“Are You My Mommy is essentially about women trying to fight against sexism and ageism in the entertainment industry. When I wrote it two years ago, I was 48 and growing more frustrated every day by how few roles (never mind interesting ones) were available to actresses my age, and how invisible we are both on screen and elsewhere. Needless to say, the news cycle was exacerbating all my negative feelings and I thought/screamed to myself, “What if we just…took over?” —Paula Jean Hixson
Are You My Mommy recently screened at Laemmle in Santa Monica for the Artemis Women In Action Film Festival 2019.
Interview by Kaylene Peoples
Responses: Paula Jean Hixson (Writer, Producer, Co-star), Gavin Michael Booth (Director, Editor), Neil Napier (Co-star, Producer), and Sarah Booth (Producer, Actor)
Kaylene Peoples: Tell me a little about your film and what inspired you to make Are You My Mommy?
Paula Jean Hixson: Are You My Mommy is essentially about women trying to fight against sexism and ageism in the entertainment industry. When I wrote it two years ago, I was 48 and growing more frustrated every day by how few roles (never mind interesting ones) were available to actresses my age, and how invisible we are both on screen and elsewhere. Needless to say, the news cycle was exacerbating all my negative feelings and I thought/screamed to myself, “What if we just…took over?” I wondered what that attempt might look like, and that’s basically how the script came to be. My sense of humor arcs toward satire; and I think laughter can be an ‘in’ for raising awareness of important issues, so an action-comedy seemed like the right genre for this project.
Gavin Michael Booth: When Paula Jean told me about the script, immediately I was interested – one, because the concept was funny, as I’m a fan of films within films and breaking the fourth wall, but also for the chance to work with a group of talented friends.
Kaylene Peoples: How long did it take to complete the film? What was it shot on? Tell me about the filmmaking process.
Gavin Michael Booth: We shot over two grueling hot days just outside of Los Angeles. We filmed using a Red Digital Cinema camera. The entire film was shot handheld. The process was a very small crew, one major location for the bulk of the film. It was really streamlined.
Paula Jean Hixson: All told, it took about a year. I wrote it around February 2017, we crowdfunded in March, shot it in July, and the post-production took us into February/March of 2018. It was an international effort, as our sound designer and composer are both in Ontario, Canada, and Gavin edited in LA, Canada, and on plane trips in between.
Kaylene Peoples: Let’s talk about the cast and crew. Tell me about who was involved and particularly your key players.
Paula Jean Hixson: We really were blessed with an incredibly generous and talented crew that came together through connections and previous collaborations. Gavin and his wife Sarah (who plays Clara and is a co-producer) are friends from Canada who moved to LA around the same time as Neil (co-star, co-producer, and husband) and I did. We were lucky that our friends and fellow actors Christopher Grove and Enuka Okuma (Mr. Sirz and Nadine) were available and excited to be a part of the film. Ava (Penner, who plays Reed) was a gem that we found through Neil’s previous manager. In addition to Adrian and George, Gavin had also collaborated with our cinematographer, Seth Wessel-Estes, before. Our good friend Jillian Ross came on board to do costumes, and Kelly Phelan, with whom both Neil and Sarah had worked previously, was fantastic as our stunt coordinator and all-around safety person. Neil had been in a short where he met our line producer and first AD, Jerry terHorst, who connected us with our makeup maven, Sierra Barton. Plus we had amazing friends who came to help on set. Basically, it was a bit of a family affair.
Gavin Michael Booth: Adrian Ellis, our composer, is a frequent collaborator and really brought out a fantastic action, almost superhero score fitting for Neil’s character’s ego. It was more than we could have ever hoped for. In that respect our sound designer and mixer, George Flores, worked wonders to great a sense of intense action and the threat of villains we only hear and never see on screen. His ability to immerse the audience can’t be stated strongly enough.
Kaylene Peoples: What was your experience on Are You My Mommy? What drew you to this film?
Neil Napier (co-star, producer): Well, Paula and Gavin have pretty well summed up the experience of making Are You My Mommy, but I would like to add a little about what drew me to the project. One evening, I was sitting at a restaurant bar with my wife, Paula Jean, reading a 4-page scene she had written. It was sharp, topical and so funny that I quite literally almost fell off my stool in laughter. I asked Paula if she could expand on the scene, because I really wanted to see where it went.
About a week or so later, she shared a 16-page script with me. After reading it, I basically said to her, “Oh, man – now we have to make this.” It was that good.Thus began the difficult and joyous process of making AYMM. With a little luck and a lot of faith, we managed to get all the pieces together, in no small part due to the talents and resourcefulness of the amazing team we assembled. And well, here we are.
Sarah Booth: What drew me to this film were my friends. I love to work with friends. And when they call on you, you better show up cause you will need them one day. The script was amazing. The message was perfect. Everyone was there because they loved the project and the people around them.
In my opinion when you have those components you have a really good chance of making something special. And we did.
Kaylene Peoples: What were some of the most memorable moments on set?
Gavin Michael Booth: Cracking up laughing while waiting on planes, trains, and ice cream trucks constantly so we could roll sound. It was so frustrating it broke us into laughter several times.
Paula Jean Hixson: And chickens! Don’t forget the chickens. I still don’t know how Gavin (Farnsworth, our on-set sound mixer) managed to get everything. Most memorable for me was the heat. We shot at the end of July, outdoors, during the day, in 97 degrees. Tied with the heat was the fact that, right up until the middle of the first day of a two-day shoot, we weren’t positive that Enuka was going to make it. She had been shooting a series in the Dominican Republic with very spotty connection, so communication was limited. We had arranged for all of her scenes to be done on day two, but she was only scheduled to arrive back in LA very late on day one. Had there been any delays or missed flights, we had no backup option for the character of Nadine. When our costume designer finally got a phone call saying she was stateside, I think that was my first exhale of the day.
Kaylene Peoples: As a filmmaker, tell me about your background.
Gavin Michael Booth: I began my career over 15 years ago in videography, sneaking into concerts in Detroit, MI with a fake Canadian television press pass. Since then, I’ve basically been eating, drinking, and breathing film. I’ve worked as a director, writer, producer, and cinematographer. I’ve created music videos for over 50 artists, and my first feature film, The Scarehouse, won Best Feature at the New York City Horror Film Festival in 2014 and is distributed by NBC/Universal. I really try to maximize every dollar and push the envelope with what can be done on a project, budget be damned. I created the first ever live film on Periscope – Fifteen – which I produced with Jason Blum, and I’ve just completed the first ever split-screen, single shot feature film, Last Call. In addition to having two simultaneous single shots, we also scored the finished film live, thanks once again to the incredible talents of Adrian Ellis. My career in film has basically been about seeking out new challenges, new ways to tell good stories, and figuring out how to make them happen.
Paula Jean Hixson: My background is as an actor. I studied theatre performance at Concordia University in Montreal, and have worked in theatre, film, television, commercials, voice, and video games for over 20 years. I started writing a few years ago. This is my first time producing, and the first writing of mine that has made it to the screen. This was essentially my and Neil’s ‘baptism-by-fire’ film school. We’ve both spent our careers in front of the camera, but are looking to create more of our own work. It’s a very steep learning curve, and this was one step on that climb. My next challenge will be directing. I am excitedly terrified and terrifyingly excited about it.
Kaylene Peoples: What would you say is unique about this film? Were there any challenging moments during production?
Gavin Michael Booth: A bunch of Canadians working together in Los Angeles all making this to move our dream along a little further. Also the idea of men and women working together to tell a female driven story targeting an important issue within the filmmaking industry. The biggest challenge was the heat. It was brutal. However, you hydrate and push through. The elements can’t stop the job at hand.
Paula Jean Hixson: It can be weird and risky to break the fourth wall in a film that is not a mockumentary or reality show. In our film, I think it highlights the absurdity of the expectations placed on women, in an unexpected way. As for challenges…well, the first, most obvious, most ubiquitous, is money. There’s just no getting around the difficulty of funding, especially for a first film, even if it’s a short. And did we mention the heat?
Kaylene Peoples: What were some of the highlights of filming Are You My Mommy?
Gavin Michael Booth: Working with friends and having a genuinely great time throughout the entire process. For me, I always enjoy the editing and post production process because that is where a movie is really shaped and you get to play around with the actors’ performances and bring the vision together.
Paula Jean Hixson: Definitely the highlight for me was how positive, encouraging, forgiving, and enthusiastic every single person was on set. Everyone just said ‘yes’. No project gets made without people believing in it, and I was completely humbled and blown away by how much everyone was willing to do to make Are You My Mommy happen.
Kaylene Peoples: What were some of the obstacles? On your next project what might you do differently and what might you do the same?
Paula Jean Hixson: Honestly, the biggest hurdle for me was getting over my fear of asking for other people’s support in trying something I’d never done before. It’s one thing to try something new in private, where you can make mistakes without showing anyone and if you decide to give up, no one will know. It must have taken me a solid fifteen minutes of deep breathing to calm my anxiety enough to press the ‘launch’ button for our crowdfunding campaign, because that was the point of no return. Either people would think my project was worth supporting or they wouldn’t, and because Are You My Mommy was so personal, ‘the project’ and ‘me’ felt like one and the same. That was a ton of misplaced, unnecessary pressure and meaning I was putting on this relatively small endeavor, but there it is. So what would I do differently? NOT put undue pressure on anything that is not life-threatening. What would I do the same? Press the ‘launch’ button.
Gavin Michael Booth: Differently – film somewhere less hot, like an air-conditioned studio with 30 million dollars worth of sets on sound stages! Other than that, not much – we had a scrappy budget and an aggressive schedule but when you bring the right team together you end up with a wonderful product you can be proud of. If you overthink things you sometimes never get off the couch and make them. That’s the most important lesson to carry over project to project – just get it made however you can and don’t wait for permission.
Kaylene Peoples: What advice could you give to a first-time director/producer/composer/etc.?
Gavin Michael Booth: Plan. Plan. Plan. The more you do in pre-production, the easier the shoot will be and the greater your footage and finished product will come out. In that sense too, find a mentor or producer that has done this before and learn from them.
Paula Jean Hixson: I agree with Gavin – learning from and working with people who really know their stuff is priceless. Also, when I told a colleague that I wanted to produce a short I had written, they asked me some questions that really helped me focus on the goal of this project: 1) Why am I making this? For fun? For some experience? To keep busy? To sell something? And 2) What is the most important thing about it? To just get it done? To get it done in a certain way? In a certain amount of time? With a certain amount of money? To work with certain people? To get it to certain people? Once I could answer for myself that I was producing this film: to learn how a film gets made, to get my words about an important issue on screen, to put a quality finished product with out into the world, and to work with people I trust, then I had a firm starting place. I knew this wasn’t the project for me to try directing, so I needed a good director who ‘got’ the script. I needed a team who already had a shorthand with each other. I needed people who would be patient with the mistakes I was going to make, which meant as many talented people already connected to my fairly limited network as possible. These were my goals and how I thought I could best achieve them. They will be different for everyone. Something is always going to go wrong, but knowing the goal will give you a touchstone to help decide what is truly necessary, and what you can let go of.
Kaylene Peoples: Final last words: Please elaborate if there is anything you didn’t mention.
Paula Jean Hixson: We are super excited to be screening at the 2019 Artemis Women in Action Film Festival and to see all the other films! What an empowering event, and we’re really proud to be a part of it.
