Celine Held wrote an early draft of Topside in 2012; ten years later, the award-winning film is now available on VOD. Co-written and co-directed by Held and her partner Logan George, Topside follows a young mother, Nikki (Held), and her 5-year-old daughter Little (Zhaila Farmer, in a remarkable debut performance) over the course of one night in New York City.
Tackling topics like class disparity, homelessness, drug abuse, and motherhood, Topside is layered with depth and deep compassion for its characters. Held and George join Awards Daily for a conversation about how Topside came to be—its thematic elements, the years of research, and making an independent film that plays like a rich cinematic drama. A stunning hidden gem waiting to be discovered.
Beware that this interview contains spoilers for the plot of Topside. Read more from Celine Held and Logan George below:
Awards Daily: Topside deals with the homelessness crisis, class disparities, drug addiction, and motherhood…the film has such depth. I’m so curious how this all came together.
Celine Held: Well, I wrote the first draft of this before I gave it to Logan. At the time, I was working through the AmeriCorps program at a kindergarten on the Lower East Side, and a child was removed from my class by ACS, which is what Child Protective Services is in New York. Later, we found out that his mom had been filling out job applications and marking she had a dependent but had no permanent place to live. She was essentially enrolling her child in a school without actually living in that area, and when his mom came at the end of the day to pick them up, he wasn’t there. She was just despondent, and it changed my perception of what Child Protective Services is. I’ve done a lot of research now, and there are parts of that system that are very black and white, where there are not a lot of gray areas. I think that those are the parts that we were interested in exploring, those parts of the system where people don’t fit into a specific category, the parts of motherhood where people don’t fit into a specific category. We were interested in making a film without a hero and a villain. What is it when basically, one character can be both? That is kind of how it came to be.
I was also interested in approaching it through the cinematic lens of something we hadn’t seen before. I was reading The Mole People: Life In The Tunnels Beneath New York City at the time and came across the line that opens the film regarding adults as young as five. I thought it was so poignant because I was also babysitting kids on the Upper West Side. Then with these children, who mainly were living below the poverty line on the Lower East Side, you saw a different type of child in this kindergarten. We wanted to try to understand and explore the resilience of children.
I sent Logan the script, and he rewrote the first ten pages without asking me, which made it a lot better. I was like, ‘I guess we should work together on this.’ And now we’re married [Laughs].
AD: Topside screened at the South by Southwest (SXSW) and Venice Film Festivals in 2020. It’s 2022. As you were saying, it’s a long process. Tell me about that and how your relationship with the project has changed. For me, this was one of those films where I watched it; the seed was planted and then just kept growing in my mind. And the more I thought about it, the more I noticed new elements and details within it that I hadn’t previously considered. What was that like for you, having been with this film and living with these characters for so long?
Logan George: Totally. Yeah. As Celine said, she wrote the first draft in 2012 and shared it with me just a year after that. So, we’ve had this script since we first started, our entire careers; it’s evolved over that time. We did a bunch of research in conjunction with writing it because neither of us has ever experienced homelessness. We wanted to make sure that we interacted with as many people who worked within the system and people currently experiencing homelessness. We made two documentary projects based on that work of just speaking to people on the street. We interviewed many mothers with their children living in the shelter system. Through all of that, the ending changed a million times. We had to solidify what kind of thesis we were bringing to it. It became very important that we weren’t ever showcasing a very clear backstory for Nikki or many other characters. We didn’t want to solidify the characters in people’s minds so that they could say, ‘Okay, I know who this person is now, I understand why they’re in this situation, I can put them in a box and forget about them.’ I think that came out of interviewing dozens and dozens of people, and you see similar themes. Still, I think you ultimately recognize homelessness, and it’s not this monoculture, one size fits all. There are a million different reasons why people can end up in situations like this, adults and children.
CH: We just had the first test screening of our second feature. So there’s a lot that happened in the time in between, but we are lucky that we have each other to not wallow. I mean, so much happened in the past two years that is so much more worthy of the attention, the sadness that comes with that. But obviously, this little film didn’t have any premiere; it was all virtual. Some sadness comes along with that, but we made sure to pat each other on the back and say, ‘It will be fine; let’s write our next thing and go crazy.’
Topside does encapsulate New York in a specific time, which we love. Going into the subway now, there are plastic dividers and Omni readers in every station, and much is different.
Another film by a friend of ours [Sam Fleischner] called Stay Clear of the Closing Doors takes place on the subway system and is a huge influence on us. Just the research on the subways, we now know all the subway car names, subway cars like R64. That kind of stuff is really beautiful about it.
AD: I wanted to also ask you about the filmmaking because Topside looks very cinematic on a small budget. I love the way it’s shot, and I think the pacing is fascinating. You have a lot of tonal shifts within the film, it starts shrouded in this mystery, and then it becomes a thriller at some parts. What can you tell me about that? Because again, you all packed a lot of different elements into this tiny film and made it work.
CH: That’s very kind of you. Thank you.
LG: I think you know, to talk about the film maybe it means we’re talking about the ending a little bit. It was interesting to us to explore exclusively through Little’s eyes as a cinematic construct, and how do you reveal the plot that way? To turn something foreign, ultimately living in a tunnel, and normalize that through her because that’s her experience. Then the inverse of that, if she goes up top and sees the New York that we’re all acclimated to but to her, it’s this totally new foreign place. That was exciting to us cinematically. Then there’s the shift of perspectives between Little for the film’s first half and Nikki for the final third. Those were constructs that were always there from the initial inception of the script; that was a great framing device for us to get excited about. We were out to explore that sensation of not having a permanent place where you can rest, gather your thoughts and feel like you have some autonomy. So that influenced the pace and the style of cutting, the freneticism that helps disorient an audience member the same way that Nikki and Little felt disoriented that night.
AD: Wow. If we can talk about the ending, you said it’d changed many times. Could you tell me what it was initially and how you settled upon what we saw? It wasn’t what I was expecting, and that’s part of what made it so impactful.
CH: Totally. There was one interview in particular that we conducted with this incredible woman, Skylar Ann, who talked about how she was put into foster care when she was five years old. She had spent her whole life romanticizing her mother and spoke about how she made this woman something else in her head. She finally found her when she was 17; she realized that this woman was never meant to be a mother.
LG: Her mother said that.
CH: Yeah, her mother told her that too. I think it took her a while to internalize that, which affected me, and changed the idea of motherhood. Logan and I both grew up with wonderful mothers who gave us so much. Truly. There have been a lot of films that explored this lately and challenged the notion of mothers. I think about my understanding of my mother and the times that I didn’t know where she doubted. I didn’t know about those moments. Those moments were closed off to me because my understanding of my mother is that she’s a superhero. I think that that was what we were looking to challenge. That perhaps life is better for someone without the person who birthed them.
LG: The other incarnations of the script carried on after the moment where the film ends.
CH: Little went into foster care, so it explored that and made for a longer film, but it was from Little’s perspective, not Nikki’s. In the same spirit of not telling the characters’ backstory, it ultimately decides many things and sort of closes the conversation window about Little’s future. It took away from the real-time narrative of the piece where once she goes Topside; it’s one night; it’s one whole event and ride that felt very cinematic to us.
We found the ending even earlier in our script and made it even more climactic because you set up this binary of whether Nikki will find Little or is she never going to find her? When you realize that it’s this third option of finding her but choosing to let her go, it feels like Nikki has changed, you know, for better or worse. That’s subjective and, hopefully, what you walk out of the theater debating and discussing. It’s a decision that Nicki could not have made at the beginning of the film.
AD: Celine, you wrote Nikki; you’ve been living with her for so long. What did that mean for you in terms of your performance, both emotionally and physically? Did you find that you had to compartmentalize your writer/director hat and go into actor mode? Did everything bleed together?
CH: Well, I did not wash my hair for two months. [Laughs]. You can tell because the first scene we shot was the church scene, where my hair looks cleaner than at the end of the film. I listened to one of the interviews we did for our doc piece constantly on repeat through headphones and tried to get into that headspace. I spent a ton of time with Zhaila, the little girl that plays Little. We cast her a year prior; I picked her siblings up from school a few times a week and got very close with the family. Even now, I just talked to their mom this morning. I think that kind of stuff became so all-consuming in my life, especially working with Zhaila, that things bled into one another as far as directing goes. I wore a headpiece on set. A tiny inner ear thing where Logan would tell me, ‘Let’s get that again.’ Zhaila’s parents were super aware of the story, but she was never around for the more violent, intense elements. She never saw a script, and we rewrote the script to suit her vocabulary and vernacular. So being Nikki was really about directing Zhaila more than anything else.
LG: I mean, Celine was on double, triple duty. I think Celine worked harder than anybody on production. She was performing but then was also totally influencing Zhaila in the moment. We’d go for these very long, 10 to 20-minute takes of just floating between the two of them. We feel like children are magical. They’re going to come up with their own sensibilities and things to say, and it’s going to be ten times better than whatever you could write and try to pigeonhole them into. It was about giving Zhaila the space, building an environment that was 360, that felt authentic for her to interact with, so we could get the most accurate performance. A big part of that was Celine, being in frames, seeing that we’re getting the right thing for Zhaila and still acting simultaneously; it’s incredibly difficult.
CH: It was a little crazy; I will say I was not planning on and did not write the character for myself. In our short film, Caroline, I also play the mother. We did a similar setup where I was internally directing, which was successful, and it worked well. So we started a preliminary search for Nikki, but it turned out better this way because it’s a lot to ask an actress to spend a year with the child; it’s almost impossible to ask. So, we felt like this was the best way to approach it.
AD: The film had such compassion for Little and everyone she meets while also being so visceral and uncomfortable to watch at times. How did you find that balance? Especially as you’re saying, Logan, you had a ton of footage.
CH: Yes, Logan’s our editor; how many hours of footage was it?
LG: 97 hours of footage. It’s because, especially with children, we don’t really cut. It’s not this action-cut world; you have to live and breathe in it. A lot of that is downtime, but it was a lot of footage. There was a lot to mine, but I think the original credit you’re talking about is to our cinematographer Lowell A. Meyer, who is an incredibly intimate person. You mentioned that it’s compassionate but visceral. He’s an incredibly brilliant handheld operator, and he held the camera while the whole thing was shot on his shoulder for more than 96 hours.
Nikki, Little, and Lowell were there the whole time for these incredibly long takes, but he’s very intuitive. And we, you know, we wanted to live in a reactionary place where the camera is not dictating anything, so a lot of it was left amorphous in that purpose. It meant that Lowell was in a position of having to intuitively find those cinematic moments in real-time. I think you saying that; it’s just a real credit to how in touch he is because he’s a very story-driven and emotional DP, which is all you can ask for as a director, and certainly really, really suited this story.
CH: He also shot everything we’ve ever done and our next feature. I think Logan hit the nail on the head because he’s incredibly emotionally connected to the actors.
AD: What can you tell me about your second feature? Are there elements of Topside that you want to explore further in future features? Or are you taking a different direction?
LG: No, it’s a different story and almost another genre. It’s still very much like a thriller.
CH: It’s very emotional, not superhuman, but very human.
LG: I think an ethos of something present in Topside and present in this second feature is we don’t believe in heroes and villains. For every character, even the secondary supporting cast and the background actors, it’s imperative that we don’t have these black and white archetypes. Everyone’s living in this world of thinking that they are doing what’s right, what’s best at that moment, because that’s what real life is. So that’s something that we knew was part of what was essential to every story. Regardless of the genre, that narrative was important to carry through.
CH: Our next feature also feels like a thriller, which Topside does in many ways, but it also explores what it is for people to have blinders. You know, Nikki does not accept the help that could be very beneficial to her that so many people offer, and it’s all women that offered this help in the church, the MTA woman going down into the tunnels. So that is similar to our second feature, where we’re exploring people who maybe have something obsessive and can’t see what’s right in front of them sometimes.
AD: And what has the reaction been? Have you discovered something new from the response that people have given you?
CH: Someone said to us after Venice that they sometimes feel like they see Nikki. Hopefully, empathy comes out of watching this film. My mom always has this thing when we’re driving; she’s like, ‘Oh, that person’s speeding, don’t get angry. Their wife is in the hospital giving birth.” I think many of us go through life, like Logan said, the heroes of our own stories. If we take a second to have compassion and empathy, what could the world be?
Topside is now available on Video-On-Demand.