While the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a boom in binge-watching, a slew of films destined for theatrical release still hang in the balance. Eliza Hittman’s latest Sundance award-winner, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” was one such title until Focus Features decided to release it Friday, April 3 through VOD. A staggeringly empathetic human portrait, “Never Rarely” is the kind of film that deserves a silent living room, lights dimmed and phones off.
Like Hittman’s previous two films, “Beach Rats” and “It Felt Like Love,” “Never Rarely” is a drama with an astonishing, little-known cast. It follows Autumn (Sidney Flanigan, in her first role), as she and her cousin, Skylar (Talia Ryder), travel from Pennsylvania to New York City so that Autumn can access abortion care. It is a small story that packs a wallop, as the oppressive forces of patriarchy work to swallow these two stoic girls whole.
On a press day just before the pandemic effectively shut down New York City, I was lucky enough to sit down with Hittman to discuss the film, including its feminist significance, its most impactful scene, and one incredibly talented chicken.
This movie has more of a message than “Beach Rats” or “It Felt Like Love.” Was that intentional?
I think the story follows more of a conventional hero’s journey, in terms of this young girl who’s kind of up against the world and is confronting very real barriers that are in the way of her getting a legal abortion. That’s the message, essentially, is that it’s very hard for women, people with uteruses, in areas that are not New York City, to get abortions. I try and avoid making more message-driven work, but this film is really about the impact that those barriers have on people’s lives.
Another significant barrier in the girls’ lives is the constant invasion of men. Why did you want to make that such an inescapable presence in the film?
In a hero’s journey, there’s usually an antagonist, a force against which the protagonist comes up, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to explore that, I didn’t want to explore who got her pregnant, it’s not what the film is about. The film is about the active process [of her seeking a legal abortion], and in lieu of having a conventional antagonist, I was thinking about exploring the environment as antagonistic, and that so much of becoming a young woman is about learning to navigate and deflect male attention and ultimately become desensitized to it. So that’s what I was playing at, is constructing this tension in the environment that they feel all the time, and hoping that the audience – the male audience – can walk in their shoes and have a deeper perspective of what it feels like.
I want to zoom in one line said by Skylar to Autumn: “Don’t you ever just wish you were a dude?”
I think the film is so much about the fact that women don’t have power over their bodies, and that they’re up against all these invisible barriers around them that are essentially created by men, so it’s about autonomy and envy and power. And that men seem to be deciding what kind of reproductive care women can have. I don’t know, what do you think of the line?
I think there are so many different reads on it. I really hope that Autumn grows up to be a lesbian, I think that would be a good path for her. But I think there’s a gender angle, a sexuality angle, a feminist angle – there are so many different paths to explore.
I think it’s all in there. It’s meant to be interpreted. But in the moment it’s about the resentment of periods and all of the things that they’re experiencing.
Talk me through the scene where Autumn and the Planned Parenthood worker actually go through the “never, rarely, sometimes, always” checklist. It’s so intense.
I spent a lot of time working on that scene, more time than any other scene in the film. I consulted with a woman named Kelly Chapman who worked at Planned Parenthood and trained in graduate school as a social worker there and then worked at a clinic in Queens called Choices. And then I ended up casting her because I had spent all this time working with her and I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing the role. And we had tossed around really big names, like Leslie Jones or Julianne Moore, and I didn’t want anything to overpower the scene, because it’s all about Autumn. And I knew that the social worker would largely be off-screen, and I wanted to create a safe space for Sidney as a first-time performer. And I felt that the combination of a real person who’s not had so much acting experience and a real social worker could create the scene.
With Sidney, I kind of quarantined her the day we were shooting that scene. I waited until the end of the shoot – sometimes you have to structure a shoot very strategically for performance. And I knew if we did it the second week, it wouldn’t be useful, so I waited as late into the shoot as possible, and I quarantined her on set and just didn’t want her to interact with anyone, and then I really gave her one piece of direction, where I told her to personalize the answers as much as possible.
So they weren’t scripted?
No, the answers are scripted, but some I told her she could answer almost as herself, like, “Is there any history of heart disease in your family?” Really think about your relatives. Really think about this, you know, talk about your own smoking, because Sidney smokes and has her own battle with smoking. And just thinking about how she could bring as much of herself to the scene as possible. We shot the scene in a very strategic way, where I had one camera frontal, up close, and the second camera body, three-quarter, and it was in her face, and it trapped her, and it was very interrogating. So all of these elements – the social worker, the fact that she was alone for so long, personalizing the answer, the camera is so close. We shot on film, so there’s another intense element, you know, that added to the stress, because when you shoot digitally, you can just delete and start over, and there’s nothing lost. But film is material. There’s a lot more risk involved. And she did it all in the first take.
That’s the first take?! What were the others like?
When the scene was over, she said it was cathartic, and she didn’t know if she could do it again. But we tried, and she did something else. It’s not the same, it’s more stoic. I think we did three total.
How did you find Sidney?
It’s a long story, but the short version is my partner [Scott Cummings] is a filmmaker and he’s from western New York, almost Niagara Falls, and we shot a film in south Buffalo – it’s his film, I produced it – about Juggalos. So we were hanging out with kids really on the margins of this town, and Sidney was dating one of them at 14. And we met her, and then we added her on Facebook, and she didn’t really know us, she didn’t have any idea who we were, but she would post videos of herself playing music, and we were her audience. So I always feel a little creepy telling this story, because we watched her videos and we watched her grow up on Facebook, but Scott knew this kid that she was dating very well, so we knew things about her through his participation in the movie. And then I auditioned like 200 girls, and then I was like, hey, wait a minute, let’s bring this girl down from western New York because I think she’s going to be really interesting.
You’re doing a coming-of-age trilogy à la Céline Sciamma! Is “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” next?
I guess we had the same idea! No, next I have to go to the other end of the spectrum and make a film about death and old people. It’s more complex than that, but yeah.
So why did you have to get these coming-of-age films out of your system?
So many people have asked me, and I really don’t have a good answer. On some level, I think that there aren’t very many movies that explore the loneliness of growing up, and I think that even though the movies are about young people, I think that they’re very relatable to grown-ups. I think grown-ups can identify with the pain of these young characters easily. I guess there’s something about films about youth, where they’re always for everybody.
These three films are also films about fathers or their absence. What’s the connection there?
I think in “Beach Rats” his father sort of represented these kinds of masculine expectations, and once he died the character was free to be himself in a way, even though that was complicated and the character didn’t totally accept himself. There was meant to be something almost liberating about his father dying, with regard to sexuality. And in “It Felt Like Love,” he just doesn’t understand her, you know? You’re meant to feel the loss of a maternal figure in that film. And through their tension, you’re meant to experience more loss. And in “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” he’s actually a stepfather. It’s sort of alluded to at the table in the beginning, in the pizza place.
What’s the deal with the suitcase?
I read a New York Magazine article a long, long, long time ago about women who travel to New York for abortions, and it said they always overpack. And it created an image in my mind of two women with a suitcase. But it’s obviously a metaphor for the burden they carry.
Talk to me about the soundtrack. It’s full of golden oldies, which I didn’t expect.
I felt like this town they were in was stuck in time, and that’s why I started the film with this fifties talent show. There’s such a myth of romantic love that’s embedded in that music from that period, and I wanted to play with disorienting the audience about the period of the movie, in a playful way – not in an M. Night Shyamalan way. And I wanted the song that Sidney’s character sings [“He’s Got the Power” by The Exciters] to break from the tone of the other songs and the sentiment of the other songs. And I sent Sidney a handful of choices and let her choose. All of the music that’s playing diegetically in Pennsylvania is music from a certain era. It’s meant to evoke this moment in time that we’re trying to dial back to.
Finally, I was tickled by the scene where Sidney goes into an arcade and loses a game of tic-tac-toe against a chicken. Where in New York can you play tic-tac-toe against a chicken?
It’s something from my youth – there’s an arcade on Mott Street called Chinatown Fair, and that’s where the chicken used to live, and I recreated it.
“Never Rarely Sometimes Always” arrives on VOD on April 3.
