I was thinking about our culture's obsession with oppression and what that does to people who aren't oppressed.

TESS POLLOK: What was on your mind when you were making Actors?

BETSEY BROWN: Definitely sibling relationships and just the most intimate relationships, which include, for me: siblings, parental, partnerships, and best friend – there’s a best friend character who’s definitely way less involved [in the film] because the Betsey character is a version of myself that is kind of just so horrifying that the friend aspect gets farther and farther away. I think the desire for fame and how that can completely ruin you is another. And on that same theme is, like, what does it mean to create art in the abyss? Being seen vs. absolutely not being seen. And the final one would definitely be our culture’s obsession with oppression, and what it does to people who aren’t oppressed.

POLLOK: Well there’s that great, really frustrating scene in the movie not long before Peter ‘transitions’ where he’s talking with your parents at the dinner table, being, like, “I want to talk, but they don’t want to listen, so how can I keep talking without talking?”

BROWN: I think the character of Peter from 2017, which was based on a bunch of cis white men that I came into contact with, was feeling too powerful at a time in our ****culture when power wasn’t trendy. ****From their perspective they felt left out, and they wanted to say, like, “As a bisexual man,” or, “As a whatever,” as a fill-in-the-blank oppressed identity, “I can speak now.” Not that I’m saying that they should feel that way, but a certain few of them felt silenced. It’s just a very fragile state, but when your history is to always be uplifted and empowered blindly, it’s threatening when other people are invited to this party.

POLLOK: And when you were crafting that character, how much of that was your nightmare of Peter and how much of that was Peter’s nightmare of Peter?

BROWN: I think it was definitely a combination. When I wrote it, it was my nightmare of him. And then when he came to set he knew that that was a huge part of what I was going for so he really ignited that, he was totally manic and that’s like a huge fear of mine because he’s always – like – whatever – his instability was very actively Peter. In the acting class he teaches right now, he always says, “Hurt their feelings for real, love them for real,” and, like, when Peter was on set he scared me for real. He sort of chose the method route for this and he was a total nightmare. Every bathroom of whatever location we were on I would basically bring him in and be like, “You have to stop,” and he would be like, “I just wanna be treated like a star!” And one day I did lunge at him because the sibling regression stuff came out. And he was like, “You don’t realize I could walk – I could walk off this set right now.” It was definitely a crazy experience but I also realized, through doing Q&As for the film and talking about these experiences, that I sort of unconsciously wanted that to happen – I wanted to set up an environment where regressing back to chilidhood sibling dynamics could happen, because I do feel like I was robbed of having that dynamic. And the fact that I lunged at him, that’s so par for the course for with siblings, but that’s the only physical fight I remember us having. So now I’m of the mind that it was all a part of my unconscious desire to heal, even though it was upsetting at the time.

POLLOK: Do you believe in birth order psychology?

BROWN: It’s funny you ask because me and Dasha were just talking about this, specifically siblings vs. only children. It’s an interesting dynamic to be an only child because you’re sort of seeing this pair that treats you like the world revolves around you but you’re also like, “wait, where’s my companion?” You guys are two but I’m just one? It seems like a formatively lonely mindset as opposed to siblings. For me, [with Peter,] I felt like, “I want my pair! I want my partner in this family to see me! But why isn’t it happening? I want us to be a duo! We’re the kids and they’re the parents. That’s their team that they’re on and this is our team that we’re on, Team Kids.” But, depending on the dynamic, that only goes so well. Ultimately, when we did become friends when I was, like, 22, it was instant. It was, like, whoa, we’re very, very compatible as friends and we have an experience of our parents that we can share and that’s fascinating to us both. How much parental love is too much is definitely a question I have in my head a lot. As I said, and as you can probably see in the movie, my parents are so supportive – and, ultimately, that’s been really helpful – and that inspires me to work. But I think it’s also because they’re very hard-working and their values are wrapped up in working, too.

POLLOK: I’m sure there are a lot of awful kill your darlings type of moments making a movie like this. Do you have any advice for other artists working on micro-scale, financially speaking? Was there any moment where you were, like, this is something I’m not willing to compromise on?

BROWN: Every moment. I would say that I’m really happy with Actors because I didn’t make any sacrifices in spite of financial constraints. I have to shout out my producer, Emily McEvoy, for just completely making our budget feel like we could do anything, even though it’s the tiniest budget – people would scoff at the budget. But we still have money left over because Emily is incredible at her job. For example, in one of the montages – there’s a pool scene where me and Andrew kiss for the first time – in the script it’s us at a real pool, but for the movie we were, like, “Okay, we don’t have a pool, there’s no way we can afford this, there’s no way to get what we want here.” But the thing I love deeply about working on a literal no-budget is that when you run into impossibilities, that’s when you really get to be creative. So what we did was, my dad had access to this basement that just had to be renovated and cleaned up, and there was already a part of it cleaned up. So my amazing production designer, Tori Lancaster, she turned the basement into a pool area by painting the ground blue and, like, painting a pool on the floor and painting fences on the back walls. And then we had projections for trees in the background. And to me, that’s just so much cooler than being at the pool! And there are a lot of other examples from the film that I’m sure show where the restrictions created creativity. I don’t feel the biggest rush to, like, double or triple my budget – I mean, I would love to for some stories – but I don’t feel so afraid of a small budget because I love the things you can get out of it.

POLLOK: What effect does playing a fictitious version of yourself have on the outcome?

BROWN: I think what drives me to make art is to understand, to try to deeper understand aspects of myself and my relationships through acting out aspects that are really caricaturized. They’re just, like, little unconscious seeds of me that I’m trying to bring out. In this movie they’re my worst qualities and my biggest fears. My assignment for myself was to make a nightmare. Well – shout out to the college students – I was reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and she talks about writing about her nightmares in order to will them not to happen and I was, like, “Wow, that’s so cool. That’s such a great idea. I want to see where that would bring me.” So, Actors is where it brought me. By focusing on all these qualities that I’m afraid of in myself and turning them into caricature and banging them on the head and going as far down the road of morality as I’m allowed to go – just trying to exorcise demons, essentially. I think that’s potentially seen as egoic and like it’s putting too much attention on yourself but, ultimately, I feel like enough people are relating to it that it must be good for people. The showing and giving aspect of it is really helpful to temper the egoic aspect of it. I don’t think it has to be egoic to feel like you can put out really personal work. Ultimately, the footage is the footage and that’s not me. None of this ever happened, it’s fiction, and I’m using narrative in the way that I am, and the way in which it’s edited has a perspective. So all of those things kind of come together to make it way larger than just me. The craft and the thought that gets put into creating the story is what makes it you, ultimately, it’s a way in which to grapple with yourself through the lens of art-making. When I look at the work that I’m most drawn to and it’s autofiction, it’s Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, it’s Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Caveh Zahedi’s stuff, Essays and Fictions by Brad Phillips.

We've done so much with so little for so long, we can do anything with nothing now.

POLLOK: I feel like there’s an interesting thread between Actors, which you made, and Empath, which you starred in, which is that they both seem to be interesting in the patholigizing of personality. I was wondering how you felt about that.

BROWN: It’s a very big question. I do feel like people are really – with social media, especially – it’s really, really easy to put on different personalities and, yeah, pathologize your own personality. I think because I feel like we are now commodifying our personalities – or shaping them – but to commodify a personality means to change it for what you think is going to benefit you and that’s something I’m constantly thinking of, as well. Especially, in terms of Empath, it’s so interesting that my mom was a psychoanalyst when I was growing up, because people really didn’t take that seriously for awhile. Like, when I would tell people my mom was a therapist their reaction would not be, like, “Oh, wow, that’s so great.” But now it’s super trendy to be into mental health, but it also means that if it’s trendy to be into mental health you’re going to be motivated to find shit that’s wrong with you. I do feel like right now I see the labels being used as a little bit of a crutch and kind of an excuse to act out in some sort of way. Just because you know you have something, or just because you’re pinpointing something about yourself and able to put a label on it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be trying to work on yourself.

POLLOK: Do you feel like using labels as a crutch was something you thought about while you were making Actors?

BROWN: Definitely, yeah. An interesting thing about Actors and what I’ve realized in showing it to people is that, like, so much of the stuff that it’s talking about – there isn’t such a clear language to talk about these things. It gets really hard. This is actually a part of why I made the movie because there are these things going on that I feel like I can’t actually articulate with language, you know, and we aren’t practiced at having to talk about it.

POLLOK: I’m struggling right now not to use the word brave because I’d hate to be, like, “Oh, Betsey, you made such a brave film,” but I do think it can be disheartening to have work be so misunderstood, especially when we live in a culture that’s obsessed with these topics and you’re constantly being encouraged to think about these things by everyone around you, but you’re not rewarded for actually taking those risks.

BROWN: I know. For sure. You get in trouble just for talking about it. One thing that I’ve been thinking about recently with the film, because it was brought up to me – actually, by Brad Troemel, so I want to give him credit for that – is that there are a handful of people who are getting really upset about the trans appropriation aspect of the film, but we’re seeing actual harm and emotional abuse, by Betsey, put on Andrew, the partner, and the baby. Like, she abandons her child and has a baby out of complete and absolute narcissism, and that child will be fully affected by her actions, while Peter’s harm is mostly unto himself because he hates himself so much. I mean, the amazing thing about the experience of showing this movie is just that it came after so much rejection by institutions that were afraid of people being upset by it. Festivals would send me emails, like, “We love this movie, but we’re not going to show it.” And yet when Ilyse Singer, the programmer at the Roxy Cinema in Tribeca, gave us a chance, the audience members have actually loved it and are seeing it for what it is, and we’ve sold out all the shows. It’s such a strange disconnect between, like, the idea of the movie vs. the experience of the movie.

POLLOK: I chose a cannibalism-related subtitle for the interview because I felt like a huge part of Actors is about wanting to be someone you hate/admire, and how looking up to someone is kind of like wanting to eat them.

BROWN: Definitely, definitely. 100%. I love that you got that from the movie, the feeling of wanting to be someone you simultaneously hate and admire. Those two things always come together, hate and admiration. I was listening to the Red Scare with Sheila Heti and Sheila Heti, or maybe Dasha or Anna, one of them was saying, “You pick your idols based on people that you see yourself in.” They’re more idealized versions of yourself. I really like that. I think that’s definitely the case, that admiration comes with jealousy and hatred. I think Betsey the filmmaker wants to, like, eat Actors so she can finally flush it away, but, like, maybe in a way where she can get some nutrients out of it. The nutrients would be, first of all and very much so, conversations like these, as well as a more stable approach to all these things that I’m trying to grapple with, like fame, being in the abyss, relationships, and our culture.

POLLOK: How do you see the abyss in Actors?

BROWN: Both the Peter and the Betsey characters feel as though they’re in the abyss because they don’t know what their space is in the culture. And I feel like I made it with an abyss mentality, of feeling, like, “I’m not a successful actor, the acting job that I thought would launch me didn’t really launch me, and now I’m stuck doing bad self-tapes, and now I can do whatever I want and make whatever I want because no one’s gonna see it.”

POLLOK: It reminds me of a piece of installation art [by Stanley Marsh 3] in Amarillo, Texas – “We’ve done so much with so little for so long, we can do anything with nothing now.” It can be motivating as an artist to realize you’ve made it all this way and suffered for nothing, and that you could be happy with even less.

BROWN: Yeah, I feel that completely and utterly when it comes to art.