Interview With Director/Actress Theda Hammel (Stress Positions)

“Even a very nice house is a kind of hell if you can’t leave it”, espouses John Early’s character in Theda Hammel’s gut-bustingly funny and quietly devastating short A Trip To Spain. Hammel began her filmmaking career during the COVID-19 pandemic, her films exploring the domestic spaces we found ourselves trapped in, and how they mentally trapped us in turn.

Her debut feature, Stress Positions, premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, to much buzz. John Early plays Terry Goon, a chronically chaotic and cautious man who finds himself holed up mid-pandemic in his ex-husband’s home with his male model nephew from Morocco, Bahlul, who everyone he knows wants to meet. Throw in back pain, Alexa calls, delivery drivers of interest, and disarmingly poignant personal histories, and Hammel’s film is guaranteed to overload and overwhelm.

It’s been radio silence on a UK release since Stress Positions premiered, and Sundance London came and went without a trace of it. Thankfully, the fine folks at Fringe! Queer Arts & Film Fest, in partnership with T-Girls on Film, have us covered, as the film enjoys its UK premiere this week as part of the festival.

Ahead of this long-awaited and sure to be well-attended screening, I sat down with Theda (appropriately, over Zoom) to talk about her pandemic experiences, the purported trans film moment, and finding humour and immediacy in chaos.

Hi Theda, lovely to meet you! I’m so glad that Stress Positions is finally playing in the UK!

I wish it had played sooner! I’m very elated.

I want to start by discussing your 2022 short, My Trip to Spain, which feels like a first take of Stress Positions,in a way. What were the first creative seeds of that film and what were your first steps into filmmaking? It’s clearly a personal film, so I’m curious to hear more.

Sure. I mean, that actually came second. The idea for Stress Positions came first, but we shot that short film to see if we had the goods, basically, to make a longer thing.

I wasn’t expecting it to go anywhere, but our cinematographer encouraged us to hire a small crew. I thought we were going to shoot it in an afternoon on a DSLR camera. 

But, yeah, that short does share some concerns. It shares the COVID setting. In that case, a different period: right as the vaccines were emerging. But you have a housebound person, you have an intruding visitor, and you have a naive or an innocent figure, who, in this case, is the gardener, that becomes the sort of prey for the corrupting New York gay character.

So I think they share a lot of thematic material, but they have a different style. The short film was working with a long take style, and that wasn’t really suitable for Stress Positions, which is a little bit more frenetic, screwy.

Stylistically, and in structural elements also, My Trip To Spain reminds me very specifically of the Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo. Is that nuts to say?

No, it’s so accurate. It’s directly lifted for the most part.

Having never directed a film before, and assuming this would just be a sort of camera test, I, who have been very influenced by Hong Sang-soo, or at least very enamoured and reverential in regard to Hong Sang-soo, thought I would just adopt his apparatus and see what happens. That apparatus is a stationary camera with a zoom lens in long take style.

And actually, the results as shot were not that compelling, because it’s much harder than it looks. 

To make that film work, I had to do a lot of crop zooming. There is a lot of motion, but it’s all flat motion. It’s all pan and scan, Ken Burns style. And that allowed me some latitude in editing, which I found I needed. If I could pan away from somebody, I could replace the audio of their line with a take that was more suitable. If something was stagnant, I could give it a little sense of this [push and momentum] with that crop zooming. I was able to bail it out in that way and make it into something less derivative, but also maybe less perfect than Hong Sang-soo.

I think that there are a lot of things to draw from Hong Sang-soo. I don’t know if I will do it ever quite so directly, but the thing that I do find in his work, in addition to the mise-en-scene, is this idea that people have a problem with each other. That it’s not a picture of human beings cooperating fluidly or effortlessly with one another, it’s not really a picture of cooperation or solidarity.

But you do see movies where people are capable of cooperating, where two strangers can meet, they get along, they start an adventure together, or they can even complete a project together. I think that the Hongian world has people who can never really actually cooperate or come together. They can never really close the gap between each other, and that’s the source of frustration, of drama and of comedy. I think that corresponds to my experience as well.

So having made My Trip To Spain, you returned to the Stress Positions idea and crafted something significantly more frenetic.  How did that new style develop?

Well, my brother just told me that the short film wasn’t funny enough. My brother is the real cinephile in the family, he knows me very well.

He felt that I was trying to posture a little bit in the earlier short. And that, like, I’m pretty vulgar. I don’t know, I’m actually more of a vulgarian than I would like to admit.

So two things basically happened at once. My brother gave me this advice, based on the short film, to not be afraid to be a little bit more funny and broad. And then I also came across some fiction by Bruce Wagner, who is a writer based in L.A. known for a few things, but maybe one of the more notable is the Map to the Stars script, the David Cronenberg movie.

I read a novel of his called Marvel Universe, which has nothing to do with the superhero world. But that was so amazing. I felt like it was the first thing that I had read in literary fiction or any kind of narrative fiction that was able to take on a social media-tised world – this totally vulgar world full of pop culture detritus – and not just satirize it, but push through it to something more sublime, only by diving headfirst into the muck of it.

Bruce Wagner doesn’t turn his nose up at the low things in life. He’s not condemning them, he’s ploughing through them to try and get to something a little more transcendent. I got very excited by that idea, and it really changed the script. The script was a little too arch. It became something a little bit more slapstick in response to those two influences.

Building on talking about the slapstick elements, much of the humour in both of your films derives from this kind of competing chaos, these living spaces that would be absolute hell for anyone who’s remotely sound sensitive. Have you lived in similar conditions, and what inspired you to make cinema that finds its humour in being overwhelming?

While I was writing the scripts for [both films], I was in the apartment that I had been in for nine years. I had spent all of lockdown in it. And early lockdown, as everybody remembers, was kind of a quiet period. Maybe there was some panic and desperation, but there was also general stillness in the air.

But as it went on, construction resumed, and some construction did resume right outside my apartment on the most horrible restaurant. Everything about the restaurant was monstrous. They made so much horrible grinding noise that I couldn’t think at all during the day, and it led me to move out of that apartment completely. So it’s really on my mind, the contamination of outside noise.

But in general, I do live my life sort of like that. I’m very easily overwhelmed, very easily overstimulated, and I’m extremely clumsy. So the feeling of frenzy in relation to small, easy household things, not like juggling on a tightrope, but just like making sure that you set a cup down in enough on a table that you won’t knock it over moments later when you turn around.

I live my life in a total panic about things like that. I’m very afraid even to stand up too quickly, because I know that something bad will happen. And so the idea of Stress Positions is that the main character is an extremely clumsy person who, because of his clumsiness- not just physically, but maybe also politically, emotionally, there is a sort of clumsiness as well, a kind of fearful paralysis of taking action or of the world at large that would want him to take action.

He’s somebody who’s really, really incapable. I think that the way that I see that more broadly in the movie is that Terry’s physical clumsiness parallels a sort of political clumsiness or a clumsiness that bourgeois white Americans have in dealing with the rest of the world or with ‘different’, period. That we can stub our toes quite a lot in trying to stand up too fast on any of these issues.

How do you prep a set for that kind of chaos? You essentially have a series of dramatic banana peels sequenced around the place.

The set itself was very chaotic, which I wish it wasn’t. That was my shortcoming, having always worked really small. This movie was, by standards of commercial filmmaking, still very small, but it was very big for me, who had never dealt with a film crew on that scale.

The most helpful thing was that we had a house with a lot of character. And aside from that, there was very little prep. I had a general idea of how I wanted people to move through the house, and the house itself was sort of pre-dressed. It was pre-dressed, but we were in a very Terry Goon-like frenzy the whole time just trying to get it made.

I feel like your humour is quite marmite. I look around Letterboxd and find that my mutuals have given Stress Positions a range from five stars to one and a half stars. How would you characterise the audiences who vibe with your cinema, and how would you characterise those who don’t?

Well, I think it can be subdivided further. Because I think that there are people who seem to like the movie without really getting it, and there are people who get the movie and still dislike it. So those are two extra categories.

I think that the complicating thing is that I would maybe not want to watch a movie like the one I made, on paper, because, especially in cinephile circles, the idea of an indie dialogue comedy about Brooklyn millennials is totally repulsive. 

It just so happens that many people in cinephile circles are Brooklyn millennials or equivalent to that. And I don’t feel any better about being one than they do.

But since that has been my life, since I haven’t been swashbuckling all around the world, and since I do have the misfortune of being part of this generation that I think is a huge disappointment, I feel like I have no choice but to start from that premise and then try to work out of it.

It’s like the genre of the movie, if you want to call it that, of the Sundance Brooklyn talkie comedy, has a fragment in it that is incommensurate with that genre, which is the Bahlul monologue strand. It appears very early on, impossible to miss, and impossible to mistake for something that is totally, fluidly integrated into that kind of movie. That fragment, for me, is like a dysphoric fragment that appears and then works its way gradually through the material until it takes over the material. So the movie transitions from a very lowly Brooklyn comedy place to something that I think is a little bit more lyrical or a little bit more poignant and a little bit more, I don’t want to say negative, but I guess sad.

So that’s the thing that I think is very easy to mistake with the movie. And I’ve kept my head down for the most part and it has not been hard for me to avoid ever looking at the Letterboxd page. I am not tempted remotely. But sometimes I do get the sense that it’s being dismissed for working with that premise, and it bums me out slightly.

Was that ‘dysphoric fragment’ there from the start? Did you start with the comedy, or did you start from the deeper ideas and flesh the comedy out around them?

The whole process was both at once. There was always the Bahlul monologue voiceover. The words in that voiceover changed, all the way up until the end of the edit, to suit the material that we had actually shot. Because written in a vacuum, the early voiceover wasn’t very suited to it.

I always knew that would be there, and I also knew that the tonal balance in the movie was going to need to be very specific in order to deal with some of the more serious subjects that the movie raises. It would have to be funny to not get weighed down into a horrible contemporary drama topicality, and it would also have to not be too cheap. Some people might say that the movie is cheap and tasteless, but it would have to be a subtle form of comedy in some cases to get at the subject without being too irreverent or disrespectful.

I think needing to thread the needle on both of those things helped give the movie the tone that it has at the end of the day, even though it wasn’t easy. Because it had to be decided on moment by moment, that’s the whole thing. I couldn’t just flip a switch.

How did your creative collaboration with John Early come about? Both films are kind two-hander character studies of sorts with lots of hubbub surrounding them. There’s a clear mutual depth of creative understanding that’s evident in your work, so I’d love to hear about your dynamic.

I’ve been very good friends with John for a long, long time. We didn’t collaborate in this way until pretty recently. We shared the stage many times, usually with me as a musician and he as a comedian. John is first and foremost for me a friend, and an amazing dramatic actor. He just also happens to be deeply, helplessly funny.

And so, what I know with writing for John is that he won’t have to be directed into a good performance. He won’t have to be made to simulate a thought process, for example of emotional panic. You’ll read it on his face and it’ll just happen so clearly and so quickly that you don’t even have to direct it.

I can also rely on John to learn his lines. So that makes writing for him a great, great pleasure. John is a really great asset on a film set because, maybe just out of his Southern upbringing or his essential good nature, he’s very committed to making sure that everybody is having a good time. He’s wonderful at keeping everybody together, keeping everybody excited and making everybody feel respected and appreciated. I just think he’s the best. He’s a fantastic actor and friend.

How much of his physicality is improvised on set, and how much is drawing from the script? Does it metamorphose as you go?

I think it comes from him. John actually did have a back injury prior to the shoot. I also have long-term back problems and, paralleling my own, I had written some of that into the script already.

He had a very serious episode where he had to have surgery. He had to be in bed rest for a few months. And I was worried that I had cursed him by writing something similar into the script. But the truth is that by the time we shot, he had recovered. He had been doing physical therapy, he was very strong. But he was able to simulate the physicality of a limping person with a herniated disc, and he had known the indignity of having a back pain.

The indignity of having a back pain is that nobody can see it, so nobody cares. They just have to take your word for it. And they’re not very sympathetic. So you’re always insisting that you’re in pain, that you can’t do this, you can’t do that. The physicality came from that experience in his life. And it wasn’t directed, it was just something that he did on his own.

I need to ask about the music. It’s quite sombre during that monologue, but elsewhere there’s a kind of quirky kind of Jean-Michel Jarre-esque anarchy to your scores. You had multiple EPs under your belt prior, which are up on Bandcamp. How did the process differ making music to soundtrack your film work?

The music was the most pleasant part of it for me.

It was really last minute. I had some of the themes in my head, but I was scoring right up against the clock when we were mixing the movie, like day by day. I would go home and score the scenes for the next day that we would be mixing.

And I was really excited by what happened with the music, because it helped me articulate the whole question of the blended tone that I had been struggling with in my meetings, trying to explain how something whimsical could also be poignant and profound and sad and melancholic at the same time. I had forgotten, because I had been dormant on music for a while, that the kind of music that I’ve made tends to be the best expression or explanation of that blend.

Because I don’t like huge vibe-y waltzes of reverb or mood. I like a rhetorical precision of melodies that you can hear. I like a little warbly, weird sound. 

I like maybe a sort of whimsical sound, but I feel like I’m always thinking about sad things, that I’m reaching for something a little more melancholy, and maybe that’s one of the reasons that the music has never really taken off in any way. The context of the movie, the people whose situation the music is underscoring, helps contextualise that kind of music, and the music helps contextualise those kind of people. I was delighted by that.

You’re programmed this week in the UK at Fringe. I think to a queer audience, the film is perhaps an easier sell. You mentioned that trying to communicate the tone was challenging. Has it been difficult positioning and selling the film for other audiences who aren’t queer?

You know, the honest truth is that, maybe because of the life I lead and the people I know, I never once thought of this movie as being a queer movie.

I felt weirdly like a tiny chihuahua who doesn’t realize that they’re not a big golden retriever, who assumes that they are. But then if they were to maybe catch the way that people were looking at and handling them, they would realize that they’re a tacky little toy dog. 

But the movie is, it is a very gay, very trans, very queer kind of movie. I don’t know if maybe there are people who would like it, who have stayed away from it because of their assumptions about what that might mean. But it is nice.

What I’ll say about it is that I don’t think that it condescends to explain any components of queer life to the viewer. There is no moment where somebody sits down and goes: Here’s the thing. Sometimes a twink marries an older man for money, and that older man gets tired of him. Or: Sometimes a person who was sexually active as a gay guy becomes a woman, and rebukes that whole aspect of their life, taking it out on the gay guys in their life and punishing them for not doing the same.

None of those things are explained. There are things that the people in the queer community know about and can recognise, and may be excited to see on screen without that explanatory tendency. So I do think that that is the way it works as a queer movie.

That’s really illuminating. I wouldn’t necessarily pigeonhole the film as ‘a queer film’, but I think that queer people are very accustomed to deconstructing and satirising themselves on screen. I think we go with the flow in a way that means that your film works perhaps more immediately for a queer audience than a cis-het audience approaching it, I don’t know.

Well, the other thing too is that, for example, you can do a queer reading of something that doesn’t have any explicitly queer characters in it. You can get a lot of mileage out of saying, for obvious reasons, that like a movie like The Matrix is an allegory for a transition, right? In the case of this movie, where transition and queerness are explicit, the question is: is it allowed to be an allegory for something else?

Like, if you want to call it twink death, can twink death be an allegory or an analogy for the decline of a generation? Or: Can the attempt to transform from one gender to another, can that be an analogy for maybe other types of transformation, whether they be of conversion or of migration or of just changes of that nature? Can the queer experience be an analogy for something a little bit more general?

I think it can. I also think that Stress Positions is not a grand enough movie to invite that reading. But that was certainly always on my mind at every step of making it, transness and queerness as an analogy for something bigger than itself, or at least different [from itself].

I think your film’s definitely a star within a bigger constellation within the last half decade. I mean, there’s been a huge explosion in fresh trans filmmaking.

And so much of that trans filmmaking explosion came about during the pandemic, which I think is a curious one and deserving of examination, perhaps in this interview, perhaps not. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I think there’s two things. The film industry is itself in decline, I think very obviously. As a formerly successful industry flails around and tries to find new purchase in a changing world, other outside voices can sometimes be brought in to the fold in the hope of revitalizing or engaging new audiences in a new way. So the sudden inclusion of all of these marginalised voices in Hollywood is a great thing for the marginalised, but it’s a symptom, I think in general, of a frailty and weakness and confusion in the industry and in viewership.

On the other hand, the old forms are very clearly not going to be able to work.  I don’t know, I guess I’m wondering how long this period will be indulged. I’m a little apprehensive, frankly, because even between now and the moment the movie was greenlit, I feel like the appetite for these kind of stories has changed.

Now that we’re living in an era beyond that initial pandemic period, what do you plan to focus your films on in future?

I think I’m going to be making a few low budget experiments in the near future and ramping up to a bigger project with some science fiction elements to it. We’ll see how it works out! In the meantime, I’m reading a lot of Philip K. Dick.

Are there any closing comments, thoughts or reflections that you’d like to share with your UK audience?

Well, I’m tremendously gratified to have been invited to participate in the festival. It’s great to be here, it’s wonderful to meet the people of the UK.

As far as the movie is concerned, of course, I hope they enjoy it. And forgive it maybe, for being about events that they don’t necessarily want to dwell on. Maybe it has some charm despite that.

Stress Positions plays the Genesis Cinema in London on Tuesday 17^th September as part of Fringe! Queer Arts & Film Fest. With thanks to Theda Hammel for her insights and generosity with her time, and to Fringe! for facilitating.