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“Emotional Time Travel”: Sophy Romvari on Blue Heron
Eylul Guven in Blue Heron Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker Sophy Romvari draws inspiration from memories across her acclaimed shorts, while also conjuring up a whole new (cinematic) world to shield them from the passage of time. After Nine Behind, Remembrance of József Romvári and Still Processing, Blue Heron is a fully staged narrative following a Hungarian family of six moving into their new home on Vancouver Island. With the promise of a clean start, they try to rewrite the family history in present tense—an effort seen through the experiences of the youngest child, Sasha (Eylul Guven). Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the oldest, is affectionate and gentle towards her, but lashes out on their parents, who in return look scared and concerned. It’s only natural for Sasha to be worried, too, but the audience is not: in the deft directorial hands of Romvari nobody is ever truly alone.
Blue Heron is steeped in the warm greens and the deep blues of Vancouver Island in the late summer, a film to swim and dive in, all the way to the profound sadness echoed by Sasha and the struggles of a family in the late 1990s. Romvari’s approach to making a ‘personal’ film includes borrowing from the story of her own family, but, as the conversation below will show, turning memories into cinema is far from a straightforward task. Below, the writer-director gives insight into the process of world-building that resulted in Blue Heron, how the location and production design breathed life into an empty house, and how does the film allow for time-travel thanks to a precisely calibrated narrative shift at a very special moment.
Filmmaker: Your 2020 short Still Processing documents your first-hand experience of discovering photographs and explores the therapeutic implications of the practice. Without comparing short and features by length, it’s fair to say that being a feature, Blue Heron involved more iterative processes: rehearsing, blocking, framing and shooting multiple takes could potentially replace that first encounter with memory, like the one in Still Processing. How do you relate to that iterative quality of filmmaking within the context of the personal [cinema]?
Romvari: Part of my impetus to make these films is to try to gain control over something that is uncontrollable—memories, grief, death. I use filmmaking to create another reality, or as a tool for acceptance of what I can’t control. For me, Blue Heron is an attempt to [first] acknowledge, but then eventually accept, an inability to go back in time, literally, or change something. It was very important that the script was very intentional and thorough and the structure was really in place before we shot it; it was equally important to follow the character of Sasha through her emotional experience, without any cross-cutting between timelines.
Filmmaker: Time is at once a circle and a spiral. In that scene we’re referring to without giving much away, there is an overlap that opens up another world. I feel like there should be a new name for what your film is doing there, because I don’t think calling it “time travel” really does it justice.
Romvari: I call it emotional time travel. That also represents the nature of the conversations you have again and again in your life. You first have it when you’re eight years old, and you’re still having it when you’re thirty with your parents.
Filmmaker: It’s not just sliding into a character’s memory, but into that decisive point of someone’s life when an irreversible change happens. Blue Heron identifies that moment for Sasha and invites us to join her in retrospect.
Romvari: Yes! I actually wrote about this in my Letterboxd list—Celine and Julie Go Boating was one of my film references as to the way time travel and time is used without explanation. There’s no machine or fantasy about it. It’s just a very literal moment.
Filmmaker: In relation to the fluidity of this narrative shift between literal and metaphorical meanings, there are quite a few shots in mirrors and through windows, as well as obstructed points of view on reflective surfaces that function like portals of sorts, while the act of looking back at a reflection seems equally important. Was this idea born out of conversations that you had with your cinematographer Maya Bankovic or already embedded in the script?
Romvari: A lot of it, from a cinematographic perspective, was inspired by the locations and attempts to [optically] create a distance. Part of the reason for this distance has to do with performance and wanting to give space to the actors and create a buffer between ourselves [the crew] and the performers. We never had any equipment inside the house, for example, and aimed to create the most naturalistic environment, especially for children [actors].
Filmmaker: During that time-travel shooting process, did you discover anything about time and the passage of time that you didn’t know before?
Romvari: It’s a cliche to say film allows you to time travel, but it’s true. I was spending so much time trying to recreate the ’90s with my production designer Victoria Furuya that I started to feel like I’m being brought back into this time and space. Having the support of an entire crew of such talented people through this very artistically but also emotionally driven process is an insane privilege.
Filmmaker: And in turn, the film extends its generosity towards the viewer. I’m thinking of those moments where the father takes photos of his family all together. We see the snap and the actual photograph, but we get to see what happens before and after the photo is taken. You get to witness both an intimate scene as present and its material trace from the future.
Romvari: I wanted to integrate the elements of construction early on in this coming of age story, but then to puncture the story with these photographs, alluding to the fact that it’s all being constructed. I don’t want to project how I think people should see the film, but it may be possible that Sasha is making this film [Blue Heron]. There certainly is intentionality in those snapshots. It gives a sense that you’re not just lost in a film.
Filmmaker: Speaking of, it’s very easy to lose yourself in the beautiful late summer setting. I assume you shot in an actual house, but what did you search for when choosing the best location?
Romvari: We searched high and low in Vancouver for a house that didn’t have a renovated kitchen. It’s very difficult to create a period movie on a budget! We found a house that was completely empty, so we didn’t have to make it feel really lived in, because the film is a process of the family moving in. So, the house gets more and more full as we go, but we also paid a lot of attention to details. For example, my production designer, Victoria Furuya, even swapped out fixtures to make them more period accurate. Similarly, my costume designer, Maria Katarina, also had an incredible attention to detail. All of the clothes were genuinely period, not just things that looked period. She hand selected each item and never relied on obvious brand logos or signifiers to evoke the ’90s.
Filmmaker: What about the colors of the film, as they, too, add to the ’90s feeling?
Romvari: We wanted the film to be very vibrant and in contrast to the emotional landscape. So much of it was a collaboration between the costume designer and the production designer trying to create a cohesive period. And yes, so much of the ’90s was defined by specific colors and textures. Also, Vancouver Island where the film is technically set in, has its color palettes built in: the greens and the blues are very, very unavoidably vibrant. In addition, it was very important to show Vancouver Island on camera because I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it, and if I have, it definitely was not played as Vancouver Island! And them being on an island is quite an obvious metaphor…
Filmmaker: You elicit marvellous performances from first-time actors. How did you make the call about who would be right to portray young Sasha?
Romvari: We cast Eylul Guven a year before we shot the film. We found her first and she was just evidently perfect. I can’t speak highly enough of her performance ability! She has an innate ability to act, she’s very intelligent and has a sort of pathos to her that I think makes her a very good observer and vice versa. You can project a lot onto her; she has a very open face.
Filmmaker: To come back to the first question about filmmaking as a longer, iterative process whose parts rearrange themselves as time goes on, what was editing Blue Heron like?
Romvari: I had such an incredible time editing this film, because I also got to edit it with one of my best friends, Kurt Walker, who’s also a filmmaker with a deep understanding of cinema. It was a joyful process, but also we did something which I think is now more common with digital editing—he was editing while we were shooting. So, instead of me looking at dailies, he was editing together rough cuts of each scene and that was very important for my confidence as a director, knowing each day that we were getting everything we needed. That way, I got a general sense of what a particular scene could be.
Filmmaker: Can you elaborate on how it helped you, practically?
Romvari: More specifically, we were shooting long master shots that didn’t have much coverage, and we needed to know that they were not going to be too long, or that they could be edited together. Kurt was able to show me that as we went along, so by the time we finished the shoot, we already had an assembly of the whole film. Then the editing process consisted of essentially me going over to Kurt’s living room twice a week through the Toronto winter, nearly slipping down the snow-covered stairs every day.
Filmmaker: And immersing yourself in that August sun on the screen.
Romvari: Exactly. It was comforting to edit this film with a close friend. And Kurt’s a very honest person and filmmaker, so we would have very direct conversations about everything, every step of the way. That said, whenever I finished a part of the process, from the edit to the sound design, I became very emotional and very melancholic, because I didn’t want it to finish. I’ve been so close to the footage for so long with the editing process, but it really moved me to see it at the premiere in Locarno.
Filmmaker: Did you feel like the film was finally finished then and there?
Romvari: A hundred per cent. I really do! I worked with such generous collaborators who were always allowing me to make tweaks until I was truly happy. Blue Heron is by far the most intentional thing I’ve ever made. Everything, from the sound, the volume levels of every time a cup is put down, is considered and I feel strongly about it. It’s the movie I wanted to make and now it’s time to hand it over to the audience.
