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As Autumn tries to conceal her fear,a counselor calmly performs a pre-abortion interview.
I want to spend a few minutes talking with you about your relationships, says the counselor.
All you have to do is answer Never, Rarely, Sometimes, or Always.
(It was also awarded the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.)
And success has come on her own terms.
Much of her work is, as shes the first to admit, rather bleak.
To come of age in an Eliza Hittman movie is to become disillusioned with the world.
Rather, theyre in varying degrees of crisis.
Their parents are sick, dead, or emotionally absent.
I wonder aloud if she doesnt like thinking too hard about these connections.
But maybe that reticence is also one of the keys to why her films feel so intimate and honest.
Shes an observer, says Madeline Weinstein, who co-stars in 2017sBeach Rats.
She is much quieter than any director Ive ever worked with in film or theater.
She feels very birdlike to me: She has a keen, sharp eye.
She is seeing everything.
Flanigan echoes the sentiment: Eliza is a little mysterious in a way.
Its kind of part of her charm, she says, laughing.
For her part, Hittman says she spends a lot of time in parks just observing interactions.
Im a bit of a spy.
The camerawork is purposefully disorienting, eschewing establishing shots for shaky, claustrophobic close-ups.
The rotten fruits of toxic masculinity also hang over every scene.
When I ask Hittman why there are rarely any good men in her movies, she laughs.
Sorry, guys, she says.
Theres a tension that you discover as a young woman that exists in the environment.
You feel it when you walk home at night.
You feel it in strange ways, wherever you are.
You dont invent it in your mind.
Hittman is reluctant to share too much about why she keeps returning to sex and violence and adolescent despair.
I think its painful to be a human being, she says.
Maybe, she says.
Its a long time ago.
Hittman, 40, is the daughterof a cultural-anthropologist father and a social-worker mother.
As a child, she spent time with her dad doing fieldwork on a Nevada reservation.
Something about that process sort of translated to me to filmmaking.
Her mother created and supervised art-therapy classes at an outpatient mental-health clinic in Cobble Hill.
Occasionally, Hittman says, shed bring home artwork from patients who had committed suicide.
Maybe thats why Hittman was always intrigued with psychology and why people do fucked-up things.
Her mother also struggled with recurrent breast and ovarian cancer throughout Hittmans youth.
I grew up in a house that was filled with illness, that reeked of illness, she says.
It pushed my father into some crazy places, I think.
I was at school until 11 p.m., always in a rehearsal or production, she says.
Even if I wasnt happy at home, I had this community.
I feel like Im doing the same thing now that I did since the age of 11.
He said something to me that Ill never forget: Youre always gonna struggle as a five-foot-tall woman.
I had this little voice go off in my head like,I can do that,she says.
Ive thought about doing that as a career, she says, as the boys laugh at her.
The hours are good and so is the pay, and I like sex a lot.
The film features a climactic scene that involves a potential sexual assault.
Hittman saysIt Felt Like Loveis the most emotionally autobiographical of her three films.
I never did what she does, but some of those experiences are loosely threaded through me.
They see themselves, and they feel a little exposed.
And inBeach Rats,it was much more about the tension and desire Frankies repressed gaze, she explains.
Both films include scenes of full-frontal male nudity so you can, as Hittman puts it, celebrate it.
I give a shot to avoid looking at women the way we conventionally look at women.
Some critics have called her male-body-centric filmmaking style voyeuristic, which Hittman doesnt disagree with.
I think turning the camera on anybody could be interpreted as voyeuristic.
As human beings, were always looking at peoples bodies and trying to conceal it.
In my films, were not concealing that.
Though quite acclaimed, these movies didnt exactly set the box office on fire.
She recalls one day on the13 Reasonsset when she had to film a fight scene.
And I said, It looks fake.
It looks like a video game.
This is not how two angry men fight.
I tried to tone down the fight, and I lost the battle in toning down the fight.
And on the first take, one actor snapped his foot in half.
Thats an example of how powerless I felt.
Eliza is very sensitive, clever, and precise.
[Other people] speak about a general feeling, but we dont go so deep as with Eliza.
And if I make some mistakes, its okay.
And if she makes a mistake or has some doubts, its okay.
She doesnt judge me, and I never judge her.
I began to wonder,Where would this woman have had to travel?
Where would she have had to go to save her own life?, says Hittman.
Hittman was struck by Chapmans take on the lesser-known aspects of the abortion process.
She said, The abortion is never the crisis.
That stuck with me.
She was sitting off to the side and had this quiet tension, says Hittman.
Ever the spy, the director began watching Facebook videos Flanigan posted of herself singing and playing the guitar.
She had this anger that she was working through in her music, says Hittman.
And I was just like, Theres no way my mom will let me do this.
So I just didnt even bother.
Flash forward to 2018, when Hittman tried her one more time after a frustrating casting search.
Still, shes already thinking about her next feature shes ready to leave the teens behind.
They somehow havent emotionally prepared themselves for the end.
Hittman too will need to emotionally prepare before filming begins.
Making things is always challenging, and I take risks in doing it, she says.
I take on dark, challenging material that I live with for a long time.
