A year of Tuesdays

Once a week, every week, for an entire year, Australian director Sophie Hyde would meet with a small crew and cast and work on her first fictional feature. With a unique production schedule that mirrored the film’s narrative structure (set entirely on Tuesdays), Hyde would script scenes only a week in advance, more interested in collaboration with her actors and crew than a prefigured vision.

52 Tuesdays follows a teenage girl named Billie and her mother’s decision to undergo a gender transition over the course of a year. Freely exploring character worlds while pulling issues like gender, sexuality and adolescence under the microscope, 52 Tuesdays has already scooped up major awards at the Sundance and Berlinale film festivals for its boldness and innovation.

Sophie Hyde was recently in Wellington to attend a Q&A at New Zealand’s International Film Festival. I got the opportunity to chat with her further on the experiment, the complexities of the issues it raises, and the conversations we should be having as a culture right now.

Judah Finnigan: To start, what inspired the conceit for production?

Sophie Hyde: Matt Cormack, who was our co-writer, approached us with the idea to make a film where two people meet every Tuesday for a year, and we film on Tuesdays. But the story and the characters came quite a lot later than that. The process came first – and the idea of time – and then it developed into their characters through conversation between Matt and I, and Bryan [Mason] who was cinematographer/editor. The three of us worked from the start on it.

We were looking for characters we could live with for quite a long time… and that would do a few things. One was to embody the promise of change… or who wouldn’t necessarily change but would have the potential to. The other was that they needed to be characters that questioned the rules of how we set up our lives, or enabled us to question that through them. I think I had this strong idea that it would be some sort of illicit affair on Tuesdays. Everyone did. Then the characters that became the family fell into place, and that just felt like it had more potential.

 I just started to really understand how full-on ideas of gender were, and how massive it is in all of our identity without us even really thinking or talking about it that much.

What drew you toward the subject matter, in terms of exploring gender and sexuality?

I think I’ll always be really interested in our own versions of identity, and how we find them and when we accept them and who fights against them… So those things are kind of always present. Gender and sexuality were always then going to be there. For me, the transgender character [James, played by Del Herbert-Jane] actually just came from an idea about being a parent, trying to uncover and reconcile the parts of you that fit in with the idea of being a mother or a parent, and the parts that feel really separate from that, and that they can feel distinct at times.

Working out as your child gets older, how do you then reveal that to them? How do you make that a part of their everyday life? So James kind of dramatised that idea, of being a mother and a man, and also the decision to make that a really separate thing from his child that we explore in the film. Then as I started to delve into that, I just started to really understand how full-on ideas of gender were, and how massive it is in all of our identity without us even really thinking or talking about it that much.

Definitely. So you scripted the film as you went. What challenges did that pose? Were you ever nervous the film might slip away from you?

We were always nervous that the film might just be shit! Like, all the time! I always felt like we knew we had really good material. There’s a great challenge in the narrative structure and whether we are going to achieve the right one for an audience; not just for you making it. So that was always the great challenge – and of course, you get so involved that you need things to happen all the time, rather than allowing for something that will come out later. So there’s a lot more complication and a lot more plot and story that we probably anticipated in the film. The challenge was that we shifted things so much that then the edit really needed to rework what was there on the page.

From the structure of the production, to your own experience in that field, even to your leads often wielding cameras themselves and interrogating subjects, how much of an influence was documentary filmmaking on this picture?

Great question. A massive influence. You can see it in that stuff with Billie [the lead character] filming her friends. That wasn’t something that was in our original story concept. That came out of when we were filming. That whole storyline came out through the year. We had some ideas about what would happen, but that wasn’t one of the things. I felt really deeply connected to that part of the story.

A lot of that is to do with being someone who’s made documentary films, and my relationship with the subjects, and my feeling of responsibility to them. The great privilege of being able to delve in to people’s lives, and what you do with that and the power it has, was really influential in that storyline. But of course, the idea of time and finding some authenticity on the screen and dissatisfaction with what feels really constructed in filmmaking… I guess those things as well.

I’d say that Australia and New Zealand have relatively similar cultural landscapes. What conversations do you think that we both need to be having about gender and sexuality right now?

I think we need to be having a lot more conversations. About gender… sexuality… all of it. I don’t understand why we are all so worried about what other people do with their gender and their sexuality, why it matters to the rest of us. I mean… I do understand it. I understand it because we are so created into these gender roles, and these roles that we think we’re supposed to have, and it confronts us to think that someone might question that… But it’s huge! Having a child, the construction of gender around her and the way that gender is talked about and what she’s supposed to be as a girl… is such a huge thing. Every single day, I feel like every interaction I have is this gendered thing. I feel relatively comfortable with that because I identify the same way that I appear, so that’s fine. But so often, I’m pissed off by it. Just to be a little angry filmmaker for a second! I really take offense to the fact I have to put my gender on my airline ticket. Is it that bigger deal for us? Does it matter so much?

Raising a daughter, I feel like I want her to not have to care whether she’s a girl or a boy, and that doesn’t need to factor into what she’s allowed to do and who she’s allowed to be. But I think we are not talking about that enough. I think that’s why trans* people that are out and active and vocal in the world are so interesting right now, because they’re asking all of us to question that inherent system. A lot of us question it anyway. Just not out loud all the time. Sexuality is the same thing for me. I mean, they’re not the same thing, but it’s this idea that we have any kind of say or any kind of rights over other people’s sexuality seems absurd.

 I find the idea of what a teenager is so limited; these terrible people who want to engage in risky things and are whinging and complaining about the world or something. I don’t find teenagers like that at all. 

I feel like in New Zealand at the moment, public acceptance and awareness has gone up, but there’s still that kind of compartmentalising going on and making sure roles are defined so it’s easier for everybody else to process.

I’m so sick of the roles, like, why does that have to be a thing? I don’t know why I’m such an angry women this morning! I am, though. The idea that it’s okay to be gay as long as you don’t want to get married or something… Y’know? I don’t think we all have to live this way just because we’ve been told to.

As well as dealing with transgender issues, the film is quite frank about teenage sexuality. How important do you think that sort of open experimentation is to coming of age?

Really, really important. That part of the story was something I feel is not talked about a great deal still. I think the way that we present young people onscreen, particularly in terms of their sexuality, is really terrible. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then people are seeing the same things reflected back and then re-repeating that stuff. I find the idea of what a teenager is so limited; these terrible people who want to engage in risky things and are whinging and complaining about the world or something. I don’t find teenagers like that at all. I really wish that young people, as they were starting to uncover their own sexuality, were able to do it in a way that is about how something feels, not how something looks to the world. I don’t think we give people much opportunity. We want to say we’re afraid of your sexuality, so don’t do it, or do it in these ways that we’re already comfortable with.

Children look at so much porn now, so there’s this idea of what sex is based on that. I don’t have a problem with porn in some ways, but if that’s creating how you feel about sex, then again it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s what you then get off on if that’s all you’ve ever been exposed to. Imagine if you could actually be in a room like these three [characters] where you got to work out what you liked the feel of, instead of what you liked the look of, or whether you had to work out whether you were friends or lovers or boyfriend and girlfriend. Everything’s so set-up. I wish that kids were able to do more of that.

The three teenagers [Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Imogen Archer and Sam Althuizen] talked loads about nakedness in art, particularly of young people naked, and how important that was to us, and of the fight against that nakedness. We now consider nakedness pornography. [We talked about] how absurd that is and how offensive that is to all of us; that bodies that do all sorts of things are only sexual if they are naked, and that children’s bodies are somehow sexual if they are naked? I find it a really horrible, terrible, shameful thing. So we talked loads about that, but we also had to explore that idea of the consequence in the real world and what that meant.

…which definitely comes through.

I think it’s important. I don’t know about New Zealand, but we do sex really badly onscreen in Australia. Especially with young people.

Yeah, I think it’s generally quite bad everywhere.

Yeah, I’m not sure why everyone’s so afraid of teenagers being sexual creatures. I’m afraid of them not being able to explore that world; it being hidden or secret or just the same bullshit.

So the film’s success at Sundance, winning an award for Directing… How did that feel and how do you think it’s going to play for the film internationally?

I was so surprised by that award. I felt like it was a very different way of directing. I feel like we put up that the best kind of directors have this picture in their head, this vision of what the film will be, and then they do everything to work towards that and take everyone along. I didn’t feel that making this. I felt like I was leading people through a process and that the vision was always shifting. So it was really surprising to me. It was very collaborative, so it was even more surprising. But it was wild. It changes things. It makes people listen or want to hear what you have to say in a different way. It certainly helped with it selling, so it will release in a lot of countries now that it might not have. Straight after Sundance, we were going to Berlin, and there we won a thing called the Crystal Bear, which is the Youth Jury award. Teenagers, watching and talking to us about our film. That was really amazing. It’s that diversity of audience that I don’t think we knew was there, the broadness. That was pretty exciting. It was thrilling. I mean, hopefully it just makes people see it. I don’t know if it helps a huge amount getting people to the cinema or anything. But it helps us get it to the cinema.

52 Tuesdays is currently playing as a part of New Zealand’s International Film Festival.