On deciding what to sacrifice

Can you talk a little bit about your experience entering the film world? You’re also a musician and a poet.

It all lives in the same realm, the creativity or the energy that you’re channeling. You’re just telling the same story in different forms or different versions of output. I moved to Vancouver when I was 17 and I went to film school. That was something that I really wanted: to be an actress. But by the time that I was 19 or 20, I realized, “You know what? Fuck this.” I didn’t like the cattle calls or the lines… I just didn’t really fit into that. I guess I had an attitude problem. I was like, “I’ll start a band instead, and that’ll be much more fun and I can do what I want without any judgment.” But who said there isn’t any judgment in music?

Living in LA, you start working with people within the industry. I started working with filmmakers and coming on board as a producer. And then I got frustrated with working for other people and working for their ideas. I started with my first short film, A Death Story Called Girl, and that did really well and got a lot of festival love. Then I continued. I did some TV, and went into trying to get this feature off the ground. That’s when things started to get a little bit more challenging—finding large amounts of money was proving to be more challenging. Finding $20,000 or $30,000 to do a short is challenging. But when you’re entering in the $2 million to $3 million range—which is nothing for films, as some of them are made for $300 million—I felt like I had no power.

Poetry’s always been something I’ve been dying to do. I’ve been keeping books of poetry since I was a very, very young girl, but it never really came into fruition until I started working in film. I felt like I was being held hostage. I didn’t have any power over when the film was going to get made. And then being a mom, having this day-to-day that seems endless… There’s all this stuff bubbling underneath. I think that’s when it all came to a head and the poetry came out.

Maybe you needed to be like, “I need to create, and to create in my own way.”

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like there’s this sickness in motherhood. We’re supposed to do fucking everything. There’s this vision [of] women who maybe don’t earn and just mom. They like their day-to-day but that doesn’t seem to be enough. People look down upon that: “Oh, you’re a housewife or whatever it is you do. You take the kids to school.” You and I both know it’s so much more than that.

It’s a lot.

It’s a lot.

What is that process like for you in your day-to-day, when you’re moving through all these different modes?

To be honest, I think there’s a lot of anger. It’s still really challenging to articulate exactly what the feeling is. It’s feeling like putting on this aesthetic falseness when you go out into the world and you do the drop-off, and then you’re doing the muffins, or you’re doing the dinner, or the interactions with the other moms and the parents or whatever, the fucking soccer practice, and all of those things. I started feeling like there was a sense of depravity underneath it all. I don’t know. Everything just felt so fucking wrong and that something needed to be said. Or maybe it was just me. Am I the only one that was feeling like this is all so wrong?

I don’t think you’re the only one… There’s a social pressure as well. How do you start a project? How does it come to you and what’s that mental process of deciding something starts now?

Maybe it’s silly, but with all the films, it always starts with song. It always starts with music. I think I’m audio-driven. I think I suffer from audio hallucinations, too. I just realized that’s a term. Nowadays, my kids are always telling me, “Everything’s diagnosable.” With Death Story, I was really inspired by Liberace. With 1996, my feature, it’s about music and creating a soundtrack and listening to that and what does that look like—what does a song look like?

Can you walk us through a work day?

There’s two very different versions of me. If I’m just strictly managing my home and my husband and my family life, then it’s very simple. I’ll still wake up at around 4:00 every day. The 4:00 to 5:00 time is for writing, meditation, journaling, and if I have anything to do for myself in that time. And then I’ll do my kids, get everybody to school. Then I come home and manage my house. We don’t have any housekeepers or nannies or anything, so I have to do everything myself. But if I’m working—if it’s like, “Okay, I’m going into the cave and I’m on a deadline to write something for somebody else,” or whatever—then the day usually starts at 3:00 in the morning.

Wow.

I have to. There’s something really specific about that time of day, from 3:00 to 6:00. I really can’t write outside of that time. I can write in the afternoon, but it just doesn’t feel the same. There’s something to be said about being alone in the house and everybody’s asleep and no one’s going to fucking ask you for a croissant or whatever the hell they want. Before I write, I always have to do a bit of a journal entry where I’m talking to myself. I pray or meditate about whatever it is that I need to accomplish that day. I’m always willingly asking to accomplish it, like, “Please let me channel whatever it is that I need to channel.”

Have there ever been times where you’ve tried to channel something and you felt yourself get stuck or like something’s not coming? How do you push through those frustrating moments?

I am more frustrated if I feel like… forgive me if I sound woo-woo, but by an entity that’s not supposed to be around. If you’re praying and you’re meditating and there’s an energy around and you’re like, “Fuck this” then I start second guessing myself, or hearing myself, or I’m in a negative space. Usually what I’ll do if I’m stuck is I’ll just write, even if it means nothing. I’ll literally just be like, “Okay, what’s the next word?” Even if it’s like, “This, that, the other, blah, blah, blah. East, west, the sun, the moon.” Whatever word comes in, I’ll just write it. Even if I’m writing a screenplay, or if it’s a poem, or whatever the fuck, I’ll just force myself to write whatever the next word is. Then I’ll be like, “Oh, what was that?”

I try and keep myself out of it as much as possible. If I’m like, “Oh, I can’t,” that’s the thing you have to push through, right? If I’m on a deadline or something has to be done, I have to push through no matter what. I don’t let myself linger. And I’ll switch mediums. If I’m writing something for somebody else, like a screenplay, and I cannot get through it, then I turn that off. It’s like, “Okay, it’s got to be poetry.” I have to move to something else and not waste that time. I have to change the medium. If I can’t do that, then it’s a journal entry. Something has to come from that.

Given the themes of your poetry, how important is subversion in your work?

If I’m going to be completely honest, I’m not thinking about any themes when I’m writing. I don’t know if you’re the same. For the book, [I felt like] I was going out on a limb. There was a sort of perversion that I was feeling really drawn to, as this antithesis of my day-to-day life and the day-to-day life that we’re seeing in society or whatever, where we all have to meet this standard. I just felt really mad about that. Like, “No, we’re not equal, and no, we don’t have anything in common.” I wanted to say all the things I wasn’t supposed to say. Even when I let my best friend read a few entries, she was like, “You can’t publish this. This is not appropriate.” And I was like, “Well, guess what I’m doing now?”

How did you feel when she said that?

I felt like then I had to. If in 2024 there’s still things that shouldn’t be said, then I’m going to say them.

How do you conquer the fear that comes from this idea of what people might think?

There’s always pushback. Especially in the last four to six years, there’s a lot of pushback if you say the wrong thing. People are really quick to tell you what’s right, what’s wrong. And I think that that was something I was so fucking fascinated by with Marquis de Sade [and other] writers that just didn’t have any concept of good or bad. It was just, “This is what it is and you can have it influence you in whatever way you want,” and maintaining that voice. You can have your voice, and even if nobody listens or it gets drowned out, you have to just do it for you. My husband has been very, very afraid of the contents in the book and stuff. And I just have to do it, even just for myself. Even if it means nothing, the act is in the creation. The point is the process.

That makes sense.

Everybody else can fuck off.

If I let the thoughts of people in my life control what I write, then where am I really free?

I always say to myself, “You know who’s going to be really fucking mad if I don’t write? It’s Nathalia when she’s 60, when she’s either shitting in a bedpan or whatever the hell. Fuck it. Say it now.” There are worse things than death, right?

Do you feel like you have that long-term vision of yourself at 65 or 70, with this body of work behind you?

It would be incredible if I could look back as an older woman and think to myself, “Wow, I did all these things. I’m really happy that I left this body of work behind and that I didn’t just surrender to the ethos of this crazy world.” I would love to make more films. I’ve got the beginnings of the next book. I just want to stay creative and stay in the process. That’s always been my motto: How do I stay in the work? How do I focus on the work? No one cares, or it doesn’t get made? Then fuck it. Just keep moving on.

That’s a really good one: “How do I stay in the work?”

And then you can’t get out of that. It’s like an eight-hour gig, right? “I have to go to work.” Even if it means nothing, you have to put in your eight hours, or however many hours you can do.

Film seems really collaborative and like there’s a lot of different parties involved. But poetry is just you there on the page. What is it like working between these two mediums? How do they differ or how are they the same?

The best part of any aspect for me is always the writing. Being alone in that space with the music, where no one is judging you, no one is telling you what you can and cannot do, or what’s possible. It’s the most beautiful time for me to be alive, honestly—when I’m just by myself in this world where I can be egregious or as violent as possible. Film is really collaborative, but more so than collaborative, I would say you have to be very concise and specific with your vision. You can’t meander or give people too much credence over their decision-making.

You have to be really specific, which means that the idea and the world—the universe or whatever you’re working in—has to be incredibly refined and edited. That’s why films can take years… And that’s something that I learned the hard way with features. Films are made in prep and in post, I think, and you have to be so bloody specific in your approach before you can take it out into the world. Otherwise, the film will eat you alive, from the inside out, for sure.

Have you ever abandoning a project or a poem? What do you consider failure for you as an artist?

Nothing is failure. Failure is not on the table because… I just think of the scraps and how beautiful those things can be. Who am I to say what’s success or what’s failure? The things that are discarded, maybe there’s something in there. Maybe there’s something really beautiful we never thought of. In terms of a concept of failing—like, “Fuck, that sucked, I didn’t do that very well”—even out of that, there’s so much that you learned from and that you take away. So then it wasn’t really a failure. Maybe it wasn’t received as well as you thought or maybe you chose the wrong words, but it’s like a time capsule of where you were in that time in your life. What do you think?

I really like that. I teach writing and I’ll always be like, “I don’t think you ever have to abandon a project,” but then I have a couple of projects that just didn’t work and that I never came back to. I have a couple of manuscripts that I put down and then why I try to pick them up again, I struggle to get back into whatever it was I was doing in that moment. I don’t know if I consider it failure so much as feeling that pain of knowing the project is there and waiting.

I’ve [abandoned] something that haunted me or scared me. Leonora Carrington: I dove really deep into her work and I started creating this occult world. I decided to create my own spiritual dimension where hell resided with these demons and it was really scary and I fucking spooked myself so much. Something happened in my personal life that echoed what I was writing and I was like, “Okay, this is getting closed and I’m putting it over here and I’m not going to do that anymore.”

That’s happened to me once before, too. I wrote something, and then something traumatic happened in my life that the symbolism and the story echoed. It was so specific that it couldn’t have been a coincidence. I think it cemented that there’s something more mystical that’s happening in the writing process.

There’s a madness associated with writing. There’s a madness associated with tapping into that energy, into that realm or that dimension or whatever you open yourself up to. And I think that’s the dangerous thing about being creative sometimes. Because we don’t have any discernment about different energies or entities because that’s not taught anymore. We open ourselves up to these places so that they can maybe invoke us or we invoke them, and then we’re there and we’re stuck with that in our minds or in our personal lives.

And for that reason, I feel like I have to be a little more careful. In the past, I’ve been really, really heavy-handed with like, “I’m going to this energy. I’m going to this negative place and I don’t give a fuck about how everybody else in my life feels about where I am right now.” Sometimes you walk up to the gates of that work and you put in your coins, like, “What am I going to sacrifice today?” It’s a constant exchange of what you’re willing to sacrifice to put on the page.