Expanding The Story Behind An Image — A Miniflix Interview With Courtney Hope Thérond
Filmmaking wasn’t Courtney Hope Thérond’s first interest in the arts. Instead, she started with photography and theater, two mediums not dissimilar to her eventual chosen profession. However, it was only in filmmaking — and in going to NYU film school and making many shorts there — that Thérond realized the potential this special medium had to “expand the story” that takes place in every image captured.
Many of her shorts (particularly “The Dress You Have On” and “Make It Up”) deal with relationships in moments of crisis. In just a few minutes, Thérond as director knows how to expertly navigate through several emotions, many of them uncomfortable and surprising. With “Rehearsal”, her latest and a Short of the Week Premiere, this theme stays true, only with four characters in a room: three men and one woman. This power dynamic, infused with the context of the recent Me Too movement, creates a compelling drama about consent, vulnerability and the inherent tension behind so many seemingly good-intentioned decisions made in the film industry, and beyond.
Courtney talks with us about the real-life sex scene that inspired “Rehearsal”, the importance of open-ended questions and what she hopes audiences will take away from the experience.
Miniflix Interviewer: What was the inspiration for “Rehearsal”?
Courtney Hope Thérond: “Rehearsal” actually came about because of my day job as a 1st AD (Assistant Director). I worked on a film where there was a sex scene that wasn’t handled in the best way and I didn’t really know how to act. At the time, I hadn’t ever encountered anything like that before. So I was first trying to figure out how I felt about the experience and what I could have done differently about it.
“Rehearsal” was a therapeutic way of dealing with it…with the Me Too movement, there are all these insane stories that come out, but so many of those start as micro-aggressions. They often start in these very small ways, where people are made to feel uncomfortable. As you accept all these little things, that’s how it ends up getting so big.
Miniflix: I was really curious why you chose to have this film take place during a rehearsal and not during an actual shoot, like the experience you went through. Can you talk about the importance behind making the short take place during a “courtesy rehearsal session” for Ana rather than the actual day of shooting the fictional film’s sex scene?
Courtney: The idea of trying to do the right thing [with a courtesy rehearsal] but not including the right people in the conversation was really important to me. I didn’t want us to think that the three male characters were just evil and terrible misogynists…I think what’s uncomfortable about this whole conversation that people don’t want to face is that these statistics aren’t just somewhere out there — we all know these people, we interact with these people and sometimes we are these people. It’s a lot easier to point fingers and say these things are outrageous but, in a way, everyone is responsible for everyone else’s well being and emotional sense of safety.
M: I definitely agree that one of the more nuanced and powerful aspects of the film comes from the fact that you don’t just make the male characters one-sided villains. You don’t make it easy for us to decide how much any one character is in the wrong. How did you approach the meta element of this film? You are essentially having your lead actress [Jessica Mendez Siqueiros] be as vulnerable to the real-life cast and crew as the film’s character is supposed to be. What were the conversations like with Jessica about this?
C: We had worked together on my last short, “The Dress You Have On”. Originally when that film premiered at Outfest, I told Jes and my DP that I had this idea about a movie about this sex scene rehearsal that would be really uncomfortable but really subtle with a lot of wides…and she immediately was like “yes, let’s do it”. I hadn’t even started casting it or writing the script. But she was very excited about it from the beginning. In the end, she helped produce it and was the editor on it.
She was involved all along the way… the thing I’ve learned from both the feature I worked on and “Rehearsal” is that the key comes from asking open questions privately. Questions like, “what do you want” or “what do you need” or “how do you feel”?
M: What was the collaboration with the cinematographer [Amanda Treyz] like? How did both of you come to make the decision to shoot this mostly in static, deliberate wide shots?
C: Amanda also shot “The Dress You Have On” so she was in the initial conversations. I pitched the aesthetic to her in this way — I wanted it to look the way white noise sounds. It needs to feel uncomfortable but in a way where there’s nothing specific that you can look away from. It was her idea to shoot the film clockwise around the room. And then I wanted to do static wides, with handheld on the closeups, particularly of Ana…hers is the only worldview we were really wanting to tap into.
