As for dictating to the audience what they're meant to see and synthesize about her feature debut Orphans, Ry Russo-Young remains in large part hands-off. "I kind of prefer to let the audience bring their thoughts to it," she writes after our initial phone interview.

A layered story of two estranged sisters, Sonia and Rosie, Orphans makes use of theatricality, experimental cinema and landscapes of isolation. "The more I make films in general I realize that in my personal process I work from locations," she says. "I’ve read that David Lynch starts films with music; he’ll hear a song, and he’ll write a scene around a song. I feel like I’m that way with locations. I’ll go somewhere and find it amazing, beautiful and fascinating, and just start taking pictures. Then I’ll find a scene that will take place in that location or the content of the scene will manifest what the location is saying. I’m more comfortable with visuals I guess, and that’s a way for me to express what’s going on internally."

With its influence from Ingmar Bergman, Orphans allows raw emotion to explore the mystery of familial relationships, how despite their intrinsic intimacy, these are never easily understood. Speaking to this mystery, Russo-Young breaks down two of the primary film sequences and also talks about the genesis of her filmmaking.

SM: With the dance sequence, one of the first things I noticed about this section is how sexy it is, sexy in a way that it’s not sexual. There’s not a feeling that you’re attempting as a director to partake in any epicurean tangent, but there’s something undeniably sexy in the relationship between these two sisters. On top of that, there’s a sense of possession related to that. How did you go about crafting that in that sequence?

RRY: With the sequence, and the whole film in general, I didn’t want to make it a sexual thing. The sisters can be sexy in their own way, but it’s really more about being female, just the way that sex is part of you. They’re not performing for anyone but each other. In so many films that I watch, girls are always acting like little sex kittens, acting sexy to impress and to put on a show. I didn’t want to see that in this movie,…and so when they’re dancing, it’s about their childhood and the bonds that they used to have. It’s playing with the idea of being sexy when you’re younger, how you don’t even know what sexy means or what it is but you’re just beginning to experiment with it. We tried to draw on that innocence, that first innocence of discovering your body…

SM: There’s also a destructive nature to the way that innocence plays with the sexiness. As it builds, it, at least for me, was quite uncomfortable. The several times I’ve watched the scene, I’ve felt progressively uncomfortable with the way the characters literally spiral into a decline. I don’t know if that’s inherent in the nature of the way women develop from innocence into adulthood, into the sexual nature of what they are later on—

RRY: I hope not! I hope it’s not all like that. I hope it’s just these characters that spiral into a decline, and even with their destructive nature, I hope it’s not true in the long run.

SM: Every woman, I think, has to go through that spiral at sometime, that confusion between childhood and adulthood, mixed in with feelings about womanhood.

RRY: Yeah, in some ways when you’re just learning how to be a woman in the world, it’s a big issue for you, negotiating how you’re going to be sexy and what it is you’re going to be a woman for you. (Rosie and Sonia) went through that together, and there are traces of that idea in the movie.

SM: Specifically with the part of the sequence where Sonia clings to Rosie, I wasn’t sure if I was to interpret it as a homoerotic play on the moment, or if I was to take that as an incredible need Sonia feels for Rosie.

RRY: We approached it that (Sonia’s) need is so great that it might be a little bit three-notches more that what somebody else would deem as appropriate. For Sonia, it’s completely appropriate that she would hold her sister that tight, and she doesn’t understand why her sister is pulling away. For Rosie, it’s one step too close. (Sonia) needs a little too much, and it does cross those boundaries I think for Rosie…So, it depended on which character I was talking to. I tried to tell them different things. I usually don’t like Rosie to hear what I’m saying to Sonia and vice versa. Sonia can’t think that her behavior is wrong. She thinks that she’s completely justified. She wanted to give her sister a really big hug, but the reasons behind why she’s giving her sister such a big hug are so immense that the hug might come off a little strong for Rosie.

SM: Staying in this sequence, Zac Posen did the dresses, and I wanted to know a little bit about the two dresses because I think they speak volumes about the characters.

RRY: We went to Zac’s studio and tried on a bunch of different dresses. Sonia’s is a little inappropriate, it doesn’t really fit, she’s always trying to stuff herself into something that isn’t quite her. It’s glitzy and shiny the way her character is glitzy and shiny, and it has almost a medieval Puritan feel the same way her character has a survivalist, soldier type quality. She’s going to bulldoze a little bit, whereas Rosie’s dress is a little bit looser. You can almost see through it the way the material has holes in it, and so in a way, she’s almost a more open book. The gray was a little more subdued just like Rosie’s a little smoother around the edges, trying to hold it together, but it was also about to break. Her dress is a lot more fragile than Sonia’s whose look is more durable.

SM: Also talking about costume design, the sisters are continually opposite in color, and that felt deliberate. So Sonia is in pink or red contrasting Rosie’s greens and blues. The most overt use of this is in the first bedroom scene where we find Sonia in white and Rosie in black. So, how did you go about working with colors for these characters?

RRY: A lot of it was instinctual honestly. We worked together in terms of what colors the characters would like, but it all came out of the choices that we all agreed on about the characters and who the characters were. Since we all were on the same page about who the characters were, we usually were on the same page about what they would wear. (The actresses) kind of would decide separately what they would wear, and when we put it together, if it didn’t look right, we would change something. But, usually those things happened naturally.

Crew of Orphans, photo courtesy Ry Russo-Young

SM: There was a four-month rough-cut process and then basically an entire year to get the editing done. So, I won’t belabor too much about that, but I did want to know about one particular sequence of editing, and that would be the last sequence when we see Rosie head to the car junkyard. The most interesting thing for me about that sequence is that it feels both very comfortable and expected as a viewer. Then the thing that ends up throwing me as a viewer is the cutaway to the deer walking up the mountain, and it threw me in a really good way. It seems hopeful in a situation that is leading up to be hopeless. How did you decide to use that cutaway, and how did you do that shot? Was it luck?

RRY: I always wanted to use animals in the movie, have animals be metaphors that were around, alive and existing. They’re fascinating in that they operate in packs, have families, give birth, have humane qualities. So, whenever we’d see animals while we were shooting, I’d say, “Let’s get it. Let’s get it. Let’s go shoot it.” So, we happened to get those here, and there were four deer. Two were up on the hill, and one was turning around to look at the other as if, “Are you going to come now? Are you going to go? What choice are you going to make?” It felt very appropriate to have that cutaway because it was the exact thing that Rosie was going through at that moment in the movie. “Am I going to come? Am I going to go? What am I going to do?”

SM: (Iranian director Amir Naderi) also worked on the editing process. How did you connect with him, and how has he influenced your work?

RRY: Amir’s a specially unique filmmaker. I met him when I was 16, still in high school through a casting director who was also a theater teacher at my school. I was acting in The Chairs by (Eugene Ionesco). It’s an absurdist and dark play. He saw me in that play and thought that I was interesting, and I basically ended up calling him up and asking him for work in film. I knew he was a filmmaker, I’d met him by that time, and I wanted to learn more about film. So, he basically began teaching me all about film history, and in a way he was like a film school for me. He taught me, made me watch all the (Jean-Luc Godard) films over Thanksgiving when I was 16-years-old, and I was just so hungry to learn about film that I did. He’s definitely educated me in the classical sense from (Michangelo Antonioni) to Godard to early (Francis Ford Coppola), all kinds of directors.

He was also really influential in just getting me to make films...He taught me not only the history of cinema but also about [the importance of] being this extremely passionate person, just the idea that if you want to make a movie, you have to go make one; you have to go make many and figure out what you care about, how to infuse that film with that passion.

Orphans screens tonight as part of the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series. For more information on the film visit www.orphansmovie.com.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Show/Hide comments

Show/Hide comment form