This interview was originally published during last year’s Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2012. It is being reposted now that the film is in theaters and about to debut on television.
A first-person style documentary about having a baby doesn’t seem all that fresh, even if the situation is that the filmmaker is over forty and going about it on her own. But Nina Davenport is a special breed, a true disciple of the best autobiographical documentarian, Ross McElwee (who was one of her mentors at Harvard). She doesn’t just seem to be making a feature-length home movie or cinematic Live Journal entry. There’s a reason people openly try to copy her films (see Josh Freed’s Five Weddings and a Felony, the “male answer to” Davenport’s Always a Bridesmaid).
Her new doc, which just had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, is called First Comes Love, and it presents her decision to become intravenously pregnant, to the great disapproval of her father, and then chronicles her experience through the birth and first years of motherhood. I talked to the filmmaker over the phone this week about this brave and difficult project and how the logistics of her style have changed in recent years, both as a result of modern media and as a single mother. Read our conversation below.
DOC Channel Blog: I want to start on the topic of vulnerability. There are personal first-person documentaries, and then there is this film. You literally are exposed in your entirety, both physically and emotionally. Where do you get that courage?
Nina Davenport: I don’t understand why people are so protective of their image and what they reveal or show of themselves. I guess I just don’t take myself that seriously. What’s more important is sharing and connecting and making art. Even if it means I look hideous in a given shot, such as two days after I’ve given birth and I look like the feminine monster, as my friend who came to visit me in the hospital said. I’m almost sort of mystified of how protective and vain people are about themselves. I don’t feel like it’s courageous. It’s normal to me.
It’s not just about your own exposure. You have a whole lot of friends, family, partners, ex-boyfriends, etc. in this film, not to mention your young child, all revealed to the world. Is it difficult to get these people to speak so comfortably with you, knowing where it could end up, and also is it difficult for you to include certain moments?
Well, one thing that makes me really like someone is if they are willing to make fun of themselves and don’t take themselves too seriously. That’s a quality that my mom had. Some of the hardest times we laughed in my family was at her and with her simultaneously. She was great about making fun of herself and not taking herself seriously. So I’m really drawn to that kind of person.
But I also have a lot of friends who would not let me film them. I’d be begging and begging, and they absolutely refused. I believe fifty-percent of my friends, if not more, refused. For example, I have two very close friends who had babies before me on their own, and neither of them wanted to be filmed. So, in fact, I found different women, whom I had not previously been friends with, to fill that role as the women who had done it before me and inspired me.
No one is more noteworthy than your father, whose harshness is a kind of transparency for him and vulnerability for you at the same time. Is that stuff hard to show an audience?
For my father, the issue of how he comes across or how people perceive him, I don’t think that even crosses his mind. In terms of communicating and exposing the harsh things that he says, that’s sort of a question of weighing the individual situation with the greater situation. And I guess for me, what’s more important is showing… Everyone has someone who they have a difficult relationship with in their immediate family. It’s just the most common thing in the world, and people struggle with it. I think people will really relate to that.
So that’s one of the things I was after in including him. Also, I think he’s very typical of men of his generation and illustrative of how times have changed. The way that people parent, the way their relationships are formed, the way their children come into the world. All of this is changing, and my dad is representative of the old ways.
It’s all of the good that communicating that and sharing that with the world can do, and what creative art can do, versus is my dad going to feel bad. In fact, it’s not like whether or not he feels bad is relevant. I don’t care. But I think, knowing him, he might feel upset for about two seconds, and then he’ll forget and move on. Or he may not get upset at all. So that wasn’t a big concern.
As a very personal filmmaker, do you ever base your major or minor life decisions on whether or not the direction will make a good story? For instance, if you didn’t decide to have a child you wouldn’t have this documentary, and then what else might you have made?
If you’re asking if I do things in my life because I might find them interesting to film, no. That’s just a categorical no. If the question is, is it difficult simultaneously living your life and trying to film it, then yes. You’re kind of existing in two very different, sometimes visually contradictory, psychological spaces: that of being in the moment, and living, and that of thinking of how this moment is going to reverberate and signify. And what is it going to mean in the future?
But to some extent, that is how I live my life anyway. That’s why I’m so drawn to documentary film, I think. Part of it is just that it’s very hard for me to let go of things. I’m really passionate to a degree. I never want things to end. By the way, that’s how my son is right now, so far. It’s a little scary. Recording things is a way of not letting go and continuing to live in a moment that’s gone.
One thing I love about this film compared to many other first-person documentaries is that you turn the camera on yourself a lot. Not just for talking to it, either. You set it down and go about what you have to do. There’s even a conversation scene here that’s cut like it’s a shot reverse shot setup for a narrative film. It allows the doc to open up. Do you aim for that sort of fiction film feel?
As you probably know, I appear in all of my films, to varying degrees. I take it on a case by case basis of what would be the most compelling. In general, I’m better behind the camera than on camera. But in this case, I knew my body was going to be changing and be a character in the film, by virtue of becoming pregnant. So I should include myself in the film so you can see me changing throughout. That was definitely one of the major reasons.
And then with the video diaries, of which there are so many in the film, in fact there’s three where I’m in the bathtub talking to the camera, I did a lot of those. The camera almost became like my husband, the person I would talk to late at night, when no one else was around, about what I was feeling in my pregnancy. Then there a lot of scenes where it was just not possible for me to film them, most relevantly the scene where I’m giving birth. Obviously I couldn’t film that.
I wanted to get a balance of you seeing me the way you see characters in a fiction film and connect with them. And then my one strength is that I can be humorous on camera, at least I hope, and another strength is that I’m good at drawing people out, and I do that best from behind the camera. I was trying to get both of those things in the film, factoring in which scenario would most likely lead to which strength.
I do try to make my films as entertaining as fiction films. And I do think about fiction filmmaking, in terms of storytelling and character and three-act structure. This film and Always a Bridesmaid both could easily be adapted by Hollywood. You’d lose a lot in the translation, but you could do it easily.
How much did the logistics of doing all this filming change once you had to take care of the baby?
The logistics were always very difficult. First of all, I was exhausted. Second of all, I had my hands full, literally, once the baby came out. Third of all, I was constantly pestering everyone in my life to be filmed, and most people don’t enjoy being filmed. So it was very, very hard. There were times where people were frustrated with me and sick of me and saying no to me about filming. And in particular, it was hard for Amy having a camera on her a lot, because I filmed a lot of our friendship, more than is actually in the final film.
I would say the logistics were easier when my child was in my womb rather than when he was out of the womb. That took it up several notches. Now the question is how will I make a film as a single mother that’s not about my son, one that requires traveling and potentially being away from him. That question remains to be answered.
Since you started making first-person style documentaries, a lot of others have come onto the scene, including the one Josh Freed made and called a male answer to Always a Bridesmaid. Also, the Internet and reality TV have made autobiographical content more common. Does all that make a doc like this any harder or easier? Does it all offer you a challenge to make something so much greater?
I would say that one very unfortunate byproduct of the reality TV world that we’re living in today is that it has made people much more paranoid and suspicious when you want to film them. They assume you’re going to humiliate and embarrass them, because unfortunately the basis of a lot of reality TV is just the humiliation of people. That’s not at all what I’m interested in doing. I kind of abhor that mode. It’s cheap and easy. What’s hard to do is build full, complex characters that can be at once lovable and hate-able. It’s definitely made it harder just, even with the people I’m close to.
Then, it doesn’t help as I become more successful as a filmmaker and more well-known. Now that people have seen that my films actually have a light, that also makes them more reluctant to be filmed, because they know they’re actually going to end up on the big screen. Whereas normally when you ask, they don’t really realize that it’s serious.
First Comes Love is now in theaters and will premiere on HBO Monday, July 29, 2013.
