A conversation wherein filmmaker Mary Bronstein speaks about crafting her feature debut Yeast, a harsh, fantastic ride of unfiltered emotional confusion between three women on the brink of friendship break-ups. Much like the work of her husband filmmaker Ronald Bronstein, yet distinct in its tone and aesthetic, Yeast, for my taste, stands as one of the most uncompromising, unique and stimulating independent films of the year.

SM: In an interview over at Linear Reflections, you’d mentioned that as a child you suffered through this strange emotional dichotomy wherein you’d be afraid to sneeze in class and draw attention to yourself but then, on the other hand, you also had this desire to be noticed and to perform. I was hoping that you could talk a bit about that dichotomy of wanting to be the wallflower and then wanting to be the flower, to put it as a silly metaphor.

MB: If you’re on a stage performing in front of a lot of people, everybody is supposed to be looking at you; it’s a very powerful position. Whereas, if you’re not sure why other people are looking at you, if you’re not sure if they’re giving you negative attention or positive attention, it is very threatening, for me. I don’t know which came first but which was why I was very shy but able to do things like dance and act in front of a large group. To this day, I’m socially pretty shy, but I don’t have any problem talking in front of people, acting, doing anything like that.

Also, I think when you’re a shy person, you observe a lot about what’s going on around you, especially when you’re a kid. You’re usually not involved right in the middle of things, but you’re sort of on the outside observing. I think that also aided a lot of the choices that I make in my acting.

SM: I wondered much of the time whether artists, actors particularly, have to go through those extremes, that there’s something inherently not moderate about acting. That’s perfectly seen with these three characters in Yeast, that there’s absolutely nothing moderate about any of them.

MB: (laughs) That’s true.

SM: So I wonder if extremity, and maybe this touches on the same ground as the last question, plays into the equation as well.

MB: It is important because you have to be able to capture the extremes of life, the extremes of emotion. So I think it helps to be a person who either feels emotions in that extreme way or perceives situations in an extreme way, which certainly fits me.

With the characters we decided that they all should be extremes, black-and-white with nothing in the middle. That’s why I think it’s not realism or naturalism. It’s more traditionally dramatic in that way, the film. That’s why, I think, it’s hard to fit into a category.

All of the characters were devised as being sort of maddening but each in a different way. Alice is extremely passive. Jen is pathologically on the lookout for having fun all the time. Then Rachel, well she’s extremely a lot of things, but she’s extremely negative. So, we decided in the performance to always be working at the extreme end of all of those emotions. It was pretty exhausting to do, but it was our goal. We set out to do it, and I think we accomplished it.

SM: I do want to talk a bit more about this realism-stylism debate. What you’d said, I believe in the Director’s Statement, was that although you hadn’t intended realism, you wanted to hit upon a real emotion. That’s a peccadillo a lot of people hold against stylism, that they somehow discount stylism as being able to impart any sort of real value system. Yet, some of the very best pieces of art that have been made, have been at their essence in a hyper-extreme stylism.

MB: The issue is really if you’re trying to capture a slice of life or something natural, there’s definitely something valuable in that as well. But, I find that if somebody were to just sort of put a camera on me, or you, or anybody else, and just follow them around all day, if you had an awkward interaction with somebody or a negative interaction, we’d only be able to see what actually happened—what that person said, what you said and how you reacted. We wouldn’t be able to see anything about how it felt, how extreme it felt to you or to the other person.

With this film what we were interested in, or what I was really interested in doing, was turning that inside out and playing the perceived reality. I find that that’s the only way that I could really get at the turmoil that I wanted to get at. If you have a fight with your friend, and you recount it to somebody else, it probably doesn’t sound as bad. So we really wanted to get at how ugly it feels to feel like you’re being abandoned by your friends.

On the set, with the acting, talking about the stylization, it was very heightened and very sort of theatrical to get to that level you see on the screen. So it was very difficult because while we were on the set we didn’t know sometimes if it was too far, if it was too much until we would end up watching the footage back. But, whenever we tried to do something that was more subdued, more natural or more sort of true to how it would actually happen in life, it just didn’t ring true to the emotions.

SM: How many takes did you generally find yourself doing? The intensity of that I’d imagine is draining. I know at any given time you were shooting two cameras, but even with that, geez…

MB: Yeah, we had the two cameras, so that definitely cut down on having to do takes from different angles, which was really great from an acting perspective.

We tried not to do that many takes. I’d say the most takes we ever did on one thing was maybe five or six. We really tried to keep that number down because, like you said, the whole film relies on the intensity of the performance, and it starts to get too rehearsed, too rote after a number of takes. We were lucky to be able to get what we wanted in a small amount of takes.

SM: I promise to get back to talking about the characters and their development in just a second, but you talked a bit before about trying to get into a particular character’s perspective, and I think the cinematography has a lot to do with that. There are a few shots in particular in which we can really empathize with Rachel’s confusion and sense of loss. The first of those is the image of Rachel sitting outside the bathroom with her head leaning against the door, waiting for Alice to come out. The second, for me, is the walking shot of Rachel as she comes into the amusement park, and that shot is a minute and a half to two minutes long, I think. We really feel her sense of disorientation in both of those shots, and what’s interesting is that the sense of disorientation in these shots is conveyed in two completely different manners in terms of camera movement.

With all that said, I was hoping you could tell me about how you worked with both Sean Williams and Michael Tully, because I know they were your two primary cinematographers.

MB: We talked beforehand, also with my husband, about what we wanted as the look of the film, and we knew that we wanted most of the film to be really tight and close-up, to get right in on the faces and capture that claustrophobic emotional feel that we wanted the acting to have.

With the two shots you’re talking about, they’re kind of opened up more, and those two shots were devised by Sean, totally himself. The bathroom shot, we shot that also in close-up; then we shot it wider, and the wider one was just so much more evocative, like you said, of what was going on in her emotional state.

For the amusement park, we knew that we wanted a really long tracking shot. I think it’s the longest shot in the film—by a lot. What we wanted to capture with that was just the absurdity first of all of trying to look for one person in a space such as that and also the idea of going to an amusement park not to have fun but for a much darker purpose. (Sean) decided that the best way to show that was to show what was going on around her. So, at the beginning of the shot, it’s positioned near the roller coaster, which I think is also a very important image for the film; this roller coaster comes right down, almost crashes next to her and then goes back up. We started from there, and it was his idea to really open up the shot and show people being normal and having fun and walking around her while she’s totally oblivious of all of this.

SM: To get back to talking about these character, I know you created an outline, approached Amy and Greta with it and then the three of you worked together to define these characters, who would then grow even more during production…What were the characters’ baselines?

MB: All three of them started from a place in ourselves, sort of a characteristic of ourselves that we recognized as being negative, and then exploiting that to the 100th degree. So for my character, it was really coming from the relationship I had with [co-starring actress Amy Judd], and hers is the same. We had this relationship where I was sort of the leader, and she was sort of the follower. It got to the point where she resented being the follower and resented me for being the leader, even though she played a part in that relationship. So, what we decided to do was to exaggerate that on both sides. Then for [Greta Gerwig], she based the character on parts of herself and then also on people that she knew that were so driven to constantly be creating fun moments that they ended up just being a menace to the people around them.

So the characters grew out of that, but they really didn’t come alive until we got on the set. I didn’t know what Rachel was going to sound like, or really look like, until we got on the set and started doing it. It was the same with Jen and Alice.

The process of talking about the characters and developing them was probably about two or three months before we actually started shooting, so it was a nice organic process of getting to know these characters. By the time I got to set, I knew if I said something, I knew how the other character would react and vice versa.

Creating the characters was really the most fun part. Rachel says things that I would love to say in real life in a lot of different situations but can’t. She doesn’t have that filter, which is to her detriment, but in a certain respect, it was relieving to play a character like that.

SM: There’s another quality about Rachel I’m drawn to. Her relationship with Alice, it walks a line between being really intimate in terms of friendship but also getting pseudo-sexual. There’s that implication, that she harbors feelings for Alice which aren’t quite platonic.

MB: We talked a lot about especially the kinds of friendships that women have, when they get so close. The friendship that I had with Amy in college, the two of us had this really, really close friendship, and that was sort of our entire world. That world had its own jokes, our own things that we did, our own way that we talked, and it excluded everybody else. When you’re in a relationship like that, it’s a breeding ground for all kinds of resentment, especially when the other person starts to date somebody or becomes interested in somebody. It becomes threatening, and you don’t even really know why. You’re not interested in them romantically, but it still becomes threatening because that person is trying to take a piece of them, almost that you can’t really have.

So for Rachel and Alice, they became so close that there’s almost no where else to go with that closeness. It doesn’t become romantic because that’s not where they’re at, but all the problems that come with a romantic relationship exist in their relationship.

All the presence of men in the movie becomes problematic for Rachel...She knows how to handle women, but she doesn’t know how to handle men. So, when we get to the bar scene, we wanted there to be a line there where it questions: Is she really trying to save Alice from a situation that’s not right for her, or is it just that she doesn’t want Alice to have that experience because it would be threatening to her? We wanted the audience watching it to not really be sure who’s in the right really in that situation.

SM: Maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, and it plays into that last point, the artwork is really important. My head’s not fully wrapped around what you were saying with the artwork, but here was my thought: There’s the religious imagery of the Virgin, this idea of Rachel trying to be the savior, kind of moming Alice and Jen. It’s almost as if she considers herself a fallen god. Then we get the glove imagery, so it’s a strange juxtaposition where this god-like figure still wants to remain pure and hands off with the mundanities that make up the harshness of man. I didn’t know if I was reading that correctly.

MB: You really got it nail on the head there.

I worked with the artist Don Raymond, who also did the art for Frownland, and he’s just immensely talented. He saw the movie, and we talked about some of the themes that I wanted to come out in the artwork. I didn’t know how, but I really wanted something about the relationship of Rachel to these two people to come out.

It was his idea to incorporate a religious symbol, so he has the Madonna there in the center, and you’re right, that’s really Rachel. She sees herself as the moral police for these two people, as the mother figure, that she’s pure in what she thinks her thoughts and opinions are. She calls a lot of things “inappropriate” in the movie, or “uncalled for”, and so she really feels that she’s existing on a higher plane. At the same time she’s also tied to this domesticity; she’s the one that cleans up physically for both of these people. So we wanted to bring that in. Then it was just having the Madonna surrounded by garbage and food and clutter, which is representative of the apartment that Rachel and Alice live in and the world that Rachel and Alice live in.

The title Yeast Don wrote on a plate of spaghetti sauce with his finger, which I think is so great because Rachel can’t ask Alice really what she wants, but what she is asking of Alice throughout the whole movie is to wash the dishes. Everybody knows that’s not really what she wants. What she wants is to have a friendship with Alice, for Alice to stay and for things to be like they are, but the only thing she can really ask for is for her to wash the dishes, which becomes a big bone of contention. So we wanted to put that image in there as well.

SM: Perhaps this is only you, Amy, Greta and I, Mary, but I’ve had this exact sort of friendship with a girlfriend go bad in this exact same way.

MB: (laughs) Right! Yeah!

SM: The notion I have, and what you’d written in the Director’s Statement, was that these were relationships that had expired. So the question I have is: Were these relationships supposed to have existed in the first place? If something is not organic, or something is not able to be forgiven in a friendship, is it actually a friendship?

MB: In life you have relationships that serve their purpose for different contexts and different situations, and then a lot of times, if you try to elongate them or try to put them into a new context, they don’t work…So perhaps for Rachel, Alice and Jen after college they had no business being friends with each other.

Rachel and Jen had really stopped being friends before the movie started. That was the idea, and this was supposed to be their return to friendship, this camping trip. It ended up just being a confirmation that this is over. Then, like you said, it could go either way. It could be said that these people just don’t go together, that their chemicals are just going to create an explosion. But, I like to think that at a certain point, when they were younger and maybe had a different set of circumstances, it was okay, and it was appropriate for that time, but they stretched it out too far so that it snaps at a certain point.

I’ve actually had a lot of women come up to me and say that they’ve had these situations. Actually men too. So it’s been really interesting to know that it’s not just a unique circumstance. I kind of knew that it was universal, but I didn’t really know.

SM: You can only account for yourself in most cases.

When I saw you in Boston, you mentioned that you were anxious for women to interact with the film, and you touched on that just now. What has the female audience reaction been overall?

MB: I find that after screenings women are a lot less vocal about what their reaction is. A lot more men approach me and tell me what they thought of the movie. There are women there at the screenings, so I don’t really know what that’s about. But, the women that have talked to me talk about how the emotions ring true for them, especially with the physicality, and that they appreciate the way that the physicality was depicted, that it’s something that’s true to their life, maybe not that they actually get into a physical fight with somebody but that it made them feel a way that was true to their experience.

For men, it’s been sort of the same, but they talk more in terms of the movie and don’t personalize it as much. I really made this movie with a female audience in mind, not to exclude men, but I felt it was very particular to experiences considered to be very female. But, men have been very vocal about it, and some men have just been really into it, and I think it’s men that have had these kind of situations too.

SM: Part of the hesitation from a female audience I can understand in that it’s almost not appropriate for us to admit that we feel anger and violence this way, much in the same way that say before Women’s Lib it wasn’t appropriate for a woman to vocalize her sexual needs.

Okay, sure, you get the Kimberly Peirce example of Boys Don’t Cry. It’s okay if a girl is violent, or she’s tough, if she’s a lesbian. Yet, it’s still somehow vastly inappropriate to be a straight woman who feels this sense of violence.

MB: Oh, totally. The lens that I wanted the movie to be seen through is a lens where the women in the movie are not performing for men; there’s no male gaze involved. These are moments that men don’t see, that they’re not supposed to see or that they usually don’t see. It’s women totally in what they are really like when they’re not trying to put on a face to attract people. That also might be jarring to people as well. I realize that.

SM: I do want to talk about the humor of the piece too because the film is full of it. As a child I know you spent a lot of time watching Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball. Then later on, when you were living in Los Angeles, you gotten into going to the silent movie theater. Thinking about those two things, I could really see the influence of them here. The humor is almost as powerful in its theatrical, silent stage dark manner as it is in its Burnett-Ball way. I was hoping you would talk a bit about those two influences.

MB: The thing that drew me to both of those when I was younger was the physical elements of it and just sort of the outrageous element of it too, visually. Those are just incorporated so much into my own sense of humor that it’s obviously going to show up in my work.

I do find a lot of parts of Yeast to be very funny, but I think the way in which they’re funny is reminiscent of that because they’re not funny with jokes; they’re funny in visual ways—the looks on people’s faces, a shot of an object. They’re more funny in physical and visual ways whereas I think that the way that most people conceptualize humor is verbal humor in movies, especially if it’s embedded within a piece that has a more dark overtone.

I sat through a couple of screenings of Yeast, and it just depends on who’s sitting in the audience as far as if it comes across as humorous or not. There have been screenings where nobody laughs at anything, and there have been screenings where people have been laughing at a ton of stuff, even stuff I didn’t actually realize was funny. So, it’s gone either way with Yeast, but I think it’s a movie that can work whether you recognize the humor or not.

SM: The editing also contributes to the humor and also the sense of certain moments being jarring. Talking about the relationship that you and Ronnie developed during post, I want to look at a few specific cuts: the first is the cut in which Jen hits Alice with her foot; then there’s the cut sequence in the hallway when Rachel’s trying to pull Alice away from the man outside the bar bathroom, which is very frenetic, very well-timed, very jarring and really very threatening because we don’t know anything about this slovenly drifter; then the last is the ending frame of the film. All of those three pieces of editing stuck in my mind, but each of them had a different intent it seemed. I was hoping you could talk about those three pieces.

MB: The way that we did the editing was that we’d talk about what the goal was of each scene and what we wanted from the scene to come across through the finished product. Ronnie would do a rough cut of the scene, and we’d sit together, go over it, make changes and talk about it.

So for the parts your mentioning: the kick came out of nowhere, and we wanted it to be very jarring in the editing. It was sort of a magical moment between the way that Sean did the camerawork and the way that Ronnie cut it. When we shot that scene, we only did it once, and Sean didn’t know that Greta was going to do that kick. He was able—I don’t even know how—to follow her leg to the chair in such a way that was so purposeful. So that just came out beautifully. With the way that we cut it, we wanted it to be that when that physical contact was made, that was just it for Alice. She stands up, and she’s out of there. So that’s how Ronnie ended up doing that, and it worked.

(The scene in the bar hallway) we wanted to be a completely chaotic moment. What I wanted to have was one shot of me coming down and then going up the stairs and then coming back down, which we were able to get. At first Rachel doesn’t know what to do, and we wanted to stay on Rachel because it’s her story at that point. So when she first discovers the kissing, we wanted it to be as shocking to the audience as it was to Rachel, and as nonsensical. We just needed it to be completely chaotic, and so Ronnie actually cut between three or four different takes of that scene to make it just a complete frenzy. He also layered over sounds from other takes too…By making it chaotic like that, Ronnie really did a beautiful job.

As for the freeze frame, one of my most favorite movies is Wanda, and Wanda sort of ends on a very lowly, non-moment almost after everything else that’s happened in the movie. At first Yeast was supposed to end with a final confrontation between Rachel and Alice, but we decided that after all the confrontations that had taken place in the movie, it wasn’t really an appropriate ending. It would need to end alone with just Rachel, that Rachel just created this world for herself with nobody left in it. So we decided that ending it alone with her in the parking lot at the amusement park would be the way to go. The freeze frame came when we were watching the scene, and I just hit the pause button, and that was the frame that was on the screen. We both just knew that that should be the last frame because (Rachel’s) look is just one of not knowing, not knowing what’s coming next and not knowing where to go. That was a clandestine moment with the editing as well.

SM: The shot harkened to me, and this may sound strange, as being one out of a horror film, and that was the first moment while I was watching Yeast that I thought, “This is an existential horror film!” That’s what lasted with me about that freeze frame at the end, that, “Oh, my gosh, this is a horror film.”

MB: A lot of people have said that. It definitely turns into a nightmare at the amusement park. We were actually really lucky that we found this amusement park that does turn into a nightmare at night with all this fog, these monsters and such. It does become very symbolic and existential…For me it’s all about what’s going on inside Rachel’s head is really what’s going on in that amusement park. What makes it more surreal is running into [Tony, a character played by Sean Williams] with the face paint. We just decided to make it as nightmarish as possible at that point.

In the editing it all came through. We had all this footage of these monsters and fog, and we just decided to go with it. That amusement park part, that whole sequence is probably my favorite part of the film because I just feel like it was a great moment of everything coming together to make something that was evocative of what I wanted to say.

SM: That sequence is interesting too in the sense that the acting I’m most attracted to is the type in which you build from the outside inward,…that idea of taking a newspaper, working with the newspaper, allowing that newspaper to be the external representation of the internal process for the characters. In the Director’s Statement, that’s something you’d mentioned was intended, that the external would become the internal while still “keeping the explicit implicit,” I think was the exact phrase.

And so, the signifiers of this world are already given to us, and thereby as viewers our job is to become interpreters of these symbols…Watching the walls of Rachel and Alice’s apartment, for example, we pick up the significance of all of those things. It becomes an almost Where’s Waldo? of emotional clues. I’m attracted to that because the film, in a way, becomes a puzzle, and it’s like, “Oh, if I look for it, I’m going to find it!”

MB: We wanted to definitely build it up like a decoupage where you’re just layering and layering and layering, so that at any given moment there are two or three things to pick up on. I was hoping that we were successful in that, and from what you’re saying I guess we were. So that’s great. (laughs) I think that’s the best way in which to watch the movie.

Where the movie fails for people is if they’re watching it, thinking that they’re going to be watching some sort of slice of reality film. Then I think it doesn’t work because it would be over the top for that person, and it doesn’t feel purposeful. But if you’re going into it like you’d go into a more traditionally dramatic movie, I think that’s when it works.

SM: To wrap up: What is one question about the film that you’ve wanted to be asked but haven’t been?

MB: For me the apartment is a character as well, just because it’s so unique to these two people and how they live. For me what the apartment says is that they are stuck in this arrested sense of adolescence, and they are living as adolescents. Just the idea of plastering every single thing that you like or you want people to know about you on your walls is a very adolescent thing to do, and it’s also a very insecure thing to do I think, to want someone to come into your apartment and immediately be able to tell things about you from your walls.

The other way we looked at it is that the two walls, Alice’s wall and Rachel’s wall were sort of battling each other. The way we conceived it was that if Alice put up one picture, the next day a picture would go up on Rachel’s wall to antagonize her and vice versa. The two walls are two very distinct personalities, and we took a lot of care and time to pick out all of those things. It was actually a really enjoyable process. Then just to make it a place that you wouldn’t want to live. At all. Creating that set was very fun.

SM: That’s your apartment, yeah?

MB: Where (Rachel and Alice) sleep is our living room.

SM: Oh, man, you get off work, and then you’re stuck on your set.

MB: It was really weird because the set was up for about three weeks, and Amy was staying in our apartment. So she actually slept in her character’s bed, which, I think, got to be a little too much for her. It got too claustrophobic. It was kind of weird because it would just never go away, and so dismantling the set was actually kind of therapeutic.

When I look back, the apartment is one of the most important parts for me.

SM: Is there anything else you wanted to add?

MB: Just that I have a real love for this film. I really love how it turned out. It was a product of people collaborating in such a wonderful way that I’m just very proud of it, and I want as many people to see it as possible.

For more information on the film visit www.myspace.com/yeastthemovie.