so hectic leading up to that karaoke scene and we were all so busy that, just a week before we shot it, I finally [asked Ally], “Okay, so can you sing?” And she can sing really well, so that was that was just really fortunate. And Nyha [Huang Breitkreuz], who played Stephanie, actually does rhythmic gymnastics, and when we cast her, we just really needed to find the right person, so the last thing I was thinking about were these extra special skills, and once I saw the tape, I knew she was the one. She did such an incredible job. But it seems like those kids can just do anything.
It seems like you can too with a magnificent feature on your hands. What’s it been like getting this out into the world over the last few months?
Everything started with its world premiere at TIFF, and that was just so, so exciting to be there because I’ve been to TIFF many times just as a visitor and supporting other films, so to have our film there was incredibly surreal. I can’t remember a single second of what happened. It was just such a whirlwind and it was so much fun and all the different festivals it’s gone to since then and now leading up to the theatrical release has just been so wonderful. It’s really exciting to share the film with audiences and getting to hear what they have to say about it.
“Seagrass” opens on February 23rd in select theaters across the U.S. and Canada, including Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal and in New York at the Roxy Cinema and the Regal Union Square and in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and Vancouver at the Cineplex 5th Avenue. A full list of theaters and dates in the U.S. is here and in Canada here.