"Maggie was very clear that she did not want a conventional-looking film," confirms Schreiber, one of the two primary Hi-8 camera operators. "She didn't want center framing, and she didn't want static talking heads. She wanted it to be quirky and interesting, and she said that it was up to us, the shooters, to figure that out. I spent a lot of time listening to her, trying to feel out who she was and how that was going to be translated into capturing her interactions on the street."
From the beginning, Schreiber saw the film as "Maggie's statement," and viewed her own role as "trying to focus in on things and look for the little details that would express what Maggie sees when she is on the street, which is not necessarily what I see. This is her film, so the question became, 'How can I take what I do and express something she wants to express, without feeling that I have nothing to [contribute to] it.' That's what made my job so exciting."
Above all, Hadleigh-West strove to make viewers feel, as often as possible, the experiences that female pedestrians often confront. Slowing down the action was one way to accomplish this goal. "If you are walking down the street and someone says something to you, it's very jarring," says the director. "From a viewer's perspective, it's just a very quick incident, but [for the women in question] the moment becomes very elongated, because they don't know what might happen. There's always the threat of physical or sexual violence."
The tactic of slowing down individual incidents injects the film with an almost tangible sense of foreboding. During production, however, Hadleigh-West wasn't sure about how slow she wanted various scenes to be, or even how much slow motion she wanted in the movie. Most of those decisions were made in post, as during editing, she also found that she occasionally needed to stretch the visuals to fit a specific time frame. She notes that Fernando Villena, her last editor and one of her main creative collaborators, was instrumental in helping to decide such matters.
Most of the frame-rate manipulation was accomplished on the Avid Film Composer system. However, to create one montage using Super 8 footage of men's faces, Hadleigh-West simply hand-cranked the film projector during the telecine transfer process to achieve a slow, halting, almost "stuttering" effect. She also manually manipulated the focus on the video camera lens. "I had no idea what I was doing," she admits with a laugh. "I zoomed in on details of the faces so they were enlarged — that's why the grain is so much bigger — because I wanted to focus on the eyes, on the look, and to show how imposing a look can be. I went as slowly as I could, and when I got to a point that I felt was appropriate, I would stop, hang out, and crank again. The technique was really 'old school,' but it was very effective. Once we had all of those images and put them on the Avid, it was easy to imagine the montage."
One slow-motion effect that was created in-camera is a lengthy shot of Hadleigh-West sitting on an iron bench, trying to escape the camera's gaze. Although she never physically moves from her position, she repeatedly turns her head from left to right and back again, trying to avoid the camera, which continually shifts its own position to pursue her. Schreiber used a focal length of 10mm to achieve a hypnotic, swooshing, slow-motion effect. "Maggie told me, 'I want the shot to feel claustrophobic,'" recounts Schreiber. "You would normally achieve that by using a long lens to make the frame very tight. But this was the exact opposite; [the sense of] being cornered was more about motion."
Structuring the film was a difficult process. "I didn't have a traditional beginning, middle and end, so I based the arc of the film, literally, on the hierarchy of street abuse," says Hadleigh-West. "I went from incidents that seem totally insignificant to things that are horrific, and then filled out the gray areas in between to create tension. There is an inherent repetition in my film, and that repetition is really important because that's how women experience street abuse. But the repetition changes, and I needed the color and the music to help create the pacing — so there wouldn't ever be a point at which the audience was bored and no longer paying attention to the subtle differences that were taking place in the dialogue."
Hadleigh-West didn't want the movie to simply consist of a long series of comments by men, so she spaced out the street interviews, intercutting them with scenes of personal narration and longer interviews she had conducted with women who discussed their experiences with street abuse. She credits editor Kelly Korzan with helping her to find the structure, in which the juxtaposition of color footage and black-and-white helped to create an escalating sense of tension. She and Korzan used a large board as a kind of road map: each character was defined by whether he or she would appear as a color or black-and-white image.
[ continued on page 3 ]