Photo Courtesy Filmmaker

A young girl sits at an office desk and types a letter for her father. Immediately more focused and mature than he, she polishes off her work, grabs her bag and heads to school. With the lack of familial affection apparent in even this introduction, it's little wonder what unfolds in Kristina Lear's debut short Cough Drop. Refusing to shy from controversial issues, the film follows ten-year-old Kate Dewey (Julia Di Angelo) as she picks up a ride from stranger Greg Pierson (David Warshofsky). Stuck between one negligent, the other neurotic parent (James Le Gros, Marin Hinkle), Kate longs for a bonding experience that seems ever out of her reach, an experience that also lands her directly in a line of danger.

“A lot of people respond very viscerally to the movie, and it’s always very interesting for me to hear what they get and what they think about," Lear says. In the following conversation, Lear explains her own thoughts and intentions for the piece, one that dances gracefully a sinister sadness.

SM: Since theater is your background, how did you make the transition from the stage to the screen?

KL: As an actor I’m very interested in design, overall concept and how and why a story is told, and I’ve found that often as an actor my ideas and my interests lay outside the bounds of my job.

I was also increasingly fascinated with telling a story imagistically. I had a number of years ago started to write a play of this story, but then it just didn’t work. It seemed completely stagnant in that form. Then a few years later it started to come to me imagistically, and that seemed like the natural fit for the story.

SM: In terms of the story itself, you’re dealing in a bit of dangerous territory, and in this case, that’s actually a good thing. So many stories of the way in which a child synthesizes adulthood and sexuality aren’t told…Interestingly, the way it’s handled in Cough Drop is such that we don’t know where you’re going to go with those themes until the last shot, and then it’s a bit of a punch in the stomach. How did you deal with those harsh themes, try to make them gentle and work with them in such a way that you avoided, say the Welcome to the Dollhouse model?

KL: It was much more interesting to me if he didn’t, say, overtly molest her, and the real impetus for the story had always been that gray area, the fact that they both needed something and gave and got something from each other. She’s a ten-year-old who’s acting on incomplete knowledge, and the circumstance alone makes people assume that certain things are going to happen…There are some people who assume that the worst is going to happen, and they just shut down to the story entirely. But, if they don’t do that, they get to experience the much grayer side. For me, it’s really more about the subtle effects of that kind of affection and attention. For this particular girl, those are really huge in her life, as opposed to the really bold effect of overt molestation.

And, I liked the fact that he was a real character, that he wasn’t just a bad guy or totally safe; he’s really on the fence that way.

SM: Talking about those two characters, so much of the short relies on that car driving scene, the interesting thing about that scene being that while it builds tension on the one hand, on the other it’s quite long. So while there’s an underlying tension, there’s a sense that maybe nothing will happen, and that depends a lot on Julia and David being able to work off of each other and be quiet together. I feel like if the two of them hadn’t been able to hold that quietness, the scene wouldn’t have worked.

KL: Exactly, that scene is so much about what’s not said, and it was written very specifically that way. My script is on the screen, every word of it is on the screen, and there aren’t extra words. That scene is really about exactly what you’ve said, what passes between them in the silences.

I knew David could do it because I knew him as an actor, but that was what arrested me about Julia, that was really different from a lot of the other girls that I saw. She had this incredible ability to listen and watch what was going on around her and seemed to be taking it in, which was so appropriate for the character of Kate.

SM: How did you go about working with Julia, because again these are heavy themes that as a kid, she can obviously intellectualize but making that emotional, which is what she had to do, requires some sort of understanding of the dilemma. It’s hard enough for an adult to understand that, and I’m sure it’s as hard, if not harder, for a child actor as well.

KL: I don’t know if you asked Julia if she would really understand the whole arc of it. When we first talked, she told me a story that she’d come up with in talking with her mom about what was going on with Kate and things not going well, and we sort of threw all of that out. The way we really worked together was about addressing the specifics of what was going on in that moment, so that when he asked her to get in the car, we talked about when somebody asks you to do something and you don’t know how to respond. We talked about wanting to do something that you’ve been told is something that you shouldn’t do. For instance, when she then shares her story with him about what she does when her parents are annoying, it was very specifically, “Well, now you have something to offer him here. You get to share a story with him.”

If you talked to Julia and asked her what her favorite part of shooting was she’d say the typing. She was so excited to use the computer. She was great that way. She was very into the doing of things, and that was again what made her so great for Kate. She’s very unaffected so when she did something, she really just did it. For instance, when we were working with her brushing her teeth, she was very methodical about it. She wanted to take the toothpaste out, put it on the brush, put it under the water and put it in her mouth. She just went through everything. There was nothing really pretend for her. So we just addressed each moment like that, and it became less about the overall theme.

I was worried about her seeing the movie actually because I didn’t know if seeing it all together would be very scary for her. I talked to her mom about it, and she said that it was fine, that she really wanted her to see it. It was much more scary for her mom to see actually. Julia was just nervous; she was nervous to see herself on screen.

SM: What was her mom’s reaction when it was all said and done?

KL: I’ve worked with a lot of kids as an actor, and the parents have an enormous impact on what it’s like to work with a child. I’ve worked with kids who don’t want to be doing it, are made to do it, are bribed to do it, all these kinds of things. So when I was casting the part of Kate, I would continuously go out to get a drink of water so that I could see the way the parents and children would interact with each other. Haley, Julia’s mom, was fantastic; she was completely there and totally attentive, but she really left Julia alone. For instance, she never looked at the monitor. I don’t know whether that’s something they worked out before, or she just really left her alone in that way.

So, when (Haley) saw the screening she said it was really scary to watch, partly because that’s what the movie is and then doubled because it was Julia.

SM: One of the standout things to notice about your work with (cinematographer Jayson Crothers), even with the cover image, is the idea of distance, also the idea of objects and stillness. I’m sure there were handheld shots, but I wasn’t cognizant of them. It felt more as if the story was being contained by the frame. How did you both go about approaching the work?

KL: Jayson and I storyboarded really thoroughly and actually had to completely revamp it because we never would have made our days. It was as thorough, as much as we could have imagined and then we scaled it back. So, it was great to go through that first part of it even though we had to throw a lot of it out.

In the beginning, those close-up images, we wanted to get right in there with what was going on, the story about these two people working together in this place. I didn’t, when I planned it, realize that the first shot of the movie and the last shot of the movie are about (Kate’s) hands...It’s amazing how much you can get with (the close-ups). You don’t always need to start with a wide master.

I wanted to get in that room with them, into their morning, basically to make it topical. You see this little girl; you probably don’t assume she’s working in her father’s office, but for them it’s a very comfortable, unextraordinary day.

SM: We get to know Kate’s character a bit, but because she is so quiet she’s still a mystery, and that intimate image [the cover photograph of Kate’s blue sneakers, a shot of such innocence] goes a long to explaining both her child-like qualities and her loneliness. Why is that the image you chose to pinpoint?

KL: Jayson and I both just loved the shot, and in a way that I’m sure nobody else would think about, her feet are not quite touching the ground, and they slightly look like they are in motion. It felt emblematic of exactly where Kate was at. And, the whole thing of the sneakers at that age and you write on them, it just felt very much like her.

For me the story is told from a ten-year-old’s point of view, but a ten-year-old couldn’t have told the story. And so, for me, everything was geared toward staying as much in Kate’s world as possible, and that shot just felt like it was of her world, as opposed to a shot that might have been more removed from the story.

Somebody said to me, “This is a parent’s worst nightmare told almost with a dreamlike quality.” In Kate’s world it’s not this horrifying experience, and so, it was always important to me to not get outside of that.

For more information, visit www.coughdropthemovie.com.