Stress Positions is a New York-set comedy tackling COVID, identity and the chronically online milieu. The film’s writer/director Theda Hammel spoke to Film in Revolt writer Jack about the journey from short film to feature and mechanics of a COVID comedy.
We have a question that we ask everyone – what film has made an impact on you?
A real profound influence on this particular movie was my encounter with Whit Stillman. Which is not the sexiest thing, in the wide world of cinephilia, but it’s a very rare thing in an American low budget movie.
There are plenty of dialogue-based movies, but none that had quite that same type of artistry as I was seeing in Last Days of Disco or in Barcelona or Metropolitan, or frankly, in his two later movies, Damsels in Distress or Love and Friendship. What I saw there was a very stubborn insistence on the dialogue comedy as worth worthy of attention without any stunts or violence or without really any hook, without any, big selling point. I haven’t lived up to his example, but I do remember getting tremendously excited to encounter those movies because I didn’t realize you could make them in the U.S. It certainly hasn’t been easy, I think, for him to continue to make them in the U.S., but, but I just didn’t know. I thought you had to go to France for that kind of thing.
You touched on the follow-up question, but is there anything that can be seen from that in Stress Positions?
I think that Stress Positions is a much more Baroque, vulgar and tasteless kind of movie, it toys around with anti-climax a little bit. It’s incorporating some topical issues and potentially controversial or inflammatory subject matter, but it’s not trying to stoke the flame for pure dramatic effect. I can only draw a line from any of the influences on it to the movie in a way that makes those movies look better and this movie look worse. Maybe it is the sort of slightly rebellious anti-climax and an insistence on the musicality of speech.
You mentioned having some inflammatory subject matter. Did you have an approach to, on that or comment on that without stoking the flames?
What I struggle with and which I think many writers are struggling with right now is that we live so much of our lives online and that the strategies for discussing very important issues online are so rote. They’re so habituated by now. There’s no novelty in it, at least none that I can see.
People take sides very quickly. And then there’s an endless sort of quibble that happens that follows very recognizable patterns. And the one advantage of staging a drama or a narrative is to keep those patterns at an arm’s length. To avoid a particular kind of blood bath and to refrain from running away from people whose positions are maybe a little odious or compromised. A lot of the people in Stress Positions they are not heroic or necessarily very ethical. They are probably not the kind of people that any of us would want to either be or hang around with for very long.
But you can hold that window open for about an hour and a half and find some charm in them and find some pity for them and take some pleasure in the arrangement of, of them in the movie.
There’s a character at the heart of this movie, a young person named Bahul, who everyone in the film is very obsessed with and who is always having people projecting various roles onto him, throughout the film.
One way to see the movie is as that character is trying something on and then saying no to it. Or trying on the role that’s being projected onto him and then, rejecting it, saying no to it. And I find that very inspiring model for the movie itself. The movie in the same way is saying no to a lot of expectations, a lot of the things that could be expected of a movie, not just regarding a movie like this, or hot button issues, but with regard to its genre as a talky indie movie. It says no to even that at the end and goes in a slightly different direction towards something a little bit more mysterious at the end. That’s part of the philosophy work behind it, inspired by the main character.
I read recently about how it gamifies politics.
Social media is very much an environment and like any environment, it really shapes behaviour, and it shapes subjectivity. And we are in a hostile environment that is not conducive to like human life when we in our virtual worlds, like that’s an environment that has been designed to extract something from us in a sinister way. With many pleasures to compensate. But there are a lot of online behaviours that are just the pure result of being there in the first place. By being there in the first place, you end up having to play by certain rules and your subjectivity gets totally shaped by that environment.
There is a dynamic of that is it in this movie as well, although social media is not a component of the movie, it’s kept deliberately off stage for the most part. But I still see these particular people as being very trapped in their environment and very worked by it.
It’s interesting that social media has an effect on people, even if the social media itself isn’t present. You can tell when people are very like kind of chronically online and it’s like a way of speech I find.
Absolutely, it’s a very rare thing. Everybody is in a different niche of the internet at any given time, but everybody has this sort of general idea about how it works, what it’s like to be online with and so there is a general experience and understanding of what that means that I feel doesn’t need to be explicitly alluded to at all times.
If there was a war going on, or if there is a horrible thing like COVID going on, everybody is generally aware of it. You don’t actually have to comment directly on it.
We can start to dramatize people whose behaviour we understand to have been shaped in some way by social media without always having to show them being on their phones, without having to point the camera at tweets. That’s my hope in any case.
While you were making the movie, was there ever a moment where you were asking, is this too niche of a character moment or a character reference to, the way they talk, in terms of being online all the time and how that it’s a lingo, it’s a speech. Was there ever a kind of concern of having characters be online all the time that it would reduce the amount of people who are going to get this film or get this joke?
They don’t speak in a super online-y way, but they’re also not speaking in the same way that normal people in the world talk. It’s a heightened dialogue.
That’s another reason I feel with Stillman is a great inspiration. People don’t talk like that either. But I have found at various times in my life, sometimes maybe even when you’re a kid and somebody around the dinner table, an adult says something that is very obviously funny, they’re referring to an old actor or they’re referring to something that you don’t quite understand. And everybody laughs. You can still laugh at that even though it’s an inside joke because it almost becomes more compelling. When you identify that an inside joke is taking place, that the people that are laughing at it or that are telling the joke, they all share a sort of common point of reference or common patois. And I have found that very often in my myself laughing at inside jokes that I don’t quite understand.
The most important thing is that something is taking place. This is a milieu, right. And it’s recognizable to me, even if only to me alone, although I don’t think that’s the case.
It’s recognizable to a small number of people, but it is an actual milieu. And when you’re dropped into it, like you sort of are at the start of this movie you can identify that fact, even if it’s not your milieu. I have a great deal of hope in that.
I recognize that as a potential pitfall. But I also see no alternative.
Both my parents are journalists. When I was a kid, they were making these very high brow jokes. They’d be talking about the state of the world that a six-year-old isn’t going to get, but they’d laugh at everything. And I wouldn’t get the joke, but I’d still find it funny in a way.
Yes. My father was a physician when he would have one of his doctor friends over, they would start making medical jokes. And I wouldn’t know what any of it meant, but you could see how entertaining they found it. And it was still entertaining for me as well.
Was there a moment where this movie started in your head?
Sure. The movie started out as a very small, little thing that I wrote for John Early, who plays the lead character.
And I’ve had the pleasure of being friends with John for a while. We a had never really made a movie or written a movie together before. And this short piece was more like a monologue than it was a script. It would occasionally break out into little dialogue portions, but then it would be long chunks of speech, which stays in the movie in some form and the use of voiceover, there’s still a big component of monologue in the movie.
The original idea, was of John as this sort of lead character, whose name is Terry, who is a gay guy in his mid-thirties, who is recently divorced from an older husband, who’s moved on to another younger husband.
He’s been replaced by a new young husband and finds himself tasked with taking care of this nephew who he’s never met, who everybody gets very excited to meet. And, and so as soon as I could position that character and his nephew in some sort of house, I could start to write the movie, especially in monologue, especially using the narrator voice to start describing the situation. And maybe it’s a cheat, like there’s a school of filmmaking that detests and despises voiceover and speech and says that you should work with the image or work with the story beat. But for me, it was like these three components were what fit together as a gestalt and indicated that there was a project there. One is this uncle-nephew relationship. The second one is being trapped in this house during the pandemic. And the third one was the sort of narrator voice that ends up being the character that I play in the movie, Carla, an antagonistic best friend who is sort of making fun of the uncle. So those three things, once those were in place, I felt like I could write the movie.
Your pilot, My Trip To Spain, premiered at Sundance in 2022. And then two years later, Stress Positions had its world premiere Sundance 2024. What was the journey between those two?
It’s just jumbled. I wrote the first draft of Stress Positions first. John knew a cinematographer. I started talking with her, Arlene Muller.
We decided we were going to shoot a camera test to see if we could make Stress Positions. The original plan was to just rent a house, do it very low budget over the course of a week. But we shot the thing that became My Trip To Spain basically as a camera test or a competence test to see if we could make anything at all.
And it went better than I think any of us expected and was instrumental in getting the financing for a longer project. But even though they came out in this big, staggered way, they were devised around the same time. There’s a lot of overlap, they both have to do with housebound people.
They both take place during a time of the pandemic and they both feature John and I, in an antagonistic sort of friendship. Although, in My Trip To Spain, the roles are reversed. It’s really more of a proving ground for the longer project.
And then it ended up being basically smuggled into Sundance as an episodic, even though it was really more of a short film because it’s 30 minutes long. So, they didn’t have room for it in the shorts program. And I was happy to call it an episode. But I never had really any plans to make it as a TV show.
Did you kind of have a touchstone while you were making Stress Positions that kept you going?
I would describe the experience of being in charge of a movie as having the only thing grounding me at all was the fact that I was needed at a given place at any, at any given time. I did not feel grounded in the slightest. The thing that kept me going was the obligation, but also the many wonderful people that I had, around me – without the obligation and without those people, I think at many, many points, I would have simply just pressed the red button and just demolished the whole thing because I had never been involved in anything that high stakes with that many demands per day.
Going into another project, I will try to have something in place, a touchstone in place that I can really grab onto when things get rough because they always get rough.
The greatest pleasure in life is to watch movies. But the thing that you watch has all of the hard stuff, fallen away from it by the time you watch it. In other words, the 30-sweating people, just out of the frame who want to eat lunch or want to know what they’re supposed to do next.
All of that has fallen away. It’s very hard to draw a line in your mind from one to the other. When you’re writing a movie, you’re writing the kind of movie that you have seen maybe, and you’re thinking of it as the movie that you want to see. And in that movie, everything is going well, the performances are all perfect. The sets work, the camera goes the way you want it to. And so, it can be really blindsiding when you get on set and nothing is going the way that you dreamed it would. But the reason you have that dream is just because you’ve watched so many movies.
I feel like a necessary little thing going forward, writing new things now is this little bit of knowledge that I have, of course, for the most part forgotten. And now I go, “Oh yeah, everything went well”.
We finished the movie. It’s going to Sydney, blah, blah, blah. But remembering, oh no, that will be difficult, basically. And trying to strategize, a little bit more upfront in the scripting so that when I get to that, there will be a strategy in place.
It’s funny you mentioned that because in university I did a lot of sound recording. So, whenever I see a movie where it’s got people talking and it’s like a long static shot or there’s a lot of panning or tracking around a room, I always think; there’s someone off screen, their shoulders are killing them. And it’s two minutes now. And they’re on fire.
Yeah. Which I haven’t done it for feature films, but I’ve done it for short films and it’s, Oh my gosh. I really feel for our boom operator, Adam. His arms must’ve been in agony. Yeah. I can’t imagine it.
You co-host a podcast called Nymphowars, write, direct, act, you have a degree in music technology, you make music. Have you found that there’s any carryovers between disciplines?
The one unifying thing that I experienced in all those fields is like a feeling that things should be done in one way and not another. And I think that’s really the essential part of directing.
There are many other assets that I don’t have that I wish I did, but I think the essential qualifying trait is like somebody who would like to see something done one way and not another. And that carries over into the music and also the podcast where I do a pretty intense edit on the podcast that we release every week, even though it’s a pretty trivial product. It comes and goes, but the feeling when you’re editing is “no, not that way, this way, not that timing, this timing, not that sound effect”. And that is just directing and directing goes a lot of other different fields, but everything from props to performance, to colour, to sound, especially to timing.
The one area that I feel solid in is I have a very strong feeling of “No, not that way, this way”. That’s the one thing that unifies all these weird fragmentary, disciplines.
It sounds like it’s given you a good sense of your voice and how that kind of comes across in your work?
Yes, absolutely. There are two things that I felt like there was maybe an unwelcome and a welcome realization about my own artistic personality that I was confronted with in this film.
One is that I might be a tasteless person. And actually, the podcast is the proving ground for that because it’s extremely vulgar, it’s a deliberately scatological, filthy podcast that is a joy to do every week and brings a lot of pleasure. But of course, what I watch for the most part are art films, or these works of incredible artistry.
And you watch enough of them, and you think, well, maybe I can, maybe I can make an art film. And then I’m brought up short a little bit by the fact that I might be a tasteless person. That I might default to certain vulgarities that are on display in this movie.
Although, it’s very tasteful in other respects. I feel like the big difference between the short film and the feature film is that I embraced a little bit more of the vulgarity, the knack for vulgarity that I have in the podcast as part of the persona of that.
The nice experience I had was in scoring the film, which I did at the very last minute. It has much more music than I was ever planning for it to have, but it was much easier than everything else because I had worked in music for much more of my life at that point. When the music came in, I could recognize in the movie, the same traits that I tend to have in my music, which is a sort of a blend of a whimsical sound component and a poignant and sincere melodic component. And I didn’t know those things could be synthesized in the movie until I realized that I had an analogy in the kind of music that I’ve made, where I think I have found a synthesis between those two tendencies and made it work.
And when I incorporated the scoring to the movie, I felt like it was a real epiphany for me in terms of making that work. I felt like those were the two big lessons that I learned relating to my artistic voice. I have no idea how to carry them forward, but they are definitive lessons.
Going forward, there’s a lot of creative outlets that you have. Are you interested in going with, maybe one of them over some of the others, or do you want to keep balancing everything?
The podcast for the moment is the way that I earn a living. That takes up a lot of each week, but I have a wish to try and be a little bit more prolific at a slightly lower budget level, to maybe learn some things and make some things happen. To see if I can make those kinds of things happen before trying again for a big swing with a little bit of a bigger project. Just because I sort of stumbled into this project. My hope is maybe to stumble into something again, rather than trying to devise the best way to wrangle a bunch of money together or trying to convince a name actor to agree to play some weird movie, but I don’t know exactly how to do that at this point. I’m still figuring it out. I’m still tinkering.
Are you following what is in your head at the moment and then seeing where that leads?
My broad, overarching goal is to actually – this sounds so general – but to get better at building a thing called a film.
I can identify several things about this film and the process that led to this movie that I would love to improve on or do in a different way on the next one. I would like to just continue to go on learning lessons of that kind and applying them. And of course, watching more and reading more. In general, the best part about making a movie has been how humbling it is and how much more impressive I find the achievements of other filmmakers. I feel like I see their genius at work in a whole new way.
When I was in film school in 2020, after the first lockdown in Sydney, the teachers said don’t make anything about COVID or lockdowns for a couple of years. Did you feel there was any kind of moratorium for talking about COVID or lockdown, or was that something you were kind of wary of? Or do you always feel like that was something that people were ready for?
It never occurred to me until it was too late. This was originally supposed to be a very low budget project and we were living in those circumstances at that time.
If you walked out onto a street, you would see a lot of people with masks on. So, there was no point in evading it. And it would be free basically. People are already costumed for the period in question. I don’t know why we were given the green light to make the movie, but whoever gave us the green light, the wonderful people at Neon, seemed to not have been too concerned about this component. And then by the time we finished it, four years after the date, that it’s supposed to take place, the summer of 2020, it actually does work.
I think our function now is a little bit of a period piece. It makes sense that in 2020, somebody would wait a little bit before dramatizing these circumstances. But the way that it worked out with our timeline is I feel like the movie is coming out right at the moment when those memories have been sort of sealed off in the past. They’re not pleasant, but they’re not horrible. And they are sort of fit for comedy.
But the truth is I never thought about it until it was too late.
I feel like for a while with COVID at least people were just so glad to be out of it. I don’t know if there was any reluctance, to engage in it in film, but people didn’t want to talk about it at least in my personal life. Now it’s kind of come back around, at least in the films I’ve been watching that’s like Oh, that really happened.
It’s a world historical catastrophe. And there is a difference in the moment, because there were a lot of shows that as soon as they could do COVID protocols, they went back into production. And then when they came back, they would make a cursory acknowledgement of the pandemic as if it were over. And then they would resume their business as normal because there was a dream that things would return to normal.
The fact that we’re no longer in lockdown is very clearly not an indication that things have returned to normal, quote unquote, whatever that means. The world is permanently warped by that event and the effects of it will only continue to be felt. So as time goes on, I think it will be more important to have things on the record, trying in their own way, the way this movie does, to parse that moment a little bit and get somewhere nearer to the heart of it. With a little bit of historical distance, but also with a good deal of historical proximity, shooting in 2022. So memory’s still fresh, but not in the moment.
Was that always the intent or was COVID and lockdown in point to talk about other issues that you talk about in the film?
I just found it very fruitful, that for example, in a fallen world of secular liberals that suddenly modes of dress would become enchanted almost as if they were sacramental. And I should say for the record that I’m very in favour of masking and every safety precaution, but the taboos around masking contact six feet of distance, all of these things, it was almost like it was the logic of magic. At least as it was processed emotionally and it manifests in all of these ritualized gestures of spraying, of handwashing, that are infused with the full mania of the fears of basically dying, an apocalypse or the fear of killing someone close to you.
Washing your hands functionally is something you’ve done your whole life, you know? But never with the feeling of the apocalypse riding on it, it’s never been invested with stakes in quite that way. And we also probably don’t like to be on a crowded subway, or stand in line for something, but now being crowded in the subway, standing too crowded in line, those were felt to be matters of life and death.
What I found very fruitful was without staging, like a King Kong knocks over a huge building, or everything being on fire, you have a very apocalyptic situation full of dread, but bourgeois people are functioning as normal. Their behaviour is basically unchanged. It just has this weird new layer of fear and psychosis almost. I thought that was interesting.
And so, I thought it spilled over into all of these other areas of movie. It’s a comment on behaviour in general.
I found COVID and lockdown were such an eye-opener in terms of behaviour and how people respond to mask mandates and checking in. It makes sense that you have a kind of global pandemic that really opens your eyes to how weird people can be with rules that make a lot of sense.
Yes. It’s, it’s not correlated to the virtue of the rule. It’s something emotional, and it’s overdetermined in the classic sense.
Was that the entry point for any of the comedy of the film?
There’s certainly a lot of physical comedy in the film of the character that John Early plays, Terry Goon. Who is the most zealous adherent to COVID protocols, at least on the surface. He is very manically always trying to keep people apart, trying to keep masks on, trying to spray things down and wipe them off and wash his hands.
But in the same way that you describe it, as soon as it was possible to forget that this was in effect, the world sort of gave up on it happily. They threw it all out. And this character, people will find is selective in the moments when he is in his zealous COVID protocols. He has no backbone regarding those protocols or in general.
When push comes to shove, he always yields. He always gives up. There is a character who he really doesn’t want to come over, played by me, who, as soon as she gets to the house, they have a little tussle, but almost immediately he yields because he actually would prefer to drink. He just wants to get drunk with a friend. And so, he is really the only character who cares that much. But there’s a lot of physical comedy, both in him practicing it and him just giving up on it.
Was there anything you wanted to capture of New York lockdown and COVID with the film?
Maybe this is true all over the world, but I don’t think anybody in New York likes their apartment. Maybe people do, but being trapped inside your apartment in New York, even if it’s a very big and nice apartment, even if it’s a house, with a lot of space in it. You always hate your house. Maybe that’s universal.
There is a line that’s repeated by two characters, “No community, no family, no friendship.” People can come to New York with big dreams: dreams of community, dreams of friendship, maybe even dreams of family, but what they will find is a contemporary urban environment that is extremely atomized, extremely alienating.
And they will find maybe social communities that are not the communities they’ve dreamed of. Maybe they’ll find friends that are not the friends they’ve always dreamed of. And maybe they will experience a bit of disenchantment with this city that they dreamed of for so long. So, I think that aspect is very much part of this movie.
My last question is a personal one for me as a soundie. Do you have any sound pet peeves? Is there anything that you want to get out there that people should know more about sound?
I went to school, and I learned a lot about multi-channel, immersive audio and the thing that I found in trying to make a movie work – which is not, this is not like avatar. And it’s also not an avant-garde art film that is super full of ambience and long shots. It’s a dialogue comedy and things about the comedy need to work. And so, for me, the big lesson that I learned and was happy to learn is that immersive audio is not always immersive dramatically. That the ambience can’t be super immersive at all times, because a film is actually a rhetorical tool.
The sound is structured rhetorically around a point of focus in a movie like this one. Which for me, it was a welcome lesson.
I realized, as well you can stage with sound at the very outset, at the very beginning, and then you can be very sparing with it.
You don’t have to hear everything, every car that passes by, every rustle of leaves. You can be extremely schematic with it. My big pet peeve is I don’t like when people get carried away with the background ambience in contemporary film, because it’s very easy to record, to capture. We have huge libraries now of multi-channel surround, surround ambiences, and you can build them out for, for forever.
But that’s not always the best strategy. That my little pet peeve.
That was me in university, where I was like, we’re doing it all. We’re going to have all the ambience and all the background noise all the time. And it’s going to be amazing. Now looking back on the things I did at university, I was like, oh yeah, I was probably taking the viewer out of the film by having all this crazy, stuff happening at any given time.
No, I’ve totally been there. And I’ve been very pleased with myself for it. In a movie like this, it’s so clear when something is working and when it’s not working for me, like when a joke wouldn’t work because I had jammed too much noise around it. And I’ve never been happier than to clear out that noise and let the joke work.
On the other hand, I know what sound can do. And the other pet peeve I would say is that the people responsible for shaping the image should take that into account a little bit more. The fact that everything about how that image reads to the viewer, it’s going to be shaped by what they hear simultaneous with it.
The audience won’t hear it as sound. They’ll feel it as being embedded in the image. They’ll experience it in a weird way, almost visually, but the whole valence will be determined by the sound design. I think that’s an important thing for everybody to acknowledge.
Interview by Jack
Stress Positions
Sydney Film Festival