“Children as scientists”: An interview with Anna Duckworth, writer/director of Pain
Written by Paul Burns
Combining wonderful performances with an unusually confronting coming-of-age story, Anna Duckworth’s Pain (2020) is a compelling exploration of how a child, Sarah (Eva Garner), comes to terms with what pain is and how it can affect people. By focusing on the relationship between Sarah and her father (Wesley Dowdell), Duckworth illuminates the moments when young people come to recognise their parents as flawed and vulnerable human beings. Set in the seemingly benign world of a bright and colourful indoor cricket club, Pain’s intimate lens captures a child’s subjectivity being suddenly disrupted and irrevocably transformed. A unique take on the coming-of-age genre, infused with black comedy and even elements of psychological thriller, Pain was awarded the Critics Choice Award for Best Freshly Squeezed at Melbourne Women in Film Festival 2022.
Below is an interview between myself and the Auckland-based writer/director of Pain, Anna Duckworth; a prolific filmmaker with three very different (and very exciting!) projects in the Melbourne Women in Film Festival 2022 program. With a background in producing, Anna has shifted gears into writing and directing, presently working on several feature-length projects exploring topics such as polyamory, parenthood and queer experiences. Hearing Anna’s layered insights on the meaning and origin of the story in Pain, along with her film-making process, deepened my experience with the film and reflections on it. I hope the interview has a similar effect on you!
Pain presents a very specific situation that becomes quite confronting for the audience. But despite being confronting, it’s also a very relatable film and it’s a very relatable thing that the main character Sarah is going through. I’m interested in why you approached this relatable coming-of-age story with a darker tone than we may be used to seeing?
Anna Duckworth: I started from a memory I had, which was very similar to the events of the film - a seemingly mundane situation where I saw a man injured at a cricket game. I started thinking about why that stood out to me, because I hadn’t really thought about it that much. It was a very formative memory. It was in figuring out why that was such a strong memory to me, I started to uncover that I didn’t really understand why an adult was behaving that way - that must’ve been really confusing to me as a child. I wondered about how I tried to grapple with that information as a small person.
I was thinking about the ways in which children are scientists, who are trying to uncover information, and trying to make sense of the world with what they have; coming to different conclusions at different points depending on the information they have. They’re great at figuring things out, but they don’t always reach the right conclusion. I was really interested in recreating that child-like approach to figuring something out, through experimentation and research and testing things, trial and error, and yeah, it ended up pretty dark - trying to understand the way that pain does or doesn’t change us, such as turning us into a monster, do we have control over our reaction to pain or not? The way she went about experimenting with that ended up pretty dark, but I feel like, from the child’s perspective, that’s really quite natural investigation.
You’re sharing this memory of seeing somebody get injured in cricket, and in the film version it’s Sarah’s father. Where did that element of a child-parent relationship come from?
AD: In reality one of my dad’s teammates was injured. Part of the reason it stuck out for me was that my Dad noticed that I was startled by seeing a grown man swearing and crying and red-faced. I’d never seen an adult behave like that. My father tried to comfort me by saying - and he’s a scientist so he comes from a very literal lens - ‘Oh, you know, people get injured, and their bodies heal, and he’ll have a swollen finger and a bandage for a few weeks, and then it will heal’. He was trying to explain that, ‘It’s okay, and these things happen’. What I interpreted was, ‘This can happen to anyone at any time. You’re telling me that this is very common’. Basically, he was saying that he had a button that could be pressed at any moment, and he would turn into a complete monster like that man. That was really scary to me. In hindsight, that’s what I uncovered about why it was such a formative memory - my dad being like, ‘Yeah, anyone can do that, at any time. That thing you saw, we’re all capable of it’. That was where the idea of combining that incident with the child-parent element came from.
I was also eight-months pregnant while we were shooting it. It was in a time of my life when I was with my first child and I was thinking about parenthood and my fears about parenthood. I think the film represents the journey from thinking your parents are perfect infallible heroes, to the time you become a parent and you’re thinking, ‘Oh! Parents don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just people’, because we’re all imperfect, flawed humans. And the message to myself is, ‘Yeah, as a parent you’re not going to know what you’re doing, and that’s okay’. It’s every child’s journey to discover that, and here I am on the other side. So the film is just a reflection of starting that journey.
In the film, do you believe there’s something specific about the injury happening to a male body or father figure?
AD: I think it’s especially frightening seeing such a strong or unemotional figure in your life, lose control of themselves. And a grown man swearing and crying is a really frightening image. It comes across more as angry or frightening in an aggressive way, whereas I feel like a woman in that experience would be perceived much more vulnerably.
Are there particular experiences or things generally that you hope audiences are thinking about, or perhaps, have become more curious about by the end of the film?
AD: That’s interesting, like what is it that the audience is left with… I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the film played in front of an audience. I remember at the very end of the film hearing everyone gasp or laugh. I think that’s quite interesting. It’s an uncomfortable laugh. But there’s something relatable about the child not really understanding the situation and going with the information they have. A lot of people have talked to me about how this related to moments in their own lives, such as when they first saw their father cry or they realised that their parents were vulnerable. I hope audiences are left thinking about those things.
The performances from all of the actors in ‘Pain’ are terrific, especially Eva Gardner as the main character Sarah. I’m really interested in what approach you took to directing actors, and particularly directing Eva, who is a younger actor?
AD: It was definitely a major factor, since so much of the film rests on our child actor. We auditioned a ton of girls looking for the ability to switch from Sarah’s quite bubbly persona at the start, to really drop-down and go quite introspective. Eva stood out as having a lot of focus - her eyes don’t look around, she just stays in the moment. We also had a bunch of really awesome mentoring from an amazing person called Miranda Harcourt. She gave us a lot of good advice on how to work with children. One of her major tips was to take the film family on a day trip to an amusement park. The film family went to a theme park, and rode on the rides, and did things that were a little bit scary and a little bit fun. I think that time bonding together helped Eva feel connected to and safe with her film family. Some of Eva’s most impressive performance moments are in difficult environments, where there’s just a giant white screen in front of her face, and she’s giving this incredible emotional reaction - so I also think she’s just a really special human.
The locker room scene stands out as being potentially quite challenging, since there’s no-one Eva has to play off or react to. It’s just her with no other characters. But the scene’s so gripping. I’m interested in what directing approach worked for that scene?
AD: Eva has such great focus and introspection. She can be thinking about anything and it reads as this amazing inner-world going on. With that scene we were quite focused on being targeted with blocking. We had items that she would look at around the room, so it would be like, ‘Look at the backpack, look at the red towel…’ So with just these technical blocking beats, her face reads as though she’s thinking about so many different incredible things. I think she just took direction really well - when we would say, ‘Now, play with the ball’, she would play with the ball in a way that you could read so much into. So we were quite literal with movement in the scene, and she was so intense and focused that it came across really well.
The vibrant internal worlds you’ve discussed being reflected by Eva, do you think they came partly from her reading the script and really understanding it, or perhaps discussing with you what’s going on in the story during pre-production?
AD: I think she definitely understood the script but we underplayed the broader context of ‘Your parents are no longer perfect’. We didn’t really focus on that meaning when dealing with Eva. It was more like, ‘You saw your dad cry and it made you feel funny’. She had an experience where her own father dived in a swimming pool and hit his nose. I think she really related to the character and was grappling with that. So she understood it in broad strokes, but delivered so much more.
I would love to hear about some of the biggest challenges and rewards during the making of ‘Pain’, at any stage of production or its festival run?
AD: Definitely one major challenge was a week before we were meant to shoot, we had to reschedule the shoot. This meant we lost a large amount of the crew who were no longer available. We had to get new crew members who hadn’t been working in pre-production, so that was stressful. I was also highly pregnant, which was a blessing and a curse. I was definitely super tired which was hard, but it also meant that I was much less active than I have been on all my other shoots. I’d usually be up and around, going from here to there, so that element of being forced to just sit down and have people come to talk to me, actually gave me a good perspective on going inwards, focusing on my own thoughts, not getting distracted and not doing too many things - just focusing on my role. That was kind of great. And we had an amazing team. It was really awesome that everyone was so generous and gave a lot - probably a lot more than we could afford, towards a really well-polished final product. I think we were really lucky with the generosity of all the crew, cast and gear suppliers.
How long has the process been since the initial idea?
AD: We filmed it one year after I wrote it. And I wrote it the week before the funding deadline! We got short-listed and went through a development period with the NZ Film Commision. And then we went into pre-production. I was going to have a baby and we had to make sure we had shot it before then. We were planning to shoot earlier, but things got pushed and pushed back, and we were like ‘That’s it! We gotta do this’’. Then Covid happened, and that was interesting in terms of our festival run…
Violet, my daughter, is about to turn three, so she was in my tummy at the time. It took us a while to edit because I had a newborn baby. But we were really lucky because at Clermont-Ferrand, right before Covid shut everything down, we got an Italian film distributor on-board. This was before we had played at any festivals! Their name is ‘Lights On’ and they took over festival distribution. Now I’m really experienced and know the whole landscape of the festival world so much better than I could’ve learned personally. They’ve just smashed it in terms of festivals, and we’ve been in festivals for around two years now. And we’ve played in some incredible festivals, which I couldn’t go to because of Covid, which is… annoying.
From my understanding, your career started in producing and later moved into writing and directing. I’m interested in hearing about how your producing background informs your current practices?
AD: Having to work with all departments about making their thing work, as a producer, gave me a holistic understanding. Also, I just worked on a ton of projects, and saw a lot of film sets with a lot of ways of working. But the biggest thing I get from having worked as a producer, is understanding what a producer does. I think that question is quite ambiguous or hard to know, because producers really do everything. And because I know what a producer does, I’m so grateful and thankful to producers. It’s a massive pet peeve when people are negative about production or producers, because it’s such a hard and thankless job. And then to be given a hard time, I’m like ‘No! You be so nice to those producers, they’re working so hard for you!’
I imagine you’re a very sought after writer/director to work with, by producers, because of that.
AD: Hopefully!
Looking at Melbourne Women in Film Festival 2022, you have three projects which you’ve written and directed in the program. They’re all so different! You’re clearly a very versatile person and artist, which makes me excited to ask, what’s next?
AD: I feel like I have two distinct styles which I’m slowly merging together, and hopefully, will become just one style. One is outrageous, feminist, NSFW comedy, or body-sex-identity comedy, and the other is this more serious and earnest drama stuff based in the profound moments of mundane, everyday life. I feel like I’m slowly merging them together. But what I’ve got coming up is a feature film I’m really excited about, that I’m writing with screenwriter Ali Burns. It’s a polyamory romantic comedy, which is going to be really funny! It’s asking a question of, is it possible to love more than one person, and is love abundant or is it a scarce resource? I think it’s abundant! The film’s a positive light on polyamory, which I feel like is needed out there. And I’m also working on some feature films about my experience as a queer mum, and that whole process. I’m still going to make films about parenthood and that it’s okay to be imperfect. Because I’m not perfect.
Are there any films or film-makers that you’ve recently experienced and found particularly exciting or inspiring, and why?
AD: That’s a really good question…
But it’s a stumper.
AD: Yeah, it’s like, what films have I seen lately? I saw this film but I didn’t like it, so I won’t say that one. I really like the work of… people. No, I really like the work of Miranda July. It’s not your mainstream thing, but it’s also really accessible. It’s not cerebral, you don’t have to think really hard about it, but there’s a unique perspective. I like Noah Baumbach’s films. I loved The Squid and the Whale and how it was really silly and pretentious but also serious. I really like Greta Gerwig’s work. I also really liked Booksmart. That’s one of my favourite recent releases. I love a feminist comedy!
It’s interesting when you spoke about Miranda July having a different angle, because that’s what stands out to me about Pain. I’ve seen coming-of-age stories about people realising their parents are flawed, but your film presents the unique perspective of a child in private trying to figure something out. Do you feel having a unique angle is integral to your writing/directing approach?
AD: I hope so. When I have those dark moments of questioning my ability or my validity to have a voice, I reassure myself that everyone has a unique angle, so it’s whether or not you can communicate that. And it’s whether or not you can show how universal these experiences are, actually by being able to show them from a different perspective. I like to exist in the real world. All my stories are real-world experiences which I feel are yet to be represented in a way that I relate to. It’s about capturing something that I hope will resonate with people, in a way they haven’t seen before.