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“I Put 30 Years of My Life Into 80 Minutes”: Myrid Carten on Her True/False Documentary, A Want in Her
Nuala and Myrid Carten in A Want in Her Interweaving home movies, intimate phone calls, previous art school projects and deeply moving footage shot over an intense seven-month timeframe, A Want in Her documents increasing tumult within the filmmaker’s immediate family. The documentary may be the feature debut of moving-image artist Myrid Carten, but the inclusion of charming mini-DV footage shot by the director in her youth proves that, in many ways, she’s been a personal storyteller her whole life. (Even if the early ‘00s footage is more interested in parodying America’s Next Top Model than capturing the cracks already materializing in her family’s foundation).
The film opens by documenting her uncle Danny’s deteriorating mental faculties in tandem with her uncle Kevin’s stress over maintaining their mother Nuala’s family estate (his inheritance of which is still a hotly contested topic). Yet when news arrives of her mother’s escalating struggle with alcoholism—a longtime addiction that’s impacted their relationship for as long as Carten can remember—this thread almost instantly takes over the narrative. Arriving at Kevin’s after a recent bender, the already simmering tension between siblings soon comes to a fierce boil, and Carten is put in the familiar position of mediating their grievances in-person during sporadic visits and frequent phone calls. Throughout the film, she confronts the idea that children must inherently “step up” and become their parents’ keepers, advocating instead for the demand that they become accountable for their own actions. Indeed, there’s a dissonance between coddling someone and loving them—at times, performing the latter means refusing to cater to their self-destructive creature comforts.
Following its world premiere at IDFA back in November, A Want in Her screens today at True/False before screening at MoMI as part of their First Look showcase. Ahead of the film’s U.S. premiere, Carten spoke to me about rediscovering her home movies, her love of Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C. and a desire to tackle a narrative feature for her next project.
Filmmaker: You’ve said that it feels like most of your artistic practice to date has led to this project. I’d like to know more about when you decided this subject and recorded material would be the basis for your first feature.
Carten: It happened very organically. In 2018, my mother’s brother died, the first uncle on my maternal side. He was in his 60s and had a heart attack. That was the catalyst for me. I was always fascinated with my mother’s siblings. She comes from a large family—she’s the youngest of 10. I’m an only child, and I spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s house growing up. These people would always come around, and I always thought it would be great to record some of their stories around their upbringing, which sounded chaotic. It would also be good material for future stories, because I do want to move into fiction. But I went to his funeral with a camera and I was so terrified of shooting most of that footage. It’s just awful, awful footage. I thought, “Okay, I’m making an interview-heavy archival piece with people talking about the past.” That’s what it was for that first year.
My mother’s siblings started to pass away nearly every six months after that. In that process, I thought, “Okay, now I’m making this story about the inheritance of my grandmother’s house.” What actually happened was that real-life events started to emerge that were far more alive and sort of dramatized these issues, like my uncle showing up at my other uncle’s house and my mother then spiraling. She very quickly took over the film.
So I first shot something in 2018 and then 2019 was when I pitched the project. I still thought it was this film about the past, but that’s when I really began working on it. Then obviously COVID happened, so that gave me lots of time to sit around and percolate on these things. But the main body of the film was shot from August 2019 to March 2020, so it was actually a quite short filming period.
Then I did lots of other shoots, which you see in the film, like the 16mm. These took place over a couple of years, but the main story of my mother going back to the house was in March 2020, and that’s when I felt like I know what the pinnacle of this film is leading to. That gave me a real structure.
Filmmaker: I’d like to know more about the film’s structure. Clearly COVID was a factor, but when did you feel like the story was ready?
Carten: I was almost editing it myself from the beginning. During the end of 2020, I did a 60-minute cut. A lot is quite similar: it has the phone call [with my mother], and then there’s a funeral at the end. I used that cut to get [story editor] David Barker on board. Actually, that cut got a lot of really good people on board, but it was very messy. One of the big things that people would say was, “There’s not enough of you in it.” There was no archive, so there was none of the childhood stuff or the art stuff. It was just very much what had happened over that period of time, and at the end of that period I started editing it together. It was mostly cinema verite and the “house as a character” stuff. Then I realized the film could actually include this archive of material that I have, these mini-DV [recordings from childhood]. I’ve had a lot of editing consultants on this, and they said, “What about your works from art school 10 years ago that your mother’s in?” I just thought, “Is there anything left that hasn’t been used in this film?” It felt like this sphere was getting bigger and bigger. How do we piece this together? Especially the art materials, because at least with mini-DV, there’s such a different texture. Everyone’s younger and you can immediately tell what we’re looking at.
But the art material, which was shot in digital 16:9, was really challenging. Eventually, I did get a Brazilian editor on board, Karen Harley, who’s amazing with images. We edited for months, and she very much took the spine that was there and began the process of bringing in this other material. I learned so much from her, because she’s a person who’s all about emotion and feeling. That was how we started to weave together the different strands. With the art stuff, it ended up being a “less is more” approach on that front. We added a bit of me chatting in a gallery, and it was awful. We actually tried to do a voiceover at one point, and that didn’t work either. So, I started the edit in 2020, and we didn’t finish until the start of 2024. We were actually still filming some stuff during the edit, mostly cutaways.
Filmmaker: Speaking to those notes about the film needing more of you in it, you don’t appear in front of the camera very much. I know the story is about your family from your point of view and you’re the one shooting much of the time, but I’m curious about your resistance to being in the frame.
Carten: I almost imagined that I would be taking the viewer by the hand. Most of the stuff around “there’s not enough of you” was a response to the fact that in this mode of personal filmmaking, you typically have voiceover, and I didn’t. The reason was, partly, that I didn’t want to talk from a place in the future. I’m also dealing with material that I find quite difficult to talk about. I find that when I try to say, “I feel this” or “I feel that” it almost diminishes the experience of being within these scenes. I also really wanted the audience to make up their own minds about these complexities and not be put in the middle of a relationship dynamic. I didn’t want to be too didactic. I love stories about relationships and intimacy, and it’s a lot easier to do that in a dramatic story because you have actors. It was hard to bring my character to the fore because I’m behind the camera, but at the same time I didn’t really want to have another DP shooting with me because it was so intimate.
But it was the voiceover that I really had an aversion to in this context. I really love voiceovers, especially in dramas like Goodfellas. In this film, I thought it took away the power of these encounters to have my voice over the top. It was about intimacy, immediacy and creating space for me not to have the final word. Even though as a filmmaker, I obviously have all of the tools of manipulation at my feet. I am the one that’s in control in some ways, but I didn’t want to be a dictator or guide too much.
Filmmaker: Are there any moments from this time period that you didn’t document and regret? Conversely, is there a time when you didn’t turn the camera off and wish you had?
Carten: The first question is what haunts every filmmaker. I can’t actually remember now, which is a good sign [laughs]. Well, one of my mother’s siblings’ funerals I didn’t record, which isn’t a big deal because it’s only a montage at the end, but I kind of felt like that was a bit of a cop out in some ways because I’d shot the other ones. Something I kind of regretted at the time, but I think works now, is that I really struggled, if I’m honest, with the fact that I didn’t go and stay with my mother and uncle for six months. I just couldn’t do that for my own sanity. There was one time they had a little fight about the coal money, and I did capture some of it when I was there. But there were a lot of phone calls of them having these arguments and I wasn’t there to capture them. Part of me thinks, “Oh, maybe you should have camped out there and captured their actual fights,” but that wasn’t truthful to my experience. In the same way that I don’t film my mother when she’s drinking, there are these moments in the film where there’s a question about her lucidity. But that’s part of the honesty of our relationship, so I wasn’t going to start doing things for the film that weren’t truthful to this sense of distance that I’m trying to navigate to keep myself safe.
I think in the early days of shooting, it’s not that I wished I had turned the camera off. I wish I had been clearer and more direct about shooting things. Most of the time, all my family knows that I’m shooting, but there are certain instances where police were outside and I didn’t go, “Hi, I’m making a film!” We had to navigate that and blur that out in the edit. In hindsight, I could have managed that a bit better. It’s very hard when there are police or hospital people showing up to explain that you’re making a film when you don’t really understand why you’re making a film. I don’t know how I could have done that better, but I do think it would have saved me a lot of heartache if I had been a bit more honest in those moments.
Filmmaker: This is your first feature, but clearly you’ve been a filmmaker your whole life. Your previous artworks incorporate moving images, and I would love to know when the urge to capture these moments first emerged in you, and have you sought to preserve these mini-DV recordings?
Carten: I think sometimes I look back on that period as a “golden period.” You see a little bit of her in the footage, but I had this real maverick teacher. It was a tiny school and it had two teachers. There were, like, 30 people in the whole primary school, so I had the same teacher for four years. She really encouraged us to be creative. We used to do little dramas; I think she just wanted to have a longer lunch break and go for a cigarette [laughs]. She would tell us, “Make up a little drama and I’ll come in and watch it!” That became very natural to us. It was the late ‘90s, early 2000s. I remember one of my friends getting a mini-DV, then another one, then me. It was a sort of phase we all went through, but I think I was more attached to it than they were. To be fair, one of them is now a musician. She got into songwriting when she was 10, I got into film. Apparently, something you’re into when you’re 10 can have a big influence on what you end up doing! The reason I look at it as a golden period is because it was just about fun. There was none of the self-criticism or self-destruction that emerges in your teenage years and then plagues you as an artist or creative.
But I didn’t know where these tapes were. In 2018, actually, my father digitized them for me for Christmas. Then I watched them and realized, “Oh, we weren’t actually geniuses.” Not having seen them in 10 years, I thought these might be incredible works of art. When I watched them, I realized most of them were rip-offs of America’s Next Top Model. We did a version that we literally called “America and Ireland’s Next Top Model” [laughs]. That was a rude awakening. But there were other revelations in them. I didn’t remember shooting my family. One of the frustrating things about the tapes was that there were only four of them. Nobody ever bought me more tapes! I don’t know why. We edited in camera, so sometimes it almost felt like there was this strata that I was excavating where you could see a part of my mother and my uncle, and then it would be taped over with Blind Date or some show that we were ripping off. That was very frustrating because all together, it was 40 minutes on a tape. We didn’t have a lot of material. After my father digitized it, I mentioned it to one of my editing consultants during COVID and they said, “Let’s watch it together,” which was embarrassing! But we realized that there are parts of it that could be really useful. For example, the scene in the school where they’re acting out that “Paddy drunk” thing. The boys in the school also acted out the trial of Osama bin Laden in the Gaelic language, which we didn’t use [laughs]. But it wasn’t like there was loads of material. It just happened to be almost fated that the material was so useful in this context.
Filmmaker: I also have to note that I’m a big fan of Fontaines D.C. and appreciated their song appearing at the end of the film. How did that come to be?
Carten: I love them, too. Grian [Chatten], the great love of my life, even if he doesn’t know I exist! [laughs] My uncle Danny, who’s in the start of the film, died just before lockdown. The last trip I made was to go to his funeral in Scotland. That song came out in May, I think, so when I was editing the material that song was very fresh in my mind. I just put it into that 60-minute cut because I didn’t have to do any clearance, but it felt really like the right tone. There’s something about that song that’s nihilistic but also hopeful. The repetition of “life isn’t alway empty” starts to undercut itself. I also obviously loved that they’re Irish and they echoed, for me, a lot of what my uncle Danny does at the start. He’s giving me advice on how to live, but it’s coming from a very weird source. When it came to us getting the rights, we obviously didn’t have the budget. Well, not “obviously,” but they’d become even more successful since I first included the song, which had become very expensive. But I wrote a letter to them and explained this thing about my uncle. I didn’t even say, “Grian, I love you!” But they cut us a deal. They haven’t seen the film. I don’t know if they will, but I’m hoping that someone might say, “I saw this film with your song at the end.” We’ll see. Obviously, I’m married and pregnant and he’s engaged, so it’s just a fangirl thing.
Filmmaker: I completely understand!
Carten: The dummer’s mother is Glasgow/Donegal as well, so there was a connection! Ireland’s so small, everyone knows somebody who knows somebody.
Filmmaker: Has your family seen the film? What are their reactions to it if they have?
Carten: We got a cinema screen and showed the penultimate cut of the film to my mother in the morning and then my uncle in the afternoon. It was quite an intense day for me! I was getting feedback on if there was anything in the film that you cannot stand. My mother came out of the screening and said, “It’s the best thing I’ve seen all week!” All week? Thank you, mother [laughs]. She’d seen the Bob Marley biopic and The Holdovers, so she’d actually been to see a lot of films that week. But she was totally fine with it. There was a lot of processing that went on for both her and my uncle. My uncle said that he hardly remembered anything that happened. He’s the type of person that if something happens, he just kind of wipes it from his mind. My mother also came to the premiere at IDFA in Amsterdam, and that was really special for her. They’ve both been really encouraging, and it was encouraging for them to recognize that the film is resonating with people. But it’s a strange position for them to be in, I think. My father’s not in the film, but he hasn’t seen it yet. He’s going to see it when it comes closer to where he is, because he’s got mobility issues. But that’s going to be a big moment, as well. But I think people trust the reason behind why I’ve done it, even though they’re not artists and don’t fully understand. But they’re used to me doing this sort of stuff and they’ve been very generous and obliging around it.
Filmmaker: As the film continues on the festival circuit and you prepare to give birth, has your relationship to the project, and maybe your broader artistic process, changed as well?
Carten: I think having a child will definitely change things. It’s strange talking about motherhood, and I think it probably will give me more understanding, I suppose, of my own mother and her desire to be a good mother. I’ve done my part with the film, now it’s like a child is out in the world. I shepherded it out and I’ve done my best—although I can’t go to America, which I’m raging about. I would have loved that, but it’s just the timing. I just hope it connects with other people. In terms of my own artistic process, I don’t know. I feel like I said this to someone, “If I have dementia at 80, the good thing is I put, like, 30 years of my life into 80 minutes.” But I don’t want to do any work about my family ever again, and I’ve said that openly. There’s a new trajectory and I don’t know what it’s going to be. Sometimes that’s scary and sometimes that’s exhilarating.
Filmmaker: Do you think you’ll aim for a narrative feature with your next project?
Carten: I’d love to make a narrative feature. I’m very humble about the fact that it’s a totally different ballgame and there are so many skills to learn there. I need to take some time to do that. But I think I’ve learned a lot with this film. I worked with a lot of people who work in drama as well, like Karen and David. One of the things I struggle with drama that I want to look at more is how to bring that aliveness and that sense of stake. I’ve done [narrative] shorts, and they’ve been a bit dead, so I’m trying to think about how to bring that chaos. I think American indie filmmakers do it really well, like the Safdie brothers, Josephine Decker, even Warhol. There’s performativity, but there are also documentary elements, and it feels really raw and edgy. I am thinking about how to do that all at the same time.
