The picture perfect blissful glowing mother rocking a milk drunk babe in her arms may be the stereotypical image we are all used to seeing but it’s one that belies the truth. In most cases, those early days of motherhood are far more frantic, lonely and isolating, and it is this unspoken reality that filmmaker, and mother of two, Phoebe Arnstein wanted to see portrayed on screen. The resulting short If You’re Happy is a raw and honest look at a young mother’s struggles as she desperately wrestles with the pressures of new motherhood. Arnstein’s first short as writer and director was inspired by her own hazy memories of that sleep deprived introductory period to motherhood and exposes a far too often unspoken desperate need for community, understanding and support. If You’re Happy deftly assaults our senses with piercing screams of babies, claustrophobic surroundings and a cathartic crescendo of guttural release which will stay with you long after the film has ended. After selecting If You’re Happy as one of our top ten shorts not be missed at Bolton Film Festival earlier this year and as it continues on its festival circuit, we ask Arnstein to join us for a conversation where we delve into why she felt compelled to capture the raw emotions of those often undiscussed visceral early days of new motherhood, making a sharp transition from her career as a second AC into directing and why it was so integral that the culminating moment in the film was achieved through a mix of narrative and documentary film techniques.
[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]
How did you come to write If You’re Happy and how does it feel now you’re back in the trenches with your second baby?
I wrote this in the early days of motherhood as a first time mother. People kept saying to me, “You will never remember this time” which I found bizarre. Those early days were so raw and visceral I asked myself how it would be possible to forget them? But lo and behold, they have sort of ebbed away, it seems that the further away from the event, you do tend to start to forget the details so I felt a particular urgency to write down my lived experiences as they unfolded. I would just write notes on my phone as they happened because I’d get to the next day and I’d barely be able to remember what I did the day before. Sleep deprivation starts to do something to your brain and how you process information which in itself is quite interesting so I collated all of these experiences.
The baby group and some of the other details are all lived experiences.
I had my first child off the back of the pandemic which I think in itself is a unique time to be bringing a baby into the world. I already felt starved of deep social connection and my baby was born in August just as the world started opening up again. I found it really difficult because I was yearning to be outside of my four walls, connecting with people and finding myself after that extremely strange period. At that time I read an article in the New York Times about a group of mothers who, during the pandemic, would meet every week on a football pitch after they put their kids to bed and would stand in a circle and scream their lungs out into the night air. They didn’t have a place to vent this pent-up frustration, guilt, shame and everything they were experiencing throughout the pandemic. The stresses of homeschooling their kids and generally taking on far more domestic chores than their other halves. I guess it was quite a mediaeval time for a lot of people and I love this idea of communal outpouring.
It took me a moment to work out where that could sit in the film. The baby group and some of the other details are all lived experiences and whilst some days that baby group was a total sanctuary, other days it just felt like a really surreal stage. We played this game, passing this box around and making these infantile noises and I just thought, “What are we doing here?” We barely knew each other’s names, we knew our baby’s names and it felt so much more important to actually introduce ourselves as women and to look each other in the eye and ask, “How are you doing? What’s going on with you? What are your challenges? What support do you have?”. But it just wasn’t that. I felt very drawn to the symbolism of this circle which historically has always been a place of unity and safety yet there was something skewed that just didn’t feel like it represented that space.
In making the film, if I’m being honest, I was preparing myself for the sequel. But it’s a lot softer this time around, which fortifies my need to make something that really represents that time. I’ve got my coping mechanisms locked down now. I can leave the house in 15 minutes rather than an hour and you do become desensitised to some of those intense moments of crying whereas before you’re sort of sent into this feral state of what’s wrong? What can I do?
I felt very drawn to the symbolism of this circle which historically has always been a place of unity and safety yet there was something skewed that just didn’t feel like it represented that space.
Those feelings of being trapped and isolated are so potent, particularly when she’s in the flat looking out desperately at the world. How did you create that intense feeling of claustrophobia?
The location was always incredibly specific in my mind and I knew that it was going to be a challenge. We didn’t have a location scout. I was the location scout and actually came across that area pushing my daughter around in the pram. I became quite obsessed with it. I’d drive down there and just dwell in that area. I knew that apartment needed to look out onto an industrial estate and then also onto these neighbouring apartments where she could watch other people’s lives unfold to serve her isolation.
The isolation comes through even more acutely when she’s walking through the tunnel, above all of the traffic and people going about their lives.
Metaphorically I feel like that environment represents this sort of void of community that new mothers feel sometimes. You’re seeking something quite primal in terms of community but you’re not really sure what that looks like. You’re living in the city, pushing this tiny little life around in this flimsy pram and you do become invisible. It’s so interesting as a woman because when you become a mother the way that people look at you is completely different.
You’re seeking something quite primal in terms of community but you’re not really sure what that looks like.
You have spoken about searching for a community which is in fact the opposite of what I felt watching this group where she is chastised for leaving her baby to deal with her pad.
It wasn’t an isolated experience that led to me writing that scene. It was a collective judgement that I have felt along the way, whether that’s from midwives, feeding consultants, or strangers. You’re so impressionable as a new, young mum hoping you’re doing the best you can and if someone says something to you, it can literally play on a loop in your head for days after, it does send you into a bit of a spiral. There are numerous things that happened in those early days that I still think about now, they really stuck with me and Lynette, played by Jo Hartley, became a character that held a lot of what I’d experienced.
How did your years as a second AC influence your approach now as a director, and what have you taken from that which went into the making of If You’re Happy?
I spent nine years as a camera assistant and I really, really loved my job until I really didn’t. I generally had a very patient camera team and I was always shooting things on the side and running off at the weekend with a camera from a rental house, befriending the cast and sometimes casting them in shorts. So for me, that was my film school. Whilst I didn’t really see it like that at the time, I was just doing my job and earning a living but looking back now, it definitely was an invaluable period of time. I worked with incredible directors and DPs. If you can get in that close for any period of time nothing quite beats it.
It is like actually stopping doing one job and going in a completely different direction, albeit in the same industry.
I finally got to a point where I realised I couldn’t do it any more. I think I was the moodiest camera assistant and I just had to cut the cords because you can continue to take on job after job because they do just keep coming, but I made the decision to move into directing. It was only then I realised this is really hard. I’m not stepping into anything, it’s an entire change of career and not a progression at all. It’s like actually stopping doing one job and going in a completely different direction, albeit in the same industry. They’re completely different roles so it took me a while to actually untether myself from the logistics of that role and focus on the creative. This is the first film that I’ve written myself and that was a completely different experience. It helped even more to detach from the actual logistics of how to pull the shoot together.
Sound is so integral to the film with vast swathes of dramatic music, screaming babies and the almost horror-like Lamaze breathing. Can you talk to us about building up your sonic scape.
I got the ball rolling with Ines Adriana my sound designer and my composer Tawiah before we started shooting. I love knowing what the sound is going to do, it really informs how I shoot. I love working in those layers and having them all floating around to tap into. I had an extraordinary conversation with Tawiah from the get-go, it was the first time we spoke and we didn’t even really talk about what the sound should be but rather, metaphorically what it could be. Like this resilient weed growing up through the cracks in this concrete urban environment that’s kinetic and overwhelming. Then you have this very pure voice that represents this primal yearning for life and survival and she completely got it.
I love knowing what the sound is going to do, it really informs how I shoot.
She went away and sent me something literally 45 minutes later. I was blown away and that was actually what we used in the end. We tried different things because it felt slightly mad to just go with the original idea but we kept coming back to that very first reaction and response to our conversation. Ines then did an incredible job of placing us in this soundscape. When you watch the film in the cinema you are completely cocooned and drowning in her world with her.
That feeling of drowning is so perfectly captured when she’s covering her ears but the pervasive crying won’t quit.
Ines and I never wanted to repeat the same sound of the baby crying. Sometimes, whenever I watch dramas portraying motherhood you forget about the actual visceral experience of caring for a baby. You hear a generic baby bleating and you know that baby’s definitely a doll. When I was working with Erin Doherty whenever possible I always wanted her to have the real baby on her. Otherwise, I think you can become complacent, it’s another example of the empty coffee cup which you just start throwing around. When it’s a doll you forget but when you have the fragility of this tiny body against you, your whole body language changes the performance and informs the realism.
How did you approach the logistics of working with not just one but multiple babies on set?
It was really intense. We had twins for the hero baby Ella which was a dream. They did exactly what we needed them to do. Quite often you say you’re not casting the baby or the child, you’re casting the parent and in this case, the mother of the twins was just brilliant. She wasn’t a first time mum which might have been tricky because there were periods of time where the babies needed to cry and we needed to turn over for at least 10 minutes, but I built a really good rapport with her. It was really important that she could just look at me across the room and go – OK, enough. So those first two days were actually kind of amazingly smooth. We shot in chronological order for Erin to really build all those layers.
Then the last day in the church hall with the baby group was absolute madness. Working within the rules for how long you can work with babies on camera, which includes any rehearsal time, was a real challenge. There was one moment where I completely lost sight of my place in the shot list because there was so much coverage and there’s so much connectivity in that circle. So many glances and looks which need to build this bed of tension to elevate the drama. We got absolutely everything, to the credit of my brilliant first AD and script supervisor, but all those babies crying in the room does something to you – it sends people into a slight state of panic.
I wanted to do as much as possible to have everything locked down so that on the day there was a space to just let this evolve in an authentic way.
Talking about feelings of panic and delirium, I need to talk about that scream. It’s a scream that all women can recognise. Was that rehearsed with Erin beforehand?
First of all, I’m really glad you said that it’s an outpouring that all women can connect to because that was so important. I always hoped for this film to reach beyond motherhood to connect to all women and to men too. We never rehearsed it, it was all in the prep. I wanted to do as much as possible to have everything locked down so that on the day there was a space to just let this evolve in an authentic way. There were four real mums with their babies and that casting process was really intimate. In their self-tapes I asked each of them to imitate the most intense part of their labour if they had a vaginal birth. I actually decided to omit the final scene from the script and didn’t tell them why I was asking this but I knew they would go there. We had cast two actors, Emanuella Cole and Muireann Bird to act as pillars and instil confidence in the real mums to allow them to go and so it was like a domino effect.
I had really in-depth, detailed camera plans because the coverage of that scene was so key in the first take. Their reactions were all real and I always knew the magic and the authenticity was going to be in the first take. With Erin, I trusted that when we came to it, and from all the conversations that we’d had, that she had it instinctively within her and that it was going to be guttural. I was moved to tears, as were other people. I think it just evokes something so repressed within us, you know, something that we all want to do.
I am so genuinely drawn into these types of authentic and raw female-led stories so I just wanted to congratulate you on that. Please make more!
Well, I’m currently in development with the feature version so there will be more, there’ll be 90 minutes of it.
