DGA Monthly

4 I D G A M O N T H L Y SCREENPULLS: MGM HOME ENTERTAINMENT SHOT TO REMEMBER Continued from page 3 — Director Rebecca Miller on Personal Velocity. Paula's first instinct is to run. I wanted it to feel kinetic, inside her shattered experience, which is how we cut it. Cinematographer Ellen Kuras was running alongside Fairuza with the camera. One of the photographers that had a lot of influence on me here — for the coloration, light, and atmosphere — was Nan Goldin in her book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Those are photographs of people living in the margins of urban life. Paula belongs in that tribe. Overall, this sequence is about collapsing time and memory, and understanding a character in shock, who is telling a story about a near-death experience she just had. She's reliving it and telling it to her mother, who is no longer a part of her life, and yet she's the one person Paula needs to talk to. This part of the film is getting at the part of existence that is beyond words, for which cinema is so well suited. 7 Her boyfriend, Vincent, calls and we're pushed further into the past. They met when she was sleeping on the street and he gave her a pear. The theme of people rescuing others is big in the film, as she rescues the kid and finally her own child. There's something so primitive and biblical about the pear. It's a reverse Garden of Eden situation, like she gets to reclaim her innocence by eating this piece of fruit. Ellen was shooting handheld. We're hearing voiceover and crows, then this guitar score, which has a softer, more merciful vibe than the otherwise minimalist score. The music speaks to Vincent and her because, to believe she'll ultimately return to a relationship with real value — one that could support them having a child together — you have to believe in their relationship. 8 Voiceover tells us how Paula believed that Vincent had been drawn across the sky to save her. We see their yearlong relationship through this series of high shot stills in bed. We dissolve between the stills as Paula and Vincent position increasingly further away from each other. Distance is growing between them. It's one of my favorite moments in the film. The editing was about instinctively tying moments together. We had so many different angles and ways of telling the story. Editor Sabine Hoffman is very gifted. She and I tried many ways of doing it and having the past telescope down so that everything gets compressed. Finding the right triggers to send us into the past was a constant theme for us, so the audience wouldn't feel like, "Wait a minute, I was having such a good time over here," but rather have them ready to go. 9 We hear the score, the car doors, the engine, and her mother saying, "Don't do this!" She's trying to get Paula's attention, but Paula's already onto the next thing, her impulse taking her away. Her mother is almost dissolving, like a reflection in water that will be gone in a second. You see how helpless the mother is, but also that the past — and the past in that house — is something Paula must escape. What is unsaid in this sequence is as important as what is verbalized. Through montage and voiceover, we understand why Paula left home: the relationship with her mother's boyfriend, her way of looking at the world as a series of signs, and her strange, instinctive, compulsive decision-making. We have followed the thread of the news about the accident through the whole film until we get to Paula. 10 See more images and text from this article online at www.dga.org.

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