In a time when there is legitimate concern about the lack of visibility for women filmmakers, Eliza Hittman’s work is especially important. But the truth is, It Felt Like Love is an exciting project in any era, and Hittman is a rising talent worthy of our attention because of her contributions to film, and not just films by women. Still, one cannot turn a blind eye to the particular stories this Columbia University film professor is telling—there is a unique, feminine voice to which she provides a platform, and that visibility is crucial to the world of film. Paste caught up with Hittman to talk French film, hip-hop, and cringe-worthy sexual experiences that sometimes make for great movie scenes.
Paste: I know others have compared It Felt Like Love to Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, and I was immediately reminded of that film from some of your opening shots on the beach. Can you talk a little about the works that might have inspired this story?
Hittman: I was definitely inspired by that whole movement of French filmmakers who explored sex in their work. In American films, there’s this sense that the filmmaker wants you to be attracted to the experience, or aroused, and there’s this perpetuation of romantic ideas of love. I think I was attracted to Catherine Breillat’s depiction of these really young girls who were aggressively sexual in a way that was different—not meant to arouse an audience. Obviously, the films are visually and thematically different. She works a lot in long takes, and I had 14-year-olds, and a really different set of legality issues to deal with (laughs). You can’t quite do what they can do over there. I’m influenced by films that are subjective and that have female protagonists. I also like films that are about misfits and wayward youth.
Paste: Your main character, Lila, is not the teenage girl we’re used to seeing on screen. We spend much of the film feeling embarrassed for her, even if we can identify. So maybe some of that embarrassment is a reflection of our ability to identify.
Hittman: That was always a part of my mission statement—that the film would connect audiences to that feeling of embarrassment and shame because they know they’ve misbehaved (laughs). She’s very much a reflection of all of us, male or female. I’d like to think people can identify with her.
Paste: I know you’ve said that it’s important for filmmakers to draw on those cringe-worthy moments when they’re creating. Can you talk a little bit about how that idea played into your writing Lila?
Hittman: You have those moments in your experiences that are embarrassing or shameful and you either have to recover from them or you block them out. Those interesting moments are often omitted from films. One moment that was definitely drawn from my experience was when Lila was watching the porn and this woman was touching herself in a really aggressive way. I remember the first time I saw porn, and it was dramatically different from seeing a pornographic image. As a teenager, I said something totally embarrassing in a room full of people watching pornography—something that clearly exposed me as inexperienced, not just sexually but as a consumer!
So that moment definitely makes the film authentic. But I wouldn’t say the film is autobiographical.
Paste: It’s important that you do give her a moment of triumph, and I love the ending where we get to see the dance recital. It’s this great thing that has nothing to do with the boys of the story. In your original drafts of the script, did it always end with this scene?
Hittman: No, it didn’t. The dancing came into the film a little bit later. In the beginning, I only knew that the friend was a dancer. Originally, Lila would go and pick Chiara up at dance class and sit outside the rehearsal room at the tail end of the class, and it was always about Lila’s observations of her friend’s sexuality. When I was younger, I never took dance, and I always thought that women who did had this connection to their bodies. They knew how to carry themselves, how to move and be seductive, and draw attention to themselves. That was always a part of the friend, and not Lila.
But when I was casting I started looking in dance studios for the part of Chiara, and I went to a dance studio called Albee Dance Studio. The girls performed for me, and I was very taken by the performance—how dynamic it was, and aggressive and sexual. It had all of these elements I’d been thinking about. So I decided to cast a girl from that group, and I asked her friends if they’d want to be in the film also, so I expanded that element of the film but in a way that is unconventional for coming-of-age stories. Because they never talk about dance classes! It just establishes another way that young girls know each other, but we never see these girls rehearsing, or working towards a goal. I thought there was a more interesting way to use the dance to communicate these things and to show the layers of their relationship.