Provoked by ridiculous men in power, egregious dissolution of women’s rights, a shockingly prevalent lack of awareness around miscarriage and the terrifying reality of handling this loss – filmmaker Rachel Sweeney wrote, directed and played the central role in pitch black comedy Fish Bowl. Sweeney sardonically leans into the asinine reality of the changing laws in the US which now mean women can face prosecution for the disposal of a miscarried foetus as she constructs a visually exquisite world where a young bride, not necessarily ready for a baby and swept up in the mayhem of a wedding rehearsal dinner, finds herself miscarrying. There is a dreamlike quality to the film reflecting the bride’s dissociation from what she is experiencing until a pivotal moment women all over the world will recognise when that much-needed female support comes to find you in a bathroom cubicle. Fish Bowl was written in response to experiences in the filmmaker’s own life but when screened to friends and family Sweeney learnt her own mother Barbara Sweeney – a fierce supporter of her art and filmmaking who she recently lost and to whom this film is dedicated – was that friend in the bathroom. Directors Notes is proud to present the online premiere of Fish Bowl for which we spoke to Sweeney about destigmatising stories of loss around miscarriages, capturing poignant shots in the tight confines of a toilet cubicle and her thoughts on being told her film was a challenge to programme for festivals.
What made you want to write this exact film at this point in time?
My husband and I have been together for about 12 years and we’ve spent a lot of that time trying to not get pregnant. I became a little obsessed, especially during those Trump years, with what I would do if we got pregnant. Would we have an abortion? What if we didn’t? That is entirely a possibility due to some personal medical reasons, we’d have that added fear that it would be our only chance. Age too, of course, is always part of the equation. Then again, do we even want kids? I’ve always had irregular periods, so at least once every 3-4 weeks, I’d let my mind wrestle itself with these questions. And of course, I was writing this during Trump’s hopefully only presidency, the Supreme Court was about to overturn Roe and now the reality of those fears we had when I was writing this have come true for a lot of people.
The idea of going through with an unwanted pregnancy was very much on my mind and so I started to picture myself pregnant and not wanting to be and what it would be like to miscarry in that situation. So I started researching miscarriage and found the forums. Miscarriage is such a taboo, under-the-rug topic and you have girls and women of all ages asking each other on the internet not just advice, but literally posting pictures of what’s coming out of their bodies and asking, “Is this a miscarriage?” or “Is this my baby?” It was so indicative of how secretive we are about women’s bodies and menstruation and miscarriage, and how dangerous that is. And, of course, there is a clear and intentional pipeline for miscarriage and abortion being taboo to Christofacists taking away reproductive rights. Shroud something in mystery and it is much easier to control – including women’s bodies.
As you so accurately mentioned, we need more portrayals of the terrifying dissolving of hard fought for women’s choices. How did you develop this particular absurd but also evocative portrayal of loss?
I wanted to normalize a miscarriage story, specifically one about someone who was experiencing anxiety around having a baby, through humor. I wanted to show the complex emotions happening for people who are pregnant but don’t want to have a baby and how it is not just this “Whoopsie daisy let me go to the abortion store” kinda thing. And pregnancy loss is so, SO common, so there really needs to be more stories about it. So many women are grieving lost pregnancies in secret. If I can make someone feel less alone and even maybe laugh, that’s it, that’s the goal.
Letting people read the bones of something meant they just gave me the confidence by saying, “Yes, we’d like to hear this story. More, please.”
I did a Kickstarter and also pitched the project to production companies that were able to help us out either with money and/or creative services. People responded to the script and gave us amazing deals or free services. Dark Minds Productions, Felipe at We Make Color and Derrick who did the VFX magic for the fish. We had an amazing time with Mark Weitx from Mark’s Tropical Fish and were really supported by the folks at Birns & Sawyer. I wasn’t shy about sending the script to people while asking for help, and I was very grateful and excited that people wanted to be involved and tell this story.
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What feedback were you getting when sending the script out during those initial stages and did that reshape the story at all?
It’s pretty close to the first version I wrote about four and a half years ago. Of course, I was preoccupied with trying to make it shorter, under ten minutes is good for festivals and all that crap, but by the time I was actively in pre-pro, I had expanded both of Jude’s major scenes. I actually think everything got a bit longer as I fine-tuned it, more jokes, more specificity in each line of dialogue. Honestly, the feedback was all positive, the only people reading it were my husband, who Jude is based off of, and people who love my husband and know Jude was based off of him. Letting people read the bones of something meant they just gave me the confidence by saying, “Yes, we’d like to hear this story. More, please.”
That scene in the toilet cubicle is simply wonderful. How did you capture that back-and-forth and intense emotionality but also inject the much-needed comedy into the situation?
Thank you so much. We found the perfect bathroom that felt very much like a fish bowl with its green walls, marble surfaces, and huge mirror. It was important to me that even for those near-POV shots, Michelle Serje who plays Sara, and I could look at each other and act with each other, so DP Tammy Santos crawled into that stall and I sort of curled myself around the camera, which was a Sony Venice with the Angenieux 20-120mm lens – so big. Michelle and I are close friends and she’s a phenomenal actress. She perfectly captured this character. We rehearsed, but she also just came in with a full understanding of the character, the tone, and the purpose of that scene. She has a talent for providing comic relief in regular life, so she understood what she was there to do. And underneath that comedy is a person who is wholly freaked out, but fighting through it for her friend, and Michelle captured that perfectly.
It looks, feels and almost tastes like a picture perfect Hollywood movie clashing with chaotic and dreamlike sequences – talk to me about your approach to the wide range of cinematography and feel of the film.
That is such an awesome compliment, thank you. I love that. I want to know very badly what you think it tastes like. Zoe’s pretty dissociated, her life is a movie to her as much as it is to us. If you’re not fully on board with what’s going on in your life, things start to feel like a dream. Or when things seem to be out of control, more like a movie than real life. At the same time, I guess I’m taking something that people hide and I’m saying, yes there is an epic story here. So those are the reasons for these cinematic choices. I’m dramatic. DP Tammy Santos humored me with lots of prep before each day, since I’d also be in front of the camera, and came up with her own great ideas like using a Lensbaby in the glass-breaking scene. My editor Sabra Stratton was the one who came up with adding that sort of dream sequence towards the end. Finally, working with Nandi Rose aka Half Waif on the score was amazing. I was a fan of her music and just reached out once we had a solid picture cut. I honestly had no idea how beautiful and collaborative it would be. We worked together over Zoom, and she just captured every emotion in the film with her music which was like dissociation in music form. Everyone just sort of understood exactly what I was going for in that way. No one ever shied away from telling this story loudly.
The swathes of music heighten each emotion Rachel’s performance deftly takes us through. Nandi, how did you develop the score and express those feelings sonically?
Nandi Rose: When I saw the first cut of the film, it immediately resonated with me. I remember feeling so many emotions in such a short period of time, and when it finished, I cried. But it wasn’t just a purely sad feeling, it was cut through with this sense of wonder at how we navigate our most painful moments, together. I was so taken by the tone that Rachel so powerfully captures – the tragedy and heartbreak of a loss, but also the humor that often becomes a necessary kind of armor for meeting our biggest trials. Approaching the sound design, I wanted to find this balance sonically, creating a sound palette that felt rich and lush but also a little quirky, dreamy, and beautifully odd. This translated to a lot of pitch-bending theremin-style synths, vocal samples, arpeggiators, and minimalist electronic percussion.
I was so taken by the tone that Rachel so powerfully captures – the tragedy and heartbreak of a loss, but also the humor that often becomes a necessary kind of armor for meeting our biggest trials.
Rachel, I’d love to know your approach to filming that poignant scene in the sea, that can’t have been a simple set up!
We shot in Malibu and ended up using the first day as a test. We did a reshoot with the help of underwater cinematographer Jenny Baumert. She used a Red Komodo with many many pounds of weights hanging off of her. My co-star, Jeremy Culhane, was really good at reading the waves, so at his command, we’d run out past the surf, get as much footage as we could, until the next wave was starting to form and we’d dash back in. We needed to be able to get those underwater ocean plates so that when we added the fish in post, we could make a montage. And I really wanted those over-unders, and also the feeling that Zoe and Jude are swimming, not just standing in the surf. So we had to be deep enough for the camera to get under, deep enough that we could lift our legs and swim, so that’s why we had to go in and out and in and out. And it was March so it was incredibly exhausting and cold, but so fucking fun.
Having nineteen and twenty year olds who’d just been stripped of their rights tell me they felt seen by my film, telling me their incredible interpretations of the fish and the ocean sequence, my heart was kind of exploding.
I love this unique and very individual approach to pregnancy, miscarriage and abortion. What have reactions been like to the film?
It has been challenging programming-wise. I’ve been told how ‘controversial’ it is, which I truly didn’t expect but so many people, audience members, friends, family have told me their own stories after seeing the film. When my mom watched it for the first time, she turned to me and said “I’ve been in that bathroom.” That was a really incredible moment for us to share. She had never told me about the time she helped her friend through a miscarriage. That character is the soul of it for me – the friend who is just there, doing what’s needed, getting you cleaned off, letting you grieve however you need, making you laugh if that’s what you need, just reading you and going from there so deftly. Basically telling you without telling you, “What you’re feeling is valid and I’m here however you need me.” I wrote the friend I would need at that moment. I wrote my mom. And I wrote it without knowing she had very literally been that friend to someone else. I wasn’t surprised.
Some of my other favorite reactions, or ones I’m most proud of, have been from college students. a group of University of Idaho film students attended our premiere at Sun Valley, and it was just after that horrible “abortion trafficking” law went into effect. Having nineteen and twenty year olds who’d just been stripped of their rights tell me they felt seen by my film, telling me their incredible interpretations of the fish and the ocean sequence, my heart was kind of exploding.
How on earth do you react to what I consider to be short sighted views that this was a challenge to programme? I could think of a multitude of ways in which this film fits.
I agree. And I’m extremely grateful to people like you, and people like Melanie Addington and her team at Tallgrass, and Bennett Krishock and Ana Souza who gave us our premiere at Sun Valley, and all the other programmers who chose to include us in their festivals and events. I was naive in thinking the film wouldn’t be controversial within the oft-touted-as-liberal film festival world. I know for a fact that we were considered difficult to program. I have the personalized rejection emails to prove it.
I was naive in thinking the film wouldn’t be controversial within the oft-touted-as-liberal film festival world.
There are programmers out there, some real ones, who will come clean, whether in a discreet but incriminating email or over drinks at other festivals, about how they fought for your film against other more conservative programmers, or how fragile internet algorithms exclude certain types of content. We were rejected from dozens of festivals, and I did start to think, hmmm, my film is good, right? Could it be…difficult to program? And I told myself that I was making excuses, of course. So when I finally did start to get that validation, it made me feel less insane, less like a petulant child and confident again that I had made a good film.
This is a big one, what’s next for you?
Right now, I’m very sincerely lost. My writing, more like the furious scramblings of a madwoman, has turned entirely towards the tragedy of losing my mom. What shape that will eventually take, if any, would probably be the closest thing to “what’s next” for me. The more honest answer would be a joint and whatever television I may lay over my constant baseline feeling of terror like a lukewarm heating pad. Though, by the end of that joint, my answer might be, “a feature, hopefully.”
