FROM KIDS TO KITTY
Chloë Sevigny is back at the Cannes Film Festival, this time as a director,
Chloë Sevigny first caused a stir at the Cannes Film Festival without even being here.
It was in 1995, when the model turned actor was just 20. She had a lead role in Larry Clark’s Kids, a highly controversial comedy-drama about risk-taking street punks in the age of AIDS.
Kids was in contention for that year’s Palme d’Or but, in a break from tradition at Cannes, the youthful cast members didn’t travel here to celebrate the world premiere.
“I didn’t go there for Kids because Miramax wanted people to think that we were still on the street,” Sevigny says from New York.
She made it to Cannes the following year for Trees Lounge, her second film and actor Steve Buscemi’s directing debut. And she’s been here many times since, but her journey this time brings her to France as a first-time director rather than an actor.
Her short film Kitty, adapted from a Paul Bowles short story she loved in her youth, has its world premiere Thursday in International Critics’ Week, a parallel program at Cannes that celebrates new talent.
Kitty stars doe-eyed newcomer Edie Yvonne as a young girl who imagines herself as a kitten. She suddenly finds herself being transformed into one. Ione Skye and Lee Meriwether co-star.
The film was produced by Toronto-based First Generation Films.
It wasn’t easy to make Kitty — Sevigny literally had to herd cats — but she found it rewarding and hopes it will lead to a new career as a feature filmmaker. This interview has been edited and condensed:
What was it about Paul Bowles’ short story that made you want to turn it into a film?
I’ve been wanting to make Kitty since I was about 19. It was a deep desire, a need to try it and make the leap. And I just went for it. I had to do it. I had to get it out of my system. It’s in a collection of short stories called
Midnight Mass. I just always thought it would make a very sweet short film. It kind of reminded me of darker fairy tales, like Thumbelina by Hans Christian Andersen.
They were things I had liked growing up, stories of little girls in peril. Questioning themselves, who they are and where they are, their place in the world.
There are also interesting parentchild dynamics happening in the story. Adults don’t know what to make of the situation.
I thought that the dynamic between the daughter and the mother was interesting and I tried to play up on that, because I have so many girlfriends who are trying to balance motherhood and their own careers. There’s a lot going on for a 15-minute film, but I tried to infuse it with that. I didn’t want the mother to come off as cold or not engaged because she’s busy doing her own thing. How do you strike that balance? It’s something I’ve been hearing a lot about. You want to indulge children and celebrate their imagination, but you perhaps also want them to have their own time to process it and perhaps grow it on their own.
You set quite a challenge for yourself as a first-time director, working not just with a child but also the five cats needed for the production. I’ve heard cats are hard to film because they resist instructions.
Yes, but our cats were exceptional! We had this amazing trainer who was super kind. I had to break down every single action for the cats, from walking from A to B to jumping on a lap to rubbing the mother’s legs when she was sitting on the chair.
Every single action was isolated and each cat was trained in a different action. Even the kittens, they just performed! We were able to do each one in no more than three takes. It was shocking.
I grew up with cats and I think cats are really mystical and almost scary creatures.
How many young girls did you audition before you found Edie?
We saw about 10 girls on tape and maybe four girls in the room, maybe five. There was just something about Edie. She was not a professional. She’d never been on a set before. There was a shy quality about her, which I wanted.
I think a lot of child actors are told to go in and be more outspoken or perform or be “on.” It’s like a trained thing and she didn’t really have that. She went to summer theatre camp, like I did when I was growing up. I just felt like I wanted a girl who innately had more of what I was looking for than one who could turn it on.
It sounds like you saw a lot of yourself in the story and in Edie.
I think part of the reason why I so responded to the story is she’s so often standing in the bathroom, looking at herself in the mirror. And I remember distinctly standing in the bathroom downstairs in my parents’ house in Connecticut, on this little step stool that I had so I could see myself in the mirror, recognizing that I had blond hair and blue eyes, and I was obsessed with that.
I wasn’t really into beauty because my mother, who was so beautiful, never had fashion magazines or images of beauty. It was only when I looked at my father’s record collection that I saw images of women who are glamourized and/or sexualized.