All stills taken from director Elizabeth Godar’s music video Shame for Jennie Lawless

How did your initial conversations with the artist shape your vision for how the song would be conveyed?   

The artist is one of my good friends so I had listened to the whole album, and this song struck me as the most personal and simple song on there. I knew it came from a real period of struggle in their life that led to an important transformation. Basically they were grappling with being gayer than they had previously realized, and that was leaking out when they would drink and hit on their female friends and then feel horrible about it afterwards. They told me about coming home after one of these nights and sitting on their bedside, feeling down and working it out writing this song. I found the honesty in it really moving, especially after seeing how they had grown since that time and fully embraced who they are. I wanted to create an emotional portrait of my friend in that moment of change in the way they saw themselves. 

As well as writing and directing the narrative you co-edited the video – was it a complex process creating the multi-layered technique? 

The edit was way more involved than any other part of the process. Before the shoot, Adam Leene, the DP, and I looked at intimate portraiture references like Saul Leiter’s In My Room and the multiple exposure photography of Franicis Bruguière. I imagined the footage eventually layering and morphing to create an increasing sense of emotional complexity and transformation, on top of a print stepping process that would blur motion. So we shot it with some inkling that I would overlay the footage but I wasn’t exactly sure how much. In the edit, I worked with my friend Elliott Sellers to figure out the layering language and how it would build over the course of the video. In some sections of the video, up to 20 overlays depict the artist going about their day, which I hope conveys the amorphous quality of identity and repair. We used the same technique to create heaviness towards the beginning of the song as we did to create a feeling of transformation and inward expansion in the end. Also my friend Madeline Kann did an incredible job with the color, which involved individually coloring all the clips, sometimes at varying levels of contrast and noise to make the layering work. 

Did you always have that very last shot in mind? 

No, I added the first and last shots from in-between moments in the performance footage. I wanted to show that, however painful, the making of the song and self reflection required was part of rebuilding. That it led them to be able to pull out and gain a new perspective on themselves grounded in kindness and realism.

Are you a meticulous pre-production planner or did the shoot evolve spontaneously? 

I can be but this one was not like that. I wanted to create a portrait in a visually intimate and personal way. So it felt right to let the ideas keep evolving up til and through the two shoot days. It was just the three of us – Jennie, the DP Adam Leene, and me – working together so it was very supportive and open.

You have an architectural and design background. Were you brought up in a particularly creative environment? 

Not from the outside – both my parents are lawyers. But they always pushed this mentality that we should figure out our own way of doing things. They deliberately never got us coloring books, they gave us blank paper instead. I remember stapling things together and making tons of little story books. Both my brother and I made films with camcorders from the time we were young, too – mostly mockumentaries, skits, and music videos.

What drew you to filmmaking?

When I studied architecture I remember feeling – sometimes I’m an architect and sometimes I’m something else entirely; there was something else I wanted to express. Plenty of my favorite architects also made films, painted, wrote, etc. I thought maybe the boundaries between professions don’t need to be so hard. Around that same time, I started watching films that moved me in a profound way – especially ones that had a subversive style or messaging. I realized that it was a medium that could change me in one sitting, whether that be just in mood or on a deeper level. And when I watched those movies, I felt this sort of internal sense of motion – as if I were participating somehow in their creation. So I naturally started thinking about my own work from there.

Now that you’ve started creating your own films, what’s next – more music videos, short films or something longer?

I’m excited to dig into a longer form project but I’ll keep doing whatever interests me while I’m getting that ready, whether a music video, short film, or something else.

INFO:

@elizabeth_godar