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| Booger |
One of those wonderfully odd and yet deeply affecting films which one finds on the margins of festivals like Fantasia, Mary Dauterman’s feline fable Booger will creep into your heart, make itself comfortable and then demand to be let out again. It’s the story of Anna (played by Grace Glowicki), whose best friend and flatmate, Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin), has recently died. Prickly and unwilling to talk to anyone about her feelings, Anna focuses all her attention on Booger, the stray cat which she and Izzy took in. When Booger bites her, she begins to undergo a strange transformation. Horror elements inform an intense study of the grieving process, sprinkled with touches of the comedy which is more often at the centre of Dauterman’s work.
“It's kind of funny because I am more of a comedy director. That’s always been my background, or what I gravitate towards,” says Dauterman when we get talking about the film. “Writing this was definitely the biggest emotional subject I could tackle. It became a really interesting learning process and a really emotional process. I felt like the movie was working more the more I could bring to it emotionally. Things just started feeling more connected, and like the movie had more meaning to it, if I could bring some of that to it, rather than wall to wall jokes.”
I tell her that I like the way the film opens with a few shots in phone format, which immediately creates a sense of intimacy, and the way that Anna obsessively watches videos of Izzy on her phone, which allows the audience to get to know her.
“Yeah, for sure. It's an awesome What's so funny is Sofia, the actress, who's amazing, I think we only had her one day with the full crew. The rest of the time shooting with her was literally me shooting on my iPhone, or her shooting Grace or Grace shooting her. It really felt like just hanging out, and also just being friends with Sophia, which was really nice. But then yeah, when I was writing I was kind of trying to figure out what felt more real than a flashback. Some movies with flashbacks in them I think work really well, and I really like, but every time I started writing a flashback, it just felt wrong. And I do obsessively document my friends and my life with my phone, so that is where a lot of my memories live. It just felt right for these characters and like something I feel like people do.”
It also felt maybe to me that because there's so much of this, Izzy hasn't really left the world in the way that perhaps she should have done at this point. It's really difficult to get over grief when somebody remains that present.
“Right? Yeah, like, sometimes it is even with alive friends. Sometimes it does feel like relationships fully exist in your phone, especially my friends I'm long distance with, and it's so easy to just live there. You could choose to live in your phone, and that's kind of what Anna's doing in the movie, which I think is a scary choice.”
And then very early on, there’s the bite from the cat. It’s very much a sort of classic horror film motif, like a vampire bite or the wolf bite.
“As I was writing, it was always like, is this a werewolf movie or a vampire movie? Because it has elements of both. But yeah, it definitely was always the inciting incident and the story that kicks her off on this journey. When I was working on the emotion with Grace, we were talking about how it's also a trigger for her looking at these pictures of her friends. It all happens at the same time but does have that kind of traditional horror kick off.”
Anna’s catlike behaviours are introduced quite subtly and gradually build up over time. Did that process start with making a list?
“Yeah. I do live with two cats and I have this running list of all of their bizarro behaviours. Some of them, I think, if you're not even a cat person, you're like, ‘Okay, this is a cat behaviour’ – like coughing up hair balls or scratching holes in something – but I also wanted to consider even more subtle ways, like laying in a beam of sunlight or the little twitchy movements the character develops. So I wanted to pay a lot of attention to all of those small ways she's changing as well.”
More than one feline star was involved, Mary explains.
“It was actually two cats. There's one cat who was a professional actor named Stuart, who was very good and very beautiful, and he's the cat in the majority of the apartment scenes. And then the other cat is my own personal cat, Bobby. And Bobby is a big biter, so he is the cat who bites. Stuart was very well behaved because he's professional, and he did not bite. Bobby is also in a lot of the flashback videos, because I have access to him all the time.
It's obviously quite a low budget film, but that feels like an advantage in places. A lot of it is shot in very small spaces, which adds to the atmosphere.
“Yeah, it was a it was a small budget film, and some of it is shot in my own apartment, and some of it’s shot in our DP’s home. We were trying to utilise all these spaces to the max and just use things that we had available to us to build this world. Part of it was creating claustrophobia because that's what's going on with the character. She's turning inward and not leaving her home, and choosing to make her world as small as possible. So that was part of the emotion of the film, as well. I think probably the biggest space we were in was the bar, or the shop, which we had access to for a few days. But yeah, it was also important for me to make this feel like a neighbourhood and a pretty small footprint, because that's just the world we're living in. I'm glad you could feel that – her world collapsing.
We discuss the way that the film’s sound design contributes to the sense of Anna being overwhelmed.
“It was a lot of things,” she says. “In the edit my editor layered in a lot of sounds as we were going along that did end up living in the final film. What she can hear is part of her transformation as well, so there were parts that were in the script that were like, here's when she starts hearing things differently. Here's what she's paying attention to sonically. And then we worked with a composer, Zoe Polanski, who was amazing and brought a lot of cool ideas. She even had ideas where it was like, ‘I don't think there should be any music here. I think this is where it would be way more powerful to have these kinds of sounds.’
“Overall, the bed of sound we built together definitely has this disorienting feeling to it. And then our sound designer, Vinny [Alfano], also layered in a bunch of interesting pieces that just took it to another level. So it definitely was part of the thinking from the script phase, all the way towards finishing it. All of the layers building on top of each other, I think, just kept building the kind of cat’s...” She pauses. “Spidey senses, I was calling them.”
As if she was bitten by a radioactive cat?
“Yes!” She laughs.
Contrasting with that is the use of Escape (The Piña Colada Song) as the song which Anna and Izzy used to sing at karaoke together. Licencing your song like that is a big deal for a small movie. Was it always the one they wanted?
“It was actually really crazy trying to think of what the perfect song for these two friends was. My producer and I have a Spotify playlist of all of the songs we were talking about. But yeah, it is a small budget movie, so we were always like, ‘Who knows what's going to happen?’ And then almost by chance, I was talking to a mutual friend of mine and Lexi [Tannenholz] and he was asking how casting was going. I was like, ‘Casting is going great, but what’s not going great is finding this karaoke song.’ And he told us he was friends with a fellow filmmaker whose dad is Rupert Holmes, who's the Piña Colada Song artists, which was crazy.
“So it was just getting connected to him and him being interested in the film, and then the more I was listening to the song, I was like, ‘It's perfect!’ It's about people falling apart and then finding each other at the end. It's such a silly song, it's such a iconic song, and it worked really well for this film. And we happened to have this connection, so it sort of felt fated. It is definitely crazy that it's in this movie. And what was really amazing is he let us do some covers of the song that are in the credits and in a very sad scene.”
I ask about the costuming, because that also tells us a lot about these characters, especially Anna.
“From prep, I was really specific about using colour to convey emotions,” she says. “All of my characters have their own colour to them. And also, with Grace's character, I wanted the colour to have a gradiation to it, so she starts off more in yellow and ends in this disgusting green. So the way she's going through her journey has this colour signal to it. But also she's falling deeper into her depression and her withdrawal, so she's becoming more dishevelled throughout the the film as well.
“Another big piece was this sweater that she puts on that belongs to Izzy, as a way to cope, but it also becomes a little bit like, she's not okay. She's been wearing the sweater the entire film almost, and it's this vibrant red colour, almost to show her delusion. What also was a little bit crazy about that wardrobe choice was we filmed in July and August in New York. Grace was an amazing sport, but it also added to the discomfort of this character in a really interesting way. That piece was really important for me to show another way she was not letting go.”
When she was making it, did she have any idea that it would end up screening somewhere like Fantasia?
“I dreamed and hoped. I played at Fantasia with a short film [Wakey Wakey] and it was really incredible. I love their programming and I love the kinds of films that are shown here. So it was a little bit of a secret hope that they would like this movie too. I'm really excited to be here.”
She’s already busy with her next project, which, she explains, emerged as an idea at around the same time as Booger.
“Right now I am kind of developing and writing a heist comedy called 30 Grand. Booger felt like the right movie to make first. 30 Grand is a big silly comedy. It's a heist film that all takes place at the store The Gap over the course of one day, which is Black Friday. I feel like it's in line with the tone of Booger in that it's very stressful and anxious, but it leans more comedy thriller.
“I think like the underlying tone for me would always be some comedic edge. I don't see myself making like a straight drama, but I like playing in the genre space and subverting expectations and doing something a little surprising or disgusting. Booger is pretty disgusting.” She laughs.
