Saccharine filmmaker Natalie Erika James does not shy away from infusing her work with deeply personal subject matter. Her Chainsaw Award-nominated debut film, Relic, was heavily based on her grandmother’s journey with dementia, and the writer-director has been open about her latest feature having elements of her own experience growing up woven into the narrative. The diet culture body horror centers on a medical student, Hana (Midori Francis), who, in her desperation to lose weight, turns to unsavory methods. Namely, eating human ashes.
James shared that this is her most personal film to date, something that at times hit her in ways she wasn’t expecting while on set. “Usually, there's a bit of a veil that you can pull over a narrative a little more. I think most artists put so much of themselves into their work already, and for a lot of it, it's kind of a way of transmuting pain into something that's meaningful. It can be very healing in that way. But yeah, it's a good question. I think for me, it's always trying to capture the essence of something. I often think just because it happened doesn't make it interesting. It's why biopics are so hard, right?” James pointed out.
“You need to find that essence of the person rather than the literal retelling of something,” she expanded. “What's also really important is having some distance from the events you're trying to convey on screen. I think back to when Hana comes home to see her dad. There was a period in my life when I was 19, when I was living alone with my dad in his house. To have as much distance as I have from that now, to be able to go back to those places, I think that's important as well.”
Even with that distance between the events that loosely inspired Saccharine, James admitted there were times on set that caught her off guard. “It can really assault you on set, this re-dredging of old memories. I don't know if I'll ever go as personal again, but I think all you hope for is that you're being as truthful as possible and that hopefully people see themselves reflected on screen. I often felt growing up that there wasn't a film like this that I could have watched to be like, oh, this is not normalized, but this happens to other people in a way.”
When asked whether this is definitively James’ most personal film so far, she confirmed, “I'd say so. Yeah. I think Relic is just as personal, but I think the family dynamics are pretty different from some of the stuff that's reflected in this film.”
In the end credits, viewers may notice a dedication — in loving memory of Stephen Ross James. That’s James’ father, who passed away while she was making the film, but he was fully on board with the project and supportive of his daughter.
James noted “Shooting at the parents' house and those scenes with the dad in particular,” caught her off guard on set. “I felt that a little bit on Relic with the scene where Edna buries her photos, and there's a crisis point, but not to this extent where I was like, ‘Oh, I want to leave set.’ But then, incredibly, which is so intense because it's kind of absurdly funny in this dark way, because you've orchestrated every single element of a scene. You've hired everyone to be there, and you're like, ‘This is a prison of my own making.’
“Unfortunately, my dad, as I was making this film, was diagnosed with cancer. I started making the film just before he got diagnosed, and by the time I'd finished it, he pretty much passed as soon as we wrapped post. That was really tough. It felt like such a crawl to the finish line, but everyone was amazing in supporting us through that. But it was the story of my dad. The real events of when my dad was struggling with his food addiction and his health were about 15 years ago. The incredible thing about that was that he really turned his life around and was able to work through that and almost had a second life. He was so on board with the project and was always the type of person who was like, ‘I know exactly what I'm going to say in all my interviews.’ It was really wonderful for him to, again, similar to my sense of converting pain into something meaningful, I think he really felt that. So it was a shame he never got to see the final film, but he was so on board with the script itself.”
While James’ father didn’t get to see the final film, he did visit the set. “Yeah, he did. He never met himself, but he was thrilled that Rob Taylor was playing him.”
In real life, Saccharine star Midori Francis has been a champion of visibility for queer joy, and while the narrative itself has nothing to do with Hana’s sexuality, it is refreshing to see her romantic interest in Alanya (Madeleine Madden) unfold as a simple matter of fact with no special attention drawn to it (thank you, Midori and Natalie!).
“This story in particular felt like it required Hana to have this object of desire be someone of the same gender. I think it's kind of that effect of having a mirror to herself, and it felt like that was better. I was better able to express that duality of, do you want to be her or do you want to be with her?” James explained.
“All of that felt like so much of it is, I don't know, projected onto the female body. Even the notion of this anatomical Venus being, for me, at least the endpoint of desire, what's more object-like or the endpoint of objectification than a corpse of a woman who's depicted in this erotic way in the same way that the anatomical Venus sculptures were back in the day? For me, it was more a critique of society and the weight stigma so rife in our culture that felt like it needed to be at once expressed by a woman and experienced by a woman, but also projected onto a woman. As a queer filmmaker myself, it's not a part of myself that I've shown on screen before. I think that was also very, I don't know… important to me.”
Saccharine is now in theaters. Read more with Natalie Erika James on Saccharine here.
