Interview
SLIFF 2019 Interview: Tara Johnson-Medinger – Writer/Director of MY SUMMER AS A GOTH
MY SUMMER AS A GOTH will be screening at the Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar) on Sunday, Nov 17 at 3:30pm as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Writer/director Tara Johnson-Medinger will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A.
MY SUMMER AS A GOTH tells a delightful coming-of-age story about the sometimes painful but often comic search for identity and love in adolescence. After the sudden death of her father, 16-year-old Joey (Natalie Shershow) is sent to stay with her eccentric grandparents while her author mother promotes her latest novel. Joey promptly falls for Victor (Jack Levis), the beguiling Goth boy next door, and is soon transformed, joining his merry band of misfits in black. Set in present-day Portland, “My Summer As a Goth” navigates Joey’s relationships with her new friends, her family, and her own conflicted feelings. The film is sure to resonate with anyone who survived teenage social alienation and that first summer heartbreak — and isn’t that all of us? The San Antonio Current writes: “By making the outcasts the ‘in-crowd,’ this quirky comedy puts a spin on the typical teen story of fitting in, with the added bonus of getting to watch actors flounce across the screen in darkly Victorian costumes and stylized makeup.”
Tara Johnson-Medinger took the time to speak with We Are Movie Geeks about her film MY SUMMER AS A GOTH
Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 30, 2019
Tom Stockman: Congratulations on your film MY SUMMER AS A GOTH which will be screening at The St. Louis International Film Festival November 17th.
Tara Johnson-Medinger: I’m looking forward to the St. Louis Film Festival. I have so many friends that have had films in that fest before and I’ve heard great things about it. It will be my last film festival for a while. I have been on the film fest circuit for a year and this will be a nice way to close that out.
TS: So you’re a Portland-based filmmaker, and you run the POW Film Festival there. Tell me about that.
TJ-M: POW stands for power of women. We’ve been running this festival for 13 years now and it is a festival that prioritizes women and non-binary directors and we feature films from all over the world. It’s a good way to celebrate women filmmakers and also give space to up-and-coming filmmakers as well as established filmmakers . It’s been amazing. We have shown over one thousand films over the past 13 years.
TS: So your film festival sounds like it’s growing.
TJ-M: We’re definitely in our prime, 13 year strong. We do workshops and we have a guest of honor every year and we’ve had very well-known women directors as guest such as Katherine Bigelow and Catherine Hardwicke. Go to our website. About five years ago, we launched a youth program called ‘POW Girls’ . That is for a high school-aged youth. We do workshops with that program where a film has to be created within a week. We work with our community television station here in Portland and our participants are able to use that facility.
TS: That sounds like a great project. Let’s talk about MY SUMMER AS A GOTH. I understand this is your first feature directing and writing.
TJ-M: It’s my first feature as a director. I have been in this business for over 25 years and for the last 20 I have been producing primarily, so this is the first time I have stepped into the director’s chair. I co-wrote it with my best friend from high school. MY SUMMER AS A GOTH really shares our experiences when we were young growing up in Salem Oregon We came of age in the 80s so it’s kind of a throwback to those John Hughes-era stories that we all love so much. But we wanted to freshen it up for today’s audiences because it’s a different world now. We wanted to make it authentic. We worked with teenagers going through their own journeys and experiences. We also wanted to be very authentic to the goth subculture so we made sure to work with goth consultants to make sure we were honoring that community and not making fun of it. It’s really about celebrating otherness.
TS: That’s a fine line. When you were growing up, did you know people like Joey and her Goth friends or were you one of those outcasts?
TJ-M: Oh yes, I considered myself a goth, punk , hippie, weirdo chick. There’s a line in the film “we freaks have to stick together“. All the oddballs really seem to find each other in various communities and in Salem, we all found each other. We all wore black and hung out in the coffee shops and were the mall rats downtown in Salem. There is something about finding that community, so in our film we are normalizing otherness. It’s about honoring the subculture and being faithful to it, but there’s also a playfulness to it Some of my local Goth friends are some of the happiest people I know. There’s this misconception that it’s all doom and gloom but it’s really about celebrating inner beauty, The aesthetic, the music, the books. I feel like we have that ability to portray that on screen. The story centers around teenagers, so there is that kind of misfit fish-out-of-water angle.
TS: Were all of the actors in your film Portland-based?
TJ-M: Yes, but now they’re all scattered across the United States because they were all high school age when we need the film. Natalie Shershow, who is the lead in the film, is now working in New York.
TS: I thought the casting was particularly well done. I thought Joey really looked like the actress who played her mother and in turn, that actress looked a lot like the woman who played the grandmother
TJ-M: Yes, it all came through in our casting session We had cast Natalie first so she was part of the subsequent casting sessions. We made sure to do plenty of chemistry reads. Everything just fell into place. That particular set of actors really fell into a maternal familiarity, They all worked together in so many ways.
TS: Did your actors stick to the script, or was there some improvisation involved?
TJ-M: We were pretty much on book, but there was definitely some improv as well There are so many ways a movie unfolds. You write your movie, then you cast it, which brings it to life. Then you get it into production, and due to the circumstance, you may have to adjust things at that point. I worked with the actors to make it feel right so there were some adjustments on lines that we had to make. Sometimes things sound good in the written word, then that so much when they are said. Then in post-production, things change a lot as well. You figure out which scenes work and which scenes don’t. Some scenes are lost just because they don’t matter anymore, So you really make your movie in so many ways during the whole process. We made sure, in the editing process to have screenings in front of professionals to make sure that we were hitting it. At that time, the whole ‘Me Too’ movement was happening, and that helped take the temperature of what was working and what was not working.
TS: What were some of the unexpected challenges making your first feature film?
TJ-M: Oh gosh, you always need more money and more time. Those are very typical. We filmed this movie over 2 years. We filmed one week in 2016, then quickly realized we weren’t really set up properly for the type of movie we were hoping to make so we need to put a pause on it. That was hard to do but I was determined to raise more money and properly schedule things. It was about one year to the day when we started up production again in 2017 and we filmed for two more weeks. We were able to bring all of the cast back, and most of the crew, and that just shows how much people believed in our film. Now here we are. We’ve played in 15 film festivals where I have picked up several awards. People are really loving the film. The core audience for the film may be teenagers, but i’m 48 and it really speaks to me as well. Carissa‘s journey is similar to my journey. The grandparent’s story is very relevant. Mimi, who played grandma, was just happy to play a character who wasn’t sitting in a rocking chair knitting. Grandparents are lively, and they have lives and interests. So there were a lot of challenges in making this movie, but believing in the story got us through. There were many moments where it was so hard. I think the biggest lesson that I learned through this whole process was patience with it. Not rushing too much into decisions, finding the right people to help lift up the story. The animation in the film was done in post production, and all that points back to Joeys sketchbook. Those were the types of things that were nice to think about and think through to create this whole world and that took a lot of patience.
TS: Good luck with your film. I know it’s a lot of work making a feature film and I am glad that it’s doing so well.
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