Sarah Carter | 'In Her Name' at Tribeca

In Her Name BTS. Photo credit: Jenna Hagel.

Sarah Carter is packing her bags and heading to NYC to celebrate her directorial debut with In Her Name at the renowned Tribeca Film Festival on June 12th. You may recognize Carter from her on-screen performances in television series’ such as The Flash and Rogue. Making her way behind the camera, she did not hold back from telling a raw and complex story that is painfully relatable to many. Partially inspired by provocative Lebanese artist, Huguette Caland's bold spirit and freedom of expression, In Her Name—filmed in classic Hollywood black and white—explores the gradient of experiences across motherhood, love, aging, art and identity. Told through the female gaze, In Her Name, deeply engages with mortality, offering an emotional, existential tableau.

Ahead of her premiere, we met up with Sarah to chat about transitioning from actor to director, her vision for the film, tackling triggering subject matter with a wink, and everything in between through In Her Name.

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You are a well-known face on-screen but this is your first time in the director’s chair. Have you always wanted to direct? What was it that made you feel that the timing was right?

It was when I met Spike Lee who directed the pilot for Shark, a CBS procedural with Jimmy Woods and Jeri Ryan that I was in for years, that I began to take an active interest behind the scenes, from the writers room to the inner workings of crew members and how the set functions. Spike Lee was and is a hero of mine, so, to meet him in the context of a network show was a far cry from anything overly soulful and it bridged the parts of myself that had separated my career in television with my aspirations as an artist. Spike Lee wakes everyone up in proximity. He’s a force, and raised the bar for me as an actor but also as a human being. He snapped me into a mode of taking full advantage of where I was to take me where I wanted to go.

I decided to just take a step back from everything, when a project fell through and I joined the Markland Studio theater company where I began workshopping my ideas with them and where I met Erin Hammond, the star of In Her Name. We began workshopping ideas for a story for me to direct her in. It was a pivotal moment in all of our careers. I think it was the piece where I completely let go of the industry itself and let something greater than my own agenda engage me from a place of inspiration and love for these women and their stories. I realized that I was being presented with an opportunity to create a piece of powerful art that would at the very least change our lives, but at best might help to open hearts and shift perspectives on a more grand scale. I have Erin Hammond to thank for presenting me with the opportunity of a lifetime through tears and nothing else to lose one day in her living room.

In Her Name still

The film showcases a very distinctly Los Angeles culture with sharp levity, but also sincerity and praise. How did you strike a balance between poking fun and also sharing what you love most about LA? I’m thinking specifically about new age elements that can feel almost infuriating to outsiders, against the very real, natural beauty of the city, and its incredible galleries, and iconic artists, like Ed Moses, whose work is featured…

LA is a unique place. People often come here with dreams to become famous and stay because of its healing nature. That formula of having every temptation and opportunity for our superficial egos to spin us out of control and lead the best of us to bottom out after reaching unstainable heights... to contend with ourselves and acknowledge the insanity of some of our ambitions until we’re ready to let them go for something more real. You have an extremely diverse and massive population in Los Angeles where everyone is at various stages of their expansion or contraction. The extremes here are vast and even tragic, but yes, that makes for great comedy.

You’ve mentioned that one of your intentions is to offer insight on grieving death within differing family dynamics. This is an often unspoken topic. Can you talk about how you showcased these insights in the film?

Death and grieving bring us in direct relationship with the value of life. No matter what your relationship is with a person, especially someone in your family, at the moment of death, there is a release of all that isn’t love.

We learn at the beginning of our film that Freya, one of the sisters, was so angry at her mother for abandoning her and choosing her sister over her, a questionable narrative she has held onto, that she doesn’t even go to her mother’s funeral. She is gripping that narrative tightly so that she doesn’t have to feel the deeper pain of love and heartbreak that her victim story is protecting her from, and face the deepest truth that she loves and misses her mom and her sister. In my story, it’s the mother’s spirit that comes to haunt her, or heal her if you will.

We also introduce the influence of faith through Fiona, the other sister who is a devoted Christian on the path her mother introduced her to to help her justify her need for direction, control and safety on the other side of violence and betrayal. By watching the two sisters relate we see where they are each trapped by the constraints they have held themselves to in order to avoid the unbearable fact that nobody really knows what or why life is the way it is, why our parents so often fail us, why we make destructive choices, or even have destructive impulses.

The tone of the film is intentionally comedic so that we can deal with the gravity of themes like delusion, addiction, suicide, and personality disorders in the family that lead to abuse, neglect, and a compromised sense of confidence in one’s own goodness and right to live their life from their hearts, which I believe is what great art inspires.

The sisters are so entirely different but there are moments when they also feel like they could be the same person; like they are an expression of the different ways that women especially are pulled. Was this intentional?

Yes. This theme of art or career calling versus the calling of the family or the biological pull towards motherhood and how it seems to be at odds with what's currently imposed on us dealing with the systems that are in place. I think women can be easily brainwashed into believing both narratives: one being that we will be happier if we allow ourselves to be taken care of by our husbands and fully enjoy the responsibilities of being a wife and a mother; or we can be brainwashed into believing that we need to resist those ancient ideas that were designed to control us and keep us from sustaining any kind of power over men or sovereignty and that we must sacrifice all convention in order to obtain cultural influence or personal freedom. 

I think the truth is somewhere in between and I hope the film sends that message, that both sides of the coin have value.

The mission to experience balance, harmony, and support in becoming a powerful woman and claiming our right to have it all: to be a mother and to have a successful self-sustaining career; to be supported by a partner who has an equal right to their personal sovereignty; to have a family and be an artist; it’s still very difficult and a wonderfully complex subject to explore as a filmmaker. The two sisters are facing the same challenge; the loss of their parents and having to assert who they are and find love in their own way. Weaving between their differences and similarities was a lovely way to show this concept that we all deal with the same challenges differently and the best thing we can do as a collective is be curious and open to our differences.

The entire film has a distinctly female gaze, especially in the male characters. I found them playing into uniquely feminine desires, both physically and emotionally, which isn’t something we typically see on screens. How did this unfold behind the scenes?

I have to thank our actors, Nyambi Nyambi and James Aaron Oliver for pulling their respective love stories off with such sensitivity. And Iain Trimble, our cinematographer, should be acknowledged here as well. He was so receptive the idea to include the elements of the park, the tree, symbolic of the tree of life, the light dancing surrounding them with both sparkles and shadows, and sexual suggestion rather than anything explicit to help the viewer connect to her the sensation of overwhelm and bliss. The moment she submits to the pleasure, we see a surrender to her essential nature. This moment for a woman is often an act of connection with the parts of herself she has denied or deemed as shameful. For Fiona she is integrated into the artist in her that she has kept buried.

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The story is centered around the dynamic of the two sisters’ and their own perceived shortcomings, but anchored by their father, played by Philppe Caland, the son of the late, great feminist painter, Huguette Caland, who I understand has been something of an inspiration for this film. Where are the moments that Huguette comes in? Where do we see her influence?

There isn’t necessarily a precise moment where Huguette Caland’s influence is obvious. It’s the way in which her story inspired me as a woman, an artist, a mother, and a filmmaker. Culturally, it wasn’t possible for her to thrive in Beirut, where she was a wife and a mother of three. Her husband supported her to follow the call to Paris where she lived, worked, and acquired fame. All the while she was keeping in touch with her children and making them feel loved by her. But, I wondered what that choice must have been like for her. When you ask Philippe about his mother, it’s evident she managed to do an incredible job of mothering while on the road to fame and success. He adores her. 

But, I am left with the lingering feeling she must have been tortured on some level by having to make a choice to physically separate from her children. I wanted to explore that dilemma in general, the unspoken destructive undercurrent when we either ignore the call of the artist or ignore the call of the family. The two forces have to be able to live within the same household and that is extremely difficult. 

I also want people to feel the lack of judgment in this film. Huguette is unapologetic in her commitment to herself. That kind of personal freedom is what I wanted for my two lead characters when I wrote the script. I hope the audience is rooting for their freedom, too.

How did you meet Philippe? Was this role written for him?

Philippe cast me in one of his films years ago and we have been close ever since. I didn’t write the role for him initially but I hoped he would do it. He doesn’t act in films that he is not directing, so it was a massive leap of faith for him to trust me. He brought so much depth and complexity to his character and that was way beyond the page. Knowing his history and where he was at in his own life, grieving his mother; I had a sense the collaboration was meant to be. 

I watched him take such great care of his mother, Huguette Caland, in her final years. The bits and pieces of their relationship I gathered from his stories fascinated me and I intuited that he would bring his love for her into his love for his character which I don’t know that I would have captured with another actor given that Marv was so deplorable on the page.

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Tell us about the existential questions that In Her Name presents. For example, can we be equally devoted to creative freedom and family? While writing the screenplay with different perspectives in mind, did you find it difficult to balance the various answers to this question?

Using estranged sisters to tell a story about family healing was very exciting to me. It’s an easy way to show our shared humanity while also showing that the same circumstances or wounding can result in very different personality distortions and survival structures.

The story also explores art and spirituality. One sister is both trapped in her Christian values and saved by them, while the other sister is trapped in her pursuit of artistic perfection. Revering her father but also living under her father’s shadow, Freya ultimately finds freedom standing up to Marv and making a mark for herself as an artist with a distinctly important and feminine voice.

The parent child dynamic fascinates me as well. We can’t help wanting approval from our parents, but the cruel design is that it’s our job to outgrow them and hopefully love them and ourselves even more on the other side.

Stylistically, the film is very bold. It’s shot in black and white with a classic Hollywood, almost Fellini esque-score. It feels natural, but I’m curious if the film was written in B&W or if that was a choice that happened once the story was ironed out.

Oddly, it was inspired by Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 film Paper Moon, which happens to reflect my production company name, Cheshire Moon, as well. My inspirations are usually unconscious. In retrospect, I am able to connect the dots and make sense of my choices. Yes, Fellini is an influence, Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha, Clerks...they’re all swimming around in my subconscious. And I love that you noticed the score. The composer, Ali Helnwein is a genius, and I have my husband and editor Kevin Barth, to thank for bringing Ali onto the project. Kevin has incredible taste in music and places a similar value on music and sound design to support the narrative.

I wasn’t attached to the idea of black and white but it was definitely the original vision. I find black and white films beautiful and I thought that being a film about family tragedy but set in the art world, black and white would help to make it less about the art itself and more about the character dynamics.

I also like the metaphor of the color gray to support a story where nobody is right or wrong but judgements are running rampant. There is no clear direction or way to solve any of the problems this family is facing. I wanted to capture the beauty of this time of healing, surrender, and acceptance of reality. There is a softness and lightness I hoped to achieve with the choice to go with black and white.

What was the biggest thing you’ve learned taking a film from an idea, to pre- and post-production and ultimately to premiere at Tribeca, one of the most prestigious film Festivals in the world?

Everyone involved in this film is either an independent filmmaker in their own right or completely devoted to the indie spirit required to bring a film like this from the page to the screen; with a first time filmmaker and through a pandemic nonetheless.

I would say for any film that makes it through from conception to completion and finds an audience, there is a magnetic force bringing it together. Everyone involved in this, Erin Hammond, my husband Kevin Barth, our families, Cynthia Bravo our line producer, Antoinette Dormer our AD, Sam Findlay, Iain Trimble, Pat Monroe, Philippe, James - there are too many to name - but all of us coming together and pushing it along was also thanks to divine timing for lack of a better description. There’s an intangible beyond the hard work that needs to be acknowledged here. Some would call that God. The trick is definitely to have faith and surrender to the greater purpose. It's about tapping into the vision, feeling the inspiration, and letting spirit take the lead while working hard for it, of course. I’ve never worked harder, but also wishing for it and witnessing the miracle unfold. Because it is, it’s a miracle.