Read on below.Never Rarely Sometimes Alwaysis now playing in select theaters.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Talk a little bit about how the idea for this film first came to you.
ELIZA HITTMAN:I first had the idea in 2012 when I was in post-production on my first feature.
Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features
It’s a sad, awful death.
Women going on this stigmatized journey to find reproductive health and gain access.
I also began to ask myself, “What does that journey look like in the U.S.”?
Obviously, we have incredibly restrictive laws in place that make it very complicated for women to get access.
And began to think about what the diaspora of women traveling in the U.S. looked like.
They’re just fronts for communities against reproductive rights.
Every beat of this film felt so considered as to what this girl’s journey would look like.
Did research feel crucial to executing the film as you’d intended?
I wasn’t trying to construct a narrative that was really didactic.
It was really important to me to create an emotional journey for the character and for the audience.
That’s my primary goal as a filmmaker.
I’m not a documentary filmmaker.
So it’s all this research to consider the experience of the character.
You mentioned this is often a stigmatized journey.
What tropes or blatant inaccuracies did you want to avoid here?
I try always to avoid exposition when writing.
I really make a run at make the story as experiential as possible.
It’s about the personal obstacles that you encounter as well as the bureaucratic.
How did they find their way into the script?
How long did you spend researching?
What did a day in that experience look like?
I took maybe five or six trips to Pennsylvania.
But I only took the bus once.
As I was writing, I would have more and more questions.
I didn’t always know 100 percent the story I was telling when I began.
When I would encounter a question, it would spark another trip or visit to another clinic.
I looked to research to unlock the next step in the writing.
For me, I don’t love sitting in front of a computer.
I love being out in the world, taking a more anthropological approach.
Can you talk a little bit about that tension?
I’m very interested in cinematic tension both internal and external.
I wanted to go back to when you first had the idea.
That being several years ago, why was now the time to make this movie?
I initially put the movie away.
I thought it would be a little bit harder to execute in the first couple of years of motherhood.
I decided to come back to it after I premieredBeach Ratsat Sundance, and Trump was elected.
I felt a call to action.
All of the restrictive legislation that’s out there hurts people who are most vulnerable.
Did you feel a weight, a responsibility, in telling such an untold, important story?
I had to show this as accurately as possible.
And I’d have to bring a medical credibility to it.
Not everybody has a family that you’re free to confide in.
It’s very much about emotional isolation.
That was important for me to communicate through the film.
It can be a very lonely journey.
The movie received an electric response out of its Sundance premiere.
What was that experience like?
It’s not your first festival, of course, but did this time feel different?
I was so nervous because it was my movie.
It’s not dialogue-driven.
It’s so much on the audience to empathize with the main character.
It took me a few days after the premiere to process the reception.
The heightened state of nervousness at the premiere.
They responded so much to the world as well as to the issues.
I’m hoping it gives emotional insight into one human’s experience.
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