I want to talk about the sparkles, actually. The cinematography glows: it reminds me of fairies romping through the forest—and also of taking a picture of a light with your iPhone and your lens is smeared.
Eily always gets exactly what I’m going for, and she would love both of those comparisons. She would do this trick where you rub a bit of Vaseline on the camera, and we kind of got obsessed with it. She also did another cool thing where she took the lens off and detached it, so she’s moving it around. It’s the scene where Emily’s at the fire. She has tricks that really are fun to mess around with. Those always end up being my favorite things in the movie.
The glowing aspect of the Vaseline lens gives the movie an angelic quality.
Exactly. I love angels, and I love that.
You’ve got an angel [necklace on] right now.
This is for Maia, too. Again, not something that I felt a super strong connection to before this [movie].
The character of Jo, the angel—she didn’t exist until a year before we shot [the film]. I was like, “We’re missing somebody.” And that’s Jo. I actually named that character after Bella and Maia’s mom. There’s so much connection to my own feelings of family and loss.
Having the angel be the one that they were going to sacrifice—to me, that was the hardest pill to swallow. That wasn’t originally in the script. We were supposed to show [Jo] moving up into the sky and have it be this happy ending. But on the days when we actually shot the finale, we had no time. We never got to turn around, and we never got to see her again after she went up in flames. I was devastated. I was like, “God, this is tragic.”
Because you felt like it wasn’t complete?
Yeah, so my producer offered to pick up another half-day. We’d just have to cut something else off. I was so wrapped up in trying to figure out why that had happened, and why we hadn’t had time. Everything felt so spiritual for me.
It was Sophie’s birthday, who plays Jo. She went to do some birthday stuff, and I was alone at the Airbnb trying to figure out what’s going on. Eventually, I was like, It’s a nice thought—when you lose somebody, maybe you get to see them again. But maybe you don’t. Because with loss and how it’s felt for me, it’s just the fucking worst.
There’s no silver lining.
There’s no light at the end. That became an important part of it—that some things go up in flames, and that’s it.
That is hard to swallow.
But that’s the truth, too. I can talk about Maia coming back and showing up on set, but the reality is, I didn’t see her. She’s still gone. That’s what it’s been like putting this movie out and feeling all those things. At the end of the day, I’m still missing that thing that I was trying to find.
There is something poetic but also very sad about the idea that someone could still be out there, yet you can’t see them.
Maybe it was cool for her to be there and to see what we were doing. But I’d rather just be hanging out with her and having some beers. I’d rather not have to make the movie. At the end of the day, I’m like, “It’s so not worth it.”
And that’s why you didn’t shoot the pickup.
Exactly. It was not like this with Honeycomb. This is a new experience. CAMP was like digging, digging, digging at a wound, and I’m still raw from it.
