“I didn’t see it as a business,” says creator Alma Har’el. “It was a calling that was on my mind. I didn’t start as a filmmaker. I was many things on the way there — theater, video arts, music videos, documentaries — it just sort of unfolded over years until I got to make my first film.”
Alma’s first writing credit is Lady in the Lake, but as a director, she’s known for Bombay Beach, LoveTrue, Jellywolf, and the Shia LaBeouf inspired story, Honey Boy. “At first, it was just an attraction. I can’t really explain it — it controlled my dreams.”
While hosting a television show, she knew she wanted to direct. “I started with photography, then music videos, and VJ. With VJing, you play live visuals in clubs and music concerts while everyone is high on Molly and acid. No one is looking at the screen,” she jokes, “but you’re connected with them in your mind.”
“I think that was my first dream, to play visuals as if they were music or an instrument on stage. It was a need to have an extension of my dreams.” This led her to working with musicians like Beirut, Paul Smith, Jack Peñate, Sigur Rós, and even Bob Dylan.
Alma Har’el. Photo by Rob Berry
“The first time I did a music video in the U.S. was for a band named Beirut.” Zach Condon, the lead singer, later worked with Alma on her film, Bombay Beach. “I found their record and hit him up on MySpace,” she jokes, “and he wrote me back.” She invited the band over and they made two videos for $10,000. The videos were Elephant Gun and Post Cards from Italy.
Listening to her inner voice, she describes “feeling full” from this work in music videos, which helped her navigate towards the next collaboration, a one-hour live event with Bob Dylan called Shadow Kingdom.
There’s years where you just pitch and send treatments. There isn’t an artist out there where I haven’t pitched them, and you don’t get 99 percent of those jobs. You work really hard and make treatments, and they just stay on your laptop.
While working with Bob Dylan, she noticed he is both “an internal timeliness being” and someone who “lives in the moment.” She says, “You just try to meet him there.”
Creating Lady in the Lake
“Lady in the Lake was the first project that didn’t start [as a conversation between creatives]. Someone brought me the book. I wasn’t sure if it could feel personal, but it ended up feeling extremely personal to me.”
Thematically, she related the story of an aspiring reporter pursuing the murder of a forgotten young woman in 1960s Baltimore. “Meeting Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram, and bringing in my partner in life Byron Bowers, all of those things made it extremely personal to me — working with these soulmates, much like Honey Boy.”
Alma sees the connection between Honey Boy and Lady in the Lake as generational trauma. “It’s what they call trauma bonding. For better or worse, it definitely takes you places.”
“I wanted to communicate with people visually, about something that isn’t easy to articulate — maybe a little more transcendent. It’s the search for the marvelous. I share that with Maddie,” she says of Natalie Portman’s portrayal of the lead character.
“There’s an unspoken understanding of your own subconscious that happens in an instinctive level when you connect with a visual,” she says. “Especially when it’s accompanied with music, even when there is a story.”
She brought up some sequences specifically in Episode 6 of the series. “Those sequences are not in the book. They’re dream sequences in the book and I would say Episode 6 feels the like the purest manifestation of my connection to the work.”
How to Visualize Concepts
So how does one start to contextualize visual imagery? Well, it’s complicated. Alma thinks about a cinematographer on set who asked, “What are you going for? Can you give me something.” Her explanation was, “Think about it as a rat running in the gutters but always trying to look at the stars.”
This unique visualization helped her collaborator better understand the direction of the piece. “I just like to be in it, but also look at the stars, and dream, you know?” This metaphor was specifically for a particular job, but she feels a normal “gruel” plus “dream” in everyday life.
Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman) Photo courtesy Apple TV+
The idea to “search for the marvelous” comes from the show. “I think the idea of this contrast makes me want to say something.” The other parts of the show, staffing the writer’s room and having business conversations, “that’ll bring you to the ground,” she jokes.
“It was such a huge responsibility on this show. I read the book and it was so interesting to see this character who is Jewish and white, both persecuted and what we call ‘passing.’ Natalie Portman has a beautiful nose that isn’t stereotypical with the ideas of Jewish. She straightens her hair. That was the character. She can travel outside her community.”
“As I was reading it, the concept of surviving, being an immigrant, but also being wrapped up in your own struggle that you miss the concept and perception of other people around you — being oppressed and the oppressor — that was in the book, but we also wanted it to be a two-hander.”
The book, written by Laura Lippman, was the inspiration, but story also came from a diverse writers’ room consisted of Briana Belter (Grey’s Anatomy), Nambi E. Kelley (The Chi), Boaz Yakin (The Harder They Fall), and Sheila Wilson (Warrior Nun). “We read hundreds of samples.”
“They started the writers’ room with me, which consisted of a lot of challenging conversations. It was almost two years and a very long process that felt very heavy, a major responsibility to the characters and the city.”
Adapting the Book
“There was something very funny to me about Maddie. Her tone-deafness was funny to me. There was something about that that I tried to hold onto. I wanted to keep a few principles while making it. One. It was a murder mystery and a who done it, but two. I wanted a duality, as these characters are exploring what has died in themselves.”
“Exploring who we are is one of life’s mysteries, so trying to weave those together [was the goal]. The other thing I took from the book that I wanted to sharpen and focus on, was the absurdity and the humor of it all. It was sort of one leg in the grave and one on a banana peel.”
As for the length of the project, Alma says “the lack of sleep” has taken a toll on her health. “I’m a pretty relentless filmmaker that never lets anything go. Every shot matters. Every cut matters. To stay in that level of relentlessnessly with not a lot of sleep was extremely challenging.”
In terms of advice for filmmakers and screenwriters, Alma acknowledges a “pushback to efforts made for diversity.” As the founder of Free the Work (originally called Free the Bid), which advocates for underrepresented filmmakers, she advises, “People are having different relationships with that concept, but the one thing that never changes is to not give up.”
“Find a community. Find your people. You’re only going to get there when you find your people. This kind of work is not done by you alone. If you can write, then write. Because if you can write, you own your material and you can have a different kind of fate.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.
