Ilya Chaiken

Hanging on to the last gasp of their rock 'n' roll lifestyle, five young mothers gather every week for half price drink specials at their favorite Mexican restaurant with little toddlers in tow. Freelance illustrator Zelda (Eleanor Hutchins) finds it a welcome relief from parenting, barely making the rent and figuring out what to do with her ne'er do well boyfriend Max (Larry Fessenden). Set within the community of downtown artists now relocated to Brooklyn, Margarita Happy Hour is a richly detailed, funny and unsparing glimpse at motherhood on the fringe.

Writer-Director Ilya Chaiken, a single mom herself, first received attention for her acclaimed short film, The Actress, a festival favorite later broadcast on PBS. Her second short, Match Flick, was awarded a grant from the Princess Grace Foundation for Young Filmmakers. Rounding up several of her collaborators and friends from over the years, Chaiken plunged into her first independent feature, Margarita Happy Hour. She shared her thoughts on the experience with MM shortly before Margarita's NYC opening.

Jeremiah Kipp (MM): When did you decide to pursue a career in film?

Ilya Chaiken (IC): My father was a scenic artist, so as a kid I would go with him to work and be on movie sets. I thought, "This is the shit!" I didn't know right away in what capacity I wanted to work, and for a while thought I might become a scenic artist, too. But I was always pretty creative across the board. I liked to draw and write. Eventually I think my tendency toward being a control freak won out and I became a writer-director.

MM: Had you ever shot anything before attending film school at SUNY Purchase?

IC: No. I was interested in acting and doing theater for a while, so I had written scripts and stage plays. I was much more prolific back then. Now, I read some of my teenage writing and think, "Wow, I wish I could do that again." (laughs) At school, we were required to have at least one finished, serious film at the end of each year. My senior thesis, finished post-graduation, was a short called The Actress. A couple of years later, I made another short called Match Flick. Then I made Margarita Happy Hour.

MM: How did Margarita Happy Hour come about?

IC: I'd always wanted to do a feature. It was a matter of scheming how to do it for as little money as possible. Upon receiving a small grant from the Princess Grace Foundation, I imagined making an incredibly guerrilla-style feature which of course, I couldn't. I ended up making my second short with that. With Margarita Happy Hour, I finally took the plunge. We just went for it with the sheer delusional belief that we could get it done. It was shot and edited for very little money; even before we had our full budget in place we were scheduling production. Basically, we backed ourselves into a corner until there was no turning back, no matter how much money wasn't there. We just went ahead and shot anyway.

MM: What was the starting point for this script?

IC: I wanted to reflect the situation some of my friends and I were in, struggling with raising our kids. I was also incorporating different ideas I've had over the years, like the recovering drug addict character, Natali (played by Holly Ramos). She's based on people I've known. In a way, I looked at Natali as another child who comes in needing Zelda's help, overtaxing Zelda's maternal instincts. If you picked up on shots where we see the mobile hanging over Natali's bed, that was one of the visual ways we compared Natali to the baby.

MM: You chose to incorporate several New York moments into the film, like when the 'margarita moms' are pushing their kids' strollers down the street mimicking car alarm noises. Do you stay on the lookout for such moments, later incorporating them into your story?

IC: I get a lot of notes by noticing little details on the subway, gathering observations here and there. I pick up good stuff from eavesdropping. If I'm on the ball, I write it down on whatever's handy. Sometimes I feel like I can rely on my memory, but that's usually a wrong assumption. (laughs) But yeah, seeing things like that becomes an inherent part of living in the city. I'd sung along to car alarms so often, I was sure someone else must've already put that in a movie!

MM:There was a finished script for Margarita, but since you're working with really little kids or babies, how flexible were you with what they were or weren't doing?

IC: We mostly dealt with that by shooting one mother and child at a time, occasionally two. Sometimes, we'd have five babies in any given scene. For the most part, we lucked out. We had permits to use the children, and they say you can only shoot with them for eight hours or something ridiculous like that. I was like eight hours? We're lucky if we get eight minutes! As a mom, I went into production knowing we'd only have so long before the child starts freaking out or crying, so we had to be strategic. We would set up the shot, everybody would show up, we'd bring in the kids, then it's ready, set, go! Thankfully, the women who played the moms all got along well with their fake kids (none of them are really moms). The happy hour scenes were intentionally very cut up, so there was some leeway editing around them. There was more anxiety during scenes involving the main little kid with Zelda and Max, which were usually a little extended.

MM: You have a scene where Zelda is getting the kid to eat broccoli, and he's saying no. How does that work, directing a child actor?

IC: It's funny to call it directing child actors, because they're just learning how to talk. You have to use different tricks you've learned. If you want a kid to say no, what do you do? You feed them broccoli! You keep the boom hovering above them while you play around and ask them, "Can you say such-and-such?" They like to repeat and mimic. Once they start throwing food, though, they're having the time of their lives. It was more of a problem if we needed to get them to sit in one place for a long time.

Gordon Chou, the cinematographer, was very smart. Throughout the shoot, he never established any kind of personal rapport with the babies, which we didn't even realize until the end. Once it was a wrap and he started playing with them, one mother said, "Oh, I didn't even know you liked the kids! You never talked to them." And he said, "Well, I didn't want them to get to know me, so they would ignore me while I was shooting." That was a big help.

MM:Were the happy hour scenes always intended to have overlaps in the dialogue, where people talk about one thing over here and another thing over there, cutting back-and-forth between them?

IC: It's pretty consistent with how it appears in the script. There weren't many changes. That was always my intention, to put the viewer inside the whole experience of these moms trying to be social, having conversations where they don't get to complete a thought or finish conversations. It's just one distraction after another.

MM:That's something that was done quite a bit during that Golden Age of American moviemaking in the '70s, and in many of Robert Altman's films. Were those directors influential?

IC: I'm very influenced by those guys. Inspired, I should say I don't think anyone is ever completely aware of all their influences. I'm an Altman fan, though, and some of that stems from the work I did at Purchase where we explored the possibilities of sound editing. It's really an underused tool and can accomplish a lot. Overlapping dialogue enhances the reality of a scene, but it's also jarring and disconcerting because viewers are used to being told what to pay attention to. There's a double-edged, real-surreal effect.

MM: You have naturalistic city moments like the car alarm sequence or when Max has the confrontation with a roving bike messenger, but you've also got dreamy scenes like the one where Zelda and Max are in bed, but its floating on a pool of water.

IC: There's a side to me that is very fantastical, more Fellini than Altman. One of the shoots I visited as a kid was Bob Fosse directing All That Jazz. I realized years later that I am a huge Bob Fosse fan. Sometimes I think of him as the American Fellini. He was able to pull off the naturalistic, gritty '70s style, yet still incorporate the musical fantasy stuff. Sometimes I'd wonder about my own dream sequences and whether I was mixing them in too much. But there's only so much you can censor yourself.

MM:How did you plan shots with cinematographer Gordon Chou?

IC: I had worked with Gordon on my previous short film. We have a rapport and I could trust him to carry out what I had in mind. He has a great eye. The thing about Margarita Happy Hour was that our shots were often dictated by having a tiny shooting ratio. We weren't able to afford shooting coverage, and would figure out ways to film the scene in three shots or less. I tend to see things from an editor's perspective, so I would look forward and imagine how to cut it together. You can see its almost entirely cut on wipes; people crossing in front of the camera.

MM:How did you envision Max's character?

IC: It was a struggle to write Max because it would've been easy to make him an irredeemable villain. I wanted him to be three-dimensional, and didn't want the audience saying, "Why didn't she just leave him yesterday?" I put a lot of effort into writing the part but give Larry major credit for fleshing it out. People sympathize with Max. He's sort of a loser, but he's in a situation that he doesn't necessarily have control over.

MM:I heard that Jonah Leland, who plays Little Z, started calling actors Eleanor Hutchins and Larry Fessenden "Mommy" and "Daddy".

IC: That was Jonah's mother's idea! I would never have dared presume to do that. But like I said, kids at that age like to mimic, so the real mother introduced Eleanor and Larry as Mommy and Daddy. So who knows what little Jonah is going through right now? Somewhere in her future she'll probably think back and say, "When I was a child, I had multiple parents."

What's funny is after we finished shooting, Larry's wife was pregnant. I was snickering to myself, saying, "You've just had a taste of what is yet to come." Of course, every time I see him now he says, "I had no idea! It's all true!" Yes, Margarita Happy Hour is my contribution to the world as a form of free birth control.