The Black List Interview: Eliza Hittman
Eliza Hittman brings a New York we don’t often see to cinemas with her new film, BEACH RATS. Set in outer Brooklyn, BEACH RATS is an erotically-charged story of summer love that evokes incredible sense memories throughout. Following her 2013 Sundance debut IT FELT LIKE LOVE, Hittman premiered BEACH RATS at the festival this year, where she took home the Best Director prize. I spoke with Hittman about that experience, the film’s exquisite look, and more.
Harris Dickinson absolutely carries this film, and he’s fantastic and fearless in a lead role that many young actors would be intimidated by. What was the process like for the two of you as you prepped for production?
You know, it was a little traditional in that we had a week of rehearsal, where we read through each of the scenes and loosely blocked them on their feet. And then it was also pretty unconventional in that while he was here we were still casting some of the roles of the friends, and I took him out to a handball court in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. I just had him play different games with different guys, and looked at different combinations of kids together. And then, often, after those sort of callbacks and chemistry games, he would go and hang out with the guy, and that became a bit of his research for the film, just the time that he spent palling around with these guys on the beach — lifting weight, doing calisthenics, playing basketball. He was sort of up for an adventure, I would say.
BEACH RATS is light on dialogue, which absolutely works in this conception of Frankie as a primarily physical character. His physicality tells us everything we need to know about who he is. What are the challenges you face when working with actors on a script that relies on physical behavior over dialogue?
I think in the first draft of the script there was a lot more dialogue because a lot of people — producers and actors — look for the story in the dialogue. I think that’s how people have been sort of trained to read. A lot of times, I end up going back into Final Draft and just seeing how I can take all of that and communicate it more behaviorally. So I think that the script, in a way, takes another form later on because I’m just very aware of it. People think that the story lies in what the people say, and I’m just more interested in watching the way people act versus, you know, finding out information through what they say. And this is a film about how much he is able to hide and withhold from people he’s around, and that tension is sort of established early on — we don’t really need to hear him talk about it.
This film treats explicit sexuality with a tenderness that’s really refreshing and real, especially considering that so many films with this level of explicit sex focus more on the shock value of the moment. How did you create that intimate, warm atmosphere on set for your actors?
I think partially by having a closed set. We never really rehearsed the scenes, we would do, like, a kind of physical blocking of the scenes, like, “Oh, you’re gonna go from sitting in the chair to the bed, then this is gonna come off,” but I’m very matter-of-fact about it, I would say. After you sort of walk through the basic staging of it I think then you just turn the camera on and shoot it. You know, and not give an actor time to rehearse it or worry about it. You just try to capture it in the moment, I would say. I think I’m interested in showing sex with a certain level of tension where we don’t know how these experiences are going to play out for the characters, so there’s some identification in them. I think that’s essential, that the audience kind of be with this main character who is simultaneously vulnerable but also a bit unpredictable. It’s about finding a balance between being not erotic and not romantic — where they live.
The cinematography in this film is absolutely stunning. We can feel, taste, and smell this particular Brooklyn that Frankie is living in. Since you grew up within a similar world to Frankie, how did you work with your DP Hélène Louvart to assure that you were capturing both the Brooklyn you grew up in and the Brooklyn of now?
I think that was part of our choice to shoot on a 16mm because I wanted the film to have a consistent, sort of anachronistic, out-of-time feeling throughout, and I knew that 16mm would give us and evoke more of a timeless quality. [Helene] is a phenomenal veteran cinematographer who has done many a movie on 16mm, and part of the reason I was excited about working with her is that she’s shot so many films that are explorations of youth, and she’s also shot very dark narratives about youth, so I knew that she would be the perfect DP for the job. And she’s very flexible in terms of working within whatever limitations exist and understands that that’s part of the job. It was a minimal shoot in terms of how it was executed, and a lot of the lighting, especially on the beach, was all just one handheld light that we did several tests on to find the sort of intensity and feeling that we were looking to evoke.
I’ve read that you had a difficult time attaching actors to this script, that it was kind of being dismissed as, “Oh, it’s the one with the gay sex.” Even with MOONLIGHT winning Best Picture last year, why do you think so many folks making creative and financial decisions still struggle to fully embrace LGBTQ stories?
I think it just had more to do with the content. I think that MOONLIGHT is a beautifully restrained, sort of subtle narrative, and my film was a bit more aggressive and went into a place of darkness that I think was intimidating. We started out thinking, “maybe there’s an established actor who would be interested in this role,” and that didn’t happen, and then I thought maybe there’s this New York theater actor that would be dying for this role, and we couldn’t find that person. Harris was always in our casting tapes, and we always kept wandering back to him, but he was British and that posed some Visa challenges, and I was really convinced the actor had to be in this country and he just wasn’t. I don’t really know how the industry views LGBTQ narratives, I think that ours was just particularly provocative. I think there are a lot of narratives that embrace those themes that are being financed.
This year you became one of only a handful of women to take home the Best Director Prize at Sundance, and I noted that there were many women involved in key roles in the production of this film as well. What are the advantages of working on a set that’s filled with women as a female director, particularly when you’re telling a story about a male protagonist?
I think it’s important to have a balance of genders on the set, to be honest. I’m working on a crew now on a TV show that is, I would say, 98% male, and I think I like a balance. I think it creates a positive, collaborative spirit and in some ways I think I sort of subverted the roles on the set, because my most key department heads were women, but the producers and the editors were male, which isn’t usually where the women live in the process. You know, we had a female DP, we had a female production designer, costume designer, writer/director, male producers, and male editors, so it was a little bit of a table-turn, I would say.
