Patricia Rozema’s first feature, “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing,” screened at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Prix de la Jeunesse, was runner-up for the Camera D’Or (best first feature), and sold to over 40 countries in one week. The film opened the Toronto International Film Festival and went on to win numerous awards including being ranked in TIFF’s list of Top 10 Canadian Films of all time. In 1995, Rozema wrote and directed “When Night is Falling,” an interracial lesbian love story which premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival and won festival audience prizes around the world. Her other features include “Mansfield Park,” “Into the Forest,” and “Mouthpiece.” In 2009, Rozema co-wrote “Grey Gardens” for HBO starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. She received an Emmy nomination, a Writer’s Guild nomination, and a PEN USA award. Her other small screen credits include “Tell Me You Love Me,” “In Treatment,” “Mozart in the Jungle,” and “Anne with an E.”
A 4K restoration of “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing” opens at Metrograph in New York March 11 and at the Alamo Drafthouse in Los Angeles March 18.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
PR: It’s about a temporary secretary who can fly. It’s about the artist in all of us. And the discovery of sexual difference. It’s also about some serious ’80s shoulder pads.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
PR: I was trying to be brave enough to be an artist. And to be queer when it was definitely not cool.
I drew on different parts of myself for each of the three main characters.
W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?
PR: It feels a bit presumptuous to tell people what to think about after they watch the film. When you pour out your heart or just speak your mind you hope for understanding, sympathy, and a genuine conversation. Ideally a story bears multiple interpretations, and if the artist tells you in great detail how to respond maybe some insights are shut down or lost — so, I like to sit back and listen.
That said, these are some of the responses I’ve heard that I liked. People feel affirmed in their wish to be artists even if they don’t have the obvious markers or behaviors or successes. Some people have said they feel like their internal sense of wonder and dignity, their ability to fly in every sense, are affirmed. Some saw it as a critique of a self-satisfied art world spewing empty bloviation, that the leaders in the field set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of “good” and “bad” and yet are as weak and confused and haunted by a longing to create beauty and meaning as the rest of us.
A young woman thanked me because she’d never seen an uncomplicatedly out lesbian like Mary on-screen before, and it made her feel freer to be herself. That was deeply satisfying to hear. One woman who came from a very patriarchal and poor community in South America was struck by the freedom women had in this culture — freedom to live alone, move about the city alone, be invited to her employer’s home, etc. One guy in Cannes said, “Wow. You can make a movie without men in it and it works.”
Ultimately, I suppose I wrote it as a paean to that delicate but profound drive to hear the mermaids singing but the fear, as the T.S. Eliot poem continues, “they do not sing to me.”
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
PR: There are always hurdles, but people were moved by the character of Polly on the page so there was a wish to help. I felt emboldened by the fact that the foundation, the script, the “who does what and why” of it all, was solid. I knew I just needed to honor that in the execution and it’d be okay.
Keeping “normalizing” voices out of my head was a challenge. People are comforted by seeing what they’ve seen before. This movie was very new in its day, much more radical than it appears to be now, and I wanted everything about it to feel new: the tone, the rhythms, the themes, the style of humor. Everything. But as a first-time filmmaker, I knew there was much I didn’t know. Knowing what to listen to and what to disregard remains the most difficult balance to this day.
Finding my Polly was a challenge. I truly loved the character I had written and wanted to find someone I could love as much on screen. When Sheila McCarthy showed up I was overjoyed! She had the innocence, the Buster Keaton-esque sense of humor, and loneliness, and she broke my heart.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
PR: I applied for grants and government funding. I feel thankful that that existed in Canada when I wanted to step into this field. I got to explore what I truly wanted to explore in my own voice and not necessarily what I thought would sell.
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
PR: The wish to give form to feelings, griefs, longings, and a few jokes.
The wish to give dignity to the overlooked.
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
PR: Best advice: “Make it simple but bursting at the seams” — Jean Renoir. Also, “Don’t be seduced into thinking it takes money and technology to make something strong and real and new” — Laurie Anderson.
The worst: “Any publicity is good publicity.”
W&H: What advice do you have for other women directors?
PR: Take the thing you are sometimes criticized for and amplify that.
Dare to be very personal. That doesn’t necessarily mean very autobiographical, just personal: make sure the emotions come from the most dangerously honest part of yourself. If you aren’t feeling it, nobody will.
Try to ignore the question of whether it would be easier if you were a man or straight or cis-gendered or a different race, or anything other than what you are.
Questions of equality are profoundly important in general, of course, but when you are making a movie just focus on making the movie — that series of shots in a row is all that matters.
Ignore what anyone thinks of you. Ignore whether anyone thinks you have “executive carriage” as I once heard it described. Just get the shots you need by hook or by crook — because the proof is in the pudding.
And remember, even if no one likes your movie, make sure you do! And even if they don’t like it now, it’ll last — maybe people will get it in 10 or 20 years.
There’s lots of money in the world. You just need a relatively small amount of it. Just find it.
You have as much right to tell your story as anyone.
Don’t just try to make films that demonstrate diversity: live a life of diversity, and then your movie and your life will both be rich. And more authentic. We’ve all felt the sense of boxes being ticked. You aren’t filling out a form when you make a movie. You are expressing your deepest, most significant self — make sure that self is true. And open to a world that is large.
I once heard an actor say, “Acting is easy. It’s just drawing on an inner life. The tricky part is having one.” That applies to making films in general.
Try to make your story resonate on multiple levels: personal, social, political, metaphorical, and philosophical. A good story can do this.
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
PR: Jane Campion’s “The Piano” was the first film I saw by a woman that took my breath away. At the time there were precious few women making movies, and I didn’t even know at the time how much inspiration it gave me to know it was made by a woman.
W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?
PR: I released myself from any pressure to be productive. I gardened, noted which new birds came into my orbit and looked up their names and habits, and I painted but not a lot. The thing I have grown to love is going for walks with friends. That was deeply satisfying.
The cult of productivity — aka predatory capitalism — has resulted in a lot of junk everywhere. Environmentally and culturally. Yes, I doom-scrolled and kept very connected to and affected by the unfolding disasters, but I tried to live more simply. I wrote — very slowly — a combination of autobiography, which I’ve never done, and speculative fiction. Me in the past and me in the future. Still figuring it out. Not sure if it’s a feature or a series. It draws in some ways from the same well as “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing.” We’ll see. I won’t go out with it until I really feel it on the page. I only have maybe 30 years of life and filmmaking left, I have to make each gesture count.
Or maybe I’ll just see if that noisy “museum” of Bohemian Waxwings is eating the fermented berries again.
W&H: The film industry has a long history of underrepresenting people of color onscreen and behind the scenes and reinforcing — and creating — negative stereotypes. What actions do you think need to be taken to make it more inclusive?
PR: All discriminatory behavior is, at root, economic. Money must flow towards those who have not received it in the past. Eventually we can aim for proportional representation on-screen, but we’re not there yet. We need to redress some of the wrongs of the past.
