When a report exposed staggering statistics about rampant sexual violence on the Tulane campus, a group of diverse students come together to stage a play based on their lived experiences, exploring questions about consent, alcohol and drugs, identity, and coming of age in a politically-charged landscape.
Director Katie Mathews has put these subjects front and center, in a raw and vulnerable documentary that explores the nuances of sexual politics. Roleplay is, at times, very difficult to watch, but it feels like a privilege to see these intelligent and thoughtful college students come together and grapple with these timely and necessary subjects.
Roleplay was a standout of the SXSW Film and TV Festival. I just couldn’t shake it. And I knew I had to dig further into this daring and thought-provoking documentary. I sent Mathews some burning questions about the making of Roleplay and capturing these Tulane students as they confront the institution—and their own convictions—about sexual violence. Mathews’ insights have only furthered my esteem for Roleplay—an absolute must-see.
Read on for more from Roleplay director Katie Mathews:
Awards Daily: How did you become involved with this project? Why was it important for you to take this on?
Katie Mathews: I was a visiting lecturer at Tulane when the troubling statistics were released that 41% of undergraduate women and 19% of undergraduate men reported being sexually assaulted since starting college at the university. I knew from my own interactions with students through my class, research, and an undergraduate seminar I taught that this problem went beyond being caused by a few bad apples and encompassed lots of different types of stories and types of violence, coercion, and harassment. I began to understand this as a cultural problem.
I am interested in telling stories that are different from the pervasive media representation of an issue and was interested in telling a story not about an egregious incident of sexual assault but rather about the banal and insidious nature of rape culture and how it intersects with race, class, sexuality, and gender.
I had the opportunity to observe an introduction to acting class of my friend and theater professor, Darci Fulcher, at Tulane. I saw how vulnerable and open students became to one another. From there, an idea was born of how to invite students into a process where they could confront this culture and also imagine a different story.
AD: Roleplay has been a years-long process for you. Can you share more about the development and filming of the documentary and what it took to get this film made?
KM: This film was a labor of love. All films are miracles but this one took true grit. We shot the film over an intensive year’s time where we followed the play process and student’s lives and then did a few pick-ups thereafter. I was traveling back from a shoot in New Orleans on March 7, 2020 when the world shut down days later…needless to say that was the end of production for us.
The editing process was challenging— to weave together so many stories, voices, and different types of footage (rehearsal, verite on campus, interviews, recreations). On top of that, we were constantly fundraising to keep our editors paid, in a really challenging time for fundraising for documentaries, and that led to a lot of stops and starts with different editors. The pandemic slowed the process down. But after an almost 6-year journey, we are so proud of the film and the wonderful premiere we had at SXSW.
AD: One of the most striking scenes for me was when the students (particularly students of color) mentioned that there were very few spaces where they felt safe on campus. What steps did you take to make sure your subjects felt safe to share personal stories on camera? How did it feel to know you were being trusted to handle such intimate details?
KM: Being entrusted to tell this story is an incredible privilege and a responsibility I take very seriously. It was important to us to model some of the lessons we were trying to advocate for around consent when documenting our participants. While we explained the process of filming and had everyone sign release forms at the very beginning of the casting process in auditions, we also used a few different approaches to make sure we were gaining continuous consent throughout the process of filming and editing.
I told everyone that if there was something they felt uncomfortable about or concerned about being in the film, they should let me know, and we would discuss it. Ultimately, if there was something they were certain they didn’t want in the film, we wouldn’t use it. We shared multiple cuts of the film in the edit with the participants and incorporated their feedback into the changes we incorporated.
I also was open with students about my own experiences when asked, and most of our interviews were much more like conversations than strictly Q&A.
We spent time throughout the year of filming getting to know participants outside of rehearsal and without a camera. We had coffees, phone calls, and check-ins on random days when we weren’t filming just to keep up to speed on what was going on in their lives, how they were feeling, and to mutually discuss possibilities for what aspects of their lives might be filmed and therefore incorporated into their stories.
The duration of filming also helped. The deeper we got into the year, the more open and vulnerable they became. I also think that the crisis midway through the year with the students’ rejection of the first draft of the script and ultimately demanding more agency over writing the script and their storylines, shifted the tone of how they showed up in rehearsal; once they felt confident and safe that they had agency and control over the stories that were being told in the play, they felt more comfortable sharing more of themselves.
AD: Were there moments you struggled to shoot, or moments you had to put the camera down? How do you balance the need to tell a story with privacy and knowing when something is “too much” or “too personal” to show?
KM: I know this may not be a universal opinion, but sometimes, in hard moments, leaning in with the camera is not the way to go. One example: we did a sexual violence training session later in the year that I chose to participate in and not film. I had an instinct that it was going to be an intense and possibly triggering session, and it was important to me that it be a free space for people to receive information and process it without a camera present. I also felt like it was important for me to step forward from behind the camera and be vulnerable as the rest of them had done so many times. That instinct was correc— it ended up being an extremely triggering, challenging and emotional experience for all of us and I am happy I didn’t have the camera there.
AD: Was there anything that wasn’t shown in Roleplay that you wish you could have included?
KM: There were beautiful scenes that we wanted to include—for instance, we have a scene where Miranda travels home to her parent’s house and looks through teenage glamour photos with her mom where you see the ways our families want us to play certain gender roles—that ultimately just took the film in a different direction, and we chose not to include it. Those are always such hard choices to make—especially when you are trying to balance character’s perspectives and screen time— but ultimately, you commit to serving the film as a living, breathing thing in the hopes that by serving the film, you can serve everyone.
AD: The filmmaking is very “fly on the wall,” letting the students be front and center. Was that always the plan?
KM: The plan was always to center the students as the experts of their own lives and their own communities rather than centering the voice of the institution, traditional subject matter experts, or even the instructors. We got so much feedback in the edit about the choice not to include instructor interviews. It was hard to continue to push back on this feedback because including those voices would have made setting up the situation and the play much easier…but ultimately, I felt that when we included a non-student voice, it pushed the orbit of this world off its axis. I’m now glad that I stuck to this conviction because the feedback we have been getting is that the film moves people precisely because they are being spoken to by a peer vs. a talking head expert type.
AD: 20 years down the line, what do you hope that all Katie Mathews projects have in common?
KM: I hope I can continue to make films for the next 20 years! It is certain that any work I make will show the messy, complex, and nuanced parts of being human. I want to continue to work on fiction and non-fiction films—and to tell stories about the intersections between culture and identity.
AD: What steps should we be taking to make things safer and change the culture on college campuses? What makes you hopeful for the future?
KM: We need both top-down and bottom-up investment of time and money in making colleges and universities safer spaces for their students. Students will do the work— and frankly, are already doing more than their share of the work. Colleges and universities need to invest in all parts of the cycle of sexual violence and campus safety issues— the before, during, and after. That looks like— 1. investing in preventative education programs before and when students first arrive (ideally ones that are relevant and peer-to-peer). 2. Taking immediate investigative and restorative action when incidents happen on campus. 3. Investing in transformative justice programs so victims and communities can begin to confront what happened to them and heal.
This goes beyond just sexual violence to encompass the other intersecting issues in a rape culture, like racism, addiction, homophobia and transphobia, toxic masculinity, etc.
AD: What do you hope audiences take away from watching Roleplay?
KM: I hope that audience members see themselves in this film and that it opens them up to confronting their own complicity in a culture or gives them space to remove some of the blame, pain, and shame they have carried. Most of all, I hope that it gets people talking.