‘Invention’ Director Courtney Stephans and Co-Writer Callie Hernandez On Their Genre-Blending Film
I haven’t quite seen a film that blurs fact and fiction to such spellbinding and heartwarming effect as director Courtney Stephans’ Invention.
Written by Stephans and Callie Hernandez (Jethica, OBEX), the film focuses on Carrie (Stephans), whose father recently passed. In the aftermath of his death, he’s left behind an experimental healing device. The two have been estranged for quite some time, namely due to the ways her father became immersed in conspiracy theories in the later part of his life, and Carrie hopes to use the technology as a way to fill in the gaps of the man she thought she knew.
The film is a unique docu-fiction hybrid (Hernandez’s father passed away in September 2021) which blends real footage of Hernandez’s dad while also casting actors in the roles of her father’s friends and an executor of the state. The film works on many interesting levels, as a way for Hernandez, playing a character, to relive the complicated emotions of her father’s passing while also using the medium of film to prototype what might have been different. Adding another layer of intrigue: director Pete Ohs’ SXSW selection, The True Beauty of Being Bitten By A Tick, was filmed at the same house, which underscores the ways our memories are so deeply tied to place and location.
For the duo, they hope that the project can be a way to give visibility to the confusing, darkly humorous, and messy part of the immediate aftermath of grief. “We were much more interested in the question of what it means to lose someone and how that shapes someone as a person. I recall a story where someone kept watching conspiracy videos because he was hoping one of them was true. That’s reminiscent of grief. You’re looking for alternative narratives or realities as a way to find answers,” Hernandez shared.
The two spoke with Dread Central about using the same house to film multiple projects (in addition to Invention and The True Beauty of Being Bitten By A Tick, Hernandez shot the short film Appliance there), offering on-screen grace and compassion for conspiracy theorists, and how working on the film has shaped their next projects.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dread Central: This film features archival footage of your dad, Callie. Courtney, you shared that part of the film’s fictional story revolved around how your dad had patented a building technology towards the end of his life. Since both of you are bringing your stories into this, I’m curious to hear about where you toed this line between what to show, what not to show, and how much of your story to include.
Callie Hernandez: It’s challenging when you’re working with personal material. Courtney and I ran into each other outside of s screening and realized we had a shared experience with freaky dads who died young. Around six months after my dad died, I discovered a lot of things through his estate. There wasn’t much, but what was intriguing was that there were all of these tapes of him. I was already attached to those artifacts and wanted to make a film about them, but I didn’t know the medium it would take. When Courtney and I first started talking about making the movie, we were talking about making something that was just fiction. But the tapes were an entry point to create something different.
Towing that line is challenging and delicate, but I’ve also had to train myself to be okay with what people are getting wrong after the film or what people are deducing. An example of this is that, in the film, it’s not obvious that my father was a doctor, not an inventor; this technology he made was an outpouring of his work as a doctor. People would also come up and notice how strange my dad’s ear looked on screen and ask if it looked that way as a result of him working on the machine, which wasn’t the case at all [laughs]. It was interesting to find that making this film through a conspiratorial medium was attracting conspiracies, and that people would come up with their theories for what we were showing.
Courtney Stephans: I think the only person who watched this film and understood some of the biographical stuff I had layered into it was my brother. While I may not have felt as vulnerable as Callie might have felt because her father is the subject of the film, I found the process to be informative. The project is such that for all involved, you risk exposing not just yourself to the judgment of others but your memories to the judgment of others.
Maybe hearing a bunch of misrepresentations of a person you love helps you feel closer to that person because it causes you to defend them in your mind. As a grief film, Invention is primarily about the encounters Carrie has with the people who were close to her dad. These encounters fill in the internal dialogue she hasn’t been able to have for herself. There’s no voiceover… Callie as Carrie is our cipher as a way to hear how things are landing. There’s a private nature to grief that’s getting put on-screen in a revealing, almost anti-dramatic way.
CH: Somebody wrote to me yesterday saying how much the film resonated because she just lost her father. She was writing about how she resonated with the “frozen aspect” of grief. My dad died from COVID, which was not something I was publicly talking about until very recently. That was also one of the things that I was pretty vehemently opposed to including because adding that didn’t contribute to the questions we were exploring.
DC: In terms of inclusion, you give screen time to a lot of conspiracy theories that are pretty far out there. Yet what struck me was that you frame these people and their conjunctions with a measure of kindness and grace when it could have been easy to make them the butt of a joke. Can you speak through some of that intentionality?
CH: My dad and I were estranged for some years, but we got very tight towards the end of his life. My dad is not far-fetched from those people we see on-screen. When I entered my 30s, I realized that I wasn’t going to agree with him on a lot of things. I didn’t want to talk to him about Pizzagate when we called to check in, for example [laughs]. But I think Courtney and I both have a higher tolerance for opposing viewpoints because we come from documentary and journalism backgrounds. I don’t think either of us was interested in whether those things were right or wrong or silly or not.
We were much more interested in the question of what it means to lose someone and how that shapes someone as a person. I recall a story where someone kept watching conspiracy videos because he was hoping one of them was true. That’s really reminiscent of grief. You’re looking for alternative narratives or realities as a way to find answers.
DC: I’m fascinated by the prayer sequence with Joe Swanberg. That scene is equal parts humorous, tension-filled, and endearing. Can you talk about writing that prayer scene?
CS: I think the prayer system isn’t situated there as a comment on religion, but more so that religion is one belief system among many to help cope with grief. Others in the film turn to the law, money, or salesmanship, for example. These different systems have a lot of coefficients for the unknown, and prayer has a lot of space for the unknown. It’s an interesting practice that’s still present and hopeful when we live in a society that’s all about eliminating unknowns and super data-driven fact moments. Interestingly, we’re in this Silicon Valley type of moment where people are only thinking about modes of experience in a way to sell it and maximize it. There is a desire to experience a sort of portal into other dimensions. We live in a system that is deeply cynical, and yet there’s the possibility to experience otherworlds within the machine itself.
To your earlier point of the way the film holds space and a type of kindness for those who are wrapped up in conspiracy theories, there are political documentaries to be made where we hold people’s feet to the fire and interrogate them about the beliefs they hold. Invention, though, was more concerned about simply looking for the deeper current in what people are talking about. There’s a feeling of exploration as Carrie meets people who are wrapped up in conspiracy; the best they can do is just keep reaching back to the 1950s again and again.
CH: Love in itself could be viewed as a conspiracy. You love this person regardless of evidence. Perhaps that might make others question that love.
DC: This film underscored that clichéd truth that we contain multitudes. Watching Carrie discover more about who her father was through meeting the people he ran with and these tapes made me realize that the amount of which I know about someone is fixed to a certain point; the people in my life live full lives beyond what I may know about them.
CH: Courtney and I have oftentimes referred to this film as an artifact in and of itself. Memories become artifacts that we house to try and keep someone alive in a way. More than the question of “Do you ever really know somebody?” I was more curious to explore how many new facets you can become aware of about someone to keep someone alive. In passing, is it possible to reacquaint yourself with someone you’ve lost in a new way after they’ve passed, or are you always in the past tense?
CS: There are so many elements of death, but we were really focused on the immediate aftermath of death. You’re in these emotionally varied places that you’re trying to keep at bay, but on the one hand, you have to take care of business.
Something that struck me while making this movie was that, at least in America, there’s an anxiety around solemnity in death that stands in contrast to my limited experience of other countries on the subject. The corporate logic of these death rituals preys on that. I think about when I was going to pick an urn from my dad, and there was this pressure I felt where I could buy the $50 pine urn. Or if I wanted to honor my father, I should buy the $400 urn.
DC: How much do you really love him?
CS: Exactly! You’re standing there in these spaces having to make these decisions, you’re so vulnerable, dealing with these emotions … the whole system built around grief in this country can be so predatory. Invention isn’t meant to be a critique of the death industry, and yet it’s hard not to poke fun at those realities when making a project like this.
DC: Callie, I saw in an interview you did with Zoë at SXSW that one of the joys of The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick was the freedom of experimentation, you were rewriting the script you could improvise a bit more. Courtney, I remember you shared that one of the challenges in shooting on film is that there’s limited Super 16mm footage, but you’re also working with a crew that could adapt and respond. So I’d love to hear about it as an actor, how that affects performance when you know that the film stock is limited. And Courtney, were there scenes where maybe what you shot wasn’t quite what you were expecting or envisioned, but had to roll with it?
CH: Courtney and I are used to and like working with limitations. Invention was so different from the Tick movie because Pete likes to go into projects with just half of an outline. Then, when you get there, you figure out the rest of the film together. For Courtney and I, while both Invention and Tick are improvisational, Invention had much more intentionality around it. We had been thinking about this project for a year in advance and had a full outline and idea.
For example, we had originally thought of casting Joe Swanberg as a doctor. But then he said, “I have a mullet and I want to keep it.” We didn’t think that would work for a doctor [laughs]. So we were rethinking parts and roles in this story, even if we already had an idea. No pun intended, but the film was more vibrational and breathing. Tick had fewer limitations on the day-to-day but had more limitations narratively, if that makes sense. We were just living and listening a lot more in that house and opening ourselves up to what we would see.
CS: We were shooting with a heavy camera where we were really framing shots pretty traditionally and not just roaming around. We were very much looking kind of impressionistically at what was happening. I’ve come to feel that just formally having a kind of almost traditional, almost old-fashioned cinematography in the film helps with giving space for the more far-out stuff to have somewhere to echo. I could imagine a way more far-out way of shooting this film where we just shoot everything and find it later. And I’m so glad we didn’t do that, though. It would’ve been less stressful on the day.
DC: Looking ahead, I feel like the film is a unique point in time of some of the questions you’re exploring in your projects, like the role of sex in connection, Callie on an Untitled Erotica film … and then Courtney if I read you’re working on John C. Lilly and there’s a fair amount of themes that explore conspiracy there. How has working on Invention shaped these next projects of yours?
CH: It was funny because Courtney and I were both surprised the other knew about John C. Lilly. There was an early version of Invention that was more focused on sex. I am notoriously sort of obsessed with this idea of the duality of sex and death. Eroticas are something that I’ve always read and taken an interest in, and the erotics surrounding grief is also something that I’ve always been drawn to. Untitled Erotica is not related to this film … except in the sense that the other side of sex is death; sex is creation as opposed to the decimation of death. I’m fascinated by the ways those relate. My upcoming film isn’t an erotic thriller … I want to make something where someone is thrust into something, and they don’t understand what’s happening about sex.
CS: I’m working on another project that deals a little bit with The Wizard of Oz. I’ve often answered this question by saying that I’m in this sort of wizard period of being interested in these American mythmaking traditions and archetypal sort of maverick figures. I’m in a “man period” where, in my filmography, I’m dispelling the effects of male mythmaking. My undergrad was in medical anthropology, and I have a real interest in medical systems, so the way that people spin meaning around medicine and healing and stuff like that is just endlessly fascinating, especially in our absolutely savage medical systems.
DC: I love the role of candles in this film and how they act as a sort of grace note in between these scenes (I know candles also played a role in The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick) I’d love to hear about how you two built these pauses within the film that act as interruptions of behind the scenes realism and if you’re comfortable sharing about the significance of candles in your own lives.
CH: I wonder if it’s also a stretch to say that candles are, like us, small, thin witnesses with a limited lifespan; sentient little beings with a pulse in the form of a flame, delicate and fallible with some unspoken will to go on living until our time is done.
CS: Thank you! It felt necessary to allow some kind of reflective space for processing and listening, in which one is asked to think about the nature of processing (in terms of the making of the film itself). So the candle, which might be burning in the funeral home, is also an echo emanating from the larger concept outside the fiction plot. The image itself is actually a meditation video from 1990, so it was originally meant to be a quasi trance-inducing image, echoing, perhaps the machine. I like candles and have a lot in my apartment, though, since the LA fires, I’ve gotten weirder about smoke.
DC: As accessible as this project is, you two tap into a very particular grief here, specifically that of a daughter losing their father. Can you speak more about diving into that specificity and the significance of this not just being a “dead dads” story, but a “daughter losing their dad” story?
CH: Courtney and I spoke a lot about being the daughters of, specifically, lost fathers — both literally and figuratively lost. Seekers. Fathers with powerful beliefs, even when the optics are without clear reason or logic. Children, in general, I think, are, for the most part, a result of those beliefs. It’s layered and complicated and nearly impossible to answer. Which is why, I suppose, we wanted to make Invention. Love is amoral and illogical in this way, I guess. And I do think that’s probably specific to this film.
Invention streams exclusively on MUBI later this summer.
Categorized:Interviews
