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| 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.
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