A Magician Never Reveals Their Secrets: Carlo Mirabella-Davis On Swallow
We had the privilege of chatting with writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis on the phone about his narrative feature debut, Swallow, starring Haley Bennett. The film is a provocative and squirm-inducing psychological thriller loaded with social commentary, so we naturally had a lot to discuss.
Before Swallow, you’d done a short, a feature-length documentary, and even dabbled in cartooning. How have those endeavors and pursuits prepared you for this film?
Interesting question. Yeah, I started drawing when I was very young. My mother would teach Dante and Boccaccio in Italy, and the school she taught at would pay for us to go to Italy. So, I spent a lot of time as kid drawing frescoes of hell in my sketchbooks, and I think looking at those Catholic frescoes — with all their intensity and pain and pathos and vibrant colors — definitely had a profound impact on me and made me want to draw comic books. I found comic books — especially underground comic books — to be a fascinating medium for storytelling.
I spent a lot of time in my room with ink all over my fingers trying to get one frame absolutely right, and now I storyboard all my movies with my cinematographer, so there’s a parallel there. I was very lucky to have an amazing cinematographer on this film, Katelin Arizmendi, and we storyboarded entire film together. We sat and drew everything out, and that was very similar my hours hunched over a drawing board.
And in terms of the documentary side of things, you need an incredible amount of patience — especially observational documentary. You have to wait around for drama to happen, for life to happen. You can’t write it; you have to wait for drama to manifest in front of the screen in real life. And so you become highly attuned to what real emotional human experience are when you make documentaries because you’re seeing them happen in all of their intensity and amidst all the mundanity of filming your characters do nothing for hours and hours and hours. When that lightning strikes, you feel an intensity.
So, yeah, I think those two things definitely influenced my immersion into narrative.
The film has a deep personal connection to you as well. It was inspired somewhat by your grandmother, is that right?
Yes, that’s correct! The film was inspired by my grandmother, who was a homemaker during the 1950s in an unhappy marriage. She developed various rituals of control. She was an obsessive handwasher, and she would go through 4 cakes of soap a day and 12 bottles of rubbing alcohol a week trying to sanitize her life — I think she was looking for order in a life that she felt increasingly powerless in.
My grandfather, at the behest of the doctors, put her into a mental institution where she received electroshock therapy, insulin shock therapy (which is where they induce comas), and a lobotomy that they botched, since she lost her sense of taste and smell. I always felt like my grandmother was being punished in a way for not living up to society’s gender expectations of what they felt a wife and a mother should be, and I wanted to make a film about that.
Unlike your grandmother’s condition, the film features a condition called pica, a psychological disorder characterized by an appetite for substances that are largely non-nutritive. What kind of research did you do to learn more about that condition?
I remember seeing all the contents of someone’s stomach with pica, all these objects that were surgically removed, arranged on a table like an archeological dig, and I was fascinated. I wanted to know what drew the patient to these artifacts. It almost felt like a holy communion, something mystical.
So I began to do a lot of research, and I reached out to the world’s expert on pica, Dr. Rachel Bryant-Waugh, and she graciously agreed to be a consultant. I sent her a draft of the script, and she wrote a case study for Hunter, as if Hunter was one of her patients, which was a really important document for us. I also based the condition a little bit on my own OCD.
Even though the compulsion feels obscure, I wanted people to think, ‘Well, I wouldn’t swallow a dangerous object, but I understand what she’s feeling and what makes her do that, and I can relate to that.” And hopefully, that way the story feels universal.
It definitely does, I think, and now that you mention this case study, it has me curious what kinds of granular details may have been in the document. Is there anything you can share with us?
Well, I recall that the document was kind of an impression on Hunter, about what [Dr. Bryant-Waugh] felt she was going through and whether she felt what Hunter was doing was realistic or not — and she felt that it was realistic.
There was a scene that I actually cut out of the script that Dr. Bryant-Waugh commented on involving a soldier. There was a scene that we cut where Hunter swallows a small plastic soldier toy, and I remember Dr. Bryant-Waugh fixating on that and talking about how she felt that it symbolized Hunter ingesting a kind of strength, looking for a sort of power. I thought that was interesting, even though we did wind up cutting that it.
On the topic of things Hunter does swallow. How did you pick the objects she’d be putting into her body?
This is a film about small things and about the power of talisman and symbols, so I wanted every object to be fiercely specific and for each object to represent a different emotionally memory for Hunter, in a way.
So, the marble, if you listen to the sound design, you hear the beach and sounds of people on a warm, sunny day on the beach. The way that Haley is looking at the marble, you sense nostalgia for a time of happiness. And there’s something magical about the marble; it reflects light, it’s prismatic.
We tried to give each one this emotional texture. So that idea that there’s a trigger that happens before every one of the incidents and that each one has its own flavor with something that needed to be worked on was something I wanted to be clear in the film.
I’m always interested in the movie magic that goes into things like having a character ingest things that are dangerous — because it looks so real here. Did you achieve this by pantomime or did the prop department have to whip up some sort of edible swallowing items?
A magician never reveal their secrets, my friend. I will never talk about how we made those things, but let me just say, they’re illusions. I’m glad they felt real to you, but I will not divulge any further.
I can respect that. Speaking of real, Haley Bennett gives a tour de force performance on the level of Woman Under the Influence or Rosemary’s Baby. How did you get connected to her, and did you have to do any convincing to get her on board?
Well, I’m so glad you feel that way. I completely agree. I think her performance is just out of this world, and, you know, she’s so good with layers of emotion.
Hunter wears multiple masks throughout the film: there’s that first mask, which is like her plastered smile reflecting normalcy and what her husband wants her to be; there’s that second mask, which is her pain, her doubt; and her third mask, which his her true self, her primal self, threatening to emerge.
Haley can give you all of those emotional textures instantaneously with just the touch of her hair or the twitch of her eyes, and she poured every iota of her soul into this part. I knew that I needed an actor who would invest everything into the role and someone who could bring the audience into their internal cosmology — because the film does go into some very unusual and threatening places and really needs an actor who’s an empath, who can really sculpt emotion on their face and bring audiences into their world.
I’d seen Haley in The Girl on the Train, and I just thought she was amazing in it. I watched her other roles, and I thought, ‘I wanna to see her in a lead role’. I suspected she was looking for a part that would be really bold and unusual and powerful, and I thought I’d take a chance. I wrote her a passionate letter offering her the part, and I thought, you know, she’s gonna turn me down and that’ll be that. But to my incredible joy she decided to meet with me.
We sat down, and right away, there was this telepathic bond between us. It was a real meeting of the minds, and we instantly had wonderful rapport and collaboration about the character, and it just became clear that we wanted to make this movie together.
So, that’s how it happened, and we’re so appreciative that she decided to take the part. She’s also an executive producer on the film, and she was extremely generous with her time and her energy. We’re so fortunate that she decided to bring Hunter to life.
The story takes a lot of interesting swerves, especially in its last act. Did you know early on where it would end or was it more a discovery process getting to the film’s final moments?
I knew I wanted that climax to happen, that conclusion — there’s a big scene at the end, and I won’t spill the beans, but I always wanted that to happen — however, the final final ending, that was a big question mark. One of the things they don’t always tell you in film school is: if you want to make a great film, you’ve got to have amazing producers. So, I asked my friends, ‘So, who are the best producers in the business?’ And they said, ‘Mollye Asher and Mynette Louie, but you’ll never get them.’ I was like, well, I’m gonna try, and amazingly, both of them decided to work on the film.
It was really during the rewrites of the script — we did a lot of rewrites and we talked a lot about the ending — that that final ending emerged. They had some amazing notes, and in the end — I was say too much about what it is, but — there’s a final moment that I think really gives a beautiful ending beat to end the film on. So it was a journey. We settled on that ending about a month before production.
What do you hope people take away from the film?
Well it’s a movie about a woman who is in a world that seems like it bring her joy on the surface, but the more time she spends in it, she begins to realize she’s kind of a prisoner in this life, that everyone around her is sort of telling who to be and has all these expectations of what they want her to be. And she begins to see that this family is kind of using her like a vessel, that she is, in a way, augmenting her husband’s life, who sees kind of like an ornament, much like the objects she’s consuming.
Of course, she represses that misgiving, and then puts on that attitude of ‘everything’s fine, there is no problem’, and then it comes out in this unusual compulsion. And the compulsion itself starts as a quiet rebellion against this patriarchal structure, and like a pebble rolling down a hill creates an avalanche, it leads her on this journey to discover what she really wants and who she really is.
I hope that the film makes people feel seen. I hope that it’s a little shocking and startling, and I hope that those moments of horror and those moments of intensity can facilitate an emotional catharsis. I think movies — and in many ways horror films — because they’re so powerful and emotionally visceral can cause audiences to connect with that and to see their fears manifested on the screen so that those fears and anxieties can become more like medicine.
I believe that horror movies can increase empathy and fight prejudice. There’s so many amazing horror being made these days, like Get Out, The Babadook, Hereditary; they’re genre films but taking on these fascinating and extremely vital social issues.
Since you mentioned Get Out. I heard you went to high school with Jordan Peele.
That’s right!
That’s really cool. Were you guys pretty close?
Yeah. I mean, I was about 15 and Jordan was 16, and he invited me over to watch two movies he thought I would like, The Shining and Akira. We sat in his apartment, and watched both of those movies back to back, and I was just floored by their psychological intricacy and their power and dread, and I thought, ‘My god, yeah, motion pictures, this is the medium of the moment.’
Jordan has always been such an inspiration to me. I’ve followed his career in awe. I mean, he’s made two already legendary horror masterpieces, Get Out and Us. And, yeah, we were close. It was wonderful to know him then, and he’s been deeply inspiring that he showed me those films and that he was always such a brilliant, creative, fascinating, bold artist, who’s stopped at nothing to bring powerful, world-changing stories to the screen.
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