If anyone is complaining that Hollywood is “running out of ideas” and everything is a remake or sequel, they’d do well to examine a small but fast-growing new crop of post-digital indie films that tap into the fears, anxieties, and sometimes comedic surreality of our current world. time. These movies are often a little creepy, brutally ambiguous, a little blurry, and a powerful antidote to mainstream cinema. Embracing 16mm film, unique aspect ratios like 1.2:1, shorter runtimes, and small stories, these independent films couldn’t be more different than the bloated three-hour CGI spectacles in theaters.
In the past two years, Enys Men, Funny Pages, Falcon Lake, Tahara, Skinamarink, And We’re all going to the World’s Fair have illustrated this new post-digital style, and one of the producers of that last title, the surprisingly successful one World Expo film, has now added to the movement with his own film. Theodor Schaeferfeature film debut, Giving birth to a butterflyis a dreamy and unpredictable film with quiet humor and sometimes eerie moments of uncomfortable absurdity.
A frequent producer and assistant director, Schaefer teamed up with author Patrick Lawson to write the film and directed his debut with an offbeat and poetic aesthetic. He spoke to MovieWeb about the inspiration, meaning and production of Giving birth to a butterfly.
Therapy gave birth to Schaefer’s butterfly
Giving birth to a butterfly follows a perhaps dysfunctional family as they take in Marlene (Gus Birney), their son’s pregnant girlfriend. The matriarch of the family, Diana (played by Annie Parisse), suspects she is the victim of identity theft after her credit card is declined. Marlene drives Diana to the address of the company that overcharged her, and the two bond over a quietly bizarre road trip that culminates in a surreal visit to two older twins who change their lives.
The reason for the film is just as strange. Schaefer’s therapist was also writer Patrick Lawson’s therapist and thought Schaefer would be the perfect person to make a movie about Lawson’s life. After a while, they got together and started a furious artistic collaboration that resulted in seven different movie scripts, including Giving birth to a butterfly.
“It was weird,” Schaefer said, recalling the moment his therapist suggested he contact a fellow patient. “I think my first reaction was like, ‘Oh, this is strange,’ because originally it was like I was supposed to make a movie about this guy’s life. Especially when you’re young, I think when you get into film , anyone who doesn’t really know much about film wants to help you and tell you what you should make your films about. [So my therapist] was like, ‘Oh, you should make a movie about this person.'” Schaefer continued:
He gave me one of Patrick’s books, and I read it and was instantly drawn to it. It was a combination of poetry and interviews with Patrick telling the story of his life through both the poetry and his interviews and he has a very exciting life. So I was on it for about a year before I called him and thought, “I’ve got this idea,” and I wanted to see if he’d write it with me […] Something was going on that somehow made our brains just click. I’m not exactly sure why. But we finished writing that first script and we were like, “Let’s just keep doing this.” We’ve done a handful of shorts together and we’ve written a ton of feature films, and this was the first one we could get off the ground.
“I don’t even know who wrote what at this point,” Schaefer continued, “because our brains are just kind of fused.”
The meaning of Mina Loy
Ironically, that same detached sensibility and lack of discernible ego is reflected in the film itself. Identity, names and ego are all big themes Giving birth to a butterfly, where characters flow into each other and Marlene and Diana’s identities seem to be heavily intertwined. Much of it began with Mina Loy’s title poem, part of her Love songs from the early to mid-20th century:
We could have linked
In the bedridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with each other
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips
Maybe we gave birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
With blood pressed on his wings.
Like the movie, this poem is beautiful, sad, infinitely mysterious, and a little hopeful. It resonated with Lason and Schaefer. “So that came pretty early,” Schaefer explained. “I had come up with a seed of this idea years ago and brought it to Patrick. And what usually happens is one of us has a seed and then we both start using that to jump off of it, and we throw ideas like a google doc. He was preparing a presentation about Mina Loy at a poetry conference. As often happens when we write, as soon as one of us has an idea, whether someone is doing something in their life or has seen or read something, the other is like, ‘Well, this is just like this other thing.’ It’s like this accidental thing.” Schaefer continued:
And so we started learning more about Mina Loy, because he had to and I was intrigued, and he said, “I think there’s some meaning to what we’re writing.” So that came pretty early, and it was a great starting point as we were thinking about this character of Diana, because that’s kind of like a seed. And once you start thinking about Diana, everyone grows out of it. I just felt like it was the perfect setup, and the perfect tone setter; and thematically, the very beautiful love poem has so much in common with the themes we were already exploring, so it felt like – what a perfect match.
Explanation about giving birth to a butterfly
Like many titles in this postdigital new wave of indie cinemathis radical 16mm reaction, Giving birth to a butterfly does not lend itself to just one easy interpretation. Does Mina Loy’s poem have a convincing, linear, intellectual interpretation in which everything makes sense? No, and neither does the movie titled after it. “It’s hard, because there’s clearly deliberately not just one interpretation,” explains Schaefer. He continued:
I think it’s changing for me; it kinda depends. I think the way we wrote it, what it meant the most to me then, was different from when we recorded it, and it’s different now that it’s come into the world. A lot of it stems from Diana and her kind of individuation through cleavage. And I realized that a lot of our scripts can have a similar kind of motif of a character that has to be strung in half to become a whole. […] consciously it is the idea of trying to find that other part of yourself as something external. It’s a really interesting image to us because I think maybe it’s kind of a utopian image, the idea that somehow you can find the whole you.
There’s no really easy meaning to it Giving birth to a butterfly, leading to a variety of interpretations and distillations. People like to use “buzzwords” or create agreements to “market” a movie to someone. One such buzzy line for the film came courtesy of Film Threat when Schaefer’s film was screened at the Fantasia International Film Festival,”Donnie Darko meets Twin PeaksIn spirit, those two great titles feel distantly related Giving birth to a butterfly, but not stylistically or emotionally, not at all. The film has its own aesthetic, but that doesn’t stop people from comparing it to symbolic “weird” and “bizarre” directors, such as David Lynch or Lars von Trier.
“I understand, I think, why people make that connection. It’s something that’s easy to make you feel general,” said Schaefer, who credits masters like Aki Kaurismäki, Chantal Akerman, Jim Jarmusch, and the patient Edward Yang much more than Lynch. or someone else. “I was like Lynch would never make anything this happy. It’s kind of a happy movie, I think. I think there’s hope in it, which I don’t see in Lynch, except Straight story.”
Theodore Schaefer is living the dream
Schaefer’s film future also looks hopeful. He’s part of this post-digital indie movement, not just with Giving birth to a butterfly but with the great 2022 movie We’re all going to the World’s Fair. “We’re done shooting this, and Jane [Schoenbrun, the director] contacted me, and I’ve been doing this for years, and we’ve been good friends. And they tried to put this together and asked if I could help, and I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And I worked at this company, Direct Productions, and we were able to come and help put it together and be a part of that process.
We’re all going to the World’s Fair may have been the most successful film of this small, loose movement. “That success was such a strange thing,” said Schaefer. “I mean, I think it’s really life-changing for Jane, but even for us, it was like, ‘Whoa, this is kind of blowing up.’ It’s opened a lot of doors, it’s made things a lot easier, it’s also taught me a lot about the industry, both positively and negatively.” The filmmaker continued, following the ethos of a new movement:
Our intention was, “We’re going to make these little movies that feel really personal and director-driven.” That was the whole conceit of our company. Sure, at some point it would be great to make a movie that has a lot of success, but let’s start building community. Then the first movie, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, came out, and we thought, “Oh, well, it looks like there’s a real hunger for a certain type of movie.” It sort of proved that a lot of people like that sort of thing, so we just have to keep doing what we’re doing. Jane’s career is going to explode, but I think and hope we’ll continue to work with them on other projects, so it’s going to be fun. Being a filmmaker and having the opportunity to help other filmmakers is the dream.
The dream is sure to continue in future ethereal, terrifying and fascinating movies and the dreamy Giving birth to a butterfly will premiere digitally on May 16, 2023. Cinedigm will release the eccentric fantasy-esque drama as an exclusive streaming on the company’s indie discovery platform Fandor, and it will be available on major digital-on-demand platforms in the U.S. .