FILMMAKERs

jenny deller: writer/director/producer > statement > work

Future Weather is not autobiographical; however, it's a very personal exploration. When I began writing the script, I had just read a series of New Yorker articles by climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. (You can now find them in her book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe.) The proof of global warming is undeniable and the implications for the family of life on this planet are heartbreaking to me. So my gut instinct was to explore this complex issue through the lens of a family drama and tell a story that will provoke people to connect to it on a personal level. What is your relationship to the natural world? What happens to the impulse to reproduce when you're faced with the knowledge that thirty years from now, the world will be a vastly different place due to climate change? What do you say to children who live in fear of an unknowable future? In essence, how will we have to evolve to survive such fragile times?

genre

When I was twelve, I stood in the stacks of Young Adult novels at the public library and imagined a young heroine opening the mailbox one sunny day to find a postcard from her mother off gallivanting out west in a pick-up truck. There was something both sad and romantic about it, and that is how I perceive Laduree's coming-of-age. Young adult novels as I remember them didn't sugarcoat things; they were about kids in trouble and alienated from adults. They were awkward and romantic and sexy in a way that seemed very real and sincere. Perhaps innocent compared to what kids today are exposed to, but then again, Laduree is no Harry Potter, that's for sure.

character

Over the course of his movies, Yasujiro Ozu's characters reveal a singular soul – something true and honest. Whether it's flawed or virtuous, profane or base or charitable, wise or counterfeit, or all of the above, there is always a vulnerability in the revelation of it. Nor does Ozu hide his own limitations in portraying the human condition. He is humble. I tried to keep a little bit of Ozu's compassion and dignity close to my heart when writing Future Weather.

visual style & setting

The danger in making a film about protecting nature is to sentimentalize it. Especially when your heroine is thirteen and an environmentalist. But nature and the material world are visual motifs that run throughout Laduree's perspective, and I want to portray them in a way that will touch people on a fundamentally human level. I took instruction from Laduree's fascination with photographing trash. The Japanese sensibility of wabi-sabi is a concept based on Buddhist tradition and describes a beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete."1 Hence, all of our lighting and production design will be done with this aesthetic in mind, and I will work with the DP to express this in our cinematography. We will shoot on high-definition video with a 35mm lens adapter to achieve a cinematic depth of field, but will be careful not to get over-soft in our focus. My hope is not to get caught up in trying to mimic film, but to try to embrace our digital limitations as part of the movie's wabi-sabi.

Score

As I wrote, I found the only music I could listen to was minor-key, early-modern style piano pieces. I also kept thinking of Chekhov plays – their yearning for something higher pinned to a sense of mortality; his characters' sense of irony and attachment to escape fantasies and memories. At first this seemed strange given the disparity in social classes portrayed in his plays and this drama. But rather than fight it, I began to see it as a framing device for the film – something that would get at the story's existential questions and fight the "women's genre" trappings sometimes projected onto the story. Thus my experimentation with the piano scoring in Trailer A. I found this melancholy and humorous music an interesting juxtaposition to Laduree's world, another way to bring dignity and mystery to the stories weaving in out of hers, and to tie them to a longer history of human drama.