#Find places and ways that make you feel happy and authentic. A simplistic approach but what else can we do here?

[castlebyersafterdark]

perhaps you dont want to speak for an entire nation lmao, but im assuming youre american and if so, do you know why people assume that byler having sex is dirty, and do not see sex as an expression of love? how is love dirty? how is sexual experimentation dirty?

is sex ed not taught in schools over there? is religious paranoia really still that big of a deal in the US? are perhaps most of these people from southern or religious/homophobic states? or are they just people from all over the world who do not like the idea of accidentally conflating mike and will as children in earlier seasons with their older counterparts experimenting sexually? after all, if youre scrolling the tag all day, it's easy to see posts of young miwi/byler followed by highly explicit byler posts, and that can subconsciously fuck with your brain i guess.

but the show itself is obviously linear in terms of growth, so any story being told in canon isnt fucked up. i mean, they flashback, but their controversial creative choices are fantastic storytelling with reasons for being there, like nancy's virginity loss + barb's death. deliberately uncomfortable. but no part of byler being together and romantic is meant to make you uncomfortable. it should give you the happies.

Guilty! American all the way. And I mean this with genuine sincerity, it's kind of a huge and unfortunate reality of the state of things in this country. And many places around the world? I'd love to know where there's this seemingly so open-minded place that makes you question the mere possibility that people view gay sex negatively. Certainly interesting reality. I'd love if that was the case!!

"sex as an expression of love? how is love dirty? how is sexual experimentation dirty?" I MEAN, yeah!! That's the big question we've all been asking ourselves for... forever. To exhaustion.

Yeah, those who aren't backwards and bigoted and hateful don't view it like that, but even the most well-intentions hold prejudice as well. America? Constantly in a battle with the "traditional" values people, the extremist religious agenda, the conservatism that plagues the country. Yeah. It's pretty bad. Kind of a prevailing issue. Religious paranoia rules the land.

It's not even the sex-ed angle, because straight people are getting the kick in the teeth as well. If the public school system is failing the, admittedly, majority population on sex education, do you think gay kids stand a chance?? Hell no. My high school was barely passable above some of the crazy things I've heard that people "learn" in class, but I'd say most schools are teaching abstinence and barely covering the topic of anatomy properly. Basically taught us about how if we had sex we were all going to immediately catch diseases and then they made us watch a birth video and when it ended they just said. Don't have sex or those are your options. And then they spent a very long time teaching us all the street names of various drugs which was ridiculous, they were thorough. That's what it's like in a mild situation. And that's just my experience, and not universal. I've heard about better, and I've heard far far worse.

There's a lot to be said and has been said about the state of the fandom so I'm not going to dive into this all right now. Always trying to keep it positive and light and just do my thing and encourage others to do their things even if other people don't want them to. Being unrelenting against censorship and all that is the first step so. I don't know. There's a lot of good going on but there's a lot of problems, too. A lot of problems. For every instance where something feels progressive, just look around and there's something else that's combative. I try to do what I can and speak up and not dwell in stuff that thoroughly depresses me. I'm just one guy 😔 I mean, it's not bleak constantly, or everywhere, but the threats are very real...

[happymetalgirl]

The Amity Affliction - Misery

Okay, so I know I’m supposed to be on a bit of a self-imposed break right now for about two more weeks, but the pile-up of albums I’ve been wanting to talk about has just been growing more and more daunting by the week. Even with all the deep listening I’ve had with the most stimulating (and challenging) albums on my itinerary, it’s still going to be a massive challenge getting as caught up as I’d like to be on all the discussions about those albums. To at least put a dent in that workload, I’ve just done a few posts about the ones I feel are the easiest/quickest to talk about, and this new album from The Amity Affliction is another one of those that I feel will go very quickly. And it’s not necessarily just because it’s simplistic or generic or dumb or so atrocious it’s not worth more than a fiery berating. It’s not really any of those things in an overwhelming sense. It reminds me a lot of Escape the Fate’s new album earlier this year. It’s just not really for me. Nevertheless, I felt it was a significant enough release that I should at least give it an honest try and my honest thoughts on it.

Like Escape the Fate, I am not at all a close follower of The Amity Affliction, and I couldn’t tell you what they’ve been up to for the past few years leading up to this album. And while I do value the importance of addressing the context surrounding an album (see my gargantuan posts about Otep’s, Machine Head’s, Suicide Silence’s, and Deafheaven’s latest efforts), I didn’t really hear anything lyrically or conceptually intriguing to spur me to do any deep research, enough to give me significant confidence that I could skip that step and still come through with about the same opinion on the album. 

(Again, this is a quickie, and I’m just trying to shorten my to-do list in the places where it’s easiest while I have a lot of other pressing matters. I know that sounds very cold and probably like I don’t care enough to put the effort in. But I’m just going to be tackling the album authentically: as a non-fan revisiting this band to see what’s new. I’m not here to pretend I’m well-versed in The Amity Affliction’s career and compare this to their older stuff. I simply don’t have to time to re-listen to all their shit; I’m just one boy, and I am still a happy metal boy. And like I said, I’m pretty sure a history lesson isn’t going to change my mind about what I heard. If there is somehow some huge contextual puzzle piece to this album that just dramatically changes the way this album should be heard, by all means, let me know. But I highly doubt it. Plus, who’s really reading this anyway? Does it matter? Do I matter? Do my thoughts matter? Does music matter? It’s just music. If you’re reading this, hi, I’m chill, I’m just rambling. Should I stop?)

Okay, so I don’t really like this album, but I didn’t really expect to simply because I’ve never really been a fan of the brand of melodic post-hardcore that bands like The Amity Affliction have purveyed. The Blink-182 vocal style mixed with some shouty metalcore growls over semi-poppy instrumentation (and now electronic supplementation) has never really been my cup of tea. I said the same thing about Escape the Fate’s recent album, yet, after listening to it, I couldn’t tear into it like I have with albums I actually expected more from (Bullet for My Valentine, Volbeat). Even though it surely wasn’t for me, I had to respect Escape the Fate for the clear proficiency they displayed with the style on that album.

Unfortunately, I don’t really feel the same obligatory respect is due to Misery. Even though I haven’t really listened to too many complete post-hardcore albums in my life (certainly not recently), I still felt like this album wasn’t providing anything new or exciting to the subgenre, and it felt like I had heard everything on this album 10 years ago while trying to get in and out of Hot Topic for a Metallica shirt as fast as possible. While the album has a new electronic flair that I definitely didn’t hear in the scene’s earlier years, I didn’t find it to be anything beyond bells and whistles to give the album the appearance of trying something ambitious. The integration of these electronic elements didn’t ever really seem to push the band’s or the genre’s stylistic boundaries or even much in the way of new structural ideas except for maybe the interrupted choruses of “Feels Like I’m Dying”. The electronics just feel like sprinkles on the same frosting on the same cake. As for the compositions themselves, the only song on the album I that felt like the band applied their style well to was “Black Cloud” (and I can kind of appreciate the spelling bee lyrical approach on “D.I.E.” at least breaking up the monotony of the album a little bit), but the rest of the album is pretty by-the-numbers for this genre and if it sounds tired to me, I’m sure others who are more into this style find it bland too.

I wasn’t hoping for much from this album, just maybe another album like Escape the Fate’s that would compound my appreciation for what the bands in this scene are doing even though it’s not my style. Misery, however, only reaffirms why I don’t pay much attention to and why I’ve never tried too hard to get into this subgenre. Again, I’m not going to put it in the same category I put Bullet for My Valentine’s Gravity and Ministry’s AmeriKKKant into. Those albums have the ingredients to make a musical dish in a style I regularly enjoy, and those bands fucked those dishes up. Man, I feel like my year-end list of least favorite albums is gonna be pretty predictable this year. But most likely, Misery won’t be there.

[tumblngianni]

『*. Semiotic Analysis *.』

In today’s blog post we are going to be entering the world of semiotics and all that it entails. Before proceeding, with any piece of art there is meaning that can be recognized, depicted and interpreted in unique ways. These indicators of meaning can be expressed through “signs” and more likely than not, all images possess some sort of sign - no matter how obvious or obscure it may be. These “signs” enrich & deepen our understanding of the images being presented and unlock the theme/ meaning of them, to do so, the concept of semiotics is used.

Moving forward, regarding the picture that I chose, I feel that it reads more analogical. My reasoning for stating this is because I feel that the image holds a much deeper meaning than what meets the eye. With a closer observation of the image, our eyes are instantly drawn to the emotionless, uninspired woman whose face is fabricated of newspaper articles. Once reading the text displayed on the newspapers, I feel that this image is trying to convey a visual representation of how we can fall into the trap of unconsciously masking ourselves with the things that we read, in this case, the perceptions/ truths in newspapers, hence why this digital art collage is titled, ‘The Woman with The Newspaper’. Adding on to this statement, I also feel that this image is depicting a societal ideal, of obtaining/ creating the “perfect household” which doesn’t showcase the reality of an actual family but merely paints a façade of how a unit should be.

There are two primary “signs” that I hone into when viewing this image; the first being the larger, bolded text situated on the upper left-hand portion of the woman’s face and the actual face of the lady, more specifically, her eyes and the exhaustion and dullness that translate from it. Further elaborating on the first key sign of the text which reads, “Not so Swinging Sixties: proof that sex and money doesn’t make us happy”, pieced together the meaning slightly more. Upon reading that statement, I instantly associated the image to the time frame of the 60s and the way of living during that era. The ‘Swinging Sixties’, was a period where majority of families would dedicate much time to watching television and reading newspapers. There was quite a bit of external influence subconsciously and even, consciously shaping these families and reinforcing certain “norms” or “ideals” in their society/ homely environment. With regards to the meanings that I drew, families of that time absorbed these articles with a strong sense of agreement. Being that it was a vital part of where they received their information, I would expect it to, in a way, form their viewpoints on certain issues or outlooks. It’s as if their ideologies and opinions are created by what is being said in newspapers, subsiding their ability to form their own authentic perspective without the tampering of outside chit-chatter.

The secondary sign that I find significant in this image is the woman’s eyes. It’s as if her eyes are being weighed down by something, perhaps by a realized truth of reality. Nevertheless, when viewing them, you can sense the presence of fatigue and dullness. In correlation with the alternative meaning that’s grasped from this image which is of a pre-defined expectation/ illustration that’s casted of how a family unit should be, with respect to the time period, I felt that during the Sixties many families had idolized the concept of having that “quintessential” family and strived in creating that. Regardless of obtaining financial success/ stability and acquiring a love-filled partnership, there’s still a sadness... an emptiness. This may be an unfortunate awakening of how things aren’t always how the media describes/ portrays them to be or on the contrary, how by possessing all these qualities to this ideal life, that there’s still this unhappiness/ void within. Further looking into this, this can be linked with our previous meaning and that a conditioned/ pre-determined mindset of what should derive joy, ultimately limits the individual to feeling that there are only certain things created from life that can fulfill this sensation.

Utilizing Saussure’s method and returning to the first “sign” that we mentioned, the “signifier” is the bold newspaper text and its “signified” is how these articles can massively influence the family members who are reading it and are relying on external, informative outlets to define/ built their reality. The overall message is that people can fabricate their identity and have their perspectives primarily constructed based from different media sources, in this case, newspaper articles.

The objective significance that’s being represented is a statement regarding that era and how “sex” and “money” aren’t always factors in bringing joy into peoples’ lives. Another note to make of this is the large font size and boldness of the text, we can connect this to the harsh, abrupt awareness of pre-constructed expectations of life being opposed to what they originally were associated with; a fulfilling relationship + an abundance of funds = a positive life.

When viewing this image with a more subjective perspective, we can say that there’s a sadness, “let down” of this pre-conceived notion of what goes into making a happy household. When viewing the woman, like I had said earlier, it’s almost as if she’s created by newspapers, making it seem that her guiding system or source for validation comes from what she’s reading. Essentially, perceiving life with the ideals and standards of others who dictate what is massively consumed by the public - theirs’ a reliance on other people’s words rather than her own.

Delving into the secondary “sign”, which is that of the madame’s eyes, the “signifier” is her tiresome eyes and its “signified” is this mundaneness, almost spiritless approach to life where we let external media sources control our outlooks more than we realize. Adding to this, by investing time in reading these articles without questioning the validity/ accuracy of it makes us become a victim to this tailored reality/ truth.

The objective is this “unknown”, mysterious, unclear recipe of what truly is the foundation to a satisfying, fulfilling, joyful life. We can support this thought with the immense darkness that’s casted across the crease of her eyes. Objectively looking at this, we can clearly depict a more lethargic, defeated expression linked to something... an absence of some kind.

In relation to its subjective context, we can extract from this “sign”, how her eyelids are halfway shut, demonstrating that’s she’s been in this “dormant” stage where she has placed her happiness in what she has been reading and seeing with regards to exterior outlets and is now awakening to an unmatched, dishonest reality. With more of a subjective perspective, we can add, as well, that despite the droopiness/ deadness of her eyes, there is a sense of beauty found within her eyelashes. It’s as if they’re distracting this raw, authentic, and at times unattractive reality/ view of the world (her eyes) with a slightly more appealing, pleasant one (her eyelashes) which can create a false perception of reality.

To conclude, I feel that this digital art collage conveys a very powerful, important message that needs to be digested and made aware to as many as possible. Although, this image ties itself to the world of the Sixties, this still is a relevant message for our present world where we need to be mindful of the content that we’re processing and absorbing daily. We live in a society where they’re tons of truths and a plethora of information and it should be essential to be selective with what we put our time and minds into. Gratefully, we live in a world where knowledge is in the power of our fingertips and we have the capability of truly discovering what is legitimate and what ultimately, feeds our lives with authentic, true happiness. Referring to the era of the image, although the Sixties was a time where the television was making great strides in expanding and becoming an item found in many households alongside the importance of newspapers, these were two main sources to inquiring knowledge - there was a limitation with information and more of an unquestioned uniformity with how individuals/ families were supposed to live their lives. This collage can intertwine itself with the 1975 video titled, ‘The Semiotics of the Kitchen’ where Martha Rosler is making a powerful statement of how woman is confined to this pre-expected standard and role in their household and society altogether. This brilliant, simplistic video brought to light the association of the woman being linked to “a system of food production”② and that of “a system of harnessed subjectivity”②, conforming her to a limited reality and to an undeniable exposure of a definite role of her reality. It subsides the woman’s personal ambitions, dreams and goals as society is forming their reality/ expectations of them for them, they place an imaginary constraint on the woman herself as she is guided through life believing that there are only certain places where she truly belongs. Overall, I believe this image is a reminder – a reminder at how far we have come as a civilization, as a society, as humans. Although, there is still the need for improvement on aspects of our world, it does not deny the fact that there is progress that is being made and how we are living in a reality where indeed, we do consume massive amounts of information on the daily. We have awakened to the understanding of letting that knowledge affect our reality, I feel that we aren’t bound by what the world wants us to be but more so, letting our authentic selves continue to fill this world with more unapologetic, beautiful ways of life.

Works Cited

1. Hampe, Gabi. “Faces and Mixed Media.” digital art by Gabi Hampe, international copyright https://www.gabihampe.de/english-2/faces-and-mixed-media/ . (Location where image was found)

2. Iabel, Gallery. “Martha Rosler Semiotics of the Kitchen 1975.” MoMA, Gallery Iabel, 2019 The Museum of Modern Art, 15 September 2010-14 March 2011, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/88937

• Date Submitted: Sunday, October 13th, 2019 @ 12:55 AM

[mrmichaelchadler]

Sundance 2019 Interview: Babadook Director Jennifer Kent on Her New Film, The Nightingale

Jennifer Kent, the writer-director of the Sundance sensation “The Babadook”, is back in Park City five years after her modern-day horror classic took the festival by a storm. She is here with her arresting period drama-thriller “The Nightingale”, which premiered in competition at the Venice International Film Festival last summer and won two prizes: Special Jury Prize for Kent, and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for actor Baykali Ganambarr. “It seems like I spent a full year promoting “The Babadook”, it really took a lot of time,” says Kent, explaining her long absence. “And I was writing over that time, but also adjusting to a new life. And I had a lot thrown at me, a lot of offers, and I was trying to [decide] what I wanted to do. And I kept looking and reading a lot, but nothing was grabbing me.” So Kent pursued her own projects and wrote two films during that time: “Alice + Freda Forever” and “The Nightingale”, which she wanted to make first. “But the good news of that is, now I have another film ready to go very quickly. So I'm happy it's worked out that way.”

Set in 1825, “The Nightingale” trails the story of the young Irish convict Clare (Aisling Franciosi) and Aboriginal tracker Billy (Ganambarr) she teams up with to find the British officer (Sam Claflin) who raped her and killed her family. Throughout their journey, Kent investigates and displays the violence of the era from an uncompromising viewpoint, without ever sidestepping what makes her survivor characters human. We sat down with Kent ahead of “The Nightingale’s” first Sundance screening to discuss its historical canvas and themes around violence and hope. She also shared preliminary details on her upcoming projects “Alice + Freda Forever” and the sci-fi series “Tiptree”, about science-fiction writer Alice Bradley Sheldon, better known with her pen name James Tiptree Jr.

While “The Babadook” and “The Nightingale” are very different movies, in general terms, they are both centered on very specific female related troubles and horrors. 

I think they reflect my concerns very strongly. And I think I'm attracted [to that]. I mean, it's very hard as a filmmaker to say, "I make these kinds of films." Because all I can say is I try to make films very much from my heart, and from myself, and so it doesn't surprise me that they have similarities. I tend to be interested in films that are traveling from darkness to light usually in some way. Traveling through darkness, perhaps.

“The Nightingale” is a really tough film, thematically as well as technically since you were shooting in remote locations in Tasmania. And you're depicting stories of violence; sexual violence and violence against indigenous people. How did you work through all these risks and challenges?

I think I was really disturbed by the level of violence in the world, and I'd had my mother die, and I think it always brings questions of, "What's this all about? This life experience?" And for me, life is about a process of evolution and it should involve love. When I looked at the world around me, I didn't see a lot of that, and it was very disturbing and heartbreaking to me. I wanted to tell a story that really was about love ultimately. "Can humans love in even the hardest and most difficult of times?" And I think we can. I don't think it's a simplistic ... I don't have the answers to violence of any kind, but I really wanted to look at it honestly and in a deeper way, and I'm so proud of this film for that reason.

It was so tough to make. I mean, let's not lie here, it was so tough on every level. We shot on an island, no crew, really very little infrastructure for filmmaking. We shot in the wilderness, in autumn, in the mountains. But on top of that, this heartbreaking story of my country, which is also the story of this country, and many colonized countries around the world, is something that I wanted to speak about. It was the hardest, but [also] the best experience of my life.

I want to talk a little about the way you engage with and even film sexual violence in this story. For instance, I really responded to the fact that throughout her journey, revenge mattered less to Clare, and preserving something really core to her humanity mattered more. I think I positively responded to that aspect, as I have always had trouble with this so called “rape revenge” genre, to be perfectly honest. Your film subverts that.

Yeah, I have real problems with [rape revenge] too. Even the construct of “rape revenge” irks me. When people call this a “rape revenge” film, [I get] very offended, because I think they've missed the point entirely. But for me, the whole film had to be told through Clare's eyes. So what she was experiencing and feeling, that went in the shooting of it, in every aspect of it, that's how I approached it. I couldn't find a rape scene on screen that didn't show bodies, naked bodies, female bodies. To some sick and damaged mind, that could be somehow titillating. And I really worked hard with my DP. And the wonderful actress Aisling worked very hard to make sure that this was not the case, that we told it purely from an emotional [perspective], from how that person would experience it.

And that was my next point: the gratuitous display of nudity drives me insane in rape scenes. 

And it's a misunderstanding of what rape is. Rape is a violent act, it involves sex, but it's not sexual—the person who is committing that act is doing that to annihilate another human there, whether that human being is male, female, or otherwise. I felt a responsibility to make sure that it really did shock and hit people in the way that the act itself is shocking and heartbreaking. I wasn't interested in making a gratuitous act within a story, and it really needed to be as close to that experience as Clare would've felt it.

How did you work with your two actors filming those scenes, getting them into that headspace and providing them the right kind of on-set atmosphere?

I am an actor myself; I trained as an actor, and worked as an actor. So I know the vulnerabilities attached to it. I can confidently say I know how to push an actor and when to support and nurture them. And I have to say, the toughest job on that set was Sam Claflin's, and hats off to him. He is an incredible person and beautiful actor, and he had the courage to take on this role, when a lot of men were frightened of it.

And my job was to really support Aisling, of course, but also to support him, because he found it very hard. And without going into a lot of details, I did a lot of research on the mind of the perpetrator, and I wanted to have compassion, I wanted to explore that from not a black and white perspective, from that complex perspective. So, Sam and I worked on that together, talked a lot, we did a lot of improvised, sort of very structured games between him and Aisling. So they developed this dynamic that didn't involve any sexual contact, that involved physical contact, that when they repeated it before a take, it would get them straight to this place. I understood that for Aisling to be touched in certain ways, it had to be very carefully thought out. They really, really were very, very grateful for that. The set had to be very safe. These are terrible things that happen, and I could not put my actors through any of it.

While the events themselves are fictional, your story lives on a canvas of historic reality. Can you talk about building a story like that? That's based on reality, but not a true story. 

It was really important for us to get historical accuracy for many reasons. I'm a white person telling an aboriginal story. So we had an elder, an aboriginal elder, Uncle Jim Everett, who worked very hard with us. I brought him on. He didn't have time but he loved the story, he felt the importance of the story, and it's a story that had never been told about his people. So he was on from the get go, from the first draft, and always I deferred to him. But he was always aware, "This is a shared story," he used to say to me, "I'm here to authenticate it, and make it real," and he and his community were across it, so those aspects you can't make up.

Similarly, the experiences of the convict women at the time were accurate. They were more often than not raped. And it was a culture of rape. And in fact, the violence between the whites and the blacks in Tasmania was a war of women. So women were stolen and they were raped and they were discarded, and it was really common, so common that the men would then retaliate as they do in the film, and they would be killed, or the women would be killed, so this is the story of my country.

And so, I had to make sure that that was very historically accurate, but whether there was two people that travel across the land in this particular time, in this particular way, that's where we could take liberties. Infrastructure had to be [accurate]. I can say, this happened actually, and worse. Much worse than I documented. If you can believe it, I pulled back on the violence that existed at that time.

Even though you pulled back from the violence, you still engage with it in a very uncompromising manner. And I do agree that it’s necessary to show the truth. I'm wondering though if you were concerned at all about what the audiences would make of it. Did you negotiate with any kind of concern or fear in your hear?

I think I'm of the belief that stories need to be told, and we are the guardian, custodian of that story. We put our hand up for it, and if we don't, someone else will. I guess I had a strong responsibility to the story. So I always, and this may sound crazy, ask the story: what does it need? How far to go?

I think as a filmmaker you always wonder, especially if you’re making something slightly controversial. I was quite worried; say for example, how my own people, Australians, would receive the film. Because it's our biggest blind spot as Australians; this period in our history and what we did with colonization. For example, the government refuses to move Australia Day, even though it's the day of a well-known massacre. So things like this, there's a stubbornness. Either we didn't do this or it was over 200 years ago, get over it. So, yeah I was a little concerned about how people may take it, but I guess my commitment to the importance of the story always took precedence, so I always focused on that.

I did find premiering it was quite hard, to be honest. I was shocked at the way the film was received. Not by everyone, there were a lot of people who were really moved by it. But others who just from interviews felt like I'd made pornography or something offensive that should never have been made, and I was really saddened by that. I found it quite tough, because to me, we need to be talking about these stories to evolve as human beings, and if we don't, we're going to go backwards. I mean look at the world that we live in.

You can't heal until you own up to what you've done.

You can’t. And the happy ending to that story is that we premiered in Adelaide in October, and Australians never give standing ovations, we're just too chill, too self-effacing, and that's too fussy. But they just stood and applauded for five minutes or something. It was so wonderful to me, and I had people coming up to me afterwards wanting to talk about our history and talk about their own stories, so I felt very heartened by that, that Australians are ready to face this, and I think that's such a wonderful thing.

Jennifer Kent's "The Babadook." Courtesy of IFC.

On one hand, I don't want to talk about what happened in Venice Film Festival between you and this male journalist who heckled you with a sexist slur. On the other hand, I think it kind of crystallizes one of the points in the film about toxic male entitlement. Did that anger you?

No, I found it funny. And then I had compassion for the man, because he said he didn't know why he said it. I felt compassion for someone who had that sort of automatic response. Because it says a lot about him. And what I felt more saddened by, I think, is the general feeling that surrounds one random comment, that mentality. Because I think you can go, "Oh, one person says that," but I think what's more disturbing is a general feeling within a country or a continent. Someone can say something hurtful and it can just be, water off the duck's back. But when you realize that frame of mind, that perspective, exists in a lot of people silently, that's what I found very disappointing. It's ubiquitous. We're suffering from a distinct lack of respect for the feminine across the planet, whether that's in nature, in indigenous cultures, in women themselves. There's a misunderstanding of the feminine force and how powerful it is, and then there becomes a great disrespect for it.

But I feel hopeful. I feel hopeful that the fact that it's all coming to the surface, like some boil coming to the surface, means it has to come up and out. And that can be painful in the process. But ultimately (and I may not appear to be from my films), I'm an optimist and I have a great belief in humankind. I think we really need to enlist qualities like kindness and empathy and compassion. Without these qualities, we will not survive, we simply won't.

And that's for me what “The Nightingale” is about. Those qualities that are found in the two most unlikely people to come together. And for me, it's a tale of platonic love, and I think the world could learn a lot from platonic love, between man and woman, it's a beautiful thing.

You mentioned the script that you've written for “Alice + Freda Forever”. And I think there is also a TV series you’re working on, “Tiptree”. What can you tell me about these projects, even if it’s a bit premature to talk about?

Well, Alice + Freda is ready to go in terms of the script. We have a script that we're really proud of and excited by, and just thinking of it, I get goosebumps. I really, really want to tell that story next. And we're moving forward on casting. It has two very young girls at the center of it, and it's based on a true story. I want to keep the girls young, because they were. They were the equivalent of 12 and 13 year olds now, emotionally, so it probably means we'll cast 16, 17 year olds, unknowns, if I can get away with it.

We're looking at Savannah, Georgia. It’s not so much an empowering story, this one. It's more of a coming of age, I guess, in a very painful way. It's about the choice to love whoever you want to love and how difficult that was then, and maybe still how difficult it is now.

But yeah, such beautiful characters. It was amazing to draw on something that existed. So to have Alexis Coe's book, “Alice + Freda Forever”… But also I traveled with Alexis a couple of years ago to Memphis, to the library there and to where the girls lived, and to their gravesites. So I really connected with their story.

And I think that Alexis said when she read the draft, the first draft, it was like reading all these documents that she couldn't find to tell the historical story that she'd found in an attic somewhere. So it's more about their love story rather than the stuff in the book, which is all about the court case.

And Tiptree?

I don't know where to start. There was this writer of short science fiction stories in 60s and 70s who was very feted, and of the level of Philip K. Dick, or Ursula Le Guin. He was really creating the most powerful stories of gender and of being an outsider. But they were so potent, very prescient; because it's almost the world we're living in now. So they were written 50 years ago. They're incredibly relevant still, and then he was sort of well known. His stories were well known, but no one knew who he was for 10 years, and then eventually someone uncovered his identity to be a woman in her 60s, in I think Virginia. This woman's story is unbelievable. Unbelievable. And she was a genius. So I want to tell her story.

So you'll make something episodic at a network?

Yeah, but including her short stories within. It's not a straight biopic; so aliens from her stories inhabit her true world, and then she will be in the world of her stories, and it's so exciting to me. It's science fiction, which I love. I came across that because I was being given a lot of science fiction scripts. And I thought, “Where are the female science fiction stories?” So I Googled “female science fiction”, and I came across her! It was so hard to get the rights. And then I got all the rights to these stories, so it's just meant to be. I could sit for hours and tell you how we got these rights. I'm working with producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, who is wonderful. He's engaged with a company called Imperative, and so that's the deal at the moment. But Imperative has thrown some money at the development, but we want to keep control of it. So we didn't want to go to HBO and have it sit on a shelf and not get made, for example. So, we want to come with a pilot and a bible, so I'm working on that at the moment.

After “The Babadook”, people thought of you as a horror director. I am thrilled that you’re also working in other genres, but I’m also wondering if you want to make another horror film too. (I hope so.)

I think horror is inherently cinematic. I love horror. People got the wrong idea after “The Babadook”, cause you do interviews and you say things, and I said, "I'm not a horror director," because I'm not. But they thought then that I was putting horror down. It couldn't be further from the truth. I grew up on horror. I insisted on horror from a very young age. So, of course, for me it's about the story. If a story comes to me and I really want to tell it, its form will present itself. Do you know what I mean?

Makes perfect sense.

So, if I want to tell a story that's in a horror genre, and it's a brilliant story about humanity, then I'll jump in and tell it. I mean, I may be doing something with Guillermo del Toro, I don't know, I have to hear his pitch for it, so there is a possibility.

That's exciting.

Yeah, it's exciting, but I don't see why we should be pigeonholed, because I do want to tell the stories that I'm currently engaged in. Science fiction is another area that has so much worth and can tell us so much about humans and how we operate.

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