“I’m really happy I dropped acid in the ‘60s,” begins Vivien’s Wild Ride, a cinematic memoir of a veteran film editor looking back on her life while losing her eyesight. “It sort of prepared me for this unusual visual world I currently inhabit.”
What unfolds is a mix of narration, poetic imagery, historical b-roll and classic film clips plucked from Vivien Hillgrove’s 50-year career as a sound and picture editor to craft a directorial debut made all the more impressive by the fact that she could barely see the dailies while shooting it.
“Losing sight is a great plot,” Hillgrove says. “It’s really extraordinary. But life does not leave you when you lose your sight.
“I got the most wonderful chance to deal with it as a creative expression,” she continues, “which was so amazing — that there were people to support the making of the film from the beginning.”
Among those people is Deann Borshay Liem, a documentary filmmaker who produced Vivien’s Wild Ride after working with Hillgrove as an editor on several features of her own.
“What was amazing was seeing her lose her eyesight and yet turning that around and making it into a very visual, beautiful film,” Liem says. “The way that Viv ended up manifesting what she was seeing in her mind’s eye, and how she made that happen in spite of her vision being impaired, was just amazing to watch.”
Though the premise of Vivien’s Wild Ride is particularly alluring for those working in film — perhaps because it sounds like a nightmare scenario — the payoff is actually much deeper, diving into a fascinating life marked by tragedy and triumph.
Hillgrove’s first act includes a teenage pregnancy in the early ’60s, when her parents forced her to give up the baby for adoption. It’s a major loss that haunts her for decades, and one that feels connected to her more recent loss of sight, which has only progressed since completing the film.
The macular degeneration of her eyesight began with a blur: Letters were missing from words, details faded from objects, and then faces were lost.
The condition is diagnosed in over 200,000 people a year, and affects them all differently.
As one sufferer explains in a therapeutic support group documented for the film, it’s hard for friends and family to understand how macular degeneration impacts day-to-day life, and to comprehend that it doesn’t get better. That was a major motivation for Hillgrove to commit to depicting her experience on the screen.
“The one thing I wanted so much to do is — if there was a way to communicate this to the folks who either deal with or care for people who are losing their sight — give them a visual reference point of understanding that,” she says.
“I’ve gotten many calls like, ‘All of a sudden, my family understands what I’m seeing when I see things on macular degeneration.’ If it changes or emboldens or communicates one thing, and that is macular degeneration, I’m happy.”
Vivien Hillgrove on the Community Behind Vivien’s Wild Ride
So how does a vision-impaired director make a film?
“I was like two inches away from the monitor. Hopefully I didn’t do any brain damage,” she says with a laugh. “And then my editor helped me, because he would play things over and over again that I was unsure about.”
Her photographic memory, sharpened by making dozens of movies, was also essential in the process.
“I memorized the film when I could see better than I could towards the end,” she says. “But you definitely memorize the dailies, and that’s just a gift of editing.”
Hillgrove began her career in the late ’60s, doing sound mixing and editing on industrial and educational films in San Francisco. She even cut a few adult films under the pseudonym Lorraine Sprocket before being pulled toward the free-spirited experimental film movement that was blossoming in the Bay area after the psychedelic-fused Summer of Love.
She says LSD and other hallucinogens “opened my eyes and my feelings about community, and a community became very important, rather than one person’s suffering.”
She says the experience instilled in her a desire to communicate a range of feelings on film that might not have been so broad, “had I not taken psychotropics at that particular time in my life.”
Her big break came after she rented a room at Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope to edit low-budget family films. She was surrounded by mavericks, like Philip Kaufman and Walter Murch, and then began working alongside them. Hillgrove edited dialogue on Kaufman’s 1983 The Right Stuff andMiloš Forman’s 1984 Best Picture winner Amadeus. She worked with Murch editing Kaufman’s 1988 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, then was one of the editors on Kaufman’s 1990’s Henry & June.
Then, through a crisis of conscience, she shifted focus to editing documentary films, entering into a long partnership with acclaimed Mexican documentarian Lourdes Portillo, who she calls “one of the bravest people I’ve ever seen in my life.”
As Hillgrove was parting ways with her vision, she began fine tuning her hearing, and noticing the mental imagery it can create.
“The audio taught me a lot,” she says. “About 70% of the film, if not more, is audio. It tells you and expresses a huge amount of things about what you’re looking at.
“When I heard the audio in my mind’s eye, I saw the picture,” she continues. “If I were given a solution to blindness tomorrow, I don’t know if I would take it, because the gifts of losing my sight have been a phenomenal insight.
“I don’t feel like I’m disabled. I feel like I just have a different point of view. I have a different way of looking, literally looking, at stuff through this strange world of audio, sound effects, music, and all the things that go into a film audio mix.”
Many fellow artisans were essential in helping Hillgrove shoot and assemble her Wild Ride.
Editor, co-producer and cinematographer Eric Ivey shot one of the most vulnerable scenes in the film: Hillgrove trying to navigate the bustling city of San Rafael with a walking cane.
“In that particular scene, I almost get run over by a car, and a bicyclist,” Hillgrove remembers. “And so I just thought, ‘Well, I’m taking my life in my hands, but I’m pretty sure that Eric will save me.’ So, I wasn’t really alone, but it still was really scary.”
The film hinges on Hillgrove being open, honest and candid about the fullness of her human experience — embracing her homosexuality, dropping acid, working in a male-dominated industry, and the traumatizing process of losing her child and then reconnecting with her decades later.
So to effectively recount her life on camera, she needed a good dialogue coach.
“Deann was so helpful in this,” the filmmaker says. “If I was pulling back or had a rote answer to something, she would push me in the direction of getting down to the honest, painful part.”
Vivien’s Wild Ride is a colorful portrait of a life well lived — a detailed picture of each phase of Hillgrove’s life and loss that also shares an illuminating lesson she learned from those psychedelic adventures in the ’60s.
“I remember one time just hearing the voice: ‘Look at the hard times; look them directly in the eye and they disappear,’” she recalls.
“So, this sense of healing was always with me after taking my first psychotropic. And I think it really aided the film in saying: ‘Oh, we can do this.’”
Viven’s Wild Ride is now playing on PBS’s Independent Lens.