Sarah Klein on her documentary film “The Good Mother”

Sarah Klein interview from DocumentaryTech on Vimeo.

Sarah Klein’s “The Good Mother” uses simple but innovative approaches

In the opening moments of Sarah Klein’s The Good Mother, we see a woman applying her makeup as she stares directly into the lens of the camera, talking all the while. Then we see another, followed by snippets of a variety of women fluffing their hair, checking their lipstick and otherwise primping as they talk about the upcoming Mother Of The Year competition, the binding event of Klein’s 70-minute film that explores the notion of motherhood as it is now.

It also breaks the standard subject-talking-to-interviewer interaction so embedded in documentary films. Instead, each subject seems taken up in the task of cosmetics, speaking to someone – maybe even someone behind her, or maybe simply to herself.

The way Klein gets that effect is remarkably simple, and it’s reminiscent of another film in that the low-tech solution can be the best one. I read how in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, the director shot the paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby’s point of view (and its blurred-edged perspective of a man in a hospital bed) by shooting at a 45-degree angle off a mirror (cinematographer Janusz Kaminski also used a bellows lens to play with focus and depth). Klein, to get her arresting effect, shot through a silvered glass, the two-way mirror in which the subject sees only herself while the camera records her actions.

We set up this mirror in our hotel room. We set up lights and we had the camera hidden behind the mirror. We invited a handful of the women to come up and put their makeup on for us. They knew the camera was there, but they couldn’t see it. I didn’t know if this was going to look artificial; I didn’t know if these women were going to relax into it. But the minute they got in front of the mirror, they were in it.

It’s simple but effective, and a way that signals to the viewer that the view on this trip will be a bit different. Klein will eventually let the action unfold at the competition itself, but the buildup to that includes an interview with the Nebraska mother as she sits in a booth in a convenience store/cafe. Klein used the comings and goings of customers and the beeping of the cash register as effects in the woman’s prosaic life, a contrast to the honor the competition seeks to endow.

Indeed, each the featured women is shot in portrait in front of her house. In the background, the husband and child or children are on either side, a kind of triangulation of home, spouse and offspring. Klein did not shoot these herself, but rather hired crews in those locales to shoot them.

I sent five crews out with a production manual. I asked specifically for this shot. I wanted it center-framed, I wanted it right in front of their houses. It didn’t always work out that way because sometimes the shooter thought something else looked better. But the neat thing is that each night after different crews had finished that shot, we got each crew to send emails (with the shot) to the other crews, so each got to see what the other DPs had done. Some people said, “I didn’t get it right; I’m going to do it again, because clearly I see what you guys really want.

Part of that uniformity also came through using similar format, with the primary camera being a Panasonic HVX200, and the look Klein achieved in the film speaks to that camera’s capabilities. Primary colors seem to fit the lives of these mothers.

While the film Klein judiciously avoided making any judgments, Klein had to be mindful that a documentary focusing on a competition can smack of reality-show material if handled poorly. But she wasn’t looking for big moments of conflict, buth rather smaller ones of circumspection and perspective.

These are people who are struggling, who are working hard, who are trying to raise families, and you have to approach it with an open mind and hear what they’re trying to say. I think you can hear it in the interviews.

The film played at the MountainFilm festival in May, and at The Rhode Island International Film Festival in August. Funding for the film, which had a budget of “about $400,000, or maybe the high 300s.” She said she went into the project hoping to raise double that amount.

I think you should always shoot higher. You should go into it believing it’s a big film – that it’s a great topic, that it should get money – “BBC, you should be on board; HBO, you should be on board…” Get that going early. Don’t say, “Oh, I’m going to make it for $150,000 and starve for two years.” I have a camera package and an edit suite, and if I got people together who worked for free, and shot in a more local setting, you can make films for almost nothing. I have some other projects where there are festivals I really like, where I might be doing a short I won’t make money on, just to be part of that.

The financing came from a French company, Compagnie des Phares et Balises.

In the beginning, the interest was “Oh, these crazy American mothers. ” But at the end of the day, I think it’s a portrait of America, and that’s what the commissioning editors saw once they viewed the footage. We’ve actually sold this film in France and Germany and Finland and Belgium and Israel and Greece. It’s crazy. But I haven’t sold it in the U.S.

Trailer for “The Good Mother”

The Good Mother – Mountainfilm 2009 Trailer from Mountainfilm in Telluride on Vimeo.