Sweetness traces one teenage girl named Rylee (Kate Hallett) and her dangerous obsession with a pop star.Elevation Pictures
There might be no better place in the world than the SXSW film, music, and tech festival in Austin, Tex., to host the premiere of Emma Higgins’s new thriller, Sweetness. The Vancouver filmmaker’s feature directorial debut, which traces one teenage girl named Rylee (Kate Hallett) and her dangerous obsession with a pop star, is an edgy affair that slickly mixes the worlds of high-gloss music, dark genre cinema and addictive social media – not unlike the stomping grounds of SXSW itself.
After the world premiere of Sweetness this past weekend, Higgins sat down with The Globe and Mail in Austin to talk about music, modern fandom and the narrowing career paths for emerging Canadian directors.
You started in the Canadian industry making music videos for the likes of Tegan and Sara and Jessie Reyez. Were feature films always the end goal, or were you happy to keep experimenting with shorter forms?
Movies were always the end goal. I was looking at directors such as Spike Jonze and Mark Romanek, who started off making music videos before moving into directing – I had those Spike and Mark DVD box sets that everyone else had at the time growing up. Making a movie, there’s a big barrier of entry, it can be so expensive. Music videos, you get a small budget to get a camera, get some people, get enough for lunch, and then create something and put it out there.
It feels like that kind of career path is also eroding, though – we just don’t see that many music videos being made these days.
Yeah, the Daniels [directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once] were part of the last era of that music-video boom, and I’m on the tail end behind them. In Canada, we had great funds like MuchFACT, which built a lot of Canadian careers. But that was killed, so we don’t have that avenue. There are a couple smaller grants out there and Factor Canada, but it’s harder.
You have an interesting career path, because you also didn’t go to film school.
I got into this all by doing extra work in Vancouver. It was actually on a music-video shoot when I was a teenager, and I just started asking the director of photography all these questions. Probably too many questions. What’s a gaffer? What’s that light? He told me I should become a production assistant, so I started at the very bottom – like, trying to find unlocked dumpsters to throw out trash, because the producer didn’t want to pay a proper dumping fee.
Was the idea behind Sweetness – which feels a bit like Misery crossed with Trap in the way that Rylee ends up taking drastic actions to secure the attention of her celebrity crush – inspired from your time in the music-video world?
I did a short stint at a record label doing videography for them, like, “Hey, we’re Nickelback and we’re recording our new album today!” Maybe that job gave me more insight into the machine of the industry. But I also saw all the fan mail that would be sent in. It was just so pure, and there was a genuine belief that the artists would read them and not, you know, me. It made me sad for the poor souls who were sticking their hopes and dreams in those letters.
Was that you ever, at a younger age? There is a lot in this film about the modern nature of fandom – how it can slip into obsession.
I was just a really big movie fan. I never had the boy-band obsession, though I was into some girl bands. Movies were the real escape, just because it was always very gloomy in Vancouver, and I had a lot of big feelings as a teenager. I’ve always been a little anxious and depressed, so film was a real comfort.
Making a first-time feature is never easy, especially in Canada, but you had what sounds like an incredibly tight shooting schedule here – just 18 days in North Bay.
It was crazy. In a way I’m used to it – music videos are a day or two. Commercials, which I also do, are done in a single 12-hour day. It’s not ideal, because you have to figure out your blocking early and stick with it. There was no time to walk onto a set and figure out with the actors where you want them, where the camera is going. Along with my production designer and director of photography, we went to every set beforehand and used our iPhones to find every frame and angle. I wanted the actors to be able to follow their hearts creatively, but there’s not a lot of time. It was a miracle every single day that we completed a shoot.
How critical was it to get Kate Hallett cast as Rylee? She held together a lot of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking.
Thank God for Kate – this movie doesn’t work without her. She was just 19 when we filmed this movie, but she has such a deep understanding of acting and her character that it’s convinced me that she’s an old soul who’s been reincarnated in this young woman’s body. Her levels of wisdom, it just makes no sense.
You’re now based in L.A. – do you see your filmmaking taking a more American path, or will you continue to work in the Canadian system?
I’d like to continue to make films in Canada. Sweetness is a very Canadian movie – it’s set there, and it doesn’t exist without me being raised in Burnaby and listening to the kind of music I listened to as a Canadian. There’s one needle drop in the film from Jann Arden, and there’s nothing more Canadian than that. But it’s still a story that’s universal and commercially viable outside of Canada. I just hope that our industry can grow – we’ve got the talent.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
