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 mini-episode, we explore what she learned from directing her film, Ramona at Midlife.
Please see the full episode, “Filmmaker at Midlife: In conversation with Brooke Berman,” for show notes.
Minibabble: Brooke Berman: Director at Midlife
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[00:00:00] 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, This film digs deep into that place that most of our media ignores.
[00:01:57] Film audio: If you break your teeth, you will not be coming home tonight.
[00:02:09] 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.
[00:02:27] 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.
[00:02:54] Voiceover: 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.
[00:03:13]
[00:03:16] Suki Wessling: I was terrified to direct my film, terrified. 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.
[00:03:29] 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, fleshing out a story so that it really becomes three dimensional.
[00:03:50] 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.
[00:04:04] 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. and what I’m interested in is a much more raw form of collaboration.
[00:04:22] 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.
[00:04:39] So, You know, we did it.
[00:04:42] Suki Wessling: I think that, that it’s interesting to look at different arts and 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.
[00:04:55] So writing for readers is a very solitary thing, but in your case,
[00:05:00] Brooke Berman: 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.
[00:05:16] 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.
[00:05:26] 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 taught you the skills that you might be drawing on for being a director?
[00:05:44] Brooke Berman: Oof. Well, motherhood taught me everything.
[00:05:49] I met my husband when I was 39.
[00:05:51] We fell in love hard and fast and beautifully. 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.
[00:06:08] 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. Except that I didn’t want a full time nanny.
[00:06:46] Voiceover: 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.
[00:07:06] Film audio: 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!
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[00:07:17] 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 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.
[00:07:48] 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 got a babysitter 18 hours a week. So I would write four days a week for four and a half hours a day.
[00:08:22] And then that changed to four days a week for five hours a day. I went up to 20. and it was really humbling, humbling in every way. I was lonely. I was tired. I was, um, irritable.
[00:08:39] 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, being a mom definitely taught me how to set limits in a way I didn’t know in my life.
[00:09:00] You know, I, I had been pretty laissez faire with most relationships and suddenly I needed to cultivate a really firm no.
[00:09:07] 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.
[00:09:16] 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.
[00:09:34] Suki Wessling: You are listening to the Babblery and our interview with filmmaker Brooke Berman about her first film, Ramona at Midlife.
[00:09:42] 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. 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 how did you get to this story?
[00:10:27] 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.
[00:10:50] 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.
[00:11:22] And I imagined this character who lived in Topanga Canyon. and she had gotten divorced and now it was five years later, and she was about to get her copyright back
[00:11:31] And I never did anything with it.
[00:11:32] I always had this character Ramona in the back of my mind and I 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.
[00:11:45] And then during the pandemic, 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. by the end of the month, I knew her story. 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.
[00:12:18] Voiceover:
[00:12:18] Brooke Berman: 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.
[00:12:56] I think for me, what was the most important thing is that Ramona healed her soul. Ramona needed to face herself in the mirror.
[00:13:02] 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.
[00:13:21] 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.
[00:13:34] Film audio: 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!
[00:13:50] Voiceover: 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.
[00:14:21] Brooke Berman: 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.
[00:14:30] Suki Wessling: 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,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.
[00:15:00] Brooke Berman: 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.
[00:15:24] 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?
[00:15:36] Brooke Berman: 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.
[00:15:50] 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,
[00:16:03] 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.
[00:16:17] Film audio: Do you think I’m a cautionary tale? No. I would not have taken this case if I thought you were a cautionary tale. I mean, I read your book, you were gonna write another book as great as that one, or, I mean, you’re not done. It’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years.
[00:16:39] Brooke Berman: 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.
[00:16:51] Suki Wessling:
[00:16:53] Voiceover: Thanks to Brooke Berman for this wonderful conversation. You can find more information about Ramona at Midlife at ramonaatmidlife.com. The song Not Living at All by Mr. Airplane Man is courtesy of free music archive.org.
[00:17:15] Thanks for listening.
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