Coming of Consciousness: Tyler Taormina on Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point | Interviews

Across the three features he’s made to date, Tyler Taormina has emerged as a true American independent, with an inquisitive eye and extraordinary depth of feeling for adolescent rites of passage that unfold — poignantly, mysteriously, with a sense of romantic possibility — amid the suburbs’ lonely, nocturnal stretches.

His subliminally menacing feature debut, “Ham on Rye,” captured the nervous anticipation of a group of teenagers preparing for a formal event that will shape their lives forever — not a prom, it turns out, but a ceremonial dance at the local deli, where they are to pair off and confront the arrival of a disquieting, isolated adulthood. His follow-up, “Happer’s Comet,” a somnambulant tone poem of alienation filmed in the early days of lockdown, was more vividly experiential and wordless, observing as unnamed townsfolk broke away and fled into the night on rollerblades.

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” Taormina’s third and most miraculous feature yet, follows three generations of an Italian-American family returning to an ancestral Long Island residence for the holidays, only for a wistful sadness to settle in for some of them as it’s revealed the cherished home will soon be put on the market. This sense of longing to preserve time and space as it begins to fade into memory is a hallmark of Taormina’s filmmaking. Continuing his partnership with cinematographer Carson Lund, who shot “Ham on Rye” and “Happer’s Comet,” Taormina envisions this family gathering as a shimmering holiday fantasia, within which many varieties of familial drama coincide with moments of surreptitiously surreal opulence, with a nostalgia that appears to be crystalizing imperfectly before our eyes. 

Co-written by Taormina and Eric Berger, the film (in U.S. theaters Nov. 9, via IFC Films) is an elusive, exalted mosaic of memory, drawing not only from their childhoods on Long Island but from the strange interrelationship of their personal recollections with cultural rituals of Christmas time writ large, to form another warmly impressionistic portrait of a silent night. For the first time, Taormina works with a vast ensemble of professional and non-professional actors; Maria Dizzia, Ben Shenkman, Matilda Fleming, Elsie Fisher, Francesca Scorsese, Gregg Turkington, Sawyer Spielberg, Lev Cameron, and Michael Cera star, all contributing to both the garrulous spirit of the occasion and the sense of melancholy that underlies it. Giving the film a certain evanescent glow, Taormina and Lund at a certain point break away from the festivities, letting the adults wind down as their teenage children sneak out into the night to consecrate the holidays in their own furtive, cheerfully delinquent manner.

At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” had its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight section (alongside “Eephus,” Lund’s directorial debut scheduled to be released by Music Box Films next spring), Taormina graciously sat down with RogerEbert.com to discuss the poetic opportunities of space, lessons learned from Bresson, the mixed blessings of Christmas time, and the “coming of consciousness” that all his films explore.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You belong to Omnes Films, a Los Angeles-based collective of filmmakers that formed at Emerson College a decade ago. I understand that you’re all close friends, but do you see a shared idea you’re all pursuing as well?

Those two are the same, in a way; our friendship is so powerful because we have similar hearts and minds and souls. That’s why we come together, and we all have similar sensibilities that are a product of those things. If we were to bring any other films into Omnes—which I would love to do, to champion and create a modern canon of American cinema that I can get behind—it would have to feel as purehearted, honestly, or there would have to be at least something formally ambitious about it that I couldn’t put into words. But it’s mostly about friendship, love of cinema, and seeing each other’s ideas come to life.

Your collaboration with your cinematographer, Carson Lund, has extended through all the films you’ve made. What conversations did you have about the specific look and feel of this one?

We only discussed the look of the film a little, because Carson and I are so connected. I know he knows; he just knows. It’s as simple as that. We talked about Coca-Cola advertising, about Douglas Sirk, about “Home Alone,” and we figured it out. With [a sequence involving a] fire truck, the idea was to make it so alien, so disorienting, that you don’t even know what’s happening. That was in the script, and I wanted it to be a complete reveal of how the film has a totally psychedelic aim. That’s the end of itself; that scene has no other reason but showing you this craziness. [laughs]

You’ve said in the past that you make “ecosystem films” that focus on studying faces and objects in an environment, so as to gradually, collectively impart a sense of that space and the experience of existing there for a time. I’m curious how you approached mapping out the milieu of “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.” The home where it’s largely set is this domestic space with intimate personal meanings for its characters.

I have to admit I’m not too sentimental about specific spaces; maybe that’s just because I haven’t had my childhood house sold yet. It doesn’t have any existential threat at the moment. But I’m highly interested in space as a poetic opportunity, because I feel like cinema gives you the opportunity to put yourself in a space and have a curiosity as to all the life that inhabits it. A spatial relationship is incredibly important in the work I do, because I feel like the camera is a curious creature who wants to check every nook and cranny, every room, to see what’s going on here and there. How are these people interacting with each other, with the space, and with the ideological networks surrounding it? I think it’s an incredible chance to study life in an ontological sense, with a sense of aura. 

To that end, your films reflect this multiplicity of experience, the distinct personal and emotional relationships each character has to the space; everyone’s moving through the house differently, with their own levels of comfort and familiarity, and so much of that has to do with this idea of coming home for the holidays, being somewhere they wouldn’t usually be, with people they see only occasionally. Was the setting always Christmas?

I couldn’t help but to notice that the majority of the films that I’ve made and conceived of all take place on different holidays. Having a film set on a holiday, in a compressed timeline, heightens this ontological awareness, this sense of “here we are, in the now.” We’re engaging in these codes and these rituals that also bring attention to the now. 

I like what you said about how you get a sense of how everyone’s relating to space and what’s on their minds. It’s interesting that it comes off that way, because the way I think that’s achieved is that we did so much work in creating a psychological snapshot of this whole family tree. We discovered when the patriarch died, how that affected the parenting of the four kids, how it affected their relationship with each other and their parenting; we would study these past traumas and events in their personal lives, and what was going on with each of them. We didn’t actually tell the actors any of this information, but I think having that in the script—which is extraordinarily detailed, I’m talking nine pages of detail that were omitted for the shooting script—made every moment seem so incredibly loaded. 

You can interpret a whole world of psychological entropy; you don’t even realize what’s on your mind half the time. Bresson spoke a lot about this: that we do things automatically, that we’re not aware of what’s going on in the unconscious. I like to think of every person having a conversation with this part of their mind, but we know where the rest of their mind is—or simply that it is filled with this other energy. Think of it like an iceberg. This was another good excuse to set it around Christmas, because all of these reminders of family and tradition—how we heed tradition or not, how we buy into it and enjoy it or not—ignite that area under the tip of the iceberg. They’re all buzzing, in their deepest parts, on this night. 

This film captures, in almost pointillistic detail, those elements of a family’s holiday gathering that are also more unhappy or uncomfortable: those relationships with the extended family members you don’t stay in touch with, the melancholy of recognizing that certain relationships have frayed, the inevitability of change.

In the daytime, we don’t feel the impending night. But in the middle of the night, we know the impending morning; it’s so much more pregnant with anticipation. Although this is simply the Italian-American tradition of celebrating Christmas Eve all through the night, it’s beautiful how it’s also a pretext for tomorrow. You don’t celebrate Christmas Eve in the daytime, either. It’s all about this pregnant energy of change. The movies that I’ve made, especially “Ham on Rye” and “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” have to do with this collective protagonist looking at an array of all ages; perhaps this allows me to study and ruminate on where we lose ourselves, or we lose our parts of ourselves in this experience. I’m incredibly smitten with and clinging to my innocence, to my youth. 

I very much value my own innocence. At this festival, I feel like I’ve peeled away too much of it. I need to recuperate. [laughs] It’s so incredibly self-conscious. I’ve never had my photograph taken so many times, and I never have realized what that would actually feel like. It’s very weird. I didn’t think about that. In my films, I want to study where we lose this innocence—and do we ever get it back? That’s a question I’ve asked a lot, as well. I look at the ensemble as a point of study. If you’ve ever seen the film “Voci nel tempo,” by Franco Piavoli, I saw this film after making “Ham on Rye,” but this was the film that had been playing in my head; he had this same idea to explore, through a community, all the stages of life. It brings this existential part to mind, this idea of alienation through the ages.

Another film comes to mind there: “Toute une nuit,” by Chantal Akerman, has about it this sense of alienation and loneliness, but also possibility and escape in the night, where all your films eventually end up… 

She’s one of the greatest of all time. That was a huge reference point for “Happer’s Comet,” my previous film. I love that movie so much. I’m not a night owl. And the way of America, much more than here in France, is that people are much more conforming into a certain rhythm of sleep. No one’s ever awake at certain times of night, so there’s a discomfort I have, even a guilt of some kind, about being awake so late. You feel like a degenerate.

Once everyone else is asleep, though, you can break away from the community and be your own person, which can be exhilarating and disquieting at the same time. In this film, when you follow the character of Emily out into the night, there’s escape but also another kind of community she’s hoping to fit into.

Yes, exactly. And deviation is everything in these films. There’s strength in deviation. That’s really stimulating. You could see how the friend group that they have, they really declare their own familyhood. In that sense, they’re conforming to their own collective normality, which is only different from their individual families. It’s funny that they go from one to the other. 

But what is true is that the difference between family and friends allows them to explore sex. And that is, obviously, one of the most formative expressions of the self that we have in our whole life. It’s the definitive first step away from the family. It’s the one thing you can’t do with the family! And you see it with your friends. I look at this sequence where they’re all pairing off as like popping open the hood of a car and looking deep into what the engine is. What’s the combustion chamber of this whole piece, right? It’s this magnetism towards sex.

“Ham on Rye” explores this through its staging of this ceremonial dance at a deli. There’s a surrealism to your cinema, and you find a way in this film, as in that one, to collapse all these rites of passage into one sequence: the beauty and mystery of maturing, of expressing oneself as an individual, of coming together with others by existing on your own terms, but also the terror of growing up.

It’s the clearest way to see that which is driving us into tomorrow, which is mysterious. There’s some instinct in us, but it’s so interesting to explore that through an embodiment. You realize what’s pushing us along this path. It’s almost as inherent as our telomeres shrinking; it’s just this force. That’s when I fell in love with the film most of all, conceiving that scene as the center of it all. 

There’s an exaggerated holiness to the way you approach multiple sequences in “Miller’s Point” as well, an absurdity that reveals an artifice in what’s unfolding. It’s beautiful, but there’s a distrust or suspicion of the ritual that you’re conveying simultaneously. 

In “Ham on Rye,” it almost is a social suspicion, even a political one. I think Haley in “Ham on Rye” should be suspicious of what’s going on; it requires domination and betrayal. But, in this case, it’s almost more simple. I had terrible sleep issues while trying to finance this film, and I went to see a hypnotherapist. And, at first, some magical things were happening. I felt like something happened to my subconscious; it was really intense. The next time, I realized, “Oh, this woman is actually not a great actor. She’s putting on something. If I could just believe it, I could go to sleep.” 

But you couldn’t believe her.

I wanted so badly to believe her. And it’s analogous to dancing. I could dance and have a good time; but, as soon as I feel an eye on me, I’m a little bit different, and f— that! I want to dance, but I can’t! It’s the same with ritual. I want to enjoy Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, or whatever it’s gonna be, but  there are other parts of the brain that get in the way of a sense of grace. Sometimes, that’s good. At Thanksgiving, you should think about the genocides as the pretext for that, maybe. But it’s interesting how our grace is compromised by things that are savory and unsavory, actually.

I’ve heard your films described as coming-of-age movies, and I’m not sure how you feel about that descriptor.

I love it. I love it! I mean, I hate it for other films. If someone says, “you should go see this coming of age film, I would say, I don’t want to do that.”

I’d describe yours more specifically as coming-of-consciousness films. To experience the creature comfort of ritual requires a certain surrendering of consciousness; you have to step inside the snow globe. Your characters struggle to do that amid teenage years that are all about these successive awakenings of self. 

We’re so on the same page, we really are. When you say that, it reminds me of a quote from “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” by Max Ophüls, which I think is one of the greatest movies ever made, where Joan Fontaine says, “”I think everyone has two birthdays, the day of his physical birth and the beginning of his conscious life.” And I think that’s why I’m so interested in teenage study, because that’s when I had that experience. That’s when I felt an awakening almost like what people attribute to taking a psychedelic drug; their world is something different. I didn’t do that at that time, but I think there’s actually a lot of joy in what these friends will experience that the family doesn’t actually remember.

One composition of a woman skating on a frozen lake, as a train passes by overhead, is especially extraordinary in that sense, and it feels like “Miller’s Point” slows down and becomes even more consciously dreamlike in some of those later moments.

The film has to make a formal change to feel the departure of the deviation, to outline the deviation not just in terms of where the characters go but also through a formal way of arousing not only discomfort but a sense of wonder. In terms of the allegory of the cave, it’s about finding the light. I wanted it to be a grace note, but it’s the pretext of sex as well, because there’s a lot of lustful dreaming of this woman in the center, from a lot of the characters. When the snow falls, that’s the cue. They all know it’s time for these cars to become impossible to look into. [laughs]

To your earlier observation about the camera exploring every nook and cranny, I felt I knew this house so well, but your camera is constantly alighting on these consciously overstuffed compositions. What importance did all these ornamental details—a salad bowl of red and green M&Ms, the player piano, retro video games—hold to your film? 

We were talking about consciousness, which I’m so happy that you brought up. I felt that this film, as with “Ham on Rye,” was about the burden of consciousness, although it’s also Plato’s allegory of the cave, in that consciousness is something we should strive for. I’m getting emotional just thinking about it, but the end of this movie is the confrontation with a next level of consciousness you just won’t achieve. 

Objects are loaded in these films, because what I’m so interested in is akin to how Bresson outlines a full world of entropy au hasard. His aim is finding grace amidst the chaos, which is incredibly hard. For me, the entropy is a point to study how we all have this alienation, which maybe is inherent to being a human being or is maybe indicative of capitalism in American society and suburbia. There’s a great deal of alienation going on all the time. And the camera can become aware of it; it can go from alienation to separation, in the Lacanian term. That’s an amazing opportunity. 

The camera can capture the objects passing from one sphere of alienation of a person to another. In “Ham on Rye,” it’s when we see the pig; in this movie, it’s the red-wrapped gift and the salami sticks, and these objects are representative of entire worlds floating around you that you will never ever know about. They will inherently become very loaded, because that’s the reason why I’m making these movies—or one of them, rather.

There’s a manuscript, left on a table in the hall by Uncle Ray (Tony Savino), that’s eventually read aloud, which makes for one of the film’s most unexpected moments. Where did that text come from? It’s so beautiful. 

Eric Berger, my co-writer, wrote it. What’s funny is that he wrote it, I didn’t even read it, and I was like, “She’ll speak, it’ll get sadder and sadder, and that’ll be the scene.” And when we were editing it, I started crying every time! Some of those lines… I was just like, “Holy s—.” And what’s beautiful is that I don’t know if this character could write like this. You know, I don’t actually think he could. I realized this is another player piano; it’s this dream. It’s more like what he wished it read like. 

You said you didn’t offer the actors too much in terms of psychological portraits of the characters. But these are such fully dimensionalized performances. To what degree did you encourage your actors to bring elements of themselves to these characters? And how much were you seeing them as fully realized characters as opposed to more abstract impressions that the actors fill out?

Bresson emphasizes that translation is never literal. That would be a betrayal. Actually, you have to change things to reach a perfect translation. And we had an idea of these characters. We know them so well. They’re based on these people we know. And then we meet these people who have their own whole worlds. I have to cast someone who has this whole world that I find incredibly beautiful and moving. It’s not going to be the same, but it’s going to make it feel the same. If they can bring in that, they’re good to go. They don’t need to know anything. The cast, at least in films like this, should be a little bit naive and innocent, because they shouldn’t be aware. They should be lost in their own world. Obviously, some of the actors are professionals who know how to get into that. But with a lot of them, I’m just showing you what I love about these people.

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is in theaters Nov. 8, via IFC Films.