Written and directed by Pippa Bianco and based on her Cannes Film Festival award-winning short film of the same name, “Share” premiered early this year at the Sundance Film Festival where it was largely met with major praise. A chilling and unflinching look at the fallout of a non-consensual and compromising video released publicly to the teenage peers of lead character Mandy (newcome Rhianne Barreto,) it’s a timely and horrifying look at how, systematically, victims face a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” reality when it comes to speaking out. The film centers on a sixteen-year-old on a high school basketball team. After discovering a disturbing video from a night she doesn’t remember going viral on social media, she must try to figure out what happened and how to navigate the escalating fallout at school.
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Our review of the film said, “Among its many achievements, ‘Share’ uncomfortably captures the specific end-of-the-world misery of high school scandal and the way that those highly populated spaces can somehow feel like the loneliest in the world.”
We got the chance to speak with its star Barreto, as well as director Bianco. about the making of the film and the audience response.
What inspired Share as a short film and did you always know you wanted it to be a feature-length film as well?
Pippa Bianco: Initially I had the idea for the feature first, but I wasn’t convinced that I was going to get people to give me millions of dollars to fund it. I made the short both as a way to explore the story and myself as a filmmaker too. I knew how the film would start and how it would end but had nothing in between. That part evolved over time.
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It came from two places. As a filmmaker/watcher I’m really drawn to stories about voyeurism, of ones that interrogate how we consume images and film. I thought a lot about that tradition of filmmaking. On a really personal level, I don’t know many women – young women especially – who haven’t experienced like Mandy’s, so it certainly touched my personal life in a number of ways. I had a male friend who when we were 18 made a video non-consensually of someone he was intimate with, which was different than the scenario in the film but really disturbing to me. I think trying to wrap my head around someone I care about doing that to someone he cared about – to dehumanize someone that way so easily – was a question I never stopped thinking about.
While this has always, unfortunately, been a prevalent issue the conversation surrounding is – especially in media – finding new life in the past few years due to movements such as #MeToo. Did that affect how you approached the film?
PB: I agree that the behavior itself isn’t new. We are just now deciding to look in that direction. I think it did in terms of how when we were on set when the Weinstein allegations started to break and that was definitely a dark and heavy time. I’m not so sure how it might’ve changed our approach, but the one thing I think is still in conversation with the climate we’re in now is the idea that it’s very tempting now in the era of #MeToo to assume it’s easy for people to come forward publicly about their experiences. I don’t think that’s the case. I think by and large the choice most people are making is to remain anonymous and I want to dignify that choice. It’s beautiful and profound to be an activist, advocate and public figure and to come forward with your experiences and it’s incredibly brave but it’s also very brave and heroic to go on however you need to go on to get out of bed every day and live your life. Whatever that means to you it’s no less brave or heroic.
That makes me think of one of my favorite parts of the film when Mandy’s mom talks to her to explain her dad’s reaction and how she – her mom – has grown up understanding what the world is to women and the threats it poses so she has solutions and next steps where as the dad is stuck in disbelief. Out of curiosity, have you seen a difference between men and women?
PB: That’s so interesting. I don’t know, I’m not sure. It’s difficult to say, I feel like we see even among women a real diversity in reactions to the film. I will say we have a lot of mom’s who are really vocal and supportive of the film. It was notable to me how many mom’s we had in the audience which I think was really nice because we don’t have many good representations of moms in media – something I even struggled with too.
I agree.
PB: Even me when I was writing it was so sad that my first impulses were these cliches of the mean and lecturing mother figure – the hysterical, punishing mom which was so bizarre. I am a woman, I have a mom and my mom is not all like that so there’s kind of a way we portray mom’s in media that’s such a bummer. It was shameful to me thinking about how easily those tropes and cliches come to mind maybe even before your own experiences with cool women in the world.
This was your first feature film – how was that experience diving in headfirst to starring in the film?
Rhianne Barreto: It involved a lot of listening to her direction and hoping that I’d respond to her [Bianco] and it helped that the story was so clear to me.
What drew you to this film or character?
RB: She didn’t speak perfectly which I liked. Characters often sound as if they always know what they’re going to say which I find very “writerly” and that can be very hard because no one really speaks like that. Also, the film could’ve fallen into being very melodramatic or preachy but the beauty of this film is how the script avoided that with great writing.
I often find that teenagers in the film speak as if the writers have never heard a teenager speak before so I did appreciate the authenticity of this film and how they communicated.
RB: I’ve had such great conversations with teenagers about this film that are very rich in their response that I’m just wowed. I think writers underappreciated the minds these teenagers have.
What was the thought process like in tackling the ambiguity of the ending and just how murky this case the character was going through?
PB: First and foremost I can’t write a character unless I fully believe them as me – and that’s for everyone in the film, especially the characters whose behavior doesn’t make sense intuitively to you. It’s really hard for me to write compelling versions of those characters if I don’t fully inhabit the choices they make and say “that is me.” There’s a version of me with a certain collection of experiences who could do exactly that. It’s so easy, or tempting, to make situations black and white and say “oh, well the solution to this problem is that they’re just an evil person. Let’s just remove this evil person from the equation and then these people won’t hurt each other anymore and we won’t have things like this happening.” But for me and maybe this also speaks to also my experience with my friend and how I came to make this film in the first place was it’s happening all the time. How can it be a couple of evil people? I tend to think most people moving through the world have really good intentions and they’re trying to do good and make sense of their lives and trying to be better, be kind. Yet they still hurt each other all the time. So for me the shades of gray or ambiguity there was how I thought I could be more useful by telling a story of how human beings hurt each other rather than how villains hurt heroes – something black and white.
“Share” premiered on HBO July 27 and is available on the cable channel now.