MRH: In one of the interviews on the DVD, you said that you had been approached by three companies that were interested in making the film. You had a specific budget, but they all wanted a different leading actress, and then I think it was your director of photography who said, ‘Well, we shot ten minutes. Why don’t we do this nine more times?’

I thought it was funny because it kind of reminded me of Orson Welles doing Citizen Kane (1941), and how the test footage actually became scenes in the finished film. Your film has a bit of that spirit, but at the same time when you decided to make it on your own, it had the spirit of a lot of independent filmmakers who basically just get a camera, use existing locations, and then sort of similarly use improvised dialogue and scripted dialogue, and find the film as they’re shooting and editing their film.

SR: I think we found the film in the scriptwriting in this case. A lot of it. We knew it was a very well-written script by her, and I have to give a tremendous amount of credit to Elinor, who really worked on the development of the script much more than I did with Wendell.

I was kind of like a fly in the ointment, trying to say ‘I don’t understand what’s going on here, and you guys are going to have to make it clear to me.’ For example, when we finally finished the movie and put some of it on YouTube, it was the gynaecology scene that got almost a million hits after about fourteen, fifteen months.

Why?

I mean, if you just put “pussy” up on the screen, you’re not going to get a million hits or other gynaecology scenes. This has to do with the Rorschach inkblot thing. I read that gynaecology scene when it was first written, and my immediate reaction was pretty close to the reaction of most men – not one hundred percent, but I’d say most men - which is, ‘So the kid’s adopted then?’

Most women’s reaction is, ‘You should revoke the license of that gynaecologist.’

MRH: That’s funny. I think my reaction was that I believed that Darwin was her own son, and I thought there was something odd going on with this woman physically; that whatever emotional problems she’s having are now manifesting physically.

SR: That’s actually fairly common. It happened to Wendell in real life, and the gynaecologist who came to one of the festival screenings (a woman, actually) said it’s not that uncommon for the cervix to look intact. If you haven’t had sex in a while, the cervix can look intact, so it’s not totally bizarre, but my reaction, unlike yours, was to believe authority. The gynaecologist [played by Lisa Zane] isn’t out of her mind, she’s just making assumptions.

We [also] knew we had a story to tell that had to do with Betty’s shift from her self-interest to an almost obsessive, self-interest in her son Darwin, and we knew we were going to do that in the filming.

You wouldn’t even really see him…There’s so few shots of him, except from behind or peripherally. In the second half of the movie, he’s very much a part of it because it’s her realizing she’s got to raise this kid as she’s got less and less money.

We knew that we were going to tell a narrative story [where] one scene was not necessarily going to follow the other scene in a typical narrative line. You, the viewer, were going to have to do some work (hopefully entertaining work), where you draw your own conclusions why [any given scene] is there.

And people naturally do. If you and I went out and we just shot a bunch of random scenes and put them together and showed them to somebody, they would draw raw connections between them, even though you and I had absolutely no idea what the connections were. We knew that that was going to make it a more involving film for some people. What we didn’t know was that we were going to catch the zeitgeist the way we did.