November 4, 2024 – February 23, 2025
Stone is patient. We witnessed its heavy waiting, from crusty slabs in an old English graveyard to the slick-kneed arches wading into an inky Paris Seine; the spires of Celtic churches that cut the sky so clean; the fingers of a Scottish henge poking time in the eye; the defiance of a Shetland rock against an angry, cold sea. There are crumbling castles all over Sicily that know no maps, and then there are fortresses whose clean walls withstand the battery of centuries but scream of broken lines and blood. You know there’s a lot of blood on the stone. But I do love the monolithic cathedrals and duomos – stone reconstructed as art and inspiration. And I especially love their jutting gargoyles – dogs and monkeys and fantastical winged creatures, all petrified gaping mouths and curled claws. I love the pinks, grays and blacks of marble that feet have warped trodding up and slinking down old winding French stairs. Stone knows all the secrets.
For four months this winter, we took our time following the stones, John and I. Sometimes our girls Lulu and Zelda joined us. Adventures on the road have always found their way into our creative lives – and our personal lives have always found a way into our films. It’s a good symbiosis. I’ve blogged about these crossovers since 2010, but these journeys were American; this time we ambled through the UK, Ireland, Italy, and France. As we are in post production for our new feature, Mother of Flies, this was a work trip of pleasure; an office with a shifting view. As I write this, on a train through Normandy, John edits, a blur of greens and shadows projected on his focused face. The images we spent all summer shooting have also been coming together under John’s fingertips. Sometimes we open a hotel window to capture the sound of crows, or perhaps that rusty Scottish gate creaks just right. Life blurs by; images congeal. We see and we feel. We let it all flow into our film.
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John arrived in Europe before me. He spent a few days in Reykjavik, Iceland before visiting Lu in Scotland where she attends the University of Edinburgh for a Masters in Psychodynamic Therapy. Lulu lives in Portobello Beach and has the coolest life of any 26 year-old I know, if I’m to be honest. She cold dips in the sea and runs for miles out into the lushest hills and misty heaths. (Lu already ran the Amsterdam Marathon and is now training for an Edinburgh half!) She studies in ancient libraries with an international patchwork of friends, and learns salsa and bachata in basements with total strangers. Lulu is always guzzling up life! I missed the fun in Scotland this time around, but was having my own great time on a film set in New England. The film is a dark beauty called The Recluse, written and directed by Henry Chaisson. Love the role I got to play (Lydia), loved the cast and crew. It’s going to be a gorgeous thing to behold.
So finally John and I reunited (and it feels so good) in Paris. As a junior in college, Zelda is also living abroad this year: Paris for the first half, UK for the second. Columbia University has a sweet little outpost in Paris, and Z bounced between classes there and at Sciences Po. She’s studying History of Art and, well, isn’t that convenient? Paris and its art museums, Paris and the art of walking down a tree-lined street with a baguette in your hand, Paris and the art of an accordion bending notes while you leaf through books on the Left Bank, Paris and the art of asking for more art ( and getting it). We had fun walking and eating through the City of Lights with our girl (who turned 21 there!). Z also had some cool arty modeling gigs, so she really got the full Parisian package. Zelda is such a sponge of creativity, she’s got such an observant eye, and I can’t wait to see how the Paris she experienced manifests through her art, too.
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On to England!
Making movies is like a beautiful bowl of story soup – Ok, probably more like a stew. Lots of textures and meat and potatoes. There’s the whole slicing and dicing in real time as you begin to sweat over the fire. You’re shooting! You’re cooking with gas and things are bubbling and boiling over and sometimes they lose heat and you have to kick up the fire again but there’s a heady aroma of something good that hangs in the air and invades your dreams at night so you wake up hungry …. And then there’s the story of tasting what you’ve got, the seasoning, mixing this and that and adding all the auditory and visual spices (we are currently in this kitchen)…. And then there’s telling yourselves the stew is done; it’s time to leave the kitchen and EAT. Our favorite place to share the stew is at film festivals, where we can also indulge in others’ stew. If you had a dime for every time we said we made films just to take them to festivals, you could buy a bunch of coffees. We love film festivals – for the inspiration, for the camaraderie, for the fun. Also, horror genre festivals in particular have the most lovable attendees: smart, edgy, honest, up for a good time. The kindest, warmest people love cold blooded kills and dark destruction filling four corners of a frame, screen to retina; filling ears with pounding hearts; getting under the skin with hypodermic precision.
I was invited to take part in an industry panel at a brand new women’s film festival called FFS (Females Film Screens, for fuck’s sake!) in Sheffield, England. Nothing better than being on a panel with women whose work speaks thunder – I LOVE learning from them. Lulu came down from Edinburgh, and I felt such good heat from her being there, as I’d be nowhere without the collaborative coals of my wonderful family-collective.
Then we three jumped the water to….
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Belfast, Northern Ireland!
John’s cousin, Neil Shawcross, is a painter and portrait artist renowned for his dreamy, creamy touch. And what a character he is! Stories spin from his tongue as much as his brush tip. Neil took us to his studio, which was better than a museum – packed to the brim with colors and canvases and biscuit tins and boxes of toys and a lifetime of collecting and creating eye candy.
Lulu flew back to Scotland, and John and I trained down to Ireland’s southern coast. We met a plucky older woman on the train who had that Irish twinkle. She taught me how to greet and respond to people in Irish: “Slon!” “Slon lett!” We stayed in the charming town of Cobh, which has steep streets and a big cathedral that hulks like a raven over the town and down to the cove. And we drowned in good Irish tea (the best), fish and chips, and fluffy scones with butter and jam. Editing, writing, sleeping, eating, walking, talking, repeat.
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Next we embarked on one of the most exciting jaunts of our trip: the northern Scottish isles of Orkney and Shetland.
Orkney is covered in green fields freckled with sheep flecked in rich Orkney mud. The islands are also gardens of Neolithic stone circles and Viking castles and ancient burial mounds. You feel small and wondrous in their shadows. It’s a rock-and-no roll playground, its longevity astounding. There are tiny seaside villages and the stunning Stromness, a town with history that juiced the storytellers in us. The doomed ship The Terror stopped at this well for water! And then there’s always the coast: long sandy beaches, slick black rocks, and colonies of seaweed riding a shivery sea.
Onward north to Shetland!
If I were the Sun god I’d be an exhibitionist. I’d command all ferries to emerge from the black of night and, like a whale, spit its weary travelers onto new shores to watch my golden fingers bust a pull up on the horizon. They’d ohh and ahh at me, the bronze and reds of my muscle rippling across the water; concrete towns emerging in the morning silence and adjusting in my light like mood stones. This is how we discovered Lerwick, Shetland. Thank you, god of Sun.
The Shetland Islands had something to prove. It’s like they were saying, “Look, luv, you’ve sailed all this way, like a greedy little Viking come for something to ravage and keep – let me pour you some mead for the soul, throw you some tasty fish for the gullet, offer up such sights that you will grovel slack-mouthed at the sodden foot of my majesty.” Add in lots of moody mist, stone farms with mossy thatched roofs, and cute squat peat-stained Shetland ponies with long blond manes and thick bangs, and that’s what it felt like. A highlight here was a stretch of coastline called Eshaness Cliffs: massive sheer rock and outcroppings of crag meet a frothing, vengeful sea. Here, birds ride up and down on feral winds and break away to slide tackle the cliff face where they wedge into nests. The lighthouse must have saved hundreds of ships from carnage on the rocks.
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We ferried back to mainland Scotland, where I spent some time in an Aberdeen hospital. Something got to my lungs, and my lungs are my version of Achilles’ Heal. My lungs are the haunted rooms in my house. This is where an old, holey sheet is rigged from drafty rafters, and all the horrors of my mortality are projected. I got to know the UK’s National Health Service, and let me tell you: they did me so right. The nurses and doctors were gems. So after several days in their fold, they got me back on a path lit up by steroids and John’s great smile. Up we went to the Moray Coast then dipped down to Petlochry. John edited, I slept; he walked in the rain, I breathed again.
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Back to England! First, York – what a surprising city. Surrounded by ancient Roman walls and slithering with brick alleyways and Tudor-timbered facades, it’s a city that buzzes and pops. From there we landed in London where we met the girls to take off on a long lucky jaunt with them for the holidays.
Cornwall.
We all four were charmed by Cornwall. We visited small fishing villages like Padstow where we ate hot Cornish pasties. (Sometimes the seagulls ate our pasties, trying to remake their favorite film, The Birds. Those winged devils nearly took our eyes out.) We spent Xmas in sweet St. Ives and chased chippie shops and scones with clotted cream and jam. We went on wet night walks along the coast and laughed and ate and wandered curling streets. Getting to spend time with the girls (now 26 and 21) feels so lucky. That we are great friends is the luckiest part, of course. They’re so cool and so independent… but when we come together to work on a film or tear into a meal or go for a ride, it’s like we absorb the space and time around us and become a kind of funky amoeba, lumpy and funny and hungry to devour more, but as one. What a lucky, beautiful thing.
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Next stop: Italy. Sicilia!
We flew into Palermo. First meal? Pizza, are you crazy? And tiramisu – with pistachios! We spent time in Cefalu, a lovely seaside town with a pitbull of a fortress stretching out on the water. Old towns would be staples on our trip, and Cefalu’s has Roman arches framing that gorgeous teal Mediterranean Sea. In the morning a man drove his cart through the narrow streets, singing while slinging his fruits and veggies. Busciate is a pasta shape you gotta eat in Cefalu. They are long ringlets of yum.
In the southern part of Sicily in Agrigento is the most incredible place called Valley of the Temples. It’s a mile and a half long stretch of land covered in Greek ruins, and you walk its length checking them out as if you’re at an amusement park but without the lines and vertigo. It’s awesome!! You can’t help but be impressed by the architectural design and building muscle, not to mention the preservative kindness of time here, maintaining these snapshots of deified days in a hot Magna Graecia Sicilian sun.
Ragusa Ibla was the next great surprise: an old baroque town with the prettiest high-seated duomo ringing its bells over the white marble streets. Here, you must eat pasta Norma (Norma had a thing for ricotta and eggplant) and casarecce (more twirly shaped pasta) with sardines and rich, oily breadcrumbs. After a stay in bustling, twisty Taormina we left Sicily and moved on to …..
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Scilla and Tropea in Calabria, the toe of southern Italy’s “boot.”
Chianalea is a tiny seaside village in Scilla, where the people are friendly and the swordfish is sizzling. The sea comes right up to the stony village, and plump cats reign in the salty alleys. Zelda went home from here; Lu scuba dived. She and I laughed a lot drinking local wine and dunking focaccia in olive oil. (Fun fact: Scilla is named for the infamous Greek mythological creature, Scylla – a man-eating monster with six snake heads filled with three rows of shark teeth and a loin of baying dogs. Nice! Unless you’re Odysseus, who sailed too close to the caves she haunted there.)
In Tropea you eat lots of cipolla rosa (sweet red onion) and a pasta shape called fileja, long narrow elongated screws that soak up sauce juuuuuussssttt fine.
On to Basilicata and perhaps my favorite stay in Italy: Matera. Matera is an ancient city built of, essentially, caves – sassi – which are rock-dwellings carved into the mountainside. It’s a puzzle of tiers of these cut outs layered on top of each other. It feels like old Jerusalem and looks like it, too. (Lots of movies about Jesus are shot here.) It’s such an amazing place to get lost in the ups and downs of these pale limestone streets that are essentially stairs meandering chasms lined with stone caves people live in. I can’t wait to go back.
Puglia is a fun region – Italy’s boot heel, surrounded by the sea and filled with friendly people and great grub, like the local orrecchiette (ear-shaped pasta) the nonnas are cutting from pasta logs on Old Bari streets. There’s Alberobello (with its domed swirly spire roofs) and Lecce (a great, elegant city with a mysterious vibe, offering up quiet piazzas with baroque churches and lovely orange light); Polignano a Mare’s old seaside vibes and Bari’s walkable, edible energy. Puglia is fun.
Leaving the boot we headed to……
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Abruzzo. Elevations were higher here in the Apennines, and the region was dotted with misty snowcapped medieval towns we’d love to explore. We stayed in sleepy Sulmona, which is dominated by a Roman aqueduct and has killer views of the mountains and high stony, castled villages, like sweet Pacentro, blanketing them.
Next up were Umbria and Tuscany, which are Italian heavyweights for a reason. Lots of hilltop villages that remind you of butterscotch cupcakes with chunks of vanilla icing on top. There’s just a uniformity of burnt sugar loveliness – lots of creamy browns and muted coppers in the bricks and crispy stone facades. Cheeses and breads and farro and fermented grapes…. Spello in Umbria had me enchanted with its steep, narrow dark alleys and old Roman gates. We walked through empty Umbrian villages (Todi, Montefalco, Bevagna) promising more bustling warm seasons. We were happy to hear our echoes. In Tuscany we explored Gubbio and castle-peaked Assisi. We drank espresso and talked about scenes to edit, then we’d go back to our little flat in Montepulciano overlooking Tuscan fields and John would show me what he’d edited that morning and I’d check the script to stake the scene’s claim in the timeline. (It’s rare we work with a fully formed screenplay, but since we only had Zelda for a short spell this summer – and an even shorter stint with Lu at home – we thought through the whole narrative with a vigorous intent and an atypical blueprint. As such, we’re finding Mother of Flies to be one of our biggest, most fully realized films to edit yet. The last feature we shot, in the summer of 2023, was Fairy – a 2 week fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants shoot that left us feeling wet and unwound, like bloody laundry hanging from a rusty nail in the wind. I think we’ll eventually go back to Fairy and find something really cool to make of it, but for now it’s this odd, creepy, untethered kind of wicked stepchild we’ve got locked up under the stairs.)
In Emilia-Romana we stayed in Parma and of course John ate ham and I gobbled up crystal-crumbly parmigiana. We visited friends who have the coolest shop for cinephiles, Notorious Cinema, in nearby Emilia. What a dream job – curating and selling books and physical media and movie art! Luca and Ricci took us to a local joint for regional specialties – lots of meat for John and fluffy pumpkin ravioli and effervescent purple Lambrusco for me. (Around this time John celebrated 20 years of sobriety, which is just too sexy for words. The man runs on natural creative fumes like nobody else I know on earth. I’m glad I’m on his team – and did I mention he’s as smokin’ as a hotcake skillet? Well he is and now I did.)
Speaking of John, he lived in Milan back in the early 90s as a model. He worked with fashion icons like Armani and Gucci. I, too, lived in northern Italy as an exchange student when I was 17 (back in 1986!), so this was a wonderful return for us both. We loved Milan, and Torino was an especially cool discovery – such a clean-lined, calm and pretty city we’d both revisit. After 6 weeks in Italy, from bottom to top, we really gulped in this wonderful country. It’s the kind of place that always welcomes you with open arms and a spilling-over spoonful of something tasty pointed right at your mouth.
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France!
We had a GREAT time in Nice and were both charmed by its easy, balmy vibe and colorful, buzzing narrow streets selling all the things that make your belly thud and your heart skip. We were so enchanted by the markets and streets, the glass-clinking evening banquet of sights and smells, the sapphire, clear water. With a quick stop in Arles (such a cool little city with two well preserved Roman amphitheaters – TWO!), Toulouse (where you have nothing to-lose but your mind, cuz it’s a pretty place with the baddest beauty of a Roman bridge reflecting its arches in the swift Garonne), and Bordeaux (another baroque beauty with one of my favorite cathedrals, St. Andre, with its spiky gargoyles of dogs with howling mouths you can see the sky through), we jetted up to Loches in the Loire, Rennes in Bretagne, and Caen in Normandy. Loches is a neat town wound around a cool castle with lots of history around Joan of Arc and mercurial medieval royalty. I love towns like Loches where we are the rare visitors, and locals flock in to mingle at the killer Saturday market and debate cheeses to take home and fish to buy. It’s a colorful experience, a sensory assault. Nothing beats a local market.
Meanwhile: editing, walking, writing (I’m working on the synopses and directors’ notes for Mother of Flies), napping, eating, repeat. The body of the film is really robust by now, and all the pieces are sliding into home base.
In Rennes we enjoyed walking the city’s sloopy, timber-housed streets and eating pizza in bed, resting tired legs while watching The Godfather films, All About Eve, the new Nosferatu, and The Bad News Bears. After editing all day, I love that moment when John knows he’s done for the night and we shift to studying other films. Depending on how the movie speaks to us (or doesn’t), we say, “Goddamn, that was good,” or “It’s hard making movies,” and we will talk ad nausuem about what worked for us and why, or what didn’t…. Sometimes a film will hit us so strongly, I can tell we both are questioning the film WE are currently making, and we have to swallow the natural bile of fear, blot out the devilish whispers of doubt that always bubble up. Those poison pushers are always there loitering, but you can’t let them jam a stick in your spokes as you ride those black back alleys of the mind.
So we were a bit sullen, finishing our French whirl in Caen, which isn’t far from all the ghosts of World War 2 and D-Day in Normandy (my uncle “Colonel” Ellis was there). But knowing we’d be seeing Zelda the next day was a boost……
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England and the last leg!
We got on a long ferry to England, spent a night in fun Brighton, then trained up to Cambridge. What a town! It’s a hive of activity – all ages of people bustling and biking around. You can spend a whole day wandering the many colleges, each with its own charms. Zelda is in Pembroke College at Cambridge University, and it’s like a mini Hogwarts, founded in the early 1300s and as lovely and impressive as you’d imagine a 700 year old educational establishment in England to be. Think old pointy-steepled stone church with beveled glass, old brown brick and shiny gray granite libraries with creeping ivy, and elegant turreted structures with huge windows hiding long tables where the students eat meals – sometimes in their formal black robes. They’re supposed to maintain certain levels of good manners. Ha. I am pretty sure both the rebel and the performer in Zelda are having a hoot when she’s in those robes at those tables under those gorgeous rosy windows with all the serious framed faces from centuries of academia staring down at her. Z goes to lectures and has solo sessions with a supervisor who’s probably written half of the books on her shelf. (I believe Z’s thesis this semester is on the representation of black bodies in classical art.) We also got to hang out with Z’s boyfriend, Luke, who is visiting. What a sweetie. We all walked around chasing meadows popping with purple and white crocus, looking for a noiseless place to record some wild dialogue for the film, but we ended up recording in Z’s small quiet dorm with a window open. We said our goodbyes and waved to Lulu, also thriving in inimitable vibrant Lulu style, a few hundred miles north in Edinburgh at her own ancient university. And we are heading home….
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…. To catch the tail end of winter! To cook a lot and watch John’s parents’ dog, the love-bucket called Daisy. To finish Mother of Flies! We must reshoot one or two small scenes – one is of Solveig (the necromancer I play) waking in the dirt below a tree. John will climb up the tree and shoot down at me. We aim to create our own make up and practical effects of my face as a decomposed corpse in the roots and dirt. Solveig recites these words:
Tongue of fire and mouth of moan
Blood and seed and cunt and bone
River flowing
Sapling growing
Stink of rabbit, vulture knowing
When the veil of night has flown
Sleep in quiet, still as stone.
We also must reshoot an extreme closeup of Solveig’s thorn (her wand) going deep, in and out, of John’s ear. She’s debilitated him while she takes Mickey, Z’s character, alone into the woods to perform a severe ritual with a snake. (For Mother of Flies we shot an actual snake named Cooper, with John’s wrangling cousin, Shane. I am not one of those people naturally comfortable around snakes, but Cooper, a beautiful silver ball python, was quite friendly, thankfully. The goddammned love of ART had me reaching into holes with the serpent; had me openmouthed on the ground with Cooper curiously slithering towards that warm hole. At one point Shane – almost nonchalantly – said, “I think he thinks your thumb is something to eat.” Thumb retracted, thank you.) The thorn and snake in cahoots with a human body (ears and mouths!) will be a job for our incredible VFX wizard, Trey Lindsay, of course. So cool to be rocking with Trey since 2018 and The Deeper You Dig. He’s been doing incredible work on Mother of Flies, including building roots that sprout from cabin floors and whole tree trunks from roofs, blisters that bubble and burst on bellies, corpses that blink in and out before our eyes, and a giant Death Vagina that smiles down upon us from a ceiling. He’s our fifth family member, a total pleasure, a golden-hearted human. He’s our favorite cinephile, who teaches us so much about film – especially horror.
And there it is: four months of creative fodder. Drifting on the path of stones. John and I are good drifters. Hopefully, this film will help us drift some more …. to festivals and friends. And hopefully our imaginations will continue to drift, too. Please, please, please, never let our imaginations atrophy and turn hard. We can leave the stones alone on that point. And so…. Until next time!