HCAF '24: Interview with Director Haley Elizabeth Anderson

We are joined today by the director of Tendaberry, a year-spanning, character-driven epic that chronicles the life of a young woman navigating living in New York after her boyfriend returns to Ukraine to be with his ailing father. Haley Elizabeth Anderson takes us through a blend of documentary and narrative storytelling, the collaborations between an actor and a director, and assembling a narrative around scattered thoughts. 

On a more personal note, this was my standout film from the Houston Cinema Arts Festival 2024 and is one of my favorite films I have seen this year.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Haley Elizabeth Anderson, director of Tendaberry. Thank you so much for being with me today. 

Well, thank you for having me.

I mentioned beforehand that it was just wonderful, I adored it. There was someone I kept coming back to when watching the film, it reminded me so much of a Cheryl Dunye film. Was she someone that kind of inspired this film, or, if not her, what other filmmakers inspired the aesthetic of this movie?

No, I mean, I'm actually really happy that the film reminds you of her work. But for this one, it wasn't. I really do love her, [but] the documentary aspect came about just because it was a very difficult journey to make the film. So, it was something that I would lean on. That's something that I return to when trying to get across a feeling. Maybe it’s a feeling that I can't achieve with the resources that we have. I think that's what I mean for this film. We looked at a lot of Dardenne films, Rosetta was a North Star. I will say, an influence that I keep coming back to, I grew up on classic Sesame Street. There's this sort of weird collage like style that I think I got from just watching so much old Sesame Street…it sort of kind of comes subconsciously sometimes. But as far as influences for this film, the original idea was really influenced by Kieślowski’s Dekalog, and it was really about multiple people at the beginning. There was definitely that focus on Dakota, but it was about Dakota sort of living out the last days of her apartment before the building gets demolished. It's about her neighbors and their stories and the people that live around her in Brighton Beach. But I think our North Stars were definitely Rosetta and a lot of the Dardenne film.

It's interesting that you mentioned how it was more of a community, because it feels so character driven. I think maybe the documentary style definitely helps to make it character driven. The camera also feels so diegetic, and there are multiple styles. All of the cameras, the camcorder, the cinema camera, the archival footage. How do you translate that style in order to make such a character driven film?

A lot of that was Matt Ballard, our wonderful cinematographer. He was a wonderful collaborator, and we talked a lot about the feeling. We wanted people to feel it, but I also think it's just Dakota. I always wanted to stay close to her. We were both very close to her, and I was always pushing him to film closer and closer to her. I know the personality and the look sort of changes throughout, and that's something that we discussed and planned. I think, with the look of the last chapter especially, I always wanted it to look and feel different. That change was sort of forced by just a financial hardship, like we didn't have enough money for film to shoot the rest. But, I think the spell was cast and what she was going through had been broken by then, so it made a lot of sense to shoot digitally. Anyway, me and Matt really discussed these personality changes, like the look of each chapter. We started with the idea of being in a safe space in the beginning, where everything is really sort of romantic. Even if we're going into fall, there's something warm about it. We always discussed winter feeling cold and lonely. Then we wanted spring to feel very chaotic and almost like the image is breaking down. So, I think a lot of the frenzied look lives in spring. We wanted everything to build for the last part. 

I love that you talked about your relationship with Dakota. You mentioned before that this was a long movie shoot. It was two to three years, and you feel it. You feel the weathering on the film. Can you talk to us about your collaboration with Dakota and how you guys maintain your vision throughout such a long shoot?

So, I met Dakota on the subway, the Q train in 2018. She was singing on the train. She passed me, and I was like, “wow, she's incredible.” She was almost like a blur, or a burst of color. She had orange dreads and was wearing purple. I got her contact information, and then months later or maybe even a year later, we met up again in Coney Island. Her hair was totally buzzed, so she looked completely different. She's so interesting, and her energy was interesting, and she just felt very magnetic. I was saying the story started as a multi character story, so I had other people that we were thinking about and that I was trying to cast, but Dakota was just so magnetic. I always say the first image I got of the character is a girl trying to stop her baby from crying, and she sings “Pop Smoke” to the baby. That was the only picture I had of this character before Dakota. Then I met her, and I was just like, “I'm just going to go with who Dakota is.” We talked a lot, and she quickly became someone I regarded as my little sister. As we talked, I sort of folded some things that she said into the story. Mostly like coming to the city for the first time, those experiences and how you feel when you're young and in love. I just wanted to hold her personality and fold what she would do naturally into the character. 

She is so magnetic, and she never loses that magnetism throughout the whole thing. I mean, she's always just so compelling to watch on screen. So, I believe that the most powerful special effect in filmmaking is aging. Obviously, this film takes place over a few years. How do you adapt the characters' look as she ages, and as she changes from a young person to a young adult?

Yes, that was an adventure. Well, first of all, I'll say Matt, dyed his hair every chapter. He started out with red hair and went to purple. We got into that discussion with Dakota sometime in the second chapter, she wanted to get dreads, because that's how I met her. And I think one day, someone said, “Wouldn't it be great if, in summer or in one of the chapters, her dreads are just blonde, like she just comes out with blonde hair.” Once we committed to her having that sort of blonde locs at the end in the summertime, it felt like a very drastic transformation. We wanted her to feel different. Dakota was really committed to that, so much so that we shot all that summer footage where she's dancing first with blonde hair, and then we had to go back and shoot spring. By that time, her hair had gotten so long, some of the color had faded, then she had to go back to brown and dark brown, and then it was really dark. So, it sort of happened in a strange way, but I think she ended up looking completely different every single time. I was very thankful that she was willing to go on that journey, because it was not a film that was based on continuity or anything. We were all obsessed with this idea of transformation, and she really, truly did transform. There was always something else going on in her real life, and something was going on in my life. So the transformation you see is not just the hair, it is basically her changing over the right course of the film.

I'm sure it's a trip for you, having known her the entire time. You said two to three years, and that kind of shocked me. I thought this must have been like a five to seven year project. It felt like a condensed version of something like Boyhood. Can you take through what a script looks like for this film? 

The script originally was an outline. It stayed in outline for a while, until maybe right before we shot the first chapter. Right before we would film the chapters, I would add the dialogue, or what the scene was going to be. Dakota and Yuri go to the grocery store, or Dakota sings the song. Then we started filming, and you'd have Matt and I making a shot list. That shot list was more so themes or situations. As we progressed throughout the film, we had to make changes, because again, during the first chapter, we shot with the intention to cover multiple stories. We shot a whole other episode with some other characters that I guess could be a standalone short film. But as we progressed, we had to sort of plan it a little bit better. For me, it was really based on where I wanted it to end, and I knew what situations I wanted to sort of explore. Then the poems were just not there originally, like at all. I kept my notes on my phone, and I was like writing while on the way back home from set, or just writing while traveling throughout the year. I would write any lines that I would hear when I was thinking about the project, or just lines that I would think. 

I think the film reflects the collage nature of it, but it never loses its momentum of being a film. I think one thing that I thought really stood out, is you make New York City feel so small, but you never lose the identity of the city. How were you able to use the historical understanding of New York to tell this story?

HEA: I was very careful not to think of anything as cinematic. During the location scouting, I just wanted it to feel like the pictures on my phone from years ago. I remember we were scouting for the store, and there was a store that had lines, and it was perfectly symmetrical. It looked cinematic, and I was like, “This is not the store, because this will work cinematically. It looks planned, too perfect.” I just wanted it to look normal. I didn't want to feel any production design, because that's not what we're doing. We're not trying to trick somebody into believing this is a set. I just wanted to capture what Brooklyn or South Brooklyn felt like now. So, we were careful in what we showed on the street, it was like gorilla style. I honestly don't like making anything fake, even though we are faking stuff. I wanted to create a time capsule, in a sense. That's what I love about movies from the 70s. They're shooting on the street, those are real people walking on the street, nobody's making that up. I want to be able to look back in a couple of decades and be like, “Okay, that was 2021,” you know? I tried to stay in my neighborhood, which is South Brooklyn. Besides Coney Island, we don’t go to any other places that are super well known. I just wanted to stay in that sort of section, which feels very specific to me. 

It’s like anti-postcards, you don't want anything that you would put on a postcard.

Yeah! And that is cinematic. The real thing is just as cinematic. There's no artifice with it, I really want to resist that. 

I think you do so beautifully, and I think it complements the film so well. There's this constant through line, this pursuit of a dream, and it's always despite monotony. You do a good job of demonstrating how easy it is to give up a pursuit whenever things get difficult. Was that sort of a personal experience? Or your thesis? To talk about the idea of fighting through monotony or finding passion within monotony?

Yeah, I think the finding passion within monotony is something that just sort of came about with staying close to the ground, staying close to the experience of doing the things that she's doing in the film. I do think that the thread of letting go is something that I pre-planned. The whole project was meant to be this journey through life where you have a hope, or you have your version of what you think is going to happen. Then life happens, and you have to go with the flow, no matter how painful it is. That is definitely the theme and that folds into the idea of, “Oh, I'm living in my apartment, I love my apartment. My apartment is now bought, and now it is going to be demolished. Now I have to go and find another home.” It's about not holding things too close, but really appreciating the now and being ready to move on when life forces you to move on. That came a lot from my personal experience. I was writing it right as the pandemic started. I had just graduated from film school, and a lot was changing in my life. That next year, 2020, looked nothing like I had mapped out in 2019. So, that feeling permeated the film completely, and that was something I was exploring and trying to work through. I think me and Dakota were trying to work through those feelings as we were filming the entire film.

We're kind of reaching the end here. So, you might have answered this in so many words already, but when you were writing, did you think that this was going to be a window film or a mirror film? Do you think it was going to be an opportunity for people to see someone else like Dakota, or do you think it was the opportunity for people to see themselves in her story?

Both? Right? That's funny you asked that, because I feel like there are two versions of it and it could be either one, but I'm very greedy. I want both, and I think you can see that through sort of talking about the bigger world, and then also having her story. I think that's something that I'm still working through with other projects, is wanting both. This was an experiment. I do think we can have both, but hopefully we achieve that in the film.

That's why I almost hesitate to ask questions like that, especially directors’ intent. But the reason I felt compelled to ask was because I felt both when I was watching, it was so easy to relate to those feelings. 

I'm really happy you say that, and I think it's both because living in New York is such a unique experience. I tried to put those things in there. Things like heating your apartment by the oven is something that I talked to some people about. When I did it, I was like, “Okay, this is a specific detail, but I know people that have done this because everybody in my building at that time was sort of either too hot or too cold.” So, I think I wanted it to be relatable, but maybe it's relatable to people in my neighborhood or just Brooklyn.

I think you find that relatability within specificity. I think the more specific something is, the more relatable it's going to be. So, you did mention that you are working on other projects? Is there anything that you can maybe tease or anything for us to look forward to? 

Yeah, I have another project that I've been working on for a very long time. I think I was working on this one before Tendaberry. It's a road film, and we're filming next year, and that's been a long time in the making. Then I'm writing a few others that I'm really excited about.

I was about to say I’m sure you're always writing. The way your process goes, you probably can't stop,

I mean, there's a lot of stories to tell, and the process of making a film takes so long. Hopefully it picks up soon, but yeah, working on a road film. I think I've said a lot about that film, just because it's taken so long to get that one going, but I will just leave it at that. 

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