Interview: Kate Nowlin and Remy Auberjonois on making Blood Stripe

Blood Stripe made its debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival to a sold-out audience. Blood Stripe follows a female US Marine Sergeant after she returns home from Afghanistan. Unable to assimilate back into her home routine, she goes to a lake, but the scars from her tour of duty haunt her. I sat down with filmmakers Kate Nowlin and Remy Auberjonois to talk about the  film before it received its second screening.

Blood Stripe won the US Fiction Award at the LA Film Festival.

Awards Daily: You screened at the LA Film Festival recently and ended up having two screenings. What was that like? Was that the first time you had screened the film to an audience of that size?

Remy Auberjonois: Yes, it was the first time we’d shown it to a handful of people. The movie has been through a lot, and it was really gratifying. The Arclight was fantastic, and it’s really exciting. I’m a hometown guy, from LA, so we had a lot of family and friends come out.

Kate Nowlin: We’re very proud to have been able to tell this story, that’s much bigger than us. It was nerve-wracking to share it with more folks, but it was completely appropriate.

AD: Tell us about the journey, from the inspiration to getting it to the big screen.

RA: Once we had landed on the potential of the story about a female veteran coming home and the struggles that veterans face, but now we have this new character type of a female veteran that is ripe for storytelling. Once we settled on that, we felt an urgency to get the story made because we felt, not only was it timely, it was also important. We knew we wanted to be part of the beginning of telling these stories. We had a fairly accelerated process from concept through production. We wrote, financed and got the movie in the can in ten months. Post production was longer, as that took over a year and a half to finish the film.

AD: Kate, you co-wrote this. Why the female perspective? Nine times out of ten, this story is told from the male perspective, and this made it all the more beautiful.

KN: Initially, part of the impetus on the film was that it gave Remy a chance to direct. He wanted to try his hand at directing. He actually looked at me and said, he was going to build a character around you. You’re a resource I have, that was part of that, and out of that, a warrior emerged. I come from a long line of women who stood up for things, and women who devoted themselves to causes. I was inspired by the service women I was reading about, their strength ,their tenacity, and the sheer number of them. They make up 20% of our military, and I hadn’t seen a story about them yet.

We’ve seen some documentaries, but I felt there was room to contribute to that. I’m not as muscle-bound, so I transformed my body for this role. I’m naturally strong and grew up doing all sorts of things that boys do. I was one of four girls with a really strong mom and dad. I had played a number of victims in my film and TV career, I thought what if we merged vulnerability, lovability, humanity, and intelligence in one woman? That’s most of the women I know, and it was my honor.

AD: How much research did you have to do for this role?

KN: It was a constant education. We had to immerse ourselves, there was so much material.  I was reading countless books, watching documentaries. She is really an amalgamation of a lot of different stories. She is really a fictional creation, inspired by a number of real life stories. I’m still reading about it and the legislation they’re trying to pass to keep them well represented and to keep them safe in the military. This is now a part of our lives. 

AD: Where did you shoot the film?

RA: We shot in Minnesota. St. Paul, and spent two weeks in the Iron Range on Lake Vermillion. It was an ideal setting to make the movie, we were able to live and work together and get a lot of work done up there.

Our cinematographer was able to maximize the uniqueness of the location and vistas of the lake that you see in the film. He was able to turn it into a character. That’s a testament to the beauty and of course, Radium Cheung.

AD: Talk about how you play with sound in this. The moments where you have scenes with and without noise.

RA: We gave ourselves permission to let the silence live. Sometimes film can be frenetic. We wanted to contrast the moments when it really isn’t silent. A lot of that is about the state of the character’s mind. When the sound really takes over, it really takes over. We also wanted to give the viewer to feel  where they were. 

The cast is such a beautiful cast. I wanted to give space to that as a filmmaker. The experience her character is going through is that this character goes to what might be the most idyllic place you could possibly go to, but she is still unable to put down the burdens that she carries. The contrast between the silence and the heroine sounds was so important to me. Also, there’s a tension in that silence. We use a lot of slow camera movements. It all contributes to a potential energy.

KN: There’s a lot of research in servicemen in PTSD and how that plays out in the body. There’s a distortion as a lot of these people come back with hearing impairments because of the explosions can ruin your ears. We knew there was something we had to play with, certain things start to buzz, mundane sounds start to buzz.

RA: For the sound design, we were inspired by Tim O’Brien who wrote In The Lake of The Woods which takes place in Minnesota and has a PTSD element to it and talks about the buzzing sound. We were writing and we seized on that aspect that he talks about. 

AD: You’re both actors. How did that help you in filmmaking?

KB: Casting was fun. We knew who we wanted, we recognized right away. As a director, he gave everyone permission to run and to follow their instincts. He allows for people to be and everyone was empowered. I loved the writing and the creating. I had never written a role that I was going to play, and that was incredibly gratifying. It was probably bigger for him because he directed.

RA: For our process, and our collaboration, Kate was central to the story. We had the advanced process of collaborating as writers, directors and actors. Her prep as an actor was physical work. Our prep was to write together. We collaborated in writing in ways we didn’t realize, and I carried that through to the directing.