Between before and after, p.1
Between Before and After, page 1
Between Before
and After
Jessica Stilling
Copyright © 2022, Jessica Sticklor
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Table of Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
About the Author
I
Present
“The films you are making, they are just about your mother, correct?” Jacques or Pierre, François or Michel, a twenty-something film buff at an obscure French ‘zine for cinephiles, asks after two single words of introduction. It’s a phone interview and so there’s no need for much in the way of pleasantries. “This project, it is for your mother, no? Is it for you?” He rounds his words and stabs at the last syllable, sharp edges like pinpricks curl at the ends of his r’s, upending the e’s. It still amazes me how French French people sound, even when they’re speaking English.
“They’re her books. She wrote them. I’m just translating them into film.”
“So, this movie you are making, it is based on your mother’s novel, no? And that was based on what happened in Paris?”
“It’s loosely based on what happened to my sister, yes,” I reply. I rarely give them this much, but I like this twenty-something and I like obscure magazines. Perhaps it’s because my career in film, even with some success, has also led me straight down the harrowing path of obscurity. “I came back here, to the city where my sister died, to make a film about it.” Cue the psychoanalyst. Cue the violins. I hear the voices of my elderly aunts in Scarsdale telling me that this is not emotionally healthy as they sit in front of their televisions taking my call between commercial breaks of Wheel of Fortune.
“And she was five, no? I have the newspaper article--when it happened. Would you like me to read it to you?”
“No,” I reply just a little too urgently. I know the article, the one from Le Monde, with the picture of the apartment building and the emergency vehicles outside. La Fille de l’Auteur Meurt dans les Feu or some variation of that.
“So then why did you come here?”
“I enjoy frequenting the Cluny,” I joke, but I’m not sure if he gets it at all. “I’m adapting all my mother’s novels into film and it’s next on my list.”
“And what about those scenes of Notre Dame? How are you planning to film around the damage?”
“I used to be a cameraman. We’ll get the right angles.”
“Angles are enough?”
“Are angles ever enough?” I joke and this time he laughs with me.
“There are more films, correct? You have decided to do all your mother’s novels?” the go-getter asks. “Your mother is very lucky having a director for a son.”
“I was going to do her third novel next, it’s about the life of Catherine of Aragon but I couldn’t get the permits to film in England so I’m here.”
“And why are you doing this? Now that she has won the Celsius Award it might make more commercial sense. Didn’t Martha Billingsby just get it? More people will see your films.”
“That’s not why I decided to do it.” I do not offer the reason. Thankfully, the go-getter is perceptive enough not to push it. He’ll make a good journalist someday, once he’s thrown blissfully out of obscurity and into the shining golden hands of success.
“Are you changing the stories? Making them more suitable for the medium?”
My mother’s novels have always been pretty straightforward, so there’s been no need for a massive rewrite to get the story onto the silver, the Technicolored, the CGIed, screen. “I wrote the screenplays, but I tried to stay as true as possible, as word for word, as I could to my mother’s vision.”
“Why her vision and not your own?” I am briefly reminded of my old workshop days in film school the way this line of questioning is going. “Are you doing this for your mother or yourself?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m doing this project for anyone.” I pause. Pauses are great for interviews. “There’s something there, I’m getting to it,” I say enigmatically, all tortured-artist-don’t-question-my-process. Sometimes this works.
“Are you trying to explore, to come to terms, with your sister’s death?”
Playing tortured artist hasn’t worked on this guy.
“It’s not about that. Not at all.”
“Is it nice, being back in Paris?” the go-getter throws me an easy one. “After what happened when you were a kid? Do people recognize you here?”
“They don’t even recognize me in New York, and I’ve lived there most of my adult life,” I quip.
“Well, thank you. That will perhaps be all. But I will try to have this up in the next couple of days, once it goes through my editor.”
“Of course, thanks,” I reply. I want to thank him for speaking English during this interview, but the French hate to be reminded when they’re speaking English. I’d like to think I could have gotten by in French but it’s better not having to fumble for the right word.
“Thank you,” he says just before we hang up. My phone vibrates and I see a message from my assistant. There is an issue with craft services. I roll my eyes and put my phone away, very aware that this craft services debacle will be the bane of my next three hours. “Now it’s the food, all after Drama Queen missed her call time,” my assistant texts. I am not successful enough to be able to avoid these issues.
As far as Indie filmmakers go, I’ve done okay. I can afford my apartment on the Upper West Side. If I need to direct an episode of CSI: Miami or the odd commercial, I can usually come up with a project that provides a paycheck. I have to make calls to get these gigs, but they offer them freely and don’t laugh in my face when I ask for work. My films make the festival circuit. Sometimes they place, sometimes they win.
My assistant, who is really just an old student of mine from when I adjuncted at The New School, doing a couple of film classes for a few semesters between projects a couple of years ago, posts two to three times a day to the usual newfangled social platform. She usually says something enigmatic and deep. She’s been known to look up quotes from Camus or Sartre to see where they land. Or black and white pictures of people looking out into a tangible oblivion. There aren’t many pictures of me, however. Not much to see there, just a tallish blond guy who never gets the memo about how much stubble is appropriate on any given Tuesday. Now that we’re filming in Paris she’s piling on the Existentialism.
A film I worked on just after film school, not one I directed, was nominated for an Oscar, for Best Short, but it didn’t win. That did put me on a few radars for a while, that made people think maybe I’d rise to the occasion and become the wunderkind a second generation creative with a couple of connections (my actual connections were always looser than most people thought) should be. While I don’t have a day job that isn’t tied to filmmaking, I wouldn’t say I’m exactly rolling in anything, dough or admiration or otherwise. But I do what I love, and I make a living and I know I’m damn lucky to be able to say that with a straight face.
The phone rings in the temporary apartment I’ve taken on the Rue le Goff off Saint Michel, the same neighborhood, in the 6th Arrondissement, where I lived as a child. It’s a short-term rental. I’m still speaking with the agent of the building I really want to get into. I want to say the city has changed since 1994 when I came here to live with my mother for the summer. I was fourteen and my eyes might not have adjusted to the lights of this city. I didn’t see it with the same oblique angles. In some ways I’m sure it has changed. Memory, hindsight, whatever, skews the focus, the way the same set can change so drastically when we use different lighting tech. The cafes, the cobblestones jutting up from the streets like medieval spikes…. Even the people…fashions have changed, no more butterfly clips, no more slap bracelets (I was a kid), no more Rachel haircuts and short plaid skirts, no more chic all-black suits (okay maybe there are still some chic all black suits), but the place, the pe
There’s that boyish college student with long hair and a thin mustache (Is he trying to be King Louis the XVIIII? It seems there’s always a college student around who thinks he’s Louis the XVIIII.) sitting at the same café every morning reading from an actual book. The prevalence of actual books, and therefore genuine bookstores of the not-a-glorified-cafe-and-toy-store variety, in this city is simply amazing. There’s the photo shoot down the block where women who are too tall with faces that aren’t exactly pretty, (but hey they’re thin!), prance around in clothes for the wrong season. When I walk down these streets it's like I’m in a Truffaut or Godard movie. Cue dissonant music. Cue superfluous sex scene that has nothing to do with the plot. Cue black and white stills mixed with Technicolor. Cue Jean Pierre Leaud racing down the street. It seemed Jean Pierre Leaud dominated the leading man circuit in New Wave cinema for a fifteen-year period. We tried to get him for this film but even at seventy-five he’s way too expensive.
The phone rings again and I don’t answer. There’s a knock on my door and I get up from the couch to get it. A key turns in the lock and the door opens without my consent. I know who it is before she walks in. There’s really only one person I know who cares this little for my consent.
“You could answer your phone, you know? No one knows the number,” Mary Anne, my assistant, barges in.
“The press was at my door last week,” I reply.
“You could have not told people where you were staying in that little PR puff piece. I mean really, I cannot be responsible for your stupidity, Sebastian.” She shakes her head like she’s annoyed, her short, very bright, very dyed red hair shimmers around her face and she looks like a pixie.
“I’m being cautious. I’m allowed to be cautious.”
“You’re allowed to be cautious, not rude. You can be rude to reporters; you can be rude to your agent or your mother, but you can’t be rude to me.”
“I thought that’s why I pay you,” I tease and Mary Anne smiles.
“That is definitely not why you pay me. You pay me to put up with your other eccentricities, Director.” Mary Anne smirks and power walks across the room. At five foot three she constantly takes strides that are entirely too big for her body. “Not that you pay me anywhere near enough.”
“They don’t pay me enough either.”
“The press wants to know about your mother. What happened in the ‘90s, some people still have questions. Have you talked to her yet?”
“I have not,” I reply. “I’m sure she’s fielding enough of her own questions.”
“I’m sure she is, that’s why it might be nice if you talked to her.”
“It might be nice.”
“She might be helpful with your new project.”
“She might be helpful,” I quip. “But we’ve made two of her books into films already and she didn’t call for either. She did, however, cash our checks.”
“As I recall Mommy Dearest offered you a deal on the rights and you insisted on paying market value.”
“I’d make a terrible businessman.”
“Wouldn’t we all,” Mary Anne says.
“I don’t know if she’s even seen the films.”
“You refused to invite her to the premieres.”
“She could have crashed them. Regina Foster is not above crashing –” I stop myself. “We’ve established a pattern by inertia.”
“They were good movies, should have gotten more press.”
“The oddly autobiographic coming-of-age-er set in 1970s Connecticut and the trying-to-recall-the-Beat-generation set in the wilds the New York City of the 1980s.”
“We’re running through the decades. Now if only you’d talk to your mother.”
“If only I’d talk to my mother,” I repeat, leaving the living room and heading to the kitchen. Euro-kitchens are small, even for someone like me, who has lived in New York City pretty much regularly since film school. I know the French must be able to pull off a five-course dinner out of those kitchens but for the life of me I do not know how. All I remember eating last time I was here was bread and cheese. I swear to God my films are not this full of bad stereotypes. Neither was my past, or my life, but here I am lobbing cliché after cliché against a wall like a bored kid with a baseball and a garage door. Then again, this city lends itself to bad stereotypes, hence the prevalence of college students who think they can channel Louis the XVIII by way of thin mustaches.
“Is it nice though, being back?” Mary Anne asks. “You must miss your mother. You should talk to her.”
“I call my agent, who calls her agent, who calls her PR person, who calls her. I wonder if anything gets lost in this game of telephone.”
“We’re shooting scenes 18 through 20 this afternoon,” Mary Anne reminds me. “Outside scenes, at the café.”
“Got it, boss. 18 through 20,” I repeat.
More than three quarters of this film, The Paris Picture is the working title, is finished. We’ve hired an actress to play the woman who is loosely based on my mother. She’s a Parisian up and comer with light brown hair and my mother’s cold blue eyes. Playing the character loosely based on me is a sixteen-year-old blond boy who grew up in South Dakota until his family realized that he was inordinately attractive. He did a recurring role on a popular Netflix show last year and they’ve decided to see if he can break into the movie business. I’m not sure if a little Indie film is a good career move but he’s generated some buzz just by being in the picture.
The phone rings again and Mary Anne answers. It’s a cream-colored corded contraption that came with the apartment. It reminds me a lot of the one we had at our place here in the ‘90s.
“Hello?” Mary Anne asks professionally. She has held friendly conversations with the likes of George Clooney and Cate Blanchet. She’s handled an angry press agent with the flair of a Victorian hostess and stopped a homicidal rival producer from physically charging me with a few simple words. Just now, she speaks for a while, quietly nodding, almost whispering. Then she pulls the phone away and looks over at me with cautious eyes and I wonder briefly who has died or what government official is making a stink about filming. “It’s your mother,” she says.
I freeze. If I were holding something I’d have dropped it. “Say I’m not here.”
“I’m not here,” she repeats into the phone before gently returning it to the receiver.
II
1994
The summer my mother brought us to Paris I was obsessed with Vikings and the stone of the city reminded me of Charlemagne. Bulging, misshapen, ancient stone that jutted out of the older buildings in the middle of the Seine. Paris was an island before it was a city. I could just picture the iron they used to forge chains to pull the drawbridges up so the Northmen couldn’t get in.
For the most part our life was pretty normal here. I ate dinner across a kitchen table from my mother in a tiny Euro-kitchen. She poured me glasses of milk and sat on my sister’s squeaky twin bed telling story after story as she went to sleep. I don’t want to paint a picture of blissful domesticity; it was never domestic and certainly not blissful, but it was our life, and nothing was over the top, blown out of proportion or worth writing a book about. It’s only when you pull the camera back, when you see it from a telephoto, wide angle lens, that it seems dramatic enough to warrant artistic representation. But I’ve learned being raised by a writer, and then later trying to make films, that the only way to understand anything is to turn it into art. To flip a moment, a time, a life, on its head, twist it around, and stare down all angles, until the picture comes into focus.
Only sometimes the picture never comes into focus, and you have to make it all up anyway.
We weren’t rich. That wasn’t how we traveled that summer. My mother made some money off her novels, but she wasn’t able to support herself solely with her writing until I was in college. She picked up teaching jobs and did a lot of freelance work. She was always taking on an article or opinion piece that pulled her away from her novels, but they paid the bills. And there was much more grant money for artists and writers to be had in the ‘90s. In fact, she had a grant that summer and we were staying at the apartment of one of her old friends, who had traveled to Belarus to do research on the Eastern Bloc. The rent was, “practically nonexistent,” as she put it.
