Hilary Brougher: Filmmaker

Hilary Brougher is the writer/director of the feature films The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997), Stephanie Daley (2006), and South Mountain (2019). Those films explore a diversity of subjects: time travel, infanticide, and the breakup of a marriage. Her films have been shown at numerous festivals, winning her awards for screenwriting and directing. Brougher is credited as the writer (but calls herself the story consultant) for the documentary Nothing Without Us: The Women Who Will End AIDS (2017). She is Professor of Professional Practice in the MFA Film Program at Columbia University. She is also at work with Maria Rosenblum on Striper: No Art Without Life, a documentary revolving around the artist Jay Rosenblum and his family. Brougher moved to Westbeth in 2016 with her husband Ethan Mass and their twins, Violet and Guthrie.

Terry Stoller spoke with Hilary Brougher on Jan. 3, 2023, about her introduction to filmmaking; her choice to be an independent filmmaker; her feature films, including her interest in sci-fi/genre themes; her experiences at the Sundance Labs; her philosophy on working with actors; her teaching at Columbia; and her current documentary project.

Terry Stoller: You’ve said that you started out with short films. Were these at the School of Visual Arts?

Hilary Brougher: Well, even before that. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, my parents took me to a local art-house cinema, and we’d watch movies. I loved to paint, I loved to write, and I thought, I want to try and make films. I bought a new Super 8 camera from a neighbor and tried to figure out how to use it from a book. I made little out-of-focus films in the basement with friends, family, neighbors—that kind of thing. I was doing it in this kind of solitary, arty way. I’m really grateful for that experience. It gave me a sense that I could make my own language and do this on my own, which is an unusual philosophy to have toward filmmaking because it requires so much money. It’s built into an economic machine that is formidable. So I’m grateful I had that time of playfulness in the basement with my Super 8 films.

Were you always intending to be an independent filmmaker?

I was. When I was a teenager, Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch were making waves, and the term independent filmmaker was coming into vogue. The reality is even if a film is produced with private equity and made on your own, it then has to feed into this larger distribution machine. So you might be directing independently, but you’re rarely distributing independently. I didn’t know any of that at the time. I thought, Oh, I can do this. And I really had no understanding of the gender disparity. I naively thought that maybe women just don’t try. Now I know very differently. There’s been a long history of gender bias in the industry of American filmmaking.

You must have realized fairly soon that you need collaborators to make a film.

Yes, I did figure out that I needed collaborators. One of the wonderful things about filmmaking is, it’s like a block party. If you set up a microphone, people will come and sing and dance and join you. Finding collaborators is at the heart of it. I don’t think I knew that at the very beginning, but I’ve learned that’s probably one of the things that attracted me because it was a way to interface with other people and build a community and build relationships.

Searching for capital for funding certainly was much harder than I realized it would be. We’re at a very interesting moment now, and that was one reason South Mountain, my most recent film, was made the way it was. The cost of production has come down steeply. I’m actually at this point not quite going back to Super 8 in the basement but beginning to think more along those lines. At the beginning of my career, you had to buy film; you had to have access to an editing machine. Real capital was needed for production for the technical aspects. Now you need capital to pay people and sustain the production in other ways.

You never thought that you wanted to work for a big film company?

I probably should have. With my first feature The Sticky Fingers of Time, I was surprised when larger distributors weren’t interested, because I thought that would be my on-ramp to success. There was another low budget sci-fi film I overlapped with in the festival circuit called Pi that got on the on-ramp and did well. I was processing these lessons as I went along. With each feature film I’ve made I’ve learned something new. And with each feature film the landscape has been different in terms of the business and in terms of the public. Ultimately, I’m really lucky because I’ve gotten to make three features I like, and I’ve gotten to work with a lot of amazing people, and I get to teach incredible filmmakers, and I get to still make things. I think there was a brief moment after Stephanie Daley where I was interested in making more commercial works. After I tried that, I felt like, this is a lot of pain and I’m not doing great work. Am I needed here? So I decided that I want to make work that helps me grow as a person and helps other people grow, or gives them a point of connection from which to grow. That’s really the only reason it’s worth doing. If I was going to win my bread by filmmaking alone, I would need to make very different choices. But because I teach full-time at this wonderful program, Columbia’s MFA Film Program, I can pick and choose and make the projects that are wonderfully unknown and new even to me.

How did you come to make your first feature?

I was working on features as a production assistant and in various capacities seeing how sets work. I was also learning how to write feature scripts, and that was fairly self-taught. It took me a long time to learn how to make them. Eventually I ended up with a company called Good Machine. They were an important, wonderful independent film company. And they ended up saying, OK, we’re going to make The Sticky Fingers of Time.

[The Sticky Fingers of Time, 1997, was filmed in Williamsburg and the East Village. Set in the 1950s and the 1990s, two writers, one published, one aspiring (played by Terumi Matthews and Nicole Zaray), meet in the time travel “adventure”; a mystery unfolds in the effort to rewrite and undo the murder of the 1950s author.]

Why did you write a sci-fi film for your first feature?

At the time I thought, We’re going to shoot this on Hi8 video, which was the cheapest thing you could shoot on. And we’ll shoot on weekends and shoot in New York. What am I going to make in New York on Hi8 video on the weekends that’s going to feel like an escape, that’s going to feel magical? I thought, What about time travel? Because that’s what editing is. You rearrange time. Maybe I can do a time travel with very little money, and that will be my way into a new way of looking at New York City, exploring the themes I wanted to talk about. That will be fun for me, to try and do sci-fi without any special effects or budget, and it’s really about reordering time. As it turns out, I didn’t make the film on High 8. We shot it on Super 16 film. I didn’t really understand how to write a low budget feature at the time, so although we didn’t make it for very much money, there were too many locations, etc., etc. The film is basically about creativity. Under the friendship, love story, murder mystery, it’s a story about trust and creativity and making things as a grownup.

Hilary Brougher on the set of The Sticky Fingers of Time (far left, Terumi Matthews).

I wanted to ask you about the casting. Unlike your subsequent films, the Sticky Fingers actors weren’t particularly famous; although Terumi Matthews had starred as Madonna in a TV film and James Urbaniak has had quite a career since.

That film early on was a lot through friends and contacts; we did have a good casting director. But when I think about the people who finally came together: Terumi Matthews was a close friend of a producer on the film named Jean Castelli, who’s also been a producer on South Mountain. Jean was really important on connecting Good Machine to the film. There were a lot of these mutual friendships, or I thought to myself, This person seems interesting. The other films I’ve made have been more traditionally cast. They’re slightly larger budget. Stephanie Daley obviously was built with Tilda Swinton coming on and then Amber Tamblyn coming on, and then we cast the rest of the roles around them.

You didn’t have these actors in mind when you were writing the film?

No. Every now and then when you’re writing you think about actors. One of the things I find fun about filmmaking is the transition from what you think you know about what this film is going to be to what it becomes. And the idea that an actor is going to take hold of a role and make it their own is essential. It’s essential that it get taken away from me. It’s essential that it becomes theirs. I would prefer to always be surprised in the casting process. Sometimes it’s about who’s available when. There have been hot bitter tears I’ve wept because a certain actor wasn’t available at a certain time. And then a week later, it’s fine. You find someone else who is a revelation. When we see films about filmmaking, they’re often about people struggling to control. Like any other director, I love to control reality and direct, but at the same time I also enjoy the conversations where you don’t know what’s coming, you don’t know what’s going to work out, you don’t know who’s going to be right, and yet you enter into that process anyway!

Did you find that to be true in your first film?

I think with Sticky I thought I knew more than I did, and I thought I needed to know more than I did. The interesting thing about collaboration is you really don’t have to know everything. But what you have to know is whom to trust and how to trust, what questions to ask, how not to make assumptions. I would say for Sticky, I was young and nervous when I made that film, and with each film I’ve become more comfortable with my imperfections. More comfortable with my faith in others to do good work. You’re collaborating with hundreds of people, so not everything is always going to be great. But you can learn from all of it, and all of it can make the film a better film.

Director of Photography Ethan Mass on the set of South Mountain and making a small space work.

You made two of the films with your husband, cinematographer Ethan Mass.

Ethan filmed The Sticky Fingers of Time and South Mountain. One of the biggest things that happened in between is we had our twins, Violet and Guthrie. And the reality is production is so intense you can’t be fully in filmmaking and be fully there for the kids. With Stephanie Daley, one person had to be home with the kids. When we made South Mountain what was interesting is the kids by then were teenagers, so they could come along. It was important that the production was at a scale that it was family friendly. It had to be designed to be that way so that Ethan and I could work together again. It’s very interesting working with Ethan. We do trust each other, and we’re very different people. The joy of collaboration is you can access the talents of people who are different from you. It’s not about finding people who think exactly like you.

[Stephanie Daley, 2006, was filmed in the Catskills, New York. A teenager who is accused of infanticide is questioned by a forensic psychologist who is pregnant and has her own backstory concerning childbirth. The teen’s story is revealed in flashbacks as she begins to open up and relate the events leading to the birth and death of her baby. Tilda Swinton played the psychologist and Amber Tamblyn, the teen.]

I read that Stephanie Daley, your feature after Sticky Fingers, started out as a genre film, but instead you created a very human story.

Between Sticky Fingers and Stephanie Daley, there are a number of films that didn’t get made. Screenwriting is by its nature incomplete. I love to write, but you need someone to make that film, or it does just become a canvas that gets painted over. There were more genre film scripts I was trying to make. Stephanie Daley being more of a drama and having this dramatic set of thematics—young woman accused of infanticide, another woman grappling with pregnancy and a stillbirth—was a departure for me. I was just trying something. I hadn’t had luck with the follow-ups to Sticky Fingers of Time. A number of years had passed. I hadn’t gotten another feature off the ground. So I wrote this other thing as a last gambit to see what it was and if anybody was interested. The Sundance Labs made sure that Stephanie Daley got made by connecting me with producers. But it was interesting because if you were to line up all the scripts, that would probably seem like the least likely to get made from today’s perspective. But at the time it was the one that caught people’s interest, maybe because it was singular.

You explained earlier why you chose sci-fi for Sticky Fingers. I wanted to know if that was because it was part of the zeitgeist then?

I think at the time I never saw myself as becoming someone who would write serious work. I wanted to make playful, inventive films. By the time I made Stephanie Daley, the irony is suddenly I was the one making these serious films. South Mountain is in that vein too. Again there were films in my mind that never saw the light of day, scripts that never got made that were more playful. And that is how I identified, as someone who wanted to be playful, who wanted to surprise people and create an experience they didn’t expect. I hope South Mountain and Stephanie Daley also do this in my later more dramatic ilk.

It’s not like it was a market decision. Filmmaking is so hard and takes so long. My experience is it doesn’t matter what the film is about or how big it is or how edgy it seems. You make the film you have to make, the one that insists it get made. There’s no rhyme or reason beyond that. I found that for me the film I’m going to make, even if it’s the most unfinished or seems unmarketable, is the one that I have the strongest feeling about.

Left: Amber Tamblyn and Tilda Swinton in Stephanie Daley. Right: Denis O’Hare and Tilda Swinton in Stephanie Daley.

You assembled a magnificent cast for Stephanie Daley and South Mountain. Is that because of the producers associated with those films?

To talk about Stephanie Daley first, I think that Tilda Swinton coming on early was a godsend because people want to work with her, actors, crew, me. That attracted a lot of actors, and it was also made at a moment in New York, where for whatever reason, a lot of magnificent actors were available, like Denis O’Hare, Novella Nelson, Melissa Leo. All these people were doing a lot of work in theatre and on television, but they were around for film. When it came time for South Mountain, television was booming, cable series and so forth; we had an extraordinary cast, but I was much more on edge about whether anybody’s schedule would work out.

I understand why you made South Mountain up at your mother’s house in the Catskills. Why was Stephanie Daley also in the Catskills?

I am from upstate New York. The way I make films, practical and creative have to work together. They aren’t really separable in conceiving a film, so I’ve always written to resource to some degree. By the time we made Stephanie Daley, my twins were 3½ here in the city, so I knew I wanted to film within a few hours of New York. I knew it would be a lot cheaper and easier to shoot outside of New York City, and it was. At the time filming in Ulster County and Greene County was affordable, but now it’s actually fairly expensive to film there. And I thought with Stephanie’s story, she wasn’t a city girl, she was an upstate girl. She’s not me per se, but that’s the experience of adolescence that I understood and could write to.

I’ve read that you went to a progressive school. Did you have experience with that world of religious people as portrayed in the film?

Beyond the tiny bubble I’m in now, America is still fairly religious, including New York. The world of Stephanie Daley was akin to one I knew. Her family wasn’t my family, her experience wasn’t mine, but I felt I knew it well enough and knew the feeling of it that I could write to it. Sticky Fingers of Time was a love letter to the city. I was still fairly new to the city at the time. With later films, more and more I want to get back to nature. Most of that is going to be Ulster, Greene County. As much as my films are about people, it’s very hard for me to think about telling stories without nature being part of the picture.

Naian González Norvind and Violet Rea in South Mountain.

You’ve said that the script for Stephanie Daley got developed at Sundance Labs.

Not only did they help me complete myself as a screenwriter, they also taught me a lot about working with actors. On Sticky Fingers of Time, my actors were wonderful, but I didn’t really know what I was doing and how I was doing it. More to the point, the secret of good directing is to stay out of the way, most of the time—let actors do their thing, while providing some inspiration and some guard rails and some guidance. At the directing labs, I was able to find a framework for how to approach working with actors.

In terms of the length of time, almost ten years, between films, you’ve said that between Sticky Fingers and Stephanie Daley you were writing scripts, but those got put aside, maybe forever. What were you doing between Stephanie Daley and South Mountain?

Between Sticky Fingers and Stephanie Daley, I was trying to make the films that didn’t get made, and then I had my twins and was home with them full-time for two years. The irony is I thought I was done. Somehow Stephanie Daley did get made, and that put me back on track. After Stephanie Daley, I did think, What am I going to do next? I had a lot of meetings with various people. The film I made after that [Innocence, 2013, an adaptation of a Jane Mendelsohn novel, commercially produced] honestly didn’t work out, but it was a very interesting project and very galvanizing. It’s a film I don’t feel that I truly directed, but I don’t want to get too much into that because I’m grateful for what I learned in that process. That experience was hard; what came out of it was valuable. Then South Mountain was conceived within a few years of Innocence, in response to my previous experience.

And you had started at Columbia University in 2009.

I was teaching full-time. One of the other reasons South Mountain was made the way it was, on such a compact budget, was I also felt I didn’t want to wait ten years to make another film. After Innocence, I needed to make a film and be assured that I could make it, and not have to wait a decade to find enough money to do it.

[South Mountain, 2019, is set in upstate New York and was filmed at the home of Brougher’s mother. It is centered on a family breaking apart, parents separating, their teenagers growing up, with one moving on, and a close family friend threatened with serious illness. The beauty of the natural environment is the backdrop to the drama. Talia Balsam played Lila, the mother, and Scott Cohen played her husband, Edgar.]

From what I’ve read, again it sounded as though you were going to do a type of genre film.

It did begin as a genre film. And honestly it probably would have had a more successful distribution life if it was a genre film. The seed of South Mountain began with the idea of an agoraphobic woman accused of a murder. She has to leave her house to prove that she’s not guilty and puzzle it out from the things that trap her. When I dug into the characters, I came down to a simple film about a change in a family and how it impacts this woman. She is still stuck in her house for most of the film. She’s not necessarily agoraphobic anymore, and there’s not a murder anymore.

South Mountain cast and crew.

How did you get your mother to agree to give her home over to the film for South Mountain? 

She’s a painter and a poet and wonderful. In hindsight, she probably thinks, What did I do? I asked early on, and she was all for it. At the time it made sense to me and to her. And I think she’s really proud of it. A couple of years after we made the film, we decided it was time to sell the house and let go. And in an interesting way, the film enabled us to think about change and to move on.

From top: Naian González Norvind, Talia Balsam, Andrus Nichols, and Violet Rea in South Mountain.

Many of the moments in the film are dramatic but done in a low-key way. However I read that you had the idea you would end it with some kind of explosion in the sauna in the shed near the house.

One of the challenges of this film was how do I keep an audience engaged in these kind of family problems. How do I keep people engaged in the drama of it and in the “What’s going to happen next?” And how do I infuse this small drama with the power it deserves? One way to look at it is to say, this is a film about a woman who’s lonely and depressed. Another is, here is a woman valiantly fighting not to be alone, and my task is to substantiate that and make that physical, visceral, and moving. I think with films, the job is to show people things that are painful, to lovingly and respectfully get past people’s defenses. We have to create things like tension—“What’s going to happen next?” Or humor, “This is so funny and weird, I’m going to keep watching.” Or suspense. There are a lot of horror film tropes in this quiet drama. It’s a very subtle film, but it has a lot of humor and horror film devices. Of course, horror film devices are also strongly used in Stephanie Daley, like in the bathroom birthing scene.

What horror film tropes are in South Mountain?

For me, at least, a lot of the score. You maybe don’t realize the score is scary, but it is. There are certain scenes where people are watching and being watched or pursuing through the house—I would be thinking about that kind of buildup of tension. It’s pretty subtle. Maybe I’ve overstated it. So I was always thinking about how do we make this film bigger than the house without going too far from the house. Part of it is that birth scene. The film doesn’t have a murder; it has this spectacle moment of birth seen on a cell phone call. I think that charges the whole film up. And I thought it needed something at the end. The conventional wisdom around screenplays is you have a big dramatic turning point, a big third act thing. So the sauna fire that wasn’t was going to be that big third act thing. The great joke is that in finishing the film, our tremendous third act turning point is now a cutaway of the woods. For me, it did everything it needed to do. We didn’t know that’s all it would take until we got to the editing room. Again, that’s part of the discovery. Just like actors are going to help you discover the characters, writing and editing complete each other. You’re not done writing till the picture is locked and it’s done.

Talia Balsam on set and in South Mountain.

I saw the end turning point as the tea party outdoors, with Lila putting thirteen cubes of sugar into her daughter’s teacup. It was so moving to me that Lila did what her daughter requested.

That’s the solution. Where the sauna caught fire in the script is where now, in the final cut, Lila goes out on the porch after saying goodbye to her family and looks in the woods and looks sad. What used to be a scene that was much bigger and darker is now instead a dark moment, and then she figures out how to get out of the darkness.

Both actresses, Talia Balsam and Naian González Norvind, are terrific in that tea party scene.

It was an amazing cast that came together for South Mountain. I feel like a lot of it is luck and persistence. I worked a long time on the script, and these actors came ready. They did the work too.

I was curious whether your being connected with Columbia helped you make these connections for your film.

Extraordinary alums of the program came and helped make this film. That was one way Columbia was so important. The other way was watching my students make films reminded me, Hey, I can go make a film. For not much money, I can make a film in the spirit of what they’re doing. Being around the energy of these dedicated emergent filmmakers is hugely energizing.

How was it to work with your kids on South Mountain? Did they do what you wanted them to do?

I love what they did. I wanted them to bring themselves and share themselves because I thought, they’re beautiful and they’re meaningful to me and I’d like to share this process with them. I think it was probably hard for them to have Mom as the director. But we were able to work with that. Both kids were in that adolescent teen time. They weren’t fantastically thrilled, but they were curious and willing. I also wanted them in it because of it being about their grandma’s house, and I felt like this film is not about our family, but it’s of our family. They were wonderful on set. They were not only acting those small roles, but they were also helping, cleaning up and being present, like working as production assistants and cooking. Violet did a lot of cooking. They were learning what a film crew does, and that was wonderful for them to have that learning experience and for them to see their dad work and me work and these actors work. It’s not one of those things you can duplicate. It’s a particular moment. South Mountain is a very particular film where a lot of things came together. Probably because it was done on such a small budget on such a personal location.

From left: Guthrie Mass, Violet Rea, Andrus Nichols, and Naian González Norvind in South Mountain.

I assume you’ll have to wait for your next sabbatical to make your next film.

Right now I’m exploring Striper with Maria Rosenblum. It is a documentary that has a little bit of an essay structure to it. That’s what I want to keep doing—being curious and making films, hopefully a little more often. The model of independent feature filmmaking, where you have to raise a lot of money, can take years.

What is the meaning of the subtitle, No Art Without Life?

We’re still really bringing out what this feature documentary is about. One thing I know it’s about is what art making and family mean to each other. And in this particular case, it’s the story of the two daughters and their mother, the wife of the artist who died in 1989. He’s the central artist figure of the film, but he’s gone. His absence is a huge part of this story, but at the same time the film is about their whole life, all of them being connected to art in one way or another.

Hilary Brougher on the set of Striper.

It’s not about Jay Rosenblum? The main title, Striper, seems to refer to the kind of artwork he did.

That’s one of the things we’re working out. There are these beautiful paintings he left behind in this interrupted career—you have this interesting investigation through the paintings and the family members. He’s still at the heart of this, but it’s more about the world that continues around his life and death. I am excited to feel that with the documentary, film is in my life every day. It has been really interesting, and it’s kind of a radical departure in that to make my other films I would spend a few years writing. This film: one, it’s co-directed, so I’m really collaborating on a level I haven’t yet, which I’m enjoying. And two, we filmed for five years and have a big pile of footage. We know there are a number of moving stories, but right now, we’re creating the script in the editing room.

For me, teaching, making a feature, or making this documentary, all of them feel very connected. Teaching is a lot like directing; you’re trying to bring out the best in people and gently lead them away from some of the habits that aren’t helpful and lead them toward habits and questions that are helpful. That’s exactly what directing is. And with the documentary, I’m finding it’s the same thing. You’re directing story and finding story and letting other things fall away.

Credits: Ethan Mass photos: Hilary Brougher; South Mountain cast and crew photo: Allistair Ferrant; Talia Balsam on set photo: Hilary Brougher. All images courtesy of Hilary Brougher.

For more information about Brougher, go to hilarybrougher.com; trailers for her films are available on YouTube.

Terry Stoller is a Westbeth resident and author of Tales of the Tricycle Theatre.

Profiles in Art, Copyright 2023 Terry Stoller and Westbeth Artists Residents Council