I have always been fascinated by how we consume movies and how we use them to understand our own lives. Lately, I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens after that consumption and how writing can extend our relationship with a film. This philosophy has become my North Star for my relationship with criticism and writing, consistently guiding me to ask the same question in my work. How can I understand myself and others through art? As I’ve continued to explore this idea, I’ve begun to evolve my own means of consumption, writing about films as a way to create something layered onto existing art.
My current approach to self-insertion through art is direct, obvious, and still evolving, colored by the fact that I’m still figuring out my style and growing into my voice. On the opposite side, Sophy Romvari’s film Blue Heron is a masterwork in that space. Her debut feature operates in an autobiographical mode where memory, family, and the apparatus of filmmaking are made from the same material. Romvari inserts herself directly into her own film, capturing the form I care about most at its fullest. There’s little I can say about the debut feature that hasn’t already been said, but Romvari operates at the level of the form’s best practitioners, doing things with the personal film that I have never seen anyone attempt before. We sat down for a conversation over Zoom to talk about her process, her debut feature Blue Heron, and the art of getting personal.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ali El-Sadany: I’ve always been interested in using movies to understand things I’m struggling with personally. I tend to do that through consuming and writing about them; you’ve actually made films out of those experiences. With your shorts, especially Still Processing, it feels like you were sometimes processing grief almost in real time. What does filmmaking actually give you in that process?
Sophy Romvari: With my short films, I was pretty explicitly using my work to process things in real time. In every case, I think I was going through exactly what you see in the work. It was very vulnerable. I think that’s indicative of the fact that I was in my twenties. I was learning the craft and coming to understand myself as an artist, but also as a person. I really do credit making those films with gaining a better understanding of why those emotional experiences were important enough for me to make films about. When I look back at them now, I see a lot of vulnerability that I didn’t even realize was there at the time. I didn’t understand how vulnerable they were.
Now I’ve learned how to protect myself a little more and shield myself a little bit more. Although Blue Heron is incredibly rooted in my own experiences and my own life, there is a creative distance and an emotional distance there. I’ve had the time to develop as an artist and as a person, so I know where I want to put those shields up. That doesn’t mean it isn’t vulnerable. It just means I’ve gotten better at the craft, and I know how to do that more eloquently now.
I think Still Processing was actually about trying to use filmmaking as a means of processing grief and trauma, and then Blue Heron is kind of the acceptance that there’s a limitation to that. Our art is just an expression of being alive and being a person. It’s not going to resolve these things in us.
AE: There’s a massive difference between writing about grief later and essentially allowing people to watch a version of you grieve in real time. Your shorts are now permanently out there as these versions of yourself from different moments in your life. How do you feel about having that catalog of Sophy available to people who don’t actually know you?
SR: I actually had a moment of pause when the shorts were being renewed on the Criterion Channel. Obviously, it’s such an honor and an incredible platform, but I do feel like I’ve moved on from that place artistically. There was a moment where I thought, maybe I’ll just move forward with only Blue Heron being what’s available. But ultimately, I think the short films exemplify an artist in the process of discovery. If that’s valuable to people, then who am I to shield that just because I want a more curated version of my work out in the world?
To me, my shorts are a good example of how you can make work with limited means and use that work to develop your voice. All of those shorts are very low-budget, if not no-budget. I get a lot of people reaching out to me saying the short films inspired them to make work themselves, or made them feel like there wasn’t so much restriction on making something perfect. I don’t think those short films are perfect at all. They show a lot of self-discovery, visually and personally. People get so caught up in the perfectionism of how to make a film. I’m happy if those films can play some role in breaking down those barriers.
AE: That interests me because Blue Heron is obviously still personal, but it feels like you’ve created much more distance between yourself and the film. Was there ever a point where you considered protecting yourself even more and keeping more of the reality private?
SR: There was no way I could protect myself enough that people wouldn’t know the film was personal. Even though the film is quite fictionalized, in my mind it barely scratches the surface of the reality of my life, my parents, my brothers, and my experience. But that doesn’t really matter, because ultimately people are going to assume it’s one-to-one. That’s just the assumption when you make work that is personal, especially with the way this film is framed. I had to accept the reality that this is how my family may be perceived.
There were things early on in the script where I tried to create more distance, but I realized those things were superficial. They weren’t actually going to make a difference. Ultimately, I leaned into personal things only in the ways that I felt would be helpful to the film itself. I was never putting something into the film just because it was important to me. It had to serve the film, the narrative, and the structure. I kind of shot myself in the foot by making ten years of autobiographical films if I wanted to hide my identity. It’ll be interesting moving forward. When I make work that isn’t rooted in autobiography as much, will people still make that assumption? Will I always have to fight this narrative about myself as an artist? I don’t know.
AE: That’s something I think about a lot. My instinct with almost any movie is to ask where the filmmaker exists inside of it. Maybe that’s partly why I initially looked at adult Sasha and immediately read her as an extension of you.
SR: I do wonder sometimes if people genuinely think Amy Zimmer, the actor, is me—like I am literally self-inserting into the film. I’ve joked before that she should start doing the Q&As as though she made the film. I think that would be really funny. People will ask me at Q&As, “When you go back in time…” And I’m like, okay, interesting. People just see it synonymously with me.
There are so many films where it’s clearly the director using a surrogate character, but the film isn’t spoken about in that way. I do wonder what it is about this film that makes it so apparent to people that this is a director-insert character.
AE: Blue Heron feels like an evolution from your shorts because you’ve already done so much emotional work before we arrive at the movie. Did you need that distance before you could actually direct it?
SR: I think because of the shorts, I did a lot of the emotional grounding that I needed to do in order to have the distance to make this film. Time had also genuinely passed. I spent a long time working on the script, too. The script was really the backbone of the film. I was able to rely on decisions I had made early on, so when I was directing, I could focus more on my instincts about where the camera should be and on working with my cinematographer. Those things came very naturally to me, but all of it was based around the concept and the construct of how the script was written.
There are things in the script that didn’t make it into the film—some dialogue and a couple of scenes—but for the most part, the film isn’t far from the script at all. It was about 88 pages long. I wanted to be sure about it before I ventured into production because I knew I wanted some level of spontaneity, and the second half of the film has that. That’s closer to my earlier work. But with the first half, I was diving into the world of period fiction. I don’t personally think of it as “recreation,” but it’s a much more precise thing to make than one character in a room in the present day. You have to pay much more attention to production design and all of those craft details. You could make the second half of the movie with far fewer resources than the first.
AE: It’s so special to see a film this honest and formally unconventional actually survive the traditional marketplace. You made this without compromising your voice, and now it’s found a home with distributors like Janus and Criterion. What has it been like seeing your art transcend some of the uglier sides of the business?
SR: It’s extremely rare to have your art aligned with platforms, distributors, and companies that you actually admire. Janus and Criterion are two access points in my own life and my own cinematic understanding of the world in such big ways. The fact that my film is now part of that, and that they’re upholding it, is beyond anything I could have imagined. It feels like such a perfect alignment because they really care about the film being seen the way I intended and marketing it in a way that is in alignment with the film. Those things are extremely rare with distributors. Of course, it’s about getting the film out there, but usually it’s also really about getting a return on investment. I’m in a very fortunate position where the film is being understood critically, but also people are going. People are going to the movies. It’s crazy.
This is a tiny, independent, Canadian, personal film. It wasn’t made with any assurance that it would have marketability or any place in the marketplace. The fact that—even on a small level—it’s being accepted and people are going out into the world to see it in theaters, there is no world in which I could have predicted this. I was told the opposite by everyone I spoke to for years while trying to make this movie. I really had very low expectations. It’s hard for people to believe me when I say that because it sounds like I’m trying to be too humble. But I tried to get this film financed out of the U.S. for a year, and every single person I spoke to passed on it.
AE: You mentioned earlier that making art might not resolve our own grief or trauma. Has making Blue Heron changed the way you think about what art can actually do with something painful?
SR: I think I’ve come to understand that art isn’t going to resolve these things in us. But the process of making something can give you years of thinking about it and talking about it. It creates a space where other people can talk about their experiences too. I think that might ultimately be more valuable than expecting the film itself to heal something.