SHIVA BABY
Writing exclusively for Empire, director Emma Seligman tells us all about the making of her indie comedy.
The idea for SHIVA BABY first came to me as a kind of bar joke — a girl runs into her sugar daddy at a shiva.
And she had to face two different versions of herself — her ‘independent’ sex life and her infantilised family life. It was inspired by my Jewish community, my various friends who sugared or had tried it once or twice (like myself ) and Joey Soloway’s Transparent. At the time, I simply thought of it as a fun, awkward concept. However, as I got further away from the short and closer to making the feature, I realised the story was more personal. When I approached graduation, I went through the difficult but common realisation for young women that there were limits to my sexual ‘power’, and my self-worth was slowly slipping away as a result. I looked back and saw that I had vomited my insecurities and panic into Danielle.
I grew up in a tight Jewish community with countless cousins and an endless amount of family friends. My family and I never talked about God, but weddings, bat mitzvahs, bris and shivas were active parts of our lives. I often didn’t know who we were celebrating or mourning, but it didn’t matter. As a kid, I found shivas the most interesting because despite the fact that someone had just passed away, the conversation topics stayed the same — at least in my reform Ashkenazi community. Even though we just put a body in the ground, I could still expect the same amount of doting, gossiping, talking about colonoscopies, bragging about grandchildren, etc, that would be at any other community event.
And I soon came to expect a set of questions for me, no matter the occasion. Where did
I want to go to school? What did I want to study? Film? Okay, but I wasn’t actually planning on making a career out of that, right? How can I expect that to make me money? Why had I lost weight and was I okay? But also how did I do it and could I provide tips? Etc, etc. I knew these questions always came out of a place of love and curiosity. Nonetheless, my mother always helped my sister and I create ‘soundbites’ before we entered a house together.
When my middle-aged relatives asked why I wasn’t dating anyone, I wanted to explain what college hook-up culture was and how
demoralising and invalidating it is, but I held my tongue. Even though no-one ever told me I needed a boyfriend or stable job at 22, I definitely felt the pressure to be looking for them — a career in film and an inconsistent hook-up would not do. And at the same time, I felt the pressure to be an independent, ‘sexually empowered’ young woman who doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her. So basically a nice Jewish girl with her life planned out, but also a Carrie Bradshaw/ Girlboss prototype with no attachments. These felt like two contradictory pressures caving in on me. Trying to be both quite literally made me go insane.
As I got further away from this post-grad internal crisis, my roommate, Hanna Park, edited the short film from our small apartment and my lead actor, Rachel Sennott, encouraged me to turn Shiva Baby into a feature. She asked me what my goals were, pulled out a planner and set deadlines for me. She would continue to hold me accountable to my goals until we shot the movie.
With Rachel’s motivation, I went to the best producer from my year, Katie Schiller, and asked if she wanted to devote two years of her life to making a feature for no money with me. She said sure but she’d have to split the work, so she brought on our brilliant friend, Kieran Altmann. The short film got into South By Southwest that year, which made us naively believe the feature could be easily financed. Everyone gave us great advice but told us they weren’t looking to do movies in our small budget range ($200,000). After six months of continuous rejection, I told Rachel we might have to wait ’til the summer of 2020 (which would have been this past summer in Covid) to shoot the movie. I distinctly remember her speaking to me more sternly than she ever had before when she said, “No. You said it was going to be last summer. If we wait another year, the years will continue to go by.” She essentially set a timebomb. We were going to make the movie, no matter how much money we raised. This started our weekly routine of me calling her crying, saying we weren’t going to raise the money in time, and her calming me down, saying we would.
In the fall of 2018, I went home to my parents’ in Toronto for six weeks while I waited for my new visa to come through.
I tried to use the time effectively and work on the script. I had written numerous drafts but struggled to find the right tone. Initially, I worried about keeping the audience engaged in such a creatively constricted story. I wanted to make sure there were enough odd characters and jokes to keep us entertained. Those initial drafts felt slapstick, though, more in the vein of Death At A Funeral, which didn’t feel right for this. Then I tried stripping the film back to the drama at the core of it, but the story became too boring. I turned back to the movies that inspired me, starting with the Jewish romantic comedies — Keeping The Faith, Kissing Jessica Stein, and Crossing Delancey. Then I rewatched the movies that thematically inspired the short — The Graduate, Shame, It Felt Like Love and Palo Alto.
Though they’re an odd bunch put together, they each portray deeply insecure characters seeking some kind of sexual validation.
Then I finally turned to films that took place within one setting and one day (or a few days). I wanted to see how they were successful in their structure. I rewatched August: Osage County, Rachel Getting Married and A Woman Under The Influence, but the film that had the deepest effect on the Shiva Baby process was
Krisha, Trey Edward Shults’ first film. Though it’s definitely not a comedy and it’s certainly not Jewish, the effectiveness of how Shults utilises the location kept me pausing and taking notes multiple times as we shot-listed, edited and scored the movie. I started to see Shiva Baby through the lens of a psychological thriller.
When I got back to New York, visa in hand, I had a strong, tense draft I was ready to share with my producers. I sent it to Lizzie Shapiro, another NYU grad I met at SXSW the previous year, and she quickly came on board as our third producer. She had just produced her first
feature (my friend Annie Attanasio’s Mickey And The Bear) the year before and came to our film with fresh indie-feature expertise and also Jewish expertise (she’s the daughter of a cantor). We, of course, still had no money, so Lizzie encouraged us to continue begging, but not to experienced producers. Instead, we started asking everyone we’d ever met if they’d like to start a new career in film investment. Once a real producer, Rhianon Jones, decided to take a chance on us, many others jumped on.
We started looking for our shiva house early, using coded messages on Airbnb (a strategy we used in school). After striking out with houses that didn’t fit our look, budget or the amount of space we needed, we were blessed by a house on Argyle Road in Flatbush, Brooklyn. It had the dark woods I dreamed of and gorgeous stainedglass windows bringing a Yentl glow into the space. Katie and Kieran were thrilled that there were five bedrooms that could hold the actors and extras and one cramped miscellaneous room for hair and make-up, costumes and the production office. Once we visited the house enough times, I made a Lego set (not to scale) of the location, so I could start shot-listing with our incredible cinematographer, Maria Rusche.
Lizzie brought on our casting director, Kate Geller, who strategically guided us to cast local New York, preferably Jewish actors, who love independent film. The first to join was Molly Gordon, who clicked with Rachel and I immediately. The first time I met her, before even introducing myself, she hugged me, hung up her phone and said, “How hard is it to find a gynaecologist?” Dianna Agron was next. When I met her for a coffee, she had just gotten back from Israel and was so excited about finally being in something Jewish, even though her character wasn’t. Then came Polly Draper, who was originally supposed to play another role. When we met, though, she convinced me to give her the role of Debbie, Danielle’s mom, within five minutes. We’d been holding out for a Jewish actress, but Polly put a spell on me and I had to say yes. This made my own mother very happy since she’d been pushing for Polly to play ‘her’ from the beginning.
Much to my surprise, Fred Melamed accepted the role of Danielle’s dad, Joel, without having met me. Since he was the one actor we flew out, I only met him minutes before we shot his first scene. I later found out that Fred and Polly were old friends from Yale School Of Drama. The sweet Danny Deferrari joined the film only two days before we shot. Hours after he accepted the role, he rode his bike over to what had already become our frazzled house and met Rachel and I. We’d completed the family. Now I just had to direct them all and not let impostor syndrome get to me.
The day before we shot, Molly and Rachel offered to do a rehearsal day. We threw the first scene up on its feet, where Maya and Danielle greet each other for the first time at the buffet table. It might have been the toughest scene to direct due to their hostile yet flirty yet jealous yet annoyed yet sweet dynamic. I wanted to give the impression that these girls had known each other for years, but Rachel and Molly had only met a couple days before. We couldn’t figure out the scene that day. That night, I called my filmmaker friend Annie and told her I couldn’t do this. We’d assembled all this money and all these people and costumes and
equipment, and I wasn’t going to be able to direct. Why would anyone listen to a child? She talked me off the ledge. I showed up to set the next day, running on no sleep, which would keep happening. I’d stayed up all night stressing over the wrong blazer we chose for Rachel. She was going to be wearing it the entire movie, so it had to be right. I brought an old, sweaty one of mine that Rachel wore in the short film. We were both pretty sure it hadn’t been dry-cleaned since then. She smelled her sweat from two years ago in it.
Though Rachel and I had spent weeks going through each beat of the script together, tracking Danielle’s journey and downfall, my morning routine on set after doing the blocking rehearsal always involved going up to her ‘dressing room’ (a child’s bedroom with a bunk bed) and talking to her about where Danielle was at today. Then we’d join whoever was in hair and make-up and read aloud scenes for the first time, as an actor would get their hair pulled in one direction with make-up coming at them from another.
There’s a couple worth mentioning, though. After a big storm one night, our producer Kieran cleared a flood from the basement into the backyard at 4am in his underwear. On our last day with our Baby Edgar, the entire cast and crew whisper-sang ‘Wheels On The Bus’ to him. Led by Dianna and Danny, we were able to get him to stop crying, as we tiptoed around, trying to get our shot before he erupted again. Our production team designed one of the most intricate and thorough AC systems I’ve ever seen on a New
York summer shoot. It involved creating an ‘ice box’ out of the enclosed front porch the actors would sit in. It was so cool in there and so hot in the rest of the house that the windows started to frost up.
After a sweaty three weeks together, we wrapped the movie, the adrenaline rush ended and the comedown began. I entered the small dark room called the edit where Hanna and I stayed for five months, through nights and weekends. I started working with our incredible composer, Ariel Marx, who took my Klezmerinspired horror score idea and somehow made it work for a comedy. It was a race to get this movie done just right in time for South By Southwest 2020… and then it was cancelled. This was one of the first indicators that this virus was going to touch every industry. Like many, I moved back in with my parents. I went to Toronto and felt like I went back inside my movie. This was not what I pictured when I’d thought about the year I’d release my movie. I’d imagined at least one packed theatre where I got to hear people laugh. However, there were odd personal silver linings with Shiva Baby coming out during this crazy year. My parents got to watch me accomplish my childhood fantasy when we saw it play at TIFF [Toronto International Film Festival] in person. I felt like I was truly in an odd dream, standing in a 500-seat theatre with only 40 people scattered in the seats, as [TIFF’S artistic director] Cameron Bailey did my Q&A.
Regardless of the never-ending saga of wi-fi issues in my house, I got to do Zoom Q&AS for Shiva Baby with what felt like hundreds of Jewish and queer film festivals across North America, on top of international festivals, university conversations, etc. I got to communicate to audiences that I would have never been able to physically reach otherwise. I also think we were able to reach a younger generation that might not have gone to see the film in person in a regular year. While sitting in my childhood bedroom, I could start to see that our movie was building an audience of young women (particularly young bisexual women), who were spreading the word well before our release. Their support created a big wave none of us could have foreseen. From starting this at 21 to putting it out in the world now at 26, I’ve grown up through the process of making Shiva Baby. And as I let go of the weight and emotions these last five years have carried, I think more and more about the girls supporting this movie now, who are at the beginning of this journey.
I truly didn’t realise until recently just how common it is for young women to feel that conflicting pressures are making them go insane. And with the all the extra uncertainty this year brings, I can’t imagine how that insecure feeling is being amplified. At the very least, their response to Shiva has made my experience feel less lonely, and I hope in turn the movie has maybe had a similar effect on them.
Given that this was an ultra-low-budget film with a multi-generational cast, made by a recently graduated crew in a stuffy Brooklyn house in August, there are too many memories to recount.
SHIVA BABY IS ON MUBI FROM 11 JUNE