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“Suspense Comes From Air Conditioning”: Lucy Kerr on Family Portrait
Family Portrait “I thought about The Exterminating Angel,” Lucy Kerr says over coffee as she describes the origins of Family Portrait, her hypnotic feature debut. Indeed, the film’s central conceit hews closely to Luis Buñuel’s 1962 satire, but instead of posh partygoers being inexplicably stuck in a single room, an extended Texas family is unable to get everyone to gather for the titular photo. In particular, Katie’s (Deragh Campbell) pleas for everyone to assemble are frustratingly ignored or otherwise thwarted, especially when the family matriarch (Silvana Jakich) is suddenly nowhere to be found. Wandering around the vast property in search of her mother, Katie seemingly stumbles into a state of fear and confusion as the prospect of taking the following December’s Christmas card dwindles with each passing moment.
Written by Kerr—who appeared on our 25 New Faces of Film list back in 2022—with additional writing by Karlis Bergs (Kerr’s husband as well as the film’s editor) and Rob Rice (who also served as co-producer and directorial adviser), the 72-minute film explores the impermanence of lifelong connections and confounding “need to keep up appearances” in the face of death. The sound design is intentionally elliptical, creating a sonic samsara which represents both the stagnation inherent to emotional repression as well as the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. Per the Edgar Allan Poe quote that opens the film: “Through a circle that ever returneth in / To the self-same spot.” Can we actually break free from familial cycles that we’ve inherited, or are we trapped in the belly of an ouroboros with no hope of escaping?
Family Portrait opens this weekend at Metrograph in New York City via Factory 25. I spoke to Kerr at a Brooklyn cafe the week before her film’s theatrical debut. The following conversation includes the director’s insight on the film’s casting process, how air conditioning became a crucial part of the eerie sound design and how her next feature will focus on debutante balls as “as a very occult kind of ritual.”
Filmmaker: In the press notes, you talk about how the concept for this project was based on your own mother’s obsession with taking the annual Christmas card photo. Did you generally mold the characters in the film around your own family?
Kerr: While I was at CalArts—I guess it was 2018—I went to visit my family at the same location where we shot the film. It’s my grandparents’ old house in the Hill Country on the Guadalupe River. We were taking our Christmas card because it was Thanksgiving, and my mom’s idea that year was that we would all wear matching Christmas-themed outfits, these dresses and suits that have all these crazy patterns of Santa and snowmen. I was shooting something for class, so I brought my camera and tripod, set it up and filmed on that field there. I was trying to take the picture and it took forever. One of my brother-in-laws was kicking around a soccer ball. He didn’t want to be in the picture, so he was making it really difficult to come together. All the kids were being crazy, too. When I saw that footage I was like, “It almost looks like it could be a scene in a film.” Later I thought about The Exterminating Angel, where they’re unable to ever leave the room. It was like we were unable to ever take this picture, so that was kind of the beginning of it.
My mom has this big red book, which is in the film, of Christmas cards from every year since she got married to my dad in the ’70s. It’s this very ornate album of a family institution, so the film is definitely based on my family in that way and then dramatized. I have three sisters who have very different traits from one another. There are also different anecdotes from my family that are in the film, like the Vietnam War picture. They’re peppered in there, alongside the fiction of the mother disappearing. The death of the family member was also based on the fact that many members of my family passed away during the same summer. I feel like it was kind of about our family still trying to go on like, “Everything is great,” still making the family picture happen every year. There are aspects of autobiography that are expanded on, but a lot of it did develop on set by just listening to the actors tell their own stories, some of which got put into the film. It’s a hybrid.
Filmmaker: What was the general casting process like? You have the excellent Deragh Campbell in the lead role, and I wonder how the rest of the cast fell into place. What were you looking for—physically or otherwise—from those who’d embody certain characters?
Kerr: The casting was super fun. I did it myself, with my husband helping me watch tapes. It took a really long time, though. The film started as a way more low-key short, then ended up being such a big short that I was like, “Well, maybe this is a feature.” I cast [Robert Salas], the dad character, first, about two years before we shot. I later saw Deragh in Anne at 13,000 ft, and I remember just being so mesmerized and taken by her performance. I also saw Chris Galust, who plays Olek, in Give Me Liberty. In that film, he plays a Russian-American who is taking care of his grandfather. So, I found those two actors through films, but otherwise, I wanted to have a very open process. I wanted to find as many people in Texas as I could. I found Robert on Backstage, just putting out a post and having people apply and do tapes. Then he introduced me to the two actors who play the brothers-in-law, Christian Huey and Les Weiler, who are also based in Austin. They already knew each other through being performers on a podcast together, so they also had a bit of humor between them. There were also some other actors from the Texas area, like Ed Hattaway, who plays the caretaker of the property. Otherwise, we did an open call and brought in actors from elsewhere. I went through thousands of self-tapes and met with people for coffee or over Zoom so we could get to know each other. I wanted to find people that maybe aren’t represented by agents, but have something about them that really connects them to the character.
Filmmaker: The familial chemistry really works, so it’s cool to know that some of the actors had collaborated in the past.
Kerr: I went to school with Katie Folger, who plays Grace. She’s also from Texas. We got to know each other really well because it was almost like summer camp with us living there and swimming together.
Filmmaker: Did you all stay at the house together?
Kerr: Most of us did.
Filmmaker: That must have also helped to tether everyone to your family, showing everybody around the place.
Kerr: All of the family pictures were there, and these stories would just come up. There’s a scene where two young girls are under the porch stabbing a fish. That’s something I did when I was six with a friend of mine. We were both kind of crazy, and we tore up this fish and got the meat out. My mom cooked it for us and we ate it [laughs]. I was telling people that story and they were like, “We should do that.” It didn’t end up being as grotesque in the film, but yeah.
Filmmaker: Your background in dance is palpable here. Each characters’ movement, or lack thereof, works to communicate the bonds or rifts between certain family members. How did you implement choreography here, particularly with the opening photoshoot scene?
Kerr: For the opening scene, we had a few days of rehearsal. It felt like a big task to do one take and not create a feeling of it being staged, or just chaos for the sake of chaos. Chaos has to be activated somehow. Lidia [Nikonova], the cinematographer, worked with the Steadicam operator to find the parameters for what Katie’s doing. Her mind is subconsciously feeling like she needs to wrangle everyone, so it’s almost like an exaggerated way of pulling people down, but as you see later in the film, they’re resisting and keep going back somehow. The camera finds her and plays this game with her where it is sometimes with her and sometimes bounces off before finding her again. That created the framework which is then repeated again in the last part of the film, where she’s soaking wet and the camera is closer but still doing that.
When I used to be more of a choreographer, I worked with big groups of people and found ways for the whole ecosystem of that group to become a landscape, like they’re moving organically, almost like a field does with the wind. I’d instruct certain performers: “Okay, you’re going to go down, but then you’re going to go back again, then this person is going to be here,” things like that. On top of that, the actors improvised a lot. Rob Rice—the co-producer and writer on the project along with Karlis [Bergs] and I—helped direct the actors together as my directorial advisor. We were thinking about how each character has their own motivations, but we didn’t have the actors tell each other what they were. For example, Grace, the [sister] with the baby played by Katie Folger, might act like she doesn’t care about the picture, but she has this new baby and is actually really excited. She’s the one that’s wearing the same outfit since the morning. She also wants to be in the middle during the wide shot. They all had their own personal motivations that they didn’t tell the others, which created a kind of [controlled] chaos.
Filmmaker: Also in reference to that opening scene, the sound design is incredible. It truly feels like being immersed in the middle of a family reunion, with disparate conversations and children’s playful shrieks creating an unparsable cacophony. Can you expand on your collaboration with the sound designers/mixers and Nikolay Antonov to achieve both a sonic whirlwind and quieter natural moments?
Kerr: I watch a lot of TV, and I’m always frustrated with how dialogue always has to function. It has to point to something that’s going to happen in the future. Something I was interested in while I was at CalArts is language as material. In poetry, we see words as material, so why not dialogue? That’s kind of how I wrote the script. Part of the reason some things feel to drag on without something really happening is because it was intentional. When I taught film for a couple of years at LeMoyne College, something that I tried to encourage my students to think about is off-screen sound, because it’s just not used enough. When something’s off-screen, it creates an image in our minds as we watch it, which makes it a more sensorial experience. I really love that, so I knew I wanted to also work with it.
The process of designing the sound and mix was very long. I didn’t have a lot of that in mind before we shot it, and I ended up adding more sound design than I had planned. Andrew Siedenburg was there on set and was really great about exploring the location by himself or bringing someone with him, and they would just take a lot of recordings. One thing that we all really loved was the air conditioning sound. At the side of the house, there’s a huge air conditioner, and it’s super powerful, so that’s where the hum is coming from. There were sometimes lawnmowers and construction sounds, so the drone is not really just a drone, it comes from all of that. That feeling of underlying horror and suspense comes from air conditioning. That brought Andrew to the train sound, which is at the end, when Katie’s walking back and forth. She’s sort of like a moving train, and we just EQ’d it so that it’s at a much lower frequency. Nikolai, the other sound designer and mixer, came in for that part. I wanted to take the sound super seriously. It was a 10-month process. It’s reversed at the end when the train overcomes the dialogue, and in the beginning the dialogue is hidden and then emerges, kind of like a circle.
Filmmaker: Since you also have a background in philosophy, I’d like to pick your brain about the literary excerpts that appear in this film. It opens with a line from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Conqueror Worm” and features Katie reading from a Barbara Bush memoir, appropriate for a wealthy Texan family to have on their bookshelf. Can you speak more to the influence of these distinct cultural figures?
Kerr: Collaging these different sources was a special part of the writing process and was very unique to this film. I’d like to say that the paragraph that Katie reads to Olek off her phone is what really grounds the film. It’s this story about a young woman who’s sitting with her mother at lunch, then she looks up and suddenly sees her mother present in front of her, but not really there. She says her mother left the world and what’s in front of her are the eyes of a monster.
When I first read that paragraph, it really struck me. Like I was saying before, there was that one summer when so many family members passed away, but everyone still moved forward. I went to camp, we took the family Christmas card. In the U.S.—or maybe specifically in the South—there’s a need to keep up appearances and keep up this image of prosperity. That’s what the Christmas card represents. But as a kid, I remember seeing my mom suddenly be not there somehow. During that time, this grief drew her away from her body.
I found that passage on the internet. It’s the opening to a very theoretical paper about Lacan by this woman, Liora Goder. I was trying to search for the term jouissance for my class, because I didn’t understand it. I love that paragraph, and then the rest of the paper becomes super dense. I couldn’t understand it that well, but that paragraph always stayed with me. Deragh and I were talking about the script, which didn’t have that paragraph in it yet. We were talking about her character’s relationship to the mother, then I was like, “Oh I read this thing once that really stayed with me.” She was like, “I think that should be in the film.” We put it in there and it really grounded everything.
Things kept coming in after that. We originally included the Bush family cookbook, but when we got to [the house] there were two Barbara Bush books right next to each other and the actors just improvised. The Edgar Allen Poe book came later when we found the circular structure in the edit. I read it in Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher, which is about how things keep being recycled in our postmodern capitalist realist society, and there’s become this inability to create something new—especially in art, but also in political movements. I read that and was thinking about the family in this suspended reality, because as long as they’re unable to express grief and share their mourning they’re going to be unable to process and move forward with life. They’re all in this melancholia together, which creates an inability to move or talk to one another.
Filmmaker: When you were profiled for the 25 New Faces list a couple years ago, you said that your next feature would focus on a debutante ball as “as a very occult kind of ritual.” Is this still the plan?
Kerr: Yeah, I’m still working on that project. It’s about a debutante ball set in 2004 and follows a sorority girl at the University of Texas. I was once in a sorority myself, actually, but left after a year. It’s about these swaths of people that all look the same and act the same. I was a debutante as well. That was a bit of a surreal experience and I really hated it.
Filmmaker: So this also stems from an experience that is some way personally related to you.
Kerr: For sure. It’s a little less autobiographical than Family Portrait. It comes from my own experience in these spaces where I was quite terrified at times. It’s a bit more of an arthouse thriller in that sense, and the main characters are based on these two mystics from the middle ages that I’ve been obsessed with since CalArts. The main character is overcome by a force but it’s unclear if it’s demonic or divine, which then starts to overcome the cohort of debutantes. I’m reading Marjery Kemp’s autobiography right now—some people say it’s maybe the first autobiography—and she writes about how some people blessed her and said she was in contact with the divine, but many people accused her of being inhabited by demons. It’s just based on who was around them, where they lived, what people were saying. I’ve always found that super interesting.
Filmmaker: So there will also be an element of choreography in your next film, then.
Kerr: Yeah, I think it’s going to be even more choreographic. I don’t know if you’ve seen a Texas debutante ball, but what happens is they perform what’s called the Texas Dip, which is when the debutantes come forward with their arms outstretched and they bow down and press their torso to the floor. It’s super devotional. So, [my film] is called The Bow. The rituals that are performed in the ceremony feel very occult. But the original history has been purged, because now people are like, “Oh, we just do it because it’s expected of us” or because it’s a tradition, or because, you know, “I’m doing it for my mother.” But no one’s talking about the fact that [the debutante ball] was originally done to show that a woman is ready to be married. So the main character brings that original history to the forefront and takes it very seriously.
Filmmaker: I’m really excited to see that.
Kerr: I’ve been in a residency this year. I started the project in Spain, in San Sebastian, for six weeks where I was developing the treatment. That was super fun. I’m co-writing it with Rob Rice, who also co-wrote Family Portrait. And Megan Pickrell, who is a producer on Family Portrait, is also producing this one.
Filmmaker: Are there any other projects you’re looking to develop at the moment?
Kerr: I moved to New York a year ago and it’s hard to focus here. There’s a lot going on.
Filmmaker: What brought you to New York?
Kerr: Karlis got a grant from [the Creatives Rebuild New York Artist Employment] to make a film about Staten Island. He started working on that while we were living upstate, then he was gone a lot. We were like, “Well, we should just move down to the city.” But it’s really nice being here, because I really missed having a community. Karlis and I are also writing a short right now that’s loosely based on this book called The Twenty Days of Turin, which is about a haunted library. I won’t go into details, but that short would be much less expensive and more DIY. I think it will be nice to have that as well as The Bow, where I can have a little bit more control over the process rather than looking for money, which is hard.
