Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann are a married writing and directing duo. Their short films “The Mink Catcher” and “Canary” were screened at Telluride, SXSW, Palm Springs Shortsfest, and Provincetown, among other festivals. Buck directed the Peabody award-winning documentary “Best Kept Secret,” and she was also a recipient of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Fund grant and The Adrienne Shelly’s Foundation Grant for Female Directors. Schlingmann was a recipient of the David Jones Memorial Award for Best Director and the ASCAP Scoring Fellowship. They are currently in development on their second feature, “The Big D,” with producer Bettina Barrow and Lily Rabe.
“Sister Aimee” premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival on January 26.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
SB&MS: It’s 1926. Famous evangelist and show woman Sister Aimee wants to escape the empire she’s built and finds herself on a road trip to Mexico with her married lover and a mysterious woman who pulls the narrative and Aimee’s attention into an unexpected direction.
While the film is based on a real person and events in her life, it’s not a biopic at all, but instead very much our imagination — gone wild — of what might have happened. It hopefully says something truthful about female ambition, identity, and the power –and privilege– of storytelling.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
SB&MS: A few years ago, our lead actress Anna Margaret Hollyman told us to look into Sister Aimee, and that she was the kind of character we would be obsessed with. She was right. She didn’t know then that we also became obsessed with Anna Margaret playing the part.
Looking at Aimee’s life and her disappearance, we felt there was a chance for an exciting, improbable, complex telling of a powerful woman’s decision to leave behind the thing that gave her that power.
There was also a chance to make a film with an Old Hollywood flair and mash it up with thoroughly modern themes and characters.
W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?
SB&MS: We hope some of the exhilaration that the characters experience rubs off on the audience. As filmgoers ourselves, we always love it when the characters linger around our mind after we’ve left the theater.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
SB&MS: Our vision for the story was an ambitious one. We wanted to create a consistent period world on a small budget, fill it with a big ensemble of intense, funny, dark, heightened yet dramatically grounded performances, and live within the opposites of Old Hollywood artifice and rugged, vast on-location shoots.
Thankfully, our producers, as well as the heads of departments and the entire crew, were completely up to the task. We incorporated our Director of Photography and our Production Designer into the development process really early in order to figure out where the limits of our vision were and how far we could stretch them.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
SB&MS: We had a “Field of Dreams” attitude in making the film happen — if we build it, they will come. Together with the producer, we pulled together as many elements of the shoot as possible — locations, actors, heads of departments — and then presented a coherent, very pragmatic vision of how we were going to pull it off to financiers.
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
SB&MS: It’s both the best and the worth: “Don’t be too precious.” Being an independent filmmaker means you have to straddle your thirst for an authentic vision and the limitations that budgets, time crunches, etc. put on it. It was a journey to understand that a productive version of “being precious” is “being protective,”, to not let your vision be up for grabs, to know the limits of how far you can stretch it, and when you have to say no.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
SB&MS: Find your people. Too often women learn that the way to success is to make other people like them and their work. If that’s the approach, you just find yourself twisted into a pretzel in order to fill some image of what it is that other person likes. Needless to say, don’t twist yourself into a pretzel! Instead, find the people who like you without it.
