Filmmaker at Midlife: In conversation with Brooke Berman

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Filmmaker at Midlife: In conversation with Brooke Berman
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“I had the awareness a couple of times while on set that I had been training to do this job my whole life.”

Brooke Berman is a first-time film director. She’s also a middle-aged woman, a mom, and a wife with a full writing career under her belt. In this conversation, we explore how she got to the point of directing her film, Ramona at Midlife, and what she learned in the process.

Brooke’s film is not autobiographical, but it’s deeply personal. Her main character navigates reigniting her friendship with two other midlife women writers, repairing her marriage, and taking control again of her story and her writing. The film is not unique in how it puts a middle-aged woman’s struggle front and center, but it is unusual in its avoidance of so many Hollywood tropes: Ramona’s life is not glamorous, her face is not botoxed, and in the course of the film, no one gets their comeuppance. Ramona simply learns to move on and grow.

It’s a lovely, life-affirming film, and Brooke is a wonderful conversationalist! [Click for transcript]

“My [college] roommate and I were sharing a babysitting job and on my night, I would say to them, so, um, it’s like nine, do you guys want to go to bed? And they would say, no. And I wouldn’t know what to do. And my roommate said, ‘Well, honey, you’re supposed to just tell them they have to. You’re supposed to just say, now you go to bed.’  And that’s still hard for me as a director. I don’t want to tell people what to do. I want them to come in with their impulses and us to all find it together.”

About Brooke Berman:

Brooke Berman is a filmmaker and playwright whose debut feature film Ramona at Midlife is currently streaming on Amazon, Apple TV and Vimeo. Brooke’s plays have been produced across the US and abroad at theaters like Steppenwolf, Primary Stages, The Humana Festival and others. Brooke’s memoir No Place Like Home was published by Random House in 2010 and is available on Audible. Brooke has taught writing at NYU, Bard, School of the New York Times and privately; she attended The Juilliard School and Barnard College.

Mentioned in this episode:

Credits:

“Not Living at All” by Mr. Airplane Man courtesy of Freemusicarchive.org.

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Filmmaker at Midlife: In conversation with Brooke Berman

Brooke Berman PODCAST VERSION
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[00:00:00] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling. It’s pretty safe to say that American media has traditionally had very little interest in the experiences of middle-aged women. Sometimes we’re moms in the background of a kid’s story, or we’re a bitter ex. We’ve almost always had plastic surgery in an attempt to look young. But what we feel, our relationships, our changing attitude toward our bodies and our work and our place in this world, none of that is reflected in mainstream movies for sure.

[00:01:40] Brooke Berman: I’m Brooke Berman. I’m a playwright and a filmmaker and an author and a teacher and a mom.

[00:01:46] Voiceover: Today’s guest, writer and filmmaker Brooke Berman, wrote and directed a film called Ramona at Midlife, Which debuted on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. This film digs deep into that place that most of our media ignores.

[00:02:00] Film audio: If you break your teeth, you will not be coming home tonight.

[00:02:12] If I hear the word perimenopausal one more time, I’m gonna go ape shit. Perimenopausal is real, my hair is thinning, I don’t sleep, I’m anxious all the time. Well, there’s a lot to be anxious about. Take hormones? No, just CBD. CBD is not a hormone. I mean, I’m talking about like, progesterone. CBD is a hipster scam.

[00:02:31] No. No, no, no. Then you’re using the wrong brand. Do you chart. Chart what? Secretion, sex, sleep, estrogen levels, food, library book return dates. I don’t remember what sex is. It’s a good day for me if I get to work on time, remember to drink enough water and put on sunscreen. Brooke’s story is a meditation on the struggle of middle age. Her character, Ramona is a writer who is using the excuse of being a mother and provider for her family to retreat from herself. Brooke herself is a writer, wife, and mother, along with being an actress, playwright, teacher, script writer, and now director.

[00:03:18] Voiceover: That’s where will start in this wide ranging discussion. Brooke has directed her first film in midlife about midlife. I hope you enjoy getting to know her as much as I did.

Achievement in midlife
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[00:03:29] Suki Wessling:

[00:03:34] I was terrified to direct my film, terrified. And, um, one of my mentors was this, uh, theater director Anne Bogart and Anne used to say back when I was 20 and sitting in her class, she would say when I don’t know what to do as a director, they asked me questions I can’t answer, I stand up and I walk onto the set and somewhere between getting out of my chair and arriving on the set I’ve had an impulse and that’s the thing I do. So I often thought about that. I had the awareness, I mean, a couple of times while on set that I had been training to do this job my whole life.

[00:04:19] Brooke Berman: And that, um, there were a whole bunch of things I didn’t know about directing a film, but the things I do know are about the mechanics of story and working with actors and inhabiting a script and breaking down a script and leading a team, and, um, fleshing out a story so that it really becomes three dimensional.

[00:04:42] And I learned that, first I was an actor and I went through years and years and years of sitting in scene study class, being in rehearsal for plays, watching other people rehearse plays. I’ve always loved process, it’s my favorite part. I’m sitting in the audience during other people’s rehearsals. Then I became a writer.

[00:05:02] I was a writer performer for a couple of years and then I missed having other bodies on stage with me. I didn’t want it to be about me. So I wrote other people in the, in the world. And then I went to Juilliard and became a playwright. And, um, again, part of the training for playwrights is to work in production.

[00:05:23] So as writers in the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrights Program, we were invited to audit all of the other classes in the building and, and I would sit in on Michael Kahn’s third year acting class and watch the way he taught those actors. And a lot of it was about text. And then, um, I had my first play produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1989.

[00:05:46] And they have an open rehearsal policy. So I would just go watch other people. I’d go just sit in their rehearsals. And then I had an early full length of mine, Smashing, was developed at the Eugene O’Neill Center, and again, open rehearsal policy. You can go to anyone’s rehearsal, any time you want. And so, um, I learned a lot, and I was really interested in how playwrights and directors collaborate, and, um, my best collaborations were with directors who were inclusive, you know, you hear all these horror stories about directors banishing the writer and in my experience that only happened once and the one time it happened there was a director who was really threatened both by me and by the previous director I’d worked with and she was, you know, really quite aggressive about taking me out of the process.

[00:06:37] Every other director I worked with wanted me in the room and wanted to collaborate. And there were all these things they knew about my script because they were visual thinkers and I, at that time, wasn’t. And then there were all these things I knew because I had written the story and I’d felt it. And even as a playwright, I was never interested in the actors filling out the way I’d seen it or the way I’d heard it. I’m not interested in a world in which the creator says this was the abstract idea I had in my mind. No, you do that What was interesting to me and what’s still interesting to me is giving you a story and saying well, here’s a story I felt but when you act it out, what do you feel?

[00:07:22] You know, I want it to feel honest the writers and my other really important mentor was the playwright, Maria Irene Fornes, and Fornes always rewrote in the room with the actors. So I assisted her on a production and we’d go into rehearsal and we’d sit in the room together and the actors would start to act out her play and she would say, no, no, no, stop.

[00:07:44] Okay, let’s do it again, and this time you say a different line, I’ll tell you what to say, and then you say this other line. And it was like they were dolls, you know, and she was kind of improvising with them, and that really excited me. And then I got interested in, um, Uh, devised theater. I did a process with a director in London where we would invite actors in and kind of ask them questions like tell us about your sleep. We did something called the sleep project and we interviewed everybody about their sleep and then based on those interviews, I went away and wrote a play. So coming into directing, I came at it with that experiential sort of embodiment piece in mind. And the things I had to learn ultimately were about visual logic and how to direct the camera.

[00:08:30] Because the camera isn’t going to say, well, Hey, Brooke, I have a question, here’s my impulse. And most film crews, at least the ones I have worked with, um, want to be told what to do. They just want to know where to stand. It’s not my film. I don’t care. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Um, and what I’m interested in is a much more raw form of collaboration.

[00:08:50] I really want everyone in the room to speak up if they’re having a strong impulse about the work so that we can find the truth of the story together. It is not the most financially expedient way to work, but we made this movie on $300,000 in 15 days.

[00:09:07] So, You know, we did it.

[00:09:10] Suki Wessling:

Gender in midlife
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[00:09:13] Voiceover:

[00:09:15] Suki Wessling: it’s interesting, you know, I noticed that you mentioned your mentors and you mentioned only one director that you work with, um, directly as a a woman. And so many people fall for this idea that if the world were run by women, everything would be all peachy keen and wonderfully, um, collaborative and everything. But the one person that you mentioned having a conflict with, with, I noticed

[00:09:44] Brooke Berman: was a woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it’s true. I mean, look, a gender hasn’t been a big, um, I worked with women and men as directors when I was a playwright. My two favorite directors, um, were both queer, one male, one female. And with both of them, I had gorgeous collaborations. I don’t know what happened with this other director, except maybe she just didn’t like me. Um, But that was a bummer. Yeah, it was really awful, actually.

[00:10:15] Suki Wessling: huh.

[00:10:16] Brooke Berman: But I don’t think that was about gender. I think that was about personality. And I also think it was about, um, I don’t know. I think it was about personality and etiquette, maybe.

[00:10:28] Suki Wessling: Yeah.

[00:10:30] Brooke Berman: But that, that said, I’ve had great collaborations with men. Uh, I did hire a mostly female team for my film. We were, uh, uh, I’m a woman director and writer. My producer’s female. The DP was female. Um, all of the department heads except one were female or non binary. Um, and it was nice. It was nice to have a chick set.

[00:10:55] Suki Wessling: Chick set, I love it. Yeah. And you know, you mentioned the idea that, that, you know, it was personality. And I think that one of the things that, that in parenting, I, one of the psychologists we talked to when we had issues with our family, he, he had this, um, phrase that he used goodness of fit. And it seems to me that

[00:11:18] Brooke Berman: Oh,

A collaborative art
—

[00:11:18] Suki Wessling: you know, there’s a lot of that in a collaborative art, like filmmaking.

[00:11:23] Brooke Berman: I think it’s absolutely goodness of fit. I think, and there’s certain questions and it’s not unlike, you know, a dating relationship. There are certain questions you don’t know to ask at the outset. So, you know, the person I had conflict with is an incredibly talented artist. I mean, I, wanted to work with her because I’d seen her work and I still think she’s really talented and really really smart But for whatever reason we weren’t the right fit

[00:11:49] Suki Wessling: Mm

[00:11:49] Brooke Berman: and I’m willing to claim that as me maybe I just wasn’t you know, right for her. I don’t know. Um, but that happened. That’s okay

[00:11:59] Suki Wessling: It is. And, and especially in, I, I think that, that it’s interesting to look at different arts and most writers, a writer who’s writing a novel, for example, it’s generally not collaborative until they find a publisher and their editor starts working with them.

[00:12:17] So writing for readers is a very solitary thing, but in your case, except when you were writing for solo stage productions,

[00:12:27] Brooke Berman: yeah, but even then, I mean, theater artists, yeah, theater artists are inherently collaborative. We need other people to make the thing. And even as a solo artist, I would go find a director or, you know, we, I would perform because my pieces were 10 to 15 minutes long. I would find other solo artists to perform with.

[00:12:46] So then there’s a collaborative conversation happening. My husband is a fiction writer and he is solitary, he wants to be left alone, and for him, the whole, like, the exciting and juicy part of writing is that he gets to go away and be by himself for a long time instead of summon the story. For me, it’s exactly the opposite. My favorite part Is the collaboration and working with other people to bring a story to life and changing the story depending on who the collaborators are. So, I haven’t had the luxury of doing this since becoming a mom. But back in the day, I would just write, like, I’d write whatever. I’d write a bunch of messy pages and then call up my actor friends to have them read the things out loud to me so I could hear what was exciting and juicy and what was garbage.

Collaboration with actors
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[00:13:39] Suki Wessling: That’s interesting because I was just about to ask you when you write, do you imagine, actors saying your lines? Because I know that when I write fiction, I definitely hear the voice of the characters, but I don’t I don’t expect that anyone else will quite hear it. I mean, I hope that they hear it. And when, when you have someone else read your work out loud, that’s when you can find out whether you have written the words such that you’re getting the delivery across.

[00:14:08] Do you

[00:14:08] Brooke Berman: Oh, I love that so much all the time. I love it so much first because, um, again, my training as a playwright, Irene Fornez was all about channeling the voice of the character and I teach her exercises and I was teaching once and a girl in the workshop said, um, excuse me, what do you mean here, the voice of the character, like, am I literally hearing a voice? And I I think I do I mean I don’t you know, it’s not psychosis it’s not a literal voice in my head, but it’s a felt sense that that is the character and not me and I, I know their voice. Um, the most exciting thing ever is when an actor changes what I hear in a way that I like more than what I’ve written.

[00:14:57] And not because they change any of the words, but because they make the syntax their own. And that happened the first time I heard Yvonne Woods, who’s the actor who plays Ramona, read any of my work back in graduate school in the, in the nineties, and it happened also the first time I heard April Mathis perform, the actress who plays Imani.

[00:15:18] Um, I met her when she was reading my, I was teaching at a high school program in the early aughts and April came in to read the scenes of my characters and she has this really particular delivery and this really clear sensibility and with both April and Yvonne this little light bulb went off like I went, oh, I love them.

The inner voice
—

[00:15:42] Suki Wessling: I, I actually read. I had to reach out to a friend of mine when I read this, that there are people who have no inner voice.

[00:15:52] Brooke Berman: I know

[00:15:54] Suki Wessling: Doesn’t that shock you? I mean, I can’t imagine.

[00:15:57] Brooke Berman: friends One of my best friends called me up and confessed that she has no inner voice and that, yeah, I never knew that until about a year ago.

[00:16:08] Suki Wessling: I would love to know if there are any writers who don’t have inner voices because I couldn’t imagine, because when I write, I hear and when I think I hear, I mean, I, I think in a voice, it’s not me, but it’s my inner voice, and I, I don’t hear it. Like you said, it’s not like psychosis, like you hear something outside of you,The inner voice is just sort of this, it’s like the, the inner sea that is inside of you. It’s, you know, it’s just part of your existence. And to imagine that your existence would be without that whoosh of the inner voice, it’s unimaginable for me.

[00:16:45] Brooke Berman: It’s pretty crazy, right?

[00:16:47] Suki Wessling: Yeah, yeah,

[00:16:48] Brooke Berman: It reminds me a little of, um, His Dark Materials, the trilogy, and when they talk about what it would be like to be a child without your demon. Like, what is that? You mean there are children without demons?

[00:17:01] Suki Wessling: Yeah, and for anyone listening who hasn’t read that book, you have to read it because if you are interested in in fantasy worlds It is a tour de force

Motherhood
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[00:17:13] Suki Wessling: You talked about your training in theater and as an actor and as a writer and as a performer, but what about life? And specifically, what about motherhood has has taught you the skills that you might be drawing on for being a director?

[00:17:32] Brooke Berman: Oof. Well, motherhood taught me everything. I mean, I was, um, 41 when I had my son. I didn’t know that I was going to be a mother. I had thought about it. Maybe a little bit in my twenties, but I never felt ready and in my 30s, I was mostly single and you know every now and then I would have like a maybe I’ll have a baby with that person moment, but it was never genuine.

[00:18:04] It was never foundational. I wasn’t somebody who always knew I would be a mom and in fact, I’d had a very complicated relationship with my own mom. I’m the only child of a single mother and had spent a great portion of my 20s separating from her right becoming an individual. So I met my husband when I was 39.

[00:18:25] We fell in love hard and fast and beautifully. And we moved into it with each other. I’m not saying we moved into each other. We moved in with each other and to each other very quickly. And it was really delicious. And right away at the very beginning, he said, I want to have a baby. And I went, yeah, I do too.

[00:18:46] So we knew we were going to do that together, but I didn’t have any models, really. My own mom had died. My grandma was older. She was, you know, well into her nineties and couldn’t really remember anything about, I would ask her questions about child rearing and she didn’t know. Um, so I didn’t feel I had a lot of models. I had two or three girlfriends who’d had babies two or three years before me, and they were working really successfully in television. So I assumed that my career would just blossom and go on as it always had. Um, Except that I didn’t want a full time nanny.

Segment 2: Life intersects with film
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[00:19:25] Voiceover:

[00:19:36] This is your host, Suki Wessling. When we left off screenwriter, Brooke Berman was a newly married, new mom in middle age.

[00:19:44] She’d seen her other friend’s careers thrive when they had children, but she realized that she needed to pursue a different type of motherhood.

[00:19:52] Like her character Ramona Brooke felt that she lost something of herself as a full-time mom. But unlike Ramona, She found her way back to her writing career well before she found herself in crisis.

Parenting and the Nanny
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[00:20:03] Film audio: Do you have a good lawyer? Oh my god, are you suing me? Should I? No! I just told him you were a mom at school and Francis is friends with your daughter. Okay, and maybe I told him I think of you as a cautionary tale for women artists, but that’s it. What? Just like how you were a really big deal and then disappeared.

[00:20:22] I didn’t disappear! I’m raising my daughter, supporting my family, I married an actor! But women have to learn to hold power. You could support your family writing!

[00:20:33]

[00:20:33] Brooke Berman: The only way your career is going to go on as it has been, and blossom is with full time childcare. And because I was 41 with one child and a dead mom, I didn’t want full time childcare. I just wanted to have the experience. So, um, So I did and I, I found myself, you know, I would tell people it was like outward bound when they drop you off in the wilderness and there’s no map and I had no idea where I was half the time. I had no idea who I was half the time because I knew myself in these very particular ways.

[00:21:07] I would, you know, prior to motherhood, I would wake up first thing in the morning, have my coffee, go do my Ashtanga yoga, go find someplace to write for an hour or two. And then I would sort of join the world and show up for whatever job endeavor I had, and that was all gone. Um, with a baby, you’re on baby time. Your kid sleeps. They don’t sleep. Who knows? I was nursing for a year and a half, so that was every three hours. My son and I were hanging out together doing that, um, I joined a local mom’s club and I would go to these meetings like, it felt a lot like the early days of high school when you walk into the building and try to figure out why everyone’s wearing the same shoes. Like I, like how did they all know to buy the same shoes? How did every mom in Silver Lake know to have the same stroller? Was I supposed to get a memo? Cause I didn’t get that memo. And then I would write, like I had, I got a babysitter 18 hours a week. So I would write four days a week for four and a half hours a day.

[00:22:13] And then that changed to four days a week for five hours a day. I went up to 20. Um, and it was really humbling, humbling in every way. I was lonely. I was tired. I was, um, irritable. I wanted to be a good mom to my son. My son bless his heart is incredibly verbal. So by like a year he could tell me what he needed but that first year I would just look at him and think oh my god, what do you need?

[00:22:44] Like what do you need and how do I give that to you and I just felt like I was being challenged to my core to try to be okay for him and also be okay for myself and then also maybe kind of be okay for my marriage. You know, and then we all evolved, but, um, being a mom definitely taught me how to set limits in a way I didn’t know in my life.

[00:23:15] You know, I, I had been pretty laissez faire with most relationships and suddenly I needed to cultivate a really firm no. That’s still very hard for me. You know, I remember the first time my baby sat, I was in college, my roommate and I were sharing a babysitting job and on my night, I would say to them, so, um, it’s like nine, do you guys want to go to bed?

[00:23:38] And they would say, no. And I wouldn’t know what to do and my roommate said, well, honey, you’re supposed to just tell them they have to, you’re supposed to just say, now you go to bed. And that’s still hard for me as a director. You know, I don’t want to tell people what to do. I want them to come in with their impulses and us to all find it together.

[00:23:58] And so I still work on being able to say to people, now it’s time to go to bed, put the camera over there and come at it from this angle because I told you to. Right, I mean, I never thought I’d be a because I told you to mom, but sometimes it’s just because I told you to.

[00:24:17] Suki Wessling: Yeah, yeah, that’s something it’s really interesting to me how when we come into parenting we bring everything from our lives obviously and we start to see things that things that we never learned, things that we didn’t notice we ever learned, never learned, you know, um, just sort of, it’s, it’s really, it’s really, you say, I think you used the word humbling and, and it really is, it exposes you to yourself in a way that nothing else can.

[00:24:49] Brooke Berman: Yeah, yeah, and you know, they’re their own people and they’re their own people pretty early. So I think that’s a really interesting negotiation I’m so grateful. I have a son and not a daughter because while I’m definitely revisiting a bunch of childhood wounds, um, it’s, it’s, it’s not the ones about my mom.

[00:25:12] Suki Wessling: Yeah. I was thinking that when you were saying about the difficult, I was wondering if, if that was the case that you feel that it’s easier because it’s not a girl.

[00:25:21] Brooke Berman: I don’t know. I mean, I don’t have a girl, but you know, one thing that was really sweet is, um, my son had a very, very nice relationship with my grandmother. So it was incredibly healing to be able to go back to my grandmother who had lost her daughter. You know, give her this child.

[00:25:40] Suki Wessling: Mm hmm. That’s lovely.

[00:25:42] Brooke Berman: Yeah. They were nice together.

[00:25:44] Suki Wessling: Yeah.

Truth in fiction, fiction in truth
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[00:25:45] Suki Wessling: So obviously, I mean, when you’re writing, you draw on your own life. And your character in Ramona at Midlife is a woman in the same age range as you with a child that she had later, and she wasn’t a young mom, and she’s also a writer. And so, you

[00:26:10] Brooke Berman: All those things.

[00:26:11] Suki Wessling: as, as a writer myself, as a fiction writer, and someone who writes nonfiction, I know that, that there’s always truth in fiction, and there’s always fiction in nonfiction. But how did the experiences that you had as the person you are lead you, how did you get to this story?

[00:26:36] Brooke Berman: The best of my plays and movies come out of this funky psychic soup where a whole bunch of things that happen to me and then a whole bunch of things that didn’t happen to me and questions that I have, like, go into a pot together and ruminate with each other and sort of gestate for a while and then something else comes out.

[00:26:59] So, back in 2012 or 2013, when I was living in LA, one of my friends got divorced and I learned a little bit about divorce law and I was intrigued by this notion that for writers in Los Angeles, if you’re a writer who gets divorced and you earn any money as a writer, your ex spouse is entitled to half of that, or a percentage of that, or for, they, they have, um, intellectual property rights for half the amount of time that you were married.

[00:27:33] And I imagined this character who lived in Topanga Canyon. I wanted to write a play called the Good Person of Topanga, like the Brecht play, the Good Woman of Szechwan, and she had gotten divorced 10 years ago, and now it was five, it was five years later, and she was about to get her copyright back and she had been pretending to not write and then, but secretly she’d been writing and she went down the canyon, uh, in Topanga to this Mexican bar that used to be there and picked up a guy and brought him home.

[00:28:01] And he was a literary agent. And, and then we learned that she kind of knew that. And I never did anything with it.

[00:28:06] I always had this character Ramona in the back of my mind and I sort of always knew that she was my friend Yvonne Woods would play her but I didn’t know who she was or what she was. And I also knew very early that she had these two best friends who were much more conventionally successful than her and that she was the only one with a child.

[00:28:27] And then during the pandemic, I took a writing workshop, uh, as a student and I sat down to start writing and the character of Ramona showed up and she was putting on lipstick to go see her ex husband and I knew she was still in love with him, but she was like, she was like crossing her arms and she was very guarded and I wanted to know what would happen.

[00:28:51] And I was in this workshop every day for three hours a day for a month. And by the end of the month, I knew her story. And so it was really like that. And everything in the movie is something that I’ve experienced or felt, but it’s not biographical, if that makes sense. They are not all things that happened to me, but they are all things that I’ve had very close proximity to.

[00:29:14] Voiceover: One thing I noticed from that story is the vulnerability you put yourself into by becoming a student again when you had been working professionally as a writer. Do you think that was instrumental in finding this story and in placing yourself back into a position that wasn’t necessarily the place you would have been going before the pandemic?

Becoming a student again
—

[00:29:37]

[00:29:37] Brooke Berman: Absolutely. I moved back to New York in 2013. And right before I left LA, someone introduced me to this teacher, Joan Scheckel. And I knew I wanted to work with her, but at the time I just like my baby was all encompassing and I just didn’t see how I was going to, and he was a toddler then, but I just didn’t have the mental space to kind of separate from him and go like be at this, theater, film, laboratory space for hours on end.

[00:30:10] Like it didn’t. My brain wasn’t there yet. Um, but in 2018, I found out she was coming to New York to teach a workshop and I don’t remember if she contacted me or if I contacted her, but the time was right. And I went and took this three day workshop with her in person and it really blew my mind.

[00:30:32] And then I was in LA a couple months later for a play reading, and I took another workshop with her also in person, and it really blew my mind. And then, um, in 2020, when the pandemic started, she called and said she was doing a workshop on zoom. I was so excited to put myself in the passenger seat and let someone else drive, I mean, you teach so you understand there’s a whole level of, um, there’s a level of self that has to be constructed to lead a workshop and teach craft. And there’s a level of ignorance and naivete and like beginner mind that has to be reentered in order to receive a story. Like you can’t receive a story knowing too much in advance and as a teacher you kind of have to know in advance because someone’s paying you to teach them. So it was, it was just the best thing. I mean, I, I think that workshop really, um, healed me in every way.

[00:31:36] Suki Wessling: That’s wonderful. And so you had the actresses in mind, which was really a cool idea. I mean, most of us don’t get that luxury of being able to see the actress and your actresses are wonderful.

Writing about friendship
—

[00:31:51] Suki Wessling: So speak a little bit about what the film is about and, You have this friendship that at the beginning of the film, the friendship has been completely, not just fractured, but it’s just gone and it gets rebuilt. So talk a little bit about those characters.

[00:32:11] Brooke Berman: Yeah, so Ramona at Midlife is the story of a woman making room for herself. And in the beginning, Ramona is a writer in her forties who’s put her creative life on hold in order to raise her daughter. She’s separated from her husband. She’s working in a veterinary clinic. She has told herself that her old life as a writer is over and that she doesn’t have time for it anymore.

[00:32:36] And she has told herself to be a good soldier. She calls it being a good soldier. So every day she wakes up early. She makes her daughter waffles. She drives her daughter to school. She goes and shows up at this job. She picks her daughter up and sits on the playground for, I don’t know if you did that, but my God, we would just sit on the playground for hours every day.

[00:32:58] And I actually loved it. I mean, the playground was one of my favorite parts, but that’s a day and then you know, you get home and you make dinner and who wants to write and you know for me my writing hours were always in the morning. I’m exhausted at night. So I gave that to Ramona too so Ramona’s not writing. And she’s resentful and she’s angry and she shut down and she’s exhausted But she doesn’t know any of those things about herself.

[00:33:28] She thinks she’s doing a great fucking job and um when I, when I wrote the story, when I was in the workshop, I had this image that she, at the very beginning of the movie, like, had blinders on. She can only see what’s directly in front of her. And at the end of the movie, her, her palm is open. She’s kind of removed the blinders and she’s able to open something that had been clenched before.

[00:33:53] What I discovered through writing this story is that in order to be in, um, Communion with her creative life, she has to be able to be around other artists and she doesn’t do that anymore. She’s mostly around other moms and other moms are great, but the part of her that’s the writer isn’t present in those conversations when, you know, when it, when the news comes out that she, you know, this one mom says, Oh, I know who you are. You wrote a book and, and her mom friend says, how come I didn’t know about this book? Because being an author is just not part of her mom identity. But she discovers that this hot filmmaker is making a project that is blatantly ripped from her work.

[00:34:38] The character shares her name. There are similarities to not only her real life, but also her previously published written work. And it’s so extreme that when she goes to talk to her former agent, who was also her ex best friend, this other girl knows about it. They all know about it. You know, people are talking about it.

[00:35:00] It’s clearly based on her. And she goes and hires a lawyer, she figures out what it would take to sort of pursue this legally, but she realizes that the most important thing to her is getting herself back, In the hands of Hollywood, it would turn into a revenge comedy and she would show up on set and she would, you know, um, sabotage his movie and get him back and there’d be all sorts of hijinks and that just wasn’t the movie that felt honest or relatable to me.

[00:35:29] I think for me, what was the most important thing is that Ramona healed her soul. Ramona needed to face herself in the mirror. Ramona didn’t need to go get a piece of that guy’s action.

[00:35:39] Suki Wessling: Uh huh.

[00:35:40] Brooke Berman: So that is essentially what happens in the movie. She does indeed have a confrontation with the filmmaker, but along the way she stands up for herself, she goes on a date for the first time in years, she reconciles with her old friends, she has some really hard conversations, she reconciles with her ex husband, she faces that writer, and then she basically accepts herself.

[00:36:05] Suki Wessling: huh.

[00:36:06] Brooke Berman: We’re left to believe that now she is firmly on a new path.

[00:36:10] Suki Wessling:

[00:36:11] I love the, the way that this relationship between the three friends heals. The other two friends meet with her, and at one point she, is this an intervention? I don’t want an intervention.

[00:36:24] Suki Wessling: And it, and it sort of is, but, but one of my favorite bits was where she’s explaining to them that her job is important because she was an essential worker during the pandemic, and they just start laughing at her the way that a good friend can laugh at you in a healing way.

Actors as characters
—

[00:36:44] Brooke Berman: When we were in production, I said to Yvonne, the actress who plays Ramona, um, do you think she’s good at her job? And Yvonne said, absolutely. And then I asked David Bosch, who plays the vet, do you think Ramona is good at her job? And he said, Oh God, no. And so we actually see her in these scenes where she’s not that good at her job and then she gets fired.

[00:37:07] And I, but I loved that that Ramona herself believes she’s really good at this. And we should know that she’s hiding out in this job, not because there’s anything wrong with the job, not because there’s anything wrong with veterinary care. I need a vet for my cat right now. It’s important, but she is not being true to herself and that’s all it is. Right? Like there’s absolute beauty in, in the job that Ramona is bad at. The issue here is that she’s not being who she is.

Segment 3: Representation matters
—

[00:37:38] Voiceover:

[00:37:48] This is your host, Suki Wessling.

[00:37:50] Brooke Berman is a first time director, but her understanding of film was built over a long career as an actress, playwright, and screenwriter. When she finally came to directing, she was ready to stand up for the integrity of her story.

[00:38:03] Film audio: You can’t stand when anyone else is in the spotlight. That’s not even a little bit true.

[00:38:11] It is. You’d rather sit on the sidelines than be in the game. Truth, why did you stop writing? I write. I just have a kid and a job. That’s an excuse. That’s her narrative. Wait, is this an intervention? Do you want it to be? No!

[00:38:31] Voiceover: In this last segment, we talk about the story and the characters in it. We talk about why the male characters are good guys, and and the traps that screenwriters can fall into as they write female characters.

[00:38:42] Finally, we talk about Brooke’s inspiration and the glue that holds the story together, poet and musician, Patti Smith and what Smith taught her about art mothering and embracing old age.

[00:38:55] Suki Wessling: You said that in Hollywood, it would have ended differently, and I love that about this film, I love that in general about indie films, that there is this sameness, especially now, more now than ever before, in Hollywood films, this sameness to you, you can’t always even express it as a viewer, just that it felt very familiar and you know, as fiction writers, we always do that thing where we have the little, the little action peaking at the climax and then the denouement.

[00:39:27] Brooke Berman: Comes from Aristotle. That’s exactly right.

[00:39:30] So the first thing that happens when somebody wants to write a movie is they look on Google, how do I write a movie, and they’re given a series of um, structural, they’re given a formula. At any given moment, whatever formula the people in Hollywood are in love with is the one that everyone goes and reads.

[00:39:48] So, for instance, when I was coming up as a screenwriter, it was Bob McKee’s Story and, um, Charlie Kaufman’s movie Adaptation is all about a writer who tries to, um, refute Story and then ultimately embraces Story and it’s an amazing movie, but it’s essentially about structure. And then they all moved on from Story, and they fell in love with this guy who wrote Save the Cat, and so, Blake Snyder, and there’s a beat sheet from Save the Cat, so, so, you know, the screenwriting students, and I teach screenwriting, they want to fill out this format called Save the Cat, and that tells them exactly what scenes need to happen in exactly what order.

[00:40:29] I’m in a writer’s group with someone who took a class in romantic comedy and came back and said, well, here’s the formula, like this scene states this, and then that scene revealed that. And it’s like a math problem, but I don’t think that’s interesting. And that is why all of our movies feel the same because they’re all being made according to a certain structural formula that that isn’t always in conversation with the inner logic of the movie.

[00:40:56] And the thing that I love so much about this teacher, Joan Scheckel, is she basically teaches that your content is your structure. So if you can really, um, pierce the innermost heart of your story and really articulate what the story at its essence wants to be, then you know how to structure it. And that’s the thing that no one teaches because that’s hard.

[00:41:21] That takes a really long time. It is much faster if you can get a Save the Cat story beat sheet and just fill it out.

[00:41:29] Suki Wessling:

[00:41:29] Brooke Berman: Those big, plotty movies, the really good ones are amazing. And the really good ones, to me, transcend something like Save the Cat. You know, I, I, again, I teach and I teach some of these movies and the structure, I mean, I the structure of Into the Spider Verse is brilliant, and it is not Save the Cat, it’s something else, and it is true to itself 100%.

[00:41:55] Do the Right Thing is structurally flawless. It’s amazing. And it has a great big climax, but it never feels formulaic to me. And there’s something Spike Lee understands about the integrity of the block and that it’s not a lone hero’s journey, it’s the block. It’s the neighborhood. And the inciting incident is that it’s the hottest day of the year. I mean, yes, there are things that happen, and yes, there are actions taken, but, and it all stands up to Aristotelian logic, but in its own way. And it’s that in its own way piece that people are so afraid of.

A labor of love
—

[00:42:32] Suki Wessling: Yeah, and that, that as a writer, that takes you plumbing depths that some writers might be scared of. They are more comfortable writing a formulaic sitcom than writing something that might make them think more deeply about.

[00:42:52] Brooke Berman: Well, all I know is, for me, because I put this movie together on my own, and I raised the money myself, and I assembled the team myself and I went out and found the locations myself and I contracted the caterer. The caterer lives in my building. Like everyone who participated in this movie was someone that I forged a relationship with, I wasn’t going to do it according to someone else’s logic, the story was going to have to make sense to me. And next time, if I have a producer who, you know, if we’re making a $5 million movie. which I’d like to make, and I have producers who want to put that money in, yeah, we can talk about Save the Cat.

[00:43:37] Sure, I’ll have those conversations. But that’s not what this movie was. And I wanted to, especially for my first feature as a director, I wanted to feel the integrity of every single story beat so that I knew how to direct it.

Male characters
—

[00:43:51] Suki Wessling: I noticed something I thought really special about your film that your male characters, even the one set up to be the villain are just, they’re lovely, they’re imperfect, they don’t necessarily always do the right thing, they aren’t necessarily what the women in their lives need them to be, but they’re guys that I, I like. And at one point your main character says about the, you know, supposed villain, I didn’t expect to like you. So can you talk a little bit about the men in the story and well, how you, characterized first the ex that it wasn’t your classic battling, that the exes that they really wanted to, get along, they really wanted to work things out. Then there’s the, potential boyfriend and the awkward date, but it was so sweet and he’s so sweet.

[00:44:48] And then

[00:44:49] Brooke Berman: Hmm. Isn’t he lovely. They’re married in real life, those two

[00:44:52] Suki Wessling: actors.

[00:44:53] Oh, they are. Oh my

[00:44:54] Brooke Berman: Yeah, that’s why they have such incredible chemistry.

[00:44:57] Suki Wessling: That was really sweet. And finally, your bad guy is not a bad guy.

[00:45:03] Brooke Berman: I love that bad guy. I mean, I love all three of those men, and I guess I don’t have a particularly, um, damning experience of men in general. I think you can tell women’s stories without demonizing men. The men are not the problem. The marriage is not the problem. The filmmaker is not the problem. The problem is inside of her and she, to her credit, figures that out.

[00:45:31] You know, whatever it is, she’s blaming her husband for at some point. I think she realizes it has nothing to do with him. Nor are the men perfect. The men get to be selfish sometimes. The men are, you know, taking care of themselves.

[00:45:46] The problem in the marriage was that they were blaming each other. She was blaming him for the things that she was struggling with and he was drinking and she kicked him out and he stopped drinking. And then she had no one to blame and she had to grow up a little bit.

[00:46:01] Suki Wessling: Yeah,

[00:46:03] Brooke Berman: but she does.

Representation matters
—

[00:46:04] Suki Wessling: And that that leads me into my next, um, gender and film question, which is about the portrayal of women in film. And obviously, just well, I think everybody, everybody who cares to notice it knows that representation matters, that having female directors is changing film, having women in positions of decision making is bringing perspectives that are different I was reading a piece and the one that I was familiar with is the Bechdel test.

[00:46:40] So the Bechdel test is the women have, does the film have two named women in it who talked to each other about something besides a man? And that one is an older one and pretty well understood that most Hollywood films fail that still.

[00:46:55] Brooke Berman: That’s right.

[00:46:56] Suki Wessling: and,

[00:46:56] Brooke Berman: Yeah, and.

[00:46:57] my women are more interested in writing than they are, they all have men in their lives. But when those three friends are together, they talk about writing. But I would say that most of my work hinges on female friendship.

[00:47:10] Suki Wessling: Mm hmm. And the, the other one that I read about that I didn’t know about, but it’s a really wonderful one, um, is called the Sexy Lamp Test.

[00:47:19] Brooke Berman: I don’t know that.

[00:47:20] Suki Wessling: If you can take a female character and replace her with a sexy lamp, but not actually affect the plot in any particular way, um, if she’s really there just to be cute and supportive of the male character and I thought, I thought that was wonderful too, because I, again, it would be hard for a woman, woman writer to do that. I mean, maybe?

[00:47:48] Brooke Berman: Oh, are there, well we should think about it, are there female driven movies where the men just show up to support the girl?

[00:47:56] Suki Wessling: Yeah. Are there?

[00:47:58] Brooke Berman: I don’t know, I was, in my writing class, uh, a few weeks ago, one of my undergrad students brought in a scene. In which the male character says to the female character something like, um, Hey, how are you feeling right now? Like, what’s going on with your feelings? And I said to her, In all of my years, I’ve never had a straight man ask me how I’m feeling in a way that wasn’t pertaining directly to him.

[00:48:25] Suki Wessling: That’s funny.

[00:48:26] After all of these waves of feminism that did different things, I think the point that we’re at now is really breaking into the question of do men see women as people.

[00:48:39] Brooke Berman: Yeah, I, I, I am surrounded by men who see women as people. Um, I’m married to a really good one and I’m hopefully raising a good one. The jury is still out, but they both see women as people for sure. So I had a friend whose mom was a child psychologist who said to me that the difference in, in the gendered psychologies, and that’s again, if we even believe in like gendered psychology, but if you want to go there, the, the question is whether or not they perceive themselves as part of an interconnected whole, or whether they perceive themselves as single action players and everyone else is external to them.

[00:49:19] Suki Wessling: I do also know a lot of great men who have done the work but when I look at our media in general, I just wonder where is all of that coming from? I mean, when I read the sexy lamp test, I thought, yes, that, that defines it. That the women in so many films could be objects.

[00:49:43] Actually, he could have a sexy lamp that he goes home to and talks to, or who, who distracts the villain long enough that he can grab the gun or whatever it is that the woman does the film.

[00:49:58] Brooke Berman: Absolutely. And the women are generally defined by their relationship to the man and his central needs. she’s mom, she’s a stewardess, she’s a girlfriend, she’s, a sister, she’s an ex, but she’s always in relation to him.

Patti Smith
—

[00:50:14] Suki Wessling: Mm hmm. finally, let’s talk a little bit about Patti Smith because Patti Smith is central to this movie and we have hardly talked about her. Talk about why Patti Smith. What does she mean to you?

[00:50:26] Brooke Berman: Well, I just love the way that she never, um, and, and I don’t know her, but as an icon, she seems to be an artist who found the middle ground in art and motherhood. It doesn’t seem like she perceived those two identities as being in conflict in any way. And again, I don’t know her and I’m, I don’t know who she called late at night when she was tired, if anyone, but it seems like whatever her, um, you know, she talks about, and this is what I say in the movie, she says that the year she moved to Michigan to raise her children saved her as an artist. And she talks about herself as a worker and a poet and an artist. And then she talks about the way she showed up for both of those children. And it’s a, it’s a pretty, um, it’s like devotional, you know, her relationship to both motherhood and art making feel like they’re in concert with each other and they supported each other and they’re devotional to one another. And then when her children were older and she started touring again, and, some of that was because her husband died and I think she had to start touring again, but she was able to step into her identity as an artist without question. So you hear all these women talk about their children launching and then they don’t know who they are anymore. They try to go back to a workplace that doesn’t recognize them. And that didn’t seem to be true for Smith and Smith didn’t, uh, again, to my knowledge, seem to cling to an old iteration of herself.

[00:52:00] I mean, she is so gorgeous. I don’t know if you’ve seen pictures of her, if you’re on her Substack or her blog, but you know, she’s fully gray and she has this long mane of hair. She gets on sub stack. She does these sub stack recordings and she’s like your mom that doesn’t know how to press record. You know, just really genuine. And I love that. I love that so much.

[00:52:23] Suki Wessling: I think that the fact that your main character in your movie, she, she’s writing these letters to Patti Smith and the actress herself looks her age, which is so refreshing. I can’t tell

[00:52:36] Brooke Berman: know, right?

[00:52:37] Suki Wessling: how many women I’ve talked to. It’s just like the, the women our age in movies are looking weirder and weirder.

[00:52:44] Brooke Berman: Yeah.

[00:52:45] Suki Wessling: You know, it’s not that they’re not aging, they don’t look young. They just look weird.

[00:52:51] So,

[00:52:51] Brooke Berman: My son and I were watching TV the other night and he turned to me and said, Mom, I’m so glad you never Botoxed.

[00:53:00] Suki Wessling: That’s so great.

[00:53:03] Brooke Berman: And like, mostly I’m glad too, and then, you know, every now and then I see little lines

[00:53:07] Suki Wessling: It’s

[00:53:07] Brooke Berman: and I go, Oh God, because there’s, but there’s something so alienating when they all look like that. And I think, oh shit, was I supposed to look like that too? Because I just assumed we would all move forward in our, you know, I don’t know, natural glory.

[00:53:24] Suki Wessling: What, how do you feel about aging?

[00:53:26] Brooke Berman: I feel all sorts of contradictory things. On the one hand I’ve never lied about my age. I’m certainly proud of who I am. I’m fully middle aged. I don’t wear a lot of makeup. I don’t Botox. Uh, I do a lot of yoga and I sort of hope for the best. And I, um. I love my body. I love my relationship with my husband.

[00:53:51] I feel healthy. So I don’t feel old. And then every now and then I get really frightened. Um, my dad died when he was 41. My mom died when she was 65. I don’t know what getting older looks like in a healthy body. My grandma lived till she was a hundred. So. I have her picture up on my altar because she was 100 and she worked till she was 95.

[00:54:16] She sold houses and she was vibrant and lived on her own and drove around and, you know, was kind of an ass kicker in every way. But I don’t. I don’t have a roadmap for this part of life and I’m terrified of gendered ageism in my field. I made my first movie at 52 years old. I’m 55 currently, it just premiered.

[00:54:39] And, you know, I always thought, well, this movie will lead to the next movie. And, you know, clearly, clearly they’ll see, but I, I don’t know if they will. I mean. You know, I have no idea if there’s still room at the table for a 55 year old, filmmaker. There was just an article in the New York Times this week about playwrights in their 40s, and there are a bunch of people I came up with.

[00:55:02] Um, yeah, I don’t know. I’m not in that article. So it’s really hard to say. There’s an internal experience of aging and then there’s an external experience of aging and internally, it’s all good. I feel like me. I just I feel the same I feel better and, better and better. And then externally, I’m certainly aware of moving through the world a little bit differently, and I don’t feel invisible. When I turned 50 my therapist said, you’re going to read a lot of articles about women being invisible. Don’t just don’t read them. Don’t believe them. Don’t read them. And I do not feel invisible. But when my film premiered, uh, we were at the Bentonville Film Festival and some actor was talking to my producing partner who’s 27, she was 25 at the time and he, she said, Oh, and this is Brooke.

[00:55:50] And he went, Oh, is this your mom? And I thought, you I just wanted to kill him in that moment. I was like, no, I’m the filmmaker who wrote and directed the movie that she produced that brought her here. Like, how dare you assume I’m, we don’t even look alike. So that’s how I feel about aging.

[00:56:14] Suki Wessling: Well, uh, yeah, it is complicated, isn’t it? And finally, what do you hope people will take away when they finish watching Ramona at Midlife?

[00:56:26] Brooke Berman: There are two things, really. One of them is emotional and one of them is intellectual. On an emotional level, I want people to feel seen. I want them to feel that the parts of their experience that have been left out by the very Hollywood narratives that you’ve described has now been validated.

[00:56:45] That those moments when you sit on the playground watching your kids play and you wonder who you are, someone’s seen that. And those moments when you choose to get back together with an ex, you don’t even know if that’s the right thing that you think it’s right. Someone saw that. Um, the questions themselves, as Rilke tells us, are valuable, and that being honest moment to moment with those questions will lead you somewhere valuable. So that’s the emotional.

[00:57:11] And then on the intellectual, it’s always the moment for me when Rosemary Dewitt, who plays the lawyer, says to Yvonne Woods, who plays Ramona, you are not done. That’s the moment that always gets me every time I watch it. The way she says it, too. She goes, you’re not done. And so I would love it if people come away from this movie feeling that they’re not done. You get to do more and say more and be more and create more no matter how old you are.

[00:57:40] Suki Wessling:

[00:57:46] Voiceover: Thanks to Brooke Berman for this wonderful conversation. You can find more information about Ramona at Midlife at ramonaatmidlife.com. Check out the show notes at babblery.com for links to people and books we referred to during our chat. The song Not Living at All by Mr. Airplane Man is courtesy of free music archive.org.

[00:58:15] Thanks for listening.

END
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[00:58:16]

 

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