Filmmakers Hannah Barlow & Kane Senes Talk SISSY

Following a glorious run on the festival circuit that saw a world premiere at SXSW followed by international premieres at such revered festivals such as Fantasia and Bucheon, SISSY is headed to Australian cinemas from November 3.

Smart, stylish, multi-layered and surprisingly gruesome, SISSY is one of the finest genre films to emerge from Australia in recent years and carries with it important messaging as to both anti-bullying and placing unwarranted faith in social media status.

Jarret caught up with SISSY’s filmmakers Hannah Barlow & Kane Senes to talk about the inception of the film through to the very messy (and imaginative) practical effects of the production.

Before we kick off with the questions, I just wanted to say congratulate you both on the film. It’s not only the best Aussie genre film I’ve seen in many years, quite possibly the best since Sean Byrnes’s THE LOVED ONES, but also the best anti-bullying film I’ve ever seen.

Kane: Thank you. It has to be CARRIE though. We were definitely were channeling some of that energy, but that’s very high praise, thank you.

Hannah: In fact THE LOVED ONE was a reference for us too.

As not only the directors behind SISSY but also the writers, where did the story first begin for you. What was the genesis of SISSY?

Hannah: Well there was the macro and a micro concept for the story. So why don’t you talk about the macro?

Kane: Well with the macro, we were kind of looking at the world at the time when we started writing. Trump had just been inaugurated and it just seemed like there was this wave online of people saying whatever they wanted, whether it was true or not and building followers and that concept was kind of happening at the highest level.

They say you should write about what scares you if you want to make horror film. And for us it was like, it’s just scary the fact that you can have this thing in your pocket and really change people’s lives, not necessarily for the better. I mean it’s a complex issue, but what we’re seeing in an era in the last five years is really frightening. So it kind of started with the idea of who are these influencers, these people that have influence over minds online, who’s putting them there, where we’re putting them there, We’re kind of voting with our wallets, so to speak. And what is that doing to our individual minds, You know, what is it doing to the youth? What is it doing to all us? So that was one of the jumping off points.

Hannah: Like our toxic relationship with social media, because we all love to hate social media influencers, don’t we? But we’re engaging in exactly the same behaviour as them. They’re just commodifying it. So that’s kind of what we were looking at that, the horror of our generation. But then from a micro point of view, we all go through a period where we are bullied significantly, to whatever level, as kids. Personally I got to a point with being bullied at 10 where I reacted in a way that ostracised me further from the group and from my friends.

I didn’t do what Cecilia did. Though I had a psychological reaction to the shame and the guilt I experienced as a 10 year old and it changed me, in my personality entirely. I became an overcorrecting perfectionist, a people-pleaser and made sure everybody around me liked me to my own detriment. And I had to undo a lot of that work as an adult. And as I was doing that work, I was seeing, like Instagram became a thing, along with YouTube and social media on the whole was on the rise. I was witnessing people presenting this filtered perfect version of themselves and noticing that our generation is doing that on mass and how toxic that is. And I think we explored a lot of that stuff and went into some dark core places in developing the script.

Definitely. Lifting the veil of perception to explore the reality underneath. In fact, there was a recent Finnish feature, HATCHING, that explored the projection of a perfect family via the lens of social media to the dark actuality behind-the-scenes.

In terms of the writing, having co-written the film together, how does that dynamic work?

Kane: I think it’s a bit of everything. It’s whatever we have to do to get the job done. Someone might be pacing up and down the room while the other types and throws ideas at them. Or someone might sit down and take a stab at a scene and then we kind of read each other’s scenes but we really don’t write anything until we verbally pitch the story to one another or to some close friends.

Then we break it down and start writing. It’s pretty structured. I mean it’s pretty classic in that sense. There’s such a long history of film that you can look at and I always think that’s really the secret weapon in any kind of screenwriting process. All of the references that you need are out there and they’re at your fingertips. You can read a million books about it, but until you actually know what makes a good movie, it’s kind of irrelevant.

Hannah: I feel like you have to drag it out of yourself.  It’s a torturous process.

Kane: It’s not easy. I would definitely say the writing is both fun but also torturous. I think Hannah enjoys the writing a little more. And maybe I enjoy the directing a little more.

Hannah: The vomit draft.

Kane: But we like balance. Balance in the middle somewhere.

Hannah: But that’s what is fun about it. We’re not facing the void alone. We’re best friends so we have to show up every day, we’re married as well. So it’s like we go into a little insane hole and everybody in our lives disappears and that’s a weird process. I couldn’t do it alone, at least I haven’t tried yet, but it’s scary.

Kane: Yeah, we definitely live with it, which which has its pros and its cons. But overall it’s very rewarding to wake up and suddenly have another idea for the thing and be able to talk to the person straight away.

That’s a unique partnership.

With SISSY’s central character Cecilia, how did you go about striking the balance of the heinous acts she commits and maintaining the endearing character she is?

Kane: Well we looked at the kind of lineage of great point-of-view anti-hero stories, whether it’s starting with TAXI DRIVER and something like AMERICAN PSYCHO.

Hannah: CARRIE.

Kane: I suppose so, but maybe somewhat less because she’s so innocent the whole time, which I guess Cecilia is until things start to turn. But it’s when you put someone like that in the protagonist role, you are kind of telling the audience this is you. Like this is the vehicle through which you are going to watch the story, through this person’s eyes. If you just put the right actor in that role, like with Aisha, the camera just loves her.

She’s so charming. She’s very empathetic by nature and she was able to play both sides of that character, the light and the dark. It’s one thing to be able to be charming and sweet but if you can’t convincingly pull off the turn, then it doesn’t work either. Likewise if you have someone that can play the crazy but can’t get you on board in the beginning, then it’s not going to work either. So it was a combination of both of those. I think it’s in the writing and then I think it’s in who you cast and also in the editing, trying to put the audience in her perspective as much as possible. I think Aisha played a huge role in that. Casting her was one of the kind of breakthrough moments of the movie. We are kind of seeing that now with all of the love that she’s getting for the performance.

How large a part did you have with casting the film? Aisha as Cecilia is pitch perfect, as is Emily De Margheriti as Alex.

Hannah: We actually attached Emily before we attached Aisha. And Emily was again perfect casting. Her performance in our movie is amazing and she gets the loudest screams every time. Aisha was a process. I brought Aisha’s name to the table for another role as I was obsessed with her in THE BOLD TYPE.

Of course, the television series.

Hannah: Yeah. While we were writing SISSY, her character Kat Edison in THE BOLD TYPE was my guilty pleasure. I just fell in love with her like the rest of the world did. So I brought her name to the table and the producers were like, “oh my god, yeah, we love her too. We love THE BOLD TYPE” And then her manager got back to us and they were like would you consider her for the role of Cecilia? And we were like, “oh yeah, let’s have that conversation”. So I had that conversation with her and she was like “guys, I am Cecilia” and I was like “yeah, I’m Cecilia too” and she was said “mo, no, I am Cecilia”.

So we bonded over our shared childhood trauma of being bullied and ostracised and like how I mentioned earlier, how that stuck and all the work that we had to undo as we were growing up. The bond was immediate and it was just very obvious that she was right for the role. And I knew she could do it because her performance in THE BOLD TYPE was amazing.

Kane: But a very different side of her that we hadn’t seen yet because sometimes you forget that that actors act and just because they’re showing you one side in one role doesn’t mean that they can’t play someone else. And we hadn’t necessarily seen the affirmation, but as soon as we were there on set from take one, she was it.

She was in quarantine for two weeks when she flew back to Australia to make the movie. And she would be sending us these videos on her iPhone just of her Instagram posts as Cecilia, like just playing around with that. Those were really great.

With regards to directing as your co-directors on SISSY, is there a specific area either you focus on? Is one more geared toward the technical aspects and the other toward working with the actors? How does your co-directing dynamic work?

Hannah: Kane is definitely our technical genius. I am a very big fan of Kane’s work. He knows how to translate what we read on the page to the screen and the crew absolutely loved and worshiped him.

I started every day with the cast, which was an enormous privilege because I was in the trenches with them. Our shoot was 21 days total and we had 11 days pre-production, so we were kind of still in pre-production while we were in production. So us having the advantage of splitting the roles as directors was really helpful.

Kane: Yeah, I look forward to the next one, just having a little more time in pre-production, because I think that’s where the movie is made. You prep everything and then when it comes to set, it’s just executing it. So hopefully we’ll be able to be kind of shoulder to shoulder on the next one. But with this one, it really was just like go do that, I trust your decision, I’ll go do this. You have to trust each other’s decision and we would operate like that.

Hannah And surrounding ourselves with heads of department who are well seasoned and have great attitudes. That’s the key to good directing is just everybody else being experts at their job.

Kane: It’s definitely who you cast and who you hire, that really is 80% of the job, honestly.

21 days is genuinely ambitious, given the volume of cast and locations within the film, that bundled with stunts and the practical effects too. On that note the practical effects are incredible. Had that been something you wanted to be a key component from the beginning?

Kane: Yeah, I think every time you make a movie you are like what’s something I’ve always wanted to do? And for us with this one it was like this is an opportunity to do some practical effects.

Hannah: Like in the vein of DEATH BECOMES HER.

Kane: Yeah DEATH BECOMES HER And the old Sam Raimi films and David Cronenberg too, like all of those. While in many ways there’s not a lot of it onscreen if you count up the screen time, I guess, because you don’t expect to see them in this kind of movie, especially in the first half, you’re watching it thinking it’s one thing and then suddenly there’s people’s heads getting crushed. I think that was the fun of it. Like we couldn’t wait to get to those days on set and just to try to do it all as practically as possible. And we got to work with the King, Larry.

Hannah: Larry Van Duynhoven from Scarecrew Studios. Having worked on RELIC to UPGRADE and everything. So he was the guy that we really wanted to work with and he was so lovely, such legend. We were very fortunate to have that experience and that was definitely one of the highlights of the shoot, just filming those moments. Everyone’s on set and you can hear a pin drop because they bring in this prosthetic that they’ve been making for weeks or months and you really only get the one take. So everyone is just hoping that it goes right, it’s just a lot it’s exciting as well.

SISSY in Australian Cinemas from November 3