Sarah Elizabeth Mintz on GOOD GIRL JANE
Memorializing the October 8 digital release of Sarah's writing and directing film debut, we speak about teen movies, defining audiences, and recurring themes.
Good Girl Jane is available now through all digital platforms including Apple and Amazon. It’s also available on Blu-ray.
*photo by Brock Williams
Good Girl Jane is the story of Jane, a high school-aged loner who connects with a wild group of peers who consume a myriad of drugs. Jamie, the low-level dealer of the bunch, gains Jane’s trust and takes her on a ride that is at once exciting, dangerous, and heartbreaking.
Jane is based on true events in Sarah’s life.
I met Sarah in 2019 and worked with her on her film until the pandemic shut down operations half-way through production. Almost exactly a year later, it resumed and was completed. All involved in the creation of the film will tell you that it was at times harrowing, required consistent tenacity, but was always collectively fulfilling.
Sarah speaks at length in other interviews (that you can easily find elsewhere) about the difficulties of adapting her own life and provides practical/technical anecdotes from the shoot. You won’t find any of that here! But maybe we approached a better understanding of what kept her going through those challenges, and the challenges she thinks she will continue to face in her career.
AWT Here we are, why were you drawn to being a storyteller?
SEM Am I going to introduce myself? Should I introduce? No one knows who I am.
AWT You can introduce yourself.
SEM Okay. Actually, can you introduce me?
AWT Yes, I can. This is Sarah Mintz. This is the writer and director of Good Girl Jane.
SEM Great, thank you. That was probably more painful than me doing it myself. I'm so sorry.
AWT No, and obviously there'll be more verbiage in the body of the interview introduction that will be more illustrative that you'll be able to see before it goes into the world.
SEM The question was why was I drawn to filmmaking…
AWT Storytelling.
SEM Storytelling...maybe I'm not sure I was drawn to storytelling. I feel like the go-to answer is always like, “I'm a storyteller”... I'm drawn to filmmaking specifically. I have been curious to write for the stage, so maybe that's storytelling. But… also just the common ground between those two things is working with actors. I'm really interested in working with actors, but I was drawn to storytelling in that way because I feel like it comes from a place of just having questions about my own life and experience and not knowing how to parse through them without... this is the way that I know how to parse through experiences in my own life or questions that are nagging at me. And also in my earliest memories, I'm encountering film, I was able to understand myself better when I witnessed other people telling stories. That helped me kind of wrap my mind around some of those questions I was having about myself.
AWT What were some of the, I guess, name one or two films that solidified that for you, I guess that kind of goes in concert with something I emailed you earlier from Cinereach, asking "If you could create something that would change the life of your 14-year-old self, what would it be?" What was your 13 or 14 or 15-year-old self looking at when there was a solidifying in your brain that this was a viable way to answer questions about your life?
SEM I remember first starting to go watch movies...I'm actually going to Google this right now. I want to see when this movie came out... 2001, I remember starting to go to the movie theater... specifically being proactive about going to see movies in 2000, 2001, 2002. So I was 12. I was 12 I think when I really started to engage with movies in a really hungry way. And the movie I just Googled, because now I'm realizing that was so cryptic. The movie I just Googled was Ghost World, which is one of the first movies that I remember seeing, which is 2001, which my mom brought home. She brought home a rental from Blockbuster, and it was sitting in her room and I used to do this thing- she would bring home a bunch of movies for herself and have no idea that I was interested in movies or that anyone else was going to watch them, and they would just be sitting in her room and then I would just steal them from her at one or two in the morning and go watch them in my room alone and then return them to her room. And she didn't know I was watching any of them. And I remember Ghost World was one of them. How cool was that? I don't know what she was doing with that movie… Talk to Her, the Almodovar film was one of them. I think Y tu mamá también was one of them. And then around that same time, I went to a movie theater in 2001, again, 2002, and saw Bertolucci's The Dreamers with a friend of mine. And that movie was rated NC-17. So we bought a ticket to another movie and then just waited in the bathroom at the Laemmle in Santa Monica until The Dreamers was going to play in, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes. And we snuck in, and I remember we snuck in to see that film, which utterly changed my life, but we snuck in to see that film because I'd seen Hedwig and The Angry Inch- again, how did I see that? I don't know, maybe it also played at the Laemmle- but I'd seen Hedwig and Michael Pitt was in Hedwig, and I was immediately a Michael Pitt fan. So then when The Dreamers came out, I was just seeking out anything that Michael Pitt was in, and thank god that kind of freakish teen obsession brought me to that film. I remember distinctly sitting in the back of the theater watching that movie and being 12 being like, I'm definitely going to be spotted because I was crouching in the back.
AWT You were 12 watching The Dreamers?
SEM I think it was like 12 or 13, because when did that movie come out?
AWT 2003.
SEM … so I was 14 depending on when it came out in the year. So not quite, I was a little older… I'd had a year or two of already falling in love with movies that happened really fast. I just remember all at once in 2001 just becoming hyper-obsessed and infatuated. And I lived down the street from a Blockbuster, literally down the street. I could almost see it from my house. And there was a Blockbuster and a little independent video store, which obviously went out of business pretty much immediately...and I got, I don't know, five to ten dollars a week for allowance…And I spent it all at Blockbuster starting in 2001, 2002… And then I've said this before in a few other kind of similar venues, but at some point around that time as well, I was clearly staying up really late, but I stumbled upon this Gregg Araki film called Totally Fucked Up, which was playing on HBO at again, one or two in the morning. And at the time, you couldn't really just look something up on the internet. ...And so I was watching this movie and I didn't know what I was watching. I had no idea what it was, and I didn't know how to find out what it was, but it struck me. I mean, it's crazy for anyone that's seen the film- or if you haven't go watch it because it's just complete anarchy and it's really erotic and it just really grabs you and captures what it's like to be young and I don't know, horny and wild. And I saw pieces of that movie when I was around that same age, and it took me nearly a decade to figure out what that film was. And when I figured out what that film was, then I went down whole Gregg Araki path and have now seen all of his films. But he became one of my favorite filmmakers after seeing Totally Fucked Up at that age, but not knowing what it was.
AWT Yes. And he's still making films. And what you're describing is, which I didn't realize until speaking with you about it just now, is that there was a cycle of films during that time period that whether intentionally or unintentionally spoke to teenagers but were in the shell of a film that at least seemed on the surface to be for adults only. Obviously, an NC-17 rating prevents teenagers from going to see a film, but that one in particular, The Dreamers, is an important call to action, I think, for teens who are going through malaise. And Ghost World obviously teaches very important lessons about finding yourself when you're young and you don't have guidance from any real kind of adult figures per se. So I'm curious if there was some kind of carryover from those experiences into the film you made, which I believe also speaks directly to teens... and in our time, there isn't as much of a shape to how films are marketed or sold as they were for adults or for kids, or “this is for teens” because there's not as much parsing out who the audience is. What is the question in here? The question is, did those films inform the final product?
SEM Did the films that I'm citing inform Good Girl Jane?
AWT Yes.
SEM Before I answer that, I put a bunch of movies on my desk because I didn't know whether or not we were going to do this on camera. I just spotted another one that I grabbed, which is Party Monster, which came out around the same time, 2003. And clearly… I was really hungry for movies about young people who are finding family outside of their family, or early attraction. I was clearly watching a lot of movies about young people, which I'm still doing. But one of the earlier questions that you asked me was...what would be the film that I made for myself at that age? And I definitely attempted to do that with Good Girl Jane. I didn't see Fish Tank or any of Andrea Arnold's work until later when I was in college... But her work definitely really gave me that same sensation of authentically capturing what that sort of hunger I felt was. I keep using that word, but that's what I felt as a teen, just desperately hungry for experience and for engagement. And especially Party Monster really does paint a picture of people that are finding family, chosen family. Anyway… so I tried to do that with Good Girl Jane. I started writing that movie when I was 23, and then I officially had a draft of it I think when I was 25, and I shot it when I was 30. I'm 35 now. Would I make that movie now for myself at 15? I don't know…if that's the version of that that I would make now today. But that's definitely what I was trying to do at the time when I started when I was 23, 24, 25. And then...that film in and of itself is a time capsule of me and the experiences I had when I was 15 plus my growing brain at 25 plus what it was like to be on set at 30. It took so long to make that movie that it probably has the fingerprint of what I would do for that young Sarah over many, many years.
AWT Would it be more didactic now? What about your wiser brain would make changes to the film that you would make for?
SEM Well, I think there are two sides of it. In reality, I would touch nothing. I am tempted to say it's perfect in that it is exactly [what I imagined]. Is it perfect in another criteria? I don't know…. But I feel like the two sides of the answer, that it is completely honest in the best version of what I was attempting with the skills and craft that I had access to. And also I was younger, so I'm in touch with a younger brain now...I have distance and so I can maybe articulate things differently or with clarity, but I definitely don't want to undermine the closeness that I had to my younger self in those other years. So it's strange. It's like I was younger then, and so maybe I had an access to my youth differently then, but now I have a sort of maturity in my craft and a different handle on how to move those experiences from intellect to a film space or to the screen. I have a different, hopefully more evolved capacity or sharpened capacity to do that now. So I don't know.
AWT Yes.
SEM I wouldn't change anything, but it's just a curious thought, right? It's like, oh, well, that's what I did and I was much younger when I started and I have kind of a love for that. And then at the same time, there's a curiosity as to what it would look like now if I attempted a similar pursuit.
AWT Right? There has to be an evolution as a filmmaker. It's asking a band to play the same songs from their first album over and over.
SEM I think about that all the time... I remember when I started writing Jane, it's so funny that you say that because I was thinking about the artists that I liked so much, and one of those artists was Linkin Park. I was obsessed with Linkin Park in high school and Chester Bennington- he had just committed suicide when I was in, I think when I was in college- and I was thinking about how challenging it must be to live in this space that he was creating for that long. It was almost not productive for him to make happier, healthier work. This is a tangent, but it's just something that I used to think about all the time about artists having to grow and evolve in the public eye, especially if they're identified a certain way and also accessing a certain message, but from a different age. I do think about that.
AWT Yes, and it's certainly revealing itself in media and other outlets, social media too, that there's more of a consciousness of mental health in relation to those evolutions... There's more of an open conversation about how we treat particularly... celebrity artists as humans because they are evolving in front of our eyes, so to speak. And I think you and I both grew up in a time when... we were a lot harsher to or critical of people if they changed or if they softened or if they had a lull in their career. There was an expectation of a continuous upward trajectory, but we also wanted them to maintain... you were describing the same kind of intensity or darkness... humans are not capable of maintaining that kind of head space for that long. So yeah, that was an inarticulate way of saying I agree with and understand you.
SEM Thank you.
AWT How important was creating the world of 2005 to you? Because I both have a full sense of it when watching a movie but also forget about it. I guess it's partially because this story continues to play out no matter what year it is, I.E., addiction and susceptibility to influence. But what elements of the era were important to you to preserve and why?
SEM Frankly, I'm nervous to be too revealing this answer, but I'm just going to do it. The honest answer is that.. a lot of that is Tom Castronovo, the production designer. But what I would say is that the way that I wrote this is my first script that I had ever written... I just wrote from so much personal experience. The script went through revision processes, but I was writing so much from my life that I never thought nor had to think nor had to put effort into the period piece of it. And then when we went in to take the script to make it a film, I was just, again, sort of trying to recreate a lived experience. And so I didn't think that much about the time period as much as I was just mining details in my mind. I guess what I'm saying- and it sounds sort of like "naval gazey"- is that I wasn't thinking about it as a studied piece of work. I was just pulling naturally as it went along. And what I will say is that I don't, or I haven't yet as a filmmaker, built these high concept worlds. Even the next film I'm doing and other stories that I've written... they're very much present in the universe or the reality rather that I feel I'm living in. And so all I really have is to do is put someone there. I have character and I have the texture of the physical space. And so I'm sure that that is playing a lot into the writing and to the filmmaking, but I'm not thinking about it in an overt way because I'm not also balancing a bunch of other elements like genre or high concept elements or high stylized elements. Is that a roundabout? I guess I'm just saying that it was a natural inclination and not as much personal effort was put in, but I think it's an organic effort that happens with just the type of work I'm interested in.
AWT That makes total sense. The outside elements were not driving the story. It was very internal. Which informs my next question, which is that the way that the film is set up and captured… feels like from my experience, this is a small tangent- from my experience, this feels to me like what high school was like, which was standing off to the side being a wallflower and seeing these intimate moments happen amongst people, not very far from me, because when you're that age, you don't have privacy, you don't have a sense of what should be private or not. And seeing these things kind of play out from a distance, this feels as if there's someone in the room watching these things happen, kind of like a ghost. But it also feels like it's you, the author, looking at yourself go through these events again, which I can imagine it was extremely challenging emotionally. But was that also a natural choice that informed how the film was photographed? ...or if not, how was that shooting style informed? ...how did you achieve being a gentle voyeur, but also somewhat critical, but mostly sympathetic?
SEM ...I have talked a lot about the shooting style of the movie and I'm sure I've said it more eloquently than I'm about to, but- and again, I don't want to take all of the credit away from myself, and it seems to be my inclination, but I just didn't see the film as a series of chopped up moments to have. I won't always be writing from such personal experience, but I do think that I have a pull to honor the presence of something because a lot of my characters are having a lot of internal experience...you can paint that with a lot of closeups and a lot of texture with editing. But with this, it just felt so natural and obvious that in order to gather Jane's lived internal experience was to watch her as she's almost watching herself. She's very anxious, uncomfortable, she's sad, she's lonely, she's hyper-vigilant, and we are just there with her the whole time. And again, you can do that in sort of a frenetic, quick, choppy editing, especially with a drug. You could do it like Spun or something. You could do it really hyper stylized- which ironically I think came out around a similar time [as Ghost World and The Dreamers] and which I definitely saw- but it just feels like not the lived experience of that girl. That feels like an outside experience. And so, yeah, I wanted to bring everyone into the inside experience, which I know you can do both ways...
AWT But you did achieve something beyond... I think there's something beyond what you described that was going on, which again, was this kind of sympathetic but also gently critical eye on the events of what happened in the past, which feels extremely human to look back on those things. If you've gone through therapy and can afford yourself the value and significance of looking at your past mistakes with sympathy, I guess that's something that might be more ethereal or just a happy accident... were you conscious of it? And if not, do you see that reaction from the audience?
SEM Well... this is a bit like therapizing myself, so I don't even know if this is true, but... maybe I thought that because I was trying to peel away shame and introduce this, or I was trying to talk about how I don't really see the main character of this movie of Jane in this movie as a good or bad girl. I see her as a young person, and I think some people watch it and they watch her from top to bottom, and she in every frame of this movie, essentially. And they get to be with her, and they get to feel that reality, which is that she's really kind and she's really funny and she's really confused and she's really sexy, and she also is doing drugs, and then she's doing well in class... She's just a lot of things. And I felt like if you watched her top to bottom, it would be harder to judge her because you're just with her that whole time. That isn't completely effective for everybody... If I'm being really, really honest, I think for the people that Jane really speaks to, and for the people that really are moved by this movie, they're incredibly moved. And I think some of the films that I mentioned at the top of our chat are like that too. Not everybody feels deeply about Party Monster or Totally Fucked Up- or The Dreamers is probably really boring or upsetting to other people. I think this way of shooting has brought people in to Jane...And then I also think that, I'm sure a few people feel either A, too close to her or B, alienated because of it. I am not sure, but I think it's really effective for the people that it works for.
*photo by Katherine Fairfax Wright
AWT Yes, and I think that this probably gets to what I was trying to articulate earlier, is that you memorialized a true version of yourself without judgment and with some sympathy that I think is remarkable. And I think that if I were 14, I would need to see [this film] in order to better understand how going through adolescence is having all the ingredients for a full life, but they're all in disarray. And I guess maybe that speaks to the reason why it's so hard to get teens right in media, in cinema or television, and it's also so hard to get addiction right also, in my opinion.
SEM I'm sure I'll keep trying to [get those things right], by the way...
AWT Addiction or adolescence or both?
SEM I think both... my youth was very rich time, a lot of feelings. And also I've experienced different types of addiction throughout my life ...I'm just always questioning myself and my experiences. And again, like I said, this is the medium that I use to untangle those questions… my producer Lauren Pratt1 and I talk about this literally all the time- you're kind of grappling with the same questions for most of your life. You can make headway. And I've been in therapy most of my life. You make headway and you have "aha" moments and you learn things. And I learned through my writing and my work, but I'm scratching at the same things a lot of the time.
AWT Do you think that will continue to carry you in your career in 10 years? Do you think that you'll still be diving as deep? Do you wish to, do you feel like it's exhausting? How do you see this evolving?
SEM It's so funny because I'm working with this actor right now and… I wrote a script about a power dynamic- not a romantic power dynamic per se- between two [characters], and they're both working in film. And this actor said to me over a conversation we had the other day, "this is an addiction movie." And I truly had never thought about it that way, even though it just so plainly is these two people are dealing with their own type of… they're both dealing with addiction in different ways. And so even though that film isn't specifically about drug abuse, it's about addictive behavior toward work and sex and love addiction, and it's about addiction still. And so I'm still writing about that in a different capacity. And then I have other stories that have to do with, yeah, I mean teens, I don't know… I don't think I'm going to make a coming of age drama that looks like this again, but… I think I'll be writing about shame and sexual power dynamics and addiction. And I also am sure I'll be writing about plenty of other things that I haven't encountered about myself yet, or I haven't uncovered in the world that really, I don't know, fire me up… There's a lot. I do feel like it's possible that I'll be grappling with a lot of the same stuff in my work until the end of time, and then people will be like, “oh, Sarah made that,” and that's okay. That's okay. I remember also in school, I went to film school and a lot of the people in my class did kind of give me a hard time about the stuff I was writing. They were like, “oh, another one of these.” But I felt like, “okay, should I be writing more genre or should be writing things outside of human experience solely? Should I expand from drama?” And hopefully I will, maybe I will. But right now I'm really focused on, I don't know, I lost what I was saying, but really what I'm saying is that I'm going to write what makes me jump out of my skin. I'm just always going to do that. And right now, these are the things that do, and they have been since I started writing Jane 10 years ago.
AWT That makes sense. And not to implant the answer, but is the audience still going to be your 14-year-old self finding the VHS tapes- assuming they were VHS tapes, maybe they were DVDs...
SEM I got a little bit of both.
AWT ...On your mother's dresser? Or will you make movies ostensibly for yourself [now], because I guess there's a little bit of that in every filmmaker: you make the movie you want to see.
SEM Yeah.
AWT How can you see that evolve?
SEM Well, it's like I'm looking at these movies now. It's like Cuarón was not a teenager when he did Y tu mamá también, Bertolucci was absolutely not a teenager, and Gregg Araki was probably in his fifties when he made his film. I just made Good Girl Jane so I don't know if I'm going to make it again tomorrow, but I'm always going to make work that is shouting at me from the inside. I'm going to make work that I need to make, and it's always going to be coming from the same person. I'm going to be that girl that was stealing movies in my mom's room, and I'm going to be whoever I am as an adult too.
*photo by James Rosser Berry
Good Girl Jane (2022 [first screened at Tribeca])
written and directed by Sarah Elizabeth Mintz
produced by Lauren Suzanne Pratt, Fred Bernstein, Simone Williams,
Dominique Telson, Mintz
music by Kent Sparling
director of photography Jake Saner
edited by Harrison Atkins
casting by Kerry Barden, Jennifer Ricchiazzi, Paul Schnee
production design by Tom Castronovo
costume designer Haley Meeker
Lauren Pratt is my current producer partner at Opal Films.