Margot Nash’s Family Secrets (Interview)

Margot Nash has been a filmmaker since the 1970s. The Kiwi-born, Sydney-based director and academic turns the camera on her own family with her latest documentary, The Silences, which screens at this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival. Narrated by Nash herself, The Silences explores the secrets she discovered about her own family growing up in New Zealand and Australian during the 1940s and 50s including her father’s battle with mental illness, her mother’s abusive behaviour and the long-kept secret involving her oldest sister. Its an intimate and moving look at how “The Greatest Generation” dealt with the effects of war, sickness and scandal and how that affected the following generation. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke with Margot Nash just before The Silences was about to premiere in Auckland.

Click here to listen to the interview with film director Margot Nash:

Or read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: My first question to you is this, this is obviously very autobiographical, as a filmmaker how did making this film compare to your previous films that you’ve worked on, because I don’t imagine it’s quite the same experience?

MN: No, it was quite different, I think one of the things that allowed me to make this film, because I originally wrote it as a fictional drama, I wrote a version of this story and it was a big budget film and it was hard to get it financed and I’d taken a job teaching full time at the university and it all just got to hard to keep being a film maker out in the world and being an academic. I sort of put it away but I thought maybe I could make it as a documentary and then I thought, ‘what do I have to use?’ I realized that I’d re-created images from my childhood in other films and I’d drawn upon my own experiences in other films, so that gave me the extra material I needed and could use those clips.

SilencesI think the other films, when I was doing that, I was focused on making something different, not an autobiographical film, I was drawing on my memories, drawing on history to create images in the service of another narrative, where as this was sort of like a memoir and a story about my family. There’s a lot about me that’s not in the film of course because I do focus in the film on what happened to my mother and my father and then how that effected me, particularly in terms of early childhood, because I think that’s where we are formed. In 2012 I had a residency, a filmmaker in residency for 14 weeks of paid residency in Zurich, Zurich University of Arts. I went there, I had gathered all the bits and pieces, the clips for the film, the still photographs and I got everything digitized that I thought I might use. I just went there and taught myself the digital editing. I had been a film editor many years ago and started to put a cut together. I came back with a cut and then it took me until early this year to finish it. So I made it outside of the funding bodies and I made it slowly.

I wanted to have an opportunity to have what I call, a discovery driven creative development process rather than a market driven one, It was solitary and it was unfunded. I had a bit of money from the university and I had that big residency which paid me well. It was a different physical process and intellectually a different process too because I was jumping in without a script and letting the film write itself through images and words as I went along and then had to go and restructure it. So it was a different process and it was a different process emotionally too because I had to work out what was the story I really wanted to tell and how much would I make public and how much wouldn’t I because of course there is a lot of very personal material that’s not in the film and there’s a lot of personal material that is in the film. It was finding…walking that line…to try and tell a story that did really get to the heart of it but to protect my family and myself and ethically, to make sure that my family were okay with what I was doing. You don’t have to do that when you’re writing a fiction.

MD: How much did you discuss with your sister about what you were going to put into the film?

MN: Quite a bit, I made sure she saw the first cut when I came back from Zurich with it then. She probably saw at least two other cuts of the film when I was making it and I asked her for feedback and notes and was she okay with things. Some things she said, ‘you’ve got that wrong,’ and I went ‘Oh, really?’ And you go ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve always thought that, I’m completely off track there.’ There were other times where I went, ‘No, that’s my memory. It’s different to yours, but I will remove that bit, which would make it okay with her.’ It was very important to me that she was okay with it.

MD: You mentioned the word solitary and I had written down here wondering if it was a very solitary experience for you making the film because normally making a film is a very collaborative process.

Elizabeth Drake
Elizabeth Drake

MN: It was very solitary up until I started working with the composer. There is a lot of piano music in the film and I asked Elizabeth Drake, who I had worked with before. and she is a classically trained pianist, and she was obviously the person to do the music. When I started working with Elizabeth that made is much more collaborative and she was a really terrific creative collaborator and brought some wonderful things to the film and of course when you go into post-production and do the sound mix and do the colour grade and all of those things at the end, you’re dealing with people all the time. But up until then it was pretty solitary, except every so often I would have a screening and I would show it to colleagues or friends and ask them what they thought and listen to feedback and on I’d go.

MD: The film is mostly driven, as you’re watching it by your narration. My guess is that, that was the first step in the production, is that the way it worked? Did you write this out and then work with the pictures to match it up?

MN: I started working with the pictures and started writing the narration more to support the images so it was an interaction. The narration was written, then re-written and re-written and I worked with image and sound and then brought the voice in, so I didn’t write the narration and then put the film together, they were in tandem.

MD: One of the points you make early on in the film is comparing your generation to your parents’ and previous generations and how differently how the generations react in their ability to communicate and talk things out, their emotions and stuff. That seems to be a major thing between those generations. Why do you think there is such a big difference, because the generation previous to that didn’t seem to be that particularly open about it either. Then suddenly we have the baby boomers who seem to be, for the most part, interested in discussing their feelings.

MN: Yes, I am in that baby boomer generation. I worked on a documentary some years ago about the history of women’s work in Australia and when we got to the 50s, I coined these phase, ‘the amnesia of the 50s’ and I think in post-World War Two, I think families re united after the war wanted to forget. There was this fantasy of the happy home and moving on into the future and you just put all that behind you and so I think my parents’ generation just didn’t speak about a whole range of things and they tried to build a brave new world in the 1950’s and the children, of which I am one, of that generation, we were the ones who started shouting and marching and stamping our feet about the Vietnam War and racism and all of those things in the 60’s and 70’s and we started to speak about things that had been not spoken about. But I think that generation of my parents, they tried to forget.

MD: I’m just wondering if you had any insight into what made your/ our generation feel like they could talk about these things? Because it certainly didn’t have a guide from your parents to go by.

MN: I think that we reacted to the conservatism of our parents and I think in the late 60’s and 70’s, when I became a young radical, we wanted a voice and I think we were outraged by the Vietnam War and started to speak about that and that put us in conflict with our parents’ generation. It’s an interesting question you have asked cause I think that generation, my generation, we also discovered feminism in the 70’s and there were woman like Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan who started to write and Simone de Beauvoir of course, even earlier. That was the first piece of feminism I ever read. Someone, a sort of mother figure, gave me Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex when I was 16 and I went, ‘Oh my Gosh!’ So, I think there was that sort of generation of Sartre and de Beauvoir and all those intellectuals who started asking questions and the Beat Generation and my generation got swept up intellectually in all of that as well as all the radical movements in the 60’s and the 70’s, the anti-racism, the black power movement in America and what was going on in Australia and New Zealand, the Springboks and all that stuff. We became a very mouthy, loud generation, where as our parents had tried to keep everything quiet and build a lovely new life and they swept everything under the carpet where it kind of festered a bit and we became the generation that wanted to speak about those things, so there was many things going on.

MD: Do you think your motivation for your film was more personal or hoping it would have wider implications or did you just make it for yourself?

MN: Both. I think I felt compelled to make it. You’ve seen the film so you know the story of my other sister and that was something that always stayed with me, I’ve always wanted to tell that story and wanted to know more about what had happened because it was such a secret and so there was an itch you know, you have to do something with it. So, that was very much part of what motivated me, I wanted to tell that story. So it was for me, but as an artist you always know that you have to transform things into something that will speak to other people or else it is just a home movie. My sister, beginning, used to refer to it as, ‘Margot’s family movie’ and I wanted it to go further than that.

I’m a filmmaker and I’ve made a few films and you want your films to be seen and you want them to speak to other people, you want them to touch other people and stir their imaginations and their memories. I was really interested in memory and how memory works and could I make a film that was different to other films that could actually allow some spaces for other people to step into their own worlds too.

MD: Have you had much interaction with strangers who have seen the film? Do they come up to you and want to open up about their family secrets? What kind of interaction do you get from them?

MN: It’s early days, this is really the world premier tomorrow night, but I did have a screening at the university where I worked for people who had worked on the film and for friends, it was just a small non-public screening and I had incredible responses like that. Somebody I’d known since the 60’s came up and said “I’ll tell you about my mother some time.” So everybody seems to have a response where they think about their own families. When I showed the film to people, people would often start talking about their own stories. So, I thought, ‘Well that’s good!’ I wanted to make a film and the transformation of making the raw material into something else is a terrific process and I wanted to go through that process.

MD: So you are doing a Q&A tomorrow night, do you have any idea what to expect? Any questions people will ask.

MN: I don’t know yet, Gaylene Preston’s going to mediate that and she made a wonderful film called ‘War Stories,” about New Zealand women during World War Two and I remember seeing her film and thinking, “yes, my mother has a story from World War Two, too.” So, I was really curious about Gaylene’s response to the film and I haven’t spoken to her yet. I’ve done a couple of press interviews where, like you, somebody else had seen the film and a couple of people who haven’t seen the film so I’m starting to get a sense of what questions, what people are interested in. Certainly the narrative of living with mental illness in the family is a very strong one I think.

Click here for more info about The Silences screening at the NZIFF.