“Sensitivity Training” will premiere at the 2016 LA Film Festival on June 5.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
MF: “Sensitivity Training” is a female buddy comedy about a misanthropic woman named Serena who has a lot of interpersonal problems with people at work. She’s forced into sensitivity training with a bubbly personal coach named Caroline. Caroline is Serena’s complete opposite. She’s the kind of woman who believes everything can be solved with a hug — basically everything Serena hates.
Caroline follows Serena around everywhere she goes and inserts herself into Serena’s interactions and tries to correct her behavior. Eventually the two form a weird friendship and influence each other in unexpected ways.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
MF: I love misanthropes, and even more I love stories about mismatched humans: people who have no business being on the same planet, yet somehow needing each other very deeply. In my own work, I try to send my characters to their own personal hell. In this film Serena must confront her very worst fears and learn that she needs relationships with other people in order to survive. Caroline is somehow the only person who can help her. Caroline happens to be going through a life-crisis of her own, and Serena turns out to be the remedy.
I am very drawn to stories about nice people becoming meaner and mean people becoming nicer. I want to explore the influence two people might have on each other. I want to examine human behavior, the mechanics of niceness and meanness and whether there’s an acceptable happy medium.
W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?
MF: I hope this film brings people joy and emotional satisfaction. While watching the film, I want people to laugh and feel things. When they leave the theater, I hope they think about their own friendships and relationships. Serena and Caroline embody two very different ways of approaching the world, and I hope people come away from the film looking inward and thinking about where on the spectrum between these two extremes they may fall.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
MF: Of course there are many exciting and not-so-exciting challenges that come with making a film, and it’s hard to rank them and pick which one was the biggest, but an interesting challenge in making “Sensitivity Training” was learning about microbiology and figuring out how to represent Serena’s lab and her research in a way that is scientifically accurate and also serves the needs of the story.
I worked closely with scientists who are affiliated with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and with UCLA, where we shot the lab scenes, and they were very helpful in advising me and guiding my research. My cast and I spent a lot of time in microbiology labs at UCLA observing the scientists at work, both the mechanics of the tasks they complete in the lab as well as the interpersonal dynamics and hierarchies present in a university lab environment.
The scientists at UCLA were very generous and candid with us, and we learned a lot from them that impacted how we portrayed Serena’s lab and the people in it. My production designer Richard Perry and the art department worked very closely with our advisers in making the set for Serena’s lab. I’m proud of the world we were able to create.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
MF: We raised funding for “Sensitivity Training” from a combination of grants and private investors. Our first and largest grant came from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. I already had the basic idea for “Sensitivity Training,” a misanthropic woman being forced into personality prison with a bubbly personal coach, when I first learned about the Alfred P. Sloan production grants.
It clicked for me that Serena should be a scientist. It made perfect sense for her precise personality and worldview. It also provided an interesting setting for Serena’s professional life and, further, the field of microbiology helped underline the themes of self-protection and impermeability. It was settled. Grant or no grant, Serena was a scientist! This realization set everything in motion, and the story evolved naturally from there.
I am a graduate of the UCLA MFA Directing program and a lot of my key collaborators and most of my crew had been my classmates in film school. It was great to have such a supportive community behind the film. We were able to shoot a lot of the film on campus, and we had the support of the film school, as well as the Department of Biochemistry and the California Nanosystems Institute who worked with us to find the right locations for Serena’s lab. People from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology advised us on the scientific accuracy of Serena’s research. A lot of people and organizations came together to help make this film possible!
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
MF: Best advice I’ve received: On set, never move on until you know you have it. Don’t worry about upsetting cast or crew by doing another take or making a necessary change. At the end of the shoot, everyone else is going to go back to their lives, and you’re going to be working with this footage for a very long time. There’s nothing worse than sitting in an edit suite, cursing yourself for not getting that extra take or shot that you knew you needed but didn’t ask for.
Worst advice I’ve received: Go to a lot of networking events.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
MF: Make your movie! Try to figure out exactly what it is that you want to say with your film, and say it in a way that no one else could. Work as hard as you can; make sure all the choices you’re making are right for the film, and don’t settle for less.
Try not to worry about pleasing everyone — that’s not the director’s job, and your film will suffer. Do only your best work. You can’t control how people perceive you or your project, but you can control the quality of your work. Also, don’t wait for people to say “yes” to you. You have to be unstoppable.
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
MF: There are too many to pick just one! The films and filmmakers that continue to inspire me include Amy Heckerling’s “Clueless,” Lisa Cholodenko’s “The Kids Are All Right,” and all of Lisa Cholodenko’s work, everything Nicole Holofcener has ever made, Jane Campion’s “The Piano,” Patty Jenkins’ “Monster,” Nora Ephron’s “You’ve Got Mail,” and Nora Ephron’s entire body of work and existence as a human, Elaine May’s films and comedy, and Jill Soloway’s work.
If I had to talk about just one film, it would be Kimberly Peirce’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” I was 16 when I first saw this film, and it changed my life. It continues to speak to me as a director and as a queer woman. I am amazed by what Kimberly Pierce was able to say about gender, sexuality, class, human relationships — all in such a compelling, entertaining, and well-crafted narrative film! What an amazing first feature.
