In January 2012, a sixteen-year-old Dutch girl became the youngest person to sail around the world on a solo mission. She celebrated this great feat by getting back in her boat shortly thereafter, and returning to the waters. Laura Dekker’s story is beyond remarkable—she fought the Dutch courts when they attempted to legally block her from making the voyage, and won the case in July 2010. She set off on her epic journey just one month later, though she’d been preparing for years. Laura, who spent the first four years of her life at sea, took two years to circumnavigate the world by herself. But she wasn’t alone. As Dekker achieved her dream of a life at sea, exploring new countries and experiencing the wonders of places like the Galápagos Islands, filmmaker Jillian Schlesinger achieved her own dream of telling a powerful story, like those she’d heard growing up, of Man versus Nature. Although in this case, the man was an adolescent girl, and her voyage—beautifully captured in Schlesinger’s directorial debut, Maidentrip—tells the tale of a person more at odds with land than sea, more comfortable on the water than perhaps anywhere else. Paste caught up with Schlesinger to talk about the adventure of a lifetime, the making of Maidentrip.
Paste: Your father has experience in sailing, right?
Schlesinger: Yes. He dropped out of school in his late teens and early twenties, and built a boat with some friends. They sailed around Central America and a little bit of South America, so I heard a lot of his stories growing up, and it was always very inspiring. From a storytelling perspective, there’s nothing more exciting than the relationship between people and the sea. It comes up time and time again in so many stories that are usually male-dominated, so it was so thrilling to come across this story of a woman—particularly a young woman [Laura]. It was a dream come true.
Paste: Based on that scene with Lauren and the reporter, you can tell that she’s really not interested in the journalistic aspect of her voyage. She doesn’t want to have to explain what she’s doing or why she’s doing it. How were you able to approach her in a way that would make her feel comfortable about working with you on this?
Schlesinger: A lot of it was just instinct, which often comes into play anytime you’re doing something that you haven’t really done before. I had been involved in documentary filmmaking in a lot of different capacities for a long time, but I had never helmed a project in this way. I just went on my basic instincts as a person and I think we were so similar—maybe we didn’t have literal shared experiences, but there were a lot of similar themes in our upbringings and life experiences. I think a lot of those things just helped us establish a relationship that was more about a friendship. The filmmaking and the collaboration was sort of second to that, so our connection very much transcended the typical filmmaker/subject relationship. She would complain to me about journalists (laughs).
And a lot of it was about figuring out her comfort zone and seeing what she responded to in a negative way. I wasn’t going to force her to do something if she didn’t want to do it. She was super-independent and strong-willed, so it made sense to figure out the best way to do it so I could get the content I needed to tell the intimate story that I wanted to tell, and to have it feel really comfortable and natural for her.
Even with the filming, I saw that she had her own way of doing it, and I wasn’t going to interfere with that. She had this beautiful relationship with the camera when she was out at sea and to mess with that would have ruined that friendship that she had with it. So I was just careful to do everything with a lot of respect and a lot of input from Laura. I saw her as an essential collaborator of the film.
Paste: As Laura was making her way around the world, you were traveling as well and meeting up with her at different locations. What was that like—going on your own physical voyage while you were already on this adventure of making a film?
Schlesinger: Oh, that’s a great question! I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that question. It’s something I think so much about and I think it had a huge influence on the film too. In a lot of ways, we went on these very parallel journeys. And I think we were able to really support each other through that.