You mention your actors, and talk about how you hope your audience will follow you and not just say, “this doesn’t make sense.” How did you approach this with the actors? When I first started watching the film, I thought, “what is happening?” which is the best, but also alarming at first.
I have the same feeling. I love a movie that makes you go, “what is happening?” But I think we’re so used to movies now broadcasting to us everything, every piece of subtext, every piece of text. The idea of leaving something subtextually open sort of doesn’t exist in mainstream cinema anymore.
Kristine was the right actor to play this part for many reasons. But one of the main reasons is because she believed it, and believes it. She didn’t have to go, “Okay, but this girl’s mom had five husbands; how does she not know what a blow job is?” Or she didn’t need to ask, “Okay, but she’s seeing her mother in this situation. So why would she get herself into this dynamic?” She just met the character where she was. She had lots of questions for me, but they all existed within the reality that I had written, not outside of it. It was amazing how Taylour [Paige], Jennifer [Jason Leigh], Jon [Bernthal], all of the people who were in that world — they all believed their character enough, to then believe in the way their character would interact with Sara Jo. All of them also trusted that the movie was personal enough to me, that I had something to say, and that they wanted to support what I had to say.
And then, we found the parts within the film that also connected to them personally. When a movie is really personal, the story is yours until you begin to collaborate. You have to find the parts of it that resonate for each one of them, and then the story is theirs. What was so beautiful was that all of them just got on board. I remember one night where we were shooting the scenes where Sarah Jo and Josh go on that little overnight adventure, and she puts on her bow and her red lipstick to go on the trip with him. Jon was laughing at the outfit that she had put on for her sexy weekend and said something like, “you know, I feel like this is the kind of thing where if Josh ran into his friends, he would have to try really hard to explain who this person was and what she was doing.” But he didn’t question that she would exist; he just thought about how she would exist in Josh’s world. And there was just so much empathy from the whole cast — for the other characters, for their own characters, even when they were doing things that people would consider “bad.”
The whole film seems to run on empathy, it’s like the connecting tissue for everything that happens. Even for the audience: these people are weird, but you care about them, and you want to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I love them all so much that I was sad that I didn’t get to tell a million more stories with them in it because I get so attached to the people that I’m writing and to the performances the actors then deliver. But you never know if other people will have empathy, and so much of it also has to do with where viewers are when they’re sitting down to watch the movie, and what their relationship to all these different parts of themself is. I also totally accept that someone could sit down and be like, “this world doesn’t feel real to me; these don’t feel like experiences that I’ve had.”
And that’s okay, too. I watch lots of movies where I kind of feel outside of the experiences shown on screen — namely, every action movie I’ve ever seen. Vengeance, for example, isn’t really a concept that I operate with in my life, but I can sort of going into a film believing that this might be somebody’s driving force. Just like someone might hopefully be able to go into a film and go, “Okay, I’ve never had my driving force be trying to figure out who I am as a 26-year-old in the world, sexually. But I believe that that’s possible.”
That makes me think of something quite striking about the film, and which may also have to do with the context of the pandemic. “Sharp Stick” is, in some ways, a film about introspection, with a young woman trying to figure out who she is and to finally understand and experience sexual pleasure. Sarah Jo is introspective. But she also isn’t, in the sense that she doesn’t just sit around and think that much — she just goes out there in the world, which is particularly striking because, even in the film, there’s a pandemic on. We’re worried for her because she mostly just has encounters with strangers, which is scary even outside of a pandemic.
It is scary. That’s where I was thinking about movies like “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” Or a movie like “Mikey and Nicky,” where they run into that older prostitute played by Carol Grace, who has that incredibly traumatic experience in the middle of the movie, and we keep moving. There’s sort of this belief we have that every time a person who presents as female puts themselves into a situation that is somewhat sexual in nature, there’s this inherent danger. And oftentimes there is, but then plenty of other times, there isn’t. So I was interested in the idea of this character who goes into the world charging ahead with this innocence, but then her innocence kind of becomes a shield for her. It’s like she so believes that she’s going to be okay, that the world responds in kind.
In that way, it is a fairy tale. Because if you were meeting tonnes of strangers on a sex app in Los Angeles during the pandemic, you could bet that at least one of those experiences would be negative. She does have one experience that disorients her and upsets her, but what’s kind of interesting is that the one experience that is really upsetting for her is with someone she knows. That, to me, felt more like life. My most traumatic experiences in life have been with people who I thought I knew, not with strangers. In some way — and this probably has to do with where I live, and how I live — strangers have been the least terrifying aspect of the world to me. But there is this feeling that you have when she starts this journey; it’s almost like we expect her to be hurt, both because of how we perceive the world to be, and because of what happens in almost every movie where a woman places herself in a situation that is designed to further her journey or her understanding of her sexuality. I’m interested in “Is there a way that we can just upend those expectations?”
Of course, to some people, that will feel real, and to some people, it won’t. But it was also interesting to think about how, during the pandemic, there’s this added layer of danger to meeting new people. There’s always a danger to meeting new people, but the virus adds this entire other layer. And what would it look like if we felt that, but then didn’t actually get that expectation met?
“Sharp Stick” opens today, Friday, July 28, in limited release via Utopia Distribution.
