Samantha Soule’s soothing and tranquil debut short Birdwatching is quite literally a balm for the soul. Despite the circumstances that have brought them together, the two women at its centre languor in an indeterminate liminal space which envelops you in an overwhelming sense of peace and contentment. No clever distracting camera tricks are needed here, the natural cinematography of this spectacular wilderness and the melodic sounds of nature serve as backdrop enough for the dulcet tones of Amanda Seyfried and Sharon Washington. Birdwatching illustrates of the cinematic power of minimalism, simplicity, superb writing, acting and of course, the backing of a dedicated group of collaborators. Written by Daniel Talbott and Produced with Lovell Holder – a pairing who brought us tender queer short You Say Hello which has unsurprisingly found a passionate 200K+ audience over on DN’s YouTube channel since its premiere last month – I get more out of each viewing of this visual and auditory delight of a film. And so in conjunction with Birdwatching’s premiere on Directors Notes today, we invited Soule to speak to us about genuinely diving into the unknown when getting started with the project, adopting the richness of nature as their third character and finding new surprises in the edit in the interplay between her actors’ voices.
This is your debut film, what was the idea born out of?
I was supposed to be born at home, or so my mother has always told me, in the tub, with Pachelbel’s Canon playing. I wasn’t. I was born in an emergency OR, my mother in a coma and my father in the waiting room. All 3lbs 4 ounces of me was taken directly to the NICU, jaundiced, heart weak and for the following days the nurses there kept me alive. They took shifts massaging my hands and feet, keeping circulation going. These strangers, whose names I still do not know, are why I am here. There are photos of them in an album at my parents’ house. Sometimes when I visit, I find myself pausing on their faces – these women who ushered me into my life. I both want to find them, to know who them… and also I treasure the odd truth that, aside from this critical moment, we remain strangers.
I don’t know if it has anything to do with the way I came into this world, but the improbability of life is often what moves me most. The sheer luck of surviving the day. So many millions of things must go right just for us to keep breathing, never mind thrive…find love…make work…and yet – we do. It is miraculous to me. Like seeds, we are launched into this chaos and we surf its waves against incredible odds and find one another. Sometimes fleetingly, sometimes building homes and families together. This piece is about that to me. It has been made with loved ones, both blood and chosen family. My father was my DP, my brother Daniel Talbott, a DN alum, alongside our producer, Lovell Holder, another DN alum, wrote the script. Amanda Seyfried and Sharon Washington are my friends and neighbors in isolation here in the Hudson Valley. It is the first film I have ever directed. Ever edited. Ever been behind the camera for.
We knew it was gonna become something entirely new. It was like setting up an improv between brilliant performers.
It was made in September of 2020, with zero dollars and just about zero crew. Daniel had initially written the script for the stage but those early, raw lockdown days gave us the idea to let it cross over, to become something different. Everything was, after all. Changing. In transition. Leaving behind what we knew of our lives and ourselves with no idea what the future would hold. The script felt to me, like a pause in that fearful tumble. A moment to breathe. Sit. Think. Ask questions. Find connection. What if, in the moment when we dissolve and are remade, our innermost selves could be heard and held by another? What if we could find a hand to hold? Another soul to recognize us. A moment to sit with someone and treasure the tiny things that make life, life….would it give us permission to let go?
I found the writing so immersive. How did you and Daniel bring the original stage script to life for the screen?
Daniel and I found one another as teenagers at The Juilliard School and have never looked back. Over the years we became more than collaborators or friends, we became family. As an actor, I think I have worked with Daniel more than any other director in my career, so when I started exploring the other side of that dance, his voice was really natural to reach for. He sent me the script and with his blessing, we really just took it into the woods. We knew it was gonna become something entirely new. It was like setting up an improv between brilliant performers. The script and the natural world. Then we sat back and watched what it wanted to become.
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I love the strong thread of womanhood, the trauma of birth and the all-encompassing trials of being a woman. Why was this such an important aspect for you?
I think for me what was really central was the idea of finding yourself mid-transition. Waking up in the midst of change. What if we could be awake while we evolve into something new? Birth and death are such big, powerful, undeniable moments of that…but I think those moments happen in smaller, underground ways all the time and Birdwatching for me is maybe an attempt to hold space for that. To resist the temptation to tumble from one phase of self into the next. But maybe pause, to listen, hold space for another and take the time to find connection.
It is not obvious at first what we are watching and the film feels so real and vivid, how did you decide on that grounded look for what could easily have been more ethereal?
I really wasn’t raised with much in the way of organized religion, so for me, exploring what the end of life might be feels most true when it is a natural progression of what we already know. I wanted to just let it be organic. Maybe that’s all it is. You wake and put one foot in front of another and find your way towards the next chapter? I don’t know. But the natural world is so full of worlds, you know? Caterpillars becoming moths. Birds in migration. Trees in decomposition. Fungi and plant life and us…all living alongside and cycling through and around one another, it feels connected to the liminal to me.
We had no lights, no mics or sounds crews, no dolly or track and recorded the audio in VO.
We shot it in a single day, at our homes, Amanda 9 months pregnant. We tromped through the woods and through the river. A thunderstorm rolled through and then the sun came out. We had no lights, no mics or sounds crews, no dolly or track and recorded the audio in VO with Daniel on the phone from across the country cheering us on, my dad and I passing the camera back and forth, and Amanda and Sharon launching themselves wholeheartedly into this ephemeral little world.
Nature is such a prominent character, the babbling stream and the gentle sounds of the woods. Can you go into more detail about your process for recording those luscious scenes?
During the pandemic we moved from our apartment in Brooklyn to a little house in the woods at the end of a dirt road. It was a stark contrast to the wild noisy communion of the city and many of our friends wondered at how lonely we must have been feeling, but I have never felt lonely in the woods. In fact it’s often the safest place I know. The sound of wind in trees and the babble of the brook. The ever changing light and all the LIFE that is just swirling with such little care for us. It’s so easy to feel disconnected from that in our modern urban lives so it was important to me that nature was really present in this as the third character of the story. It is in opening up to it, in going out into it that our young woman finds her way.
At what point did you decide on the overlapping voices? Was it mapped out from the start or something you discovered in the edit?
The crossing of the voices was absolutely found in the editing process! It wasn’t scripted as such initially, but all of a sudden it just made so much sense. The ‘water’ as it were, needed to flow both ways. Like an estuary. The line where one woman ends and the other begins dissolves. The act of listening becomes the being heard. River meeting sea and they are both things for a moment. I don’t know if you noticed, but the footage of the water does that too at one point. Flows both ways. The sounds as well. The bird calls circle on themselves. Playing both backwards and forwards as we leave the linear flow of time behind and allow ourselves to shed and become.
The line where one woman ends and the other begins dissolves. The act of listening becomes the being heard.
This is an incredibly commendable first film, how did you approach working with such a talented and experienced team?
I have been really blessed to cross paths with collaborators I love as much as humans as I do as artists a lot in my life and it’s always a joy to find little projects together that we do just for the joy of it. This was that. We made it… to make it, you know? There really wasn’t any pre production or pitching. We never made shot lists or storyboards. We just went to the woods with a beautiful text and good people and started shooting. We worked with what we had. My Dad owned a GH5S Camera. We had one LAV. We had woods and a stream and two talented actresses, Amanda Seyfried and Sharon Washington. The rest we just let happen. It was kinda magical.
What did you learn and how have you found the whole filmmaking process?
I think the largest lesson I learned in the making of this was that there is nothing but to try. That you can learn more than you knew in shorter amounts of time than you think. That you can make movies for no money. That people will help you. That it’s worth trying, even when you feel you don’t know what you’re doing. You will grow and learn and it’s always worth it!
From everything we have discussed, I assume you’ve caught the bug now. What’s next?
100%. In fact this particular team has made a bunch of work together since. After Birdwatching, Daniel and I flipped our roles and he directed Telling Time which was something I edited and wrote text for… After that, we went on to co-write/direct our first feature, Midday Black Midnight Blue (starring Merritt Wever and Chris Stack), which our Birdwatching producers, Lovell Holder and Addie Johnson Talbott, would produce with us! I’m happy to report that feature was distributed by Good Deed Entertainment and can be found to stream on Amazon Prime, etc.
