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Hawai’i International Film Festival 2024: Zoë Eisenberg on Chaperone
Mitzi Akaha in Chaperone A chance encounter with a teenage Lothario who thought she was still in high school inspired Zoë Eisenberg to begin writing her solo directorial debut, Chaperone, which premiered at the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival and won the Breakouts Grand Jury Prize. “When I was 29, a 17-year-old boy mistook me for a teenager and asked me out to a party,” Eisenberg recalls. “While I declined, I couldn’t help but wonder: what kind of woman would have gone to that party? From there, the questions grew. What happens when a woman chooses not to pursue career or motherhood, the two narrow avenues society has opened for women to hold space in? And how do you respond if your aspirations consistently disappoint those around you?”
The compellingly entertaining result of these questions, Chaperone, follows 29-year-old Misha Miyamoto (Mitzi Akaha), who seems content with her easy-going life in the sleepy island town of Hilo, Hawai’i, working at an old movie theater, hanging out with her cat and attempting to tune out the various family and friends who’d prefer she showed a bit more initiative in the career world. Things change when a love interest emerges in the chiseled form of floppy-haired Jake (Laird Akeo), who seems to have it all: handsome, charming, muscular and eager to please, like a cross between a brick wall and a bounding Labrador. One tiny issue? He’s still in high school, and thinks she is too. Then again, small-town island life is a little boring, and what’s one afternoon together…or night….or week…..or more?
Following our heroine from one comically bad decision to another (note to self: even ice-cream shops have security cameras), Chaperone can be appreciated in many ways: a Gilmore Girls-like description of small-town eccentrics and charmers refreshingly divorced from corporate cares (in this version, admittedly, it’s Lorelei who sleeps with Dean), a Mike Leigh-like discomfort comedy of bad choices, a comic-realist drama on the judgement that single adult women are faced with (a “childless cat lady” gone rogue, indeed), a statement for everyone who finds happiness not in career but in life, or a contemporary feminist reboot of typical older men/younger women Hollywood fantasies. Either way, it’s a welcome addition to American independent cinema’s portrayal of flawed women, and a fascinating snapshot of its setting, Hilo, Hawai’i. It also boasts two stars in the making in its leads Mitzi Akaha and Laird Akeo; Akaha turns what could have been a morose cougar character into an appealing, appealingly flawed human, while Akeo channels the infectious charm of a Keanu Reeves, Takeshi Kaneshiro or Brad Pitt circa Thelma and Louise.
A few days after the film had its home-state premiere at the Hawai’i International Film Festival, Eisenberg sat down to share about the genesis and inspirations of the film, its talented cast and making film in Hawai’i.
Filmmaker: The film especially stands out for its literary script, which could just as easily be a short story or novella in its approach to character-building, foreshadowing, and metaphorical echoes, like a crumbling foundational floorboard or a freezer box that’s continually breaking open. What was your process of going from the original idea/inspiration to deciding to make it a film (and was it always thought of as a feature?), and then fleshing out all the elements as you went along?
Eisenberg: This story always came to me as a feature. Many of the foreshadowing and metaphorical elements you referenced came visually to me, instead of something that would have worked better as, say, a novel or short story with a lot of interiority. That said, I was in development with this project for five years, so the final shooting script certainly was different than draft one.
Filmmaker: What were some of the inspirations that you drew upon as you thought of the film and shot it, whether in terms of literary works or, especially, other films?
Eisenberg: In early days of conception I liked to contextualize this story as a modernized retelling of The Graduate, told from the POV of a reimagined Mrs. Robinson. When I first saw that film, and then read the book, I was struck by how much more interesting Mrs. Robinson was to me than the Benjamin Braddock character, and I wanted to know more about what she was going through. While the final shooting script of Chaperone did stray pretty far from that initial idea—our final Misha has just as much Benjamin in her as she does Mrs Robinson—the themes are still kindred: the pressures put on youth (Graduate) and women (Chaperone) to conform to societal expectations, rebelling against our cultural fixation on ambition and the very human instinct to self-destruct as a form of protest. Both Benjamin and Misha come into the story and cause a lot of trouble for everyone around them while trying to get their own needs met.
Filmmaker: The film benefits from its great cast, especially the two leads. How did you become involved with them?
Eisenberg: I ended up casting Mitzi Akaha (Misha) two years before we shot; during that time, I redrafted Misha’s character to mirror some of Mitzi’s experiences—for instance, being raised half Jewish and half Japanese, and being a former competitive gymnast who left that intensely physical ambition behind. I didn’t need to do a thing for her charisma, she gifted that to Misha; there were folks who read the script and raised concerns about scripted Misha being unlikeable, which I ignored; that’s almost never feedback on the finished film, as Mitzi’s Misha is infectiously likable. Laird Akeo, who plays Misha’s too-young paramour Jake, really made the relationship between the two believable, not only because their chemistry is so strong but because Laird is someone who has seemed 25 since he was 15. So, now you have a woman who appears much younger than she is and a man who appears much older, and that became very interesting to me.
Filmmaker: There’s a lovely ’90s slacker-like spirit (in the best possible way) to the film’s environment, especially in its small-town setting where being a theater usher or working in experimental theater/art seems like a completely rational choice. No one’s working in tech or as an AI engineer, for instance, or even thinking about a corporate life. Is this reflective of the small-town nature of Hilo, and how important was it for you to give the town its own sense of place and identity?
Eisenberg: I think more of the second; this film is definitely my love letter to my home here, and for the last 100 years the Palace theater has been the heartbeat of Hilo town. That said, downtown Hilo does sometimes feel like it’s stuck in a different era, much like Misha herself, from the architecture to the pace of things. I do buck against the concept of this being a slacker film, mostly because Misha has been holding down the same full time job for over a decade, and when we meet her she is excelling at it, though she does refuse to change it. But as a culture we’re used to a heightened sense of ambition and a desire for acceleration; being satisfied with your status quo puts most of us on edge. We view it as stagnancy. So, the idea that this is a slacker film is funny to me, because it mirrors the scrutiny Misha gets from her family for not being more ambitious, and it’s this exact scrutiny that makes her feel so isolated and propels her to make terrible choices.
Filmmaker: Speaking of the 1990s, I appreciated how it reclaimed one 1990’s indie-film trope, the manic-pixie dream girl, by asking/answering what that character would look like in their late 20’s/almost 30s, and telling the story through her lens instead of the gaze of some record-store dude. And you also flipped the gender switch and created kind of the (fe)male version of that fantasy with the Jake character, who’s like the “Stoic But Generous dream hunk” answer to the manic-pixie dream girl. Of course, Misha is also a type whose very existence is now worrisome to some: the “childless cat lady gone rogue” who’s suddenly awakened to her own desires, no matter how poorly thought through they may be. In what ways was her character a response to typical Hollywood/indie-film tropes, or even to the seemingly increasing conservatism of the past few years?
Eisenberg: Totally! Back to The Graduate: Mrs. Robinson ends up being a MPDG in that she only serves to further Benjamin’s narrative, just as Jake does for Misha—we’re only seeing him through her lens. In terms of balancing Misha’s decisions, I don’t condone them, but I do understand them, and I hope that comes through; it certainly allows me to approach her without moralizing her. She gets enough of that. Also, can we talk about the emergence of what we can now call the “age gap drama”? When I started pitching this film in 2019, this term was not colloquial. I wish it was. I would point to The Graduate, or The Piano Teacher, or Hannah Fidell’s 2013 film A Teacher, and these films were all made decades apart from each other. But in the past two years we have so many! There is something zeitgeist right now with stories about women pursuing much younger men, which of course is a power dynamic we’ve seen flipped on screen ad nauseum.
Filmmaker: There’s also special attention paid to the relationships between the characters here, whether sisters or family, to other friends in the community, that stands out from typical Hollywood fare. The people in the film seem to have one another’s best interests at heart (well, most of the time). I know your new novel addresses female friendship especially. How did you flesh out the relationships between the characters, especially the two sisters?
Eisenberg: Much of my own personal life is spent overthinking my own relationships, so I’m naturally drawn to interpersonal dynamics on screen—for me, people are the point of everything. So yeah, some of it is on the page, but I’m going to say that the rest comes from the strength of the actors and everything they bring into the connections they’re making with each other. Kanoa Goo for instance, who plays Misha’s half-brother Vik, developed a more nuanced take on their relationship that, for the majority of the film, makes him feel more like a close friend than an overprotective older brother. And Misha’s boss and friend Kenzie feels like an overprotective big sister. Now that you mention it, that does feel similar to my novel, which follows two women who behave more like spouses than friends. Thanks for making that connection. I guess I am interested in relationships that don’t fit into a standardized box.
Filmmaker: Mentioning Hollywood tropes, films like this are usually filtered through Caucasian leads, with maybe room for one or two folks in best-friend roles. The cast of Chaperone, though, reflects a very multi-ethnic community, with nearly all the cast mixed-race. Was this a purposeful response to typical Hollywood casting, or a desire to cast the film to make sure it reflected Hilo, and Hawai’i as a whole? Or both?
Eisenberg: There was certainly an intention to reflect my community on screen. Over seventy percent of the population here identifies as asian, hapa, Hawaiian or hapa-Hawaiian, some sort of mix plate, but they’re used to seeing their stories white-washed and the islands used as a backdrop. What’s so exciting about the contemporary film scene in Hawai’i is that creatives here are finally getting the chance to tell their own stories, whether they’re kanaka or kama’aina or, like me, have lived here a long time and feel deeply invested in the community. For me, this extends behind the camera as well with hiring practices. Something that really connects me with my producer Alison Week, who has been championing this film since 2019, is the desire to keep as many jobs here as possible. That can sometimes be difficult when our film scene is still relatively small, but this isn’t necessarily a limitation—it means we can make a difference by hiring someone who hasn’t had that exact opportunity yet. This is really important in building a functioning film ecosystem here.
Filmmaker: This was your feature solo feature debut. What was your process in making the leap from short films to features, whether in terms of creativity, like mapping out the narrative arc to a feature rather than a short, or even pragmatically, like maintaining your energy levels to supervise a probably much larger production and group of people, and keeping it going through many more days?
Eisenberg: I didn’t go to film school, and the first film I ever produced was a feature, back in 2013; I quickly experienced how insane it was to try and learn in such a high-stakes environment, and back pedaled to shorts where most sane filmmakers begin. I co-directed a feature with my husband Phillips Payson in 2017 (Stoke), but that was a decision we made on day three of production, so I didn’t develop or prep that film—I was only meant to produce. In that light, Chaperone is truly the first film I’ve gotten to lend a singular voice to. That said, the intensity of directing by myself for the first time at such break-neck speed really pushed me. Once the shoot was over, I had mind-blowing decision fatigue. I’m pretty sure I didn’t make another choice on anything—where to go for dinner or what to watch on TV—for a solid month. I truly was like, “Please can someone else decide?,” which is very unlike my normal temperament.
Filmmaker: You mentioned that the entire film was shot in only 13 or 14 days. What are your recommendations/tips to other beginning feature filmmakers on how to get so much accomplished in such a short amount of time?
Eisenberg: Honestly, it’s hard for me to recommend anyone to try and shoot a ninety-page script in 13 days, especially one like ours with so many locations—18. I’d have loved more time. That said, it really forced me not to be precious with anything other than the story’s north stars. Often we’d get to a scene and realize we had twenty minutes to shoot five pages, so that five pages had to become two, and fast. As a screenwriter, it was heartbreaking because these were pages I’d been polishing for years, and in thirty seconds I tossed them away. But as a director, it was an invaluable lesson in the importance of plasticity.
Filmmaker: Shooting so quickly also means that your team must have been in sync, especially in working with the cinematographer. Was there a particular visual style you were aiming for, and how did that planning and execution go?
Eisenberg: During prep I watched a Film Fatales workshop with Catherine Hardwicke specifically focused on prep and blocking, and she talked about only having a few weeks for Thirteen, which had a huge impact on me as a teenager. She described the two camera approach we ultimately incorporated on our shoot of running one camera wide and one tight pretty much at all times. We shot the film in a verite style, almost entirely hand-held, because we needed to—we could afford very few locked off shots—but also because the narrative supported this visual language. I had a really dedicated camera team—it’s physically intense to shoot so many pages hand held.
For as little time as we had in production, we made up for it in prep; during the years we were looking for financing I nerded out on color theory and developed a very intentional color narrative that follows Misha’s mental state, and we worked this into our production design. Our colorist did a beautiful job enhancing this; we get a lot of compliments on the film’s color.
Filmmaker: And in terms of collaborators, even if the film was shot quickly, what was the editing process like? Did you go through different edits to finally find the best rhythm in terms of shot length, juxtapositions, etc? People usually think of only action films as being editing-dependent, but pieces like comedies or romances can be made or lost according to the speed of the edits. Were there different things that you found did or did not work, either in something subtle like shot length, or grander like different endings or scenes?
Eisenberg: Other than Mitzi and my camera team, my editor Kali Kasashima has single handedly had the most impact on the way this film feels. Editors truly do not get enough credit. Kali has a background editing horror for Blumhouse, so he truly is a master of building tension, which you can feel in the final film. He was also editing Alika Tengan’s Molokai’i Bound at the same time. I joke that Alika and I were sharing him like divorced parents; he’d do a few days with me, then a few days with Alika. This was a really nice way to work because I could take space and then return fresh to the choices we’d made. Music was also crucial in building tension in the edit; I worked with Hawai’i composer Taimane, who brought a unique outlook into building diegetic tension, pulling some of the natural sounds present in the islands into tracks —the invasive coqui frogs, for instance, which are sadly now synonymous with darkness here.
Filmmaker: As someone who’s been involved in the creative scene in Hawai’I for many years, what do you think of both the present and the future of filmmaking in Hawai’i?
Eisenberg: I don’t think there has ever been a more exciting time to be a filmmaker in Hawai’i. The community here is strong, and it’s only getting stronger. We have several devoted organizations championing all of us—‘Ohina film lab, Hawai’i Women in Filmmaking, Creative Industries Hawai’i, the Hawai’i Filmmakers Collective, Kumau Productions, Pacific Islanders in Communications, the Hawai’i International Film Festival, on and on—and you can see how their impact is fortifying the success of local creatives. We have organizational bones to flesh our careers around now. That said, in terms of narrative features, it is still a very male-dominated space here. When I co-directed Stoke in 2017, I realized the last time a woman had directed a narrative feature here in the islands was 1994, with Kayo Hatta’s Picture Bride. That’s disturbing; it’s 23 years. Luckily we’ve had a few more made since then, but again, nowhere near an equal amount when you consider the male-directed narratives shooting here every year. While there is a lot of talk about parity in the industry right now, statistically changes are still happening very slowly. It can be very frustrating. We have the creatives ready to go, we have the organizational support, but the gatekeepers, the folks who can pull in financing and give a green light—most of them are still behind, unfortunately. And when they tell me they aren’t, it’s hard to hear, I just want to say: “OK, prove it.”
