“We Want People To Be Walking Away Talking About It” Interview With PULSE Director Stevie Cruz-Martin

Stevie Cruz-Martin’s debut feature Pulse, is John Frankenheimer’s Seconds for a new age of millennials. Where Frankenheimer’s 1966 B&W sci-fi masterpiece featured a bored businessman curing his midlife crisis by undergoing transformative surgery to become a young Rock Hudson, Cruz-Martin’s independent drama also tackles the same theme of denying one’s identity, through the central tortured character of Olly (Daniel Monks).

Olly is a gay disabled teen who feels ostracised from those around him, especially his best friend Luke (Scott Lee), who he heralds a life-long crush for. Refined to another long stint at the hospital, the depressed teenager decides to undergo an experimental surgery, one that’ll transfer his mind into the body of an attractive woman. After switching from Olly to Olivia (Jaimee Peasley), he uses his new form to chase the carnal and emotional pleasures that he had been denied his whole life – only to find out, like any classic coming-of-age tale, there’s always a cost when suppressing one’s true nature.

Following in the footsteps of Ben Young’s Hounds of Love, Stephen McCallum’s Outlaws and Grant Sputore’s I Am Mother, Stevie Cruz-Martin’s Pulse is the latest Western Australian film to launch it’s filmmakers onto an international platform. After wrapping post-production in 2015, the film has played at a number of international film festivals, including the US, India and South Korea, where it won the BNK Busan Bank Award at the Busan International Film Festival.

For Daniel Monks, the film’s leading actor, writer and producer, the story of Pulse, both in it’s narrative and construction, is a deeply personal one, mirroring his own adolescent journey of self-discovery and grappling with his sexuality and disability. The role, which was his first acting gig, scored him a Best Leading Actor nomination at the AACTA’s last year, pitting him against Lucas Hedges, Ryan Corr and fellow newcomer Hamilton Morris.

I had the chance to talk with Stevie Cruz-Martin, the film’s director and cinematographer, about her new film, her creative partnership with Daniel Monks, the mechanics of making a subversive body swap film and cinema’s ability to create cultural conversation.

Alex Lines for Film Inquiry: Now that the film is finally concluding its near 4 year festival run, how have the various international screenings been?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: Oh my gosh, the Q & A’s on a whole have been really beautiful, filled with a lot of emotion. What’s really great about the film is, obviously you are sometimes getting those mainstream audiences, but you’re getting a lot of people that are from the niche markets that we want, the minorities that we made the film for. We’ve had a lot of support from disabled and LGBT audiences, they’ve all responded really beautifully, with a lot of people getting in touch with us after they’ve seen the film, we’re always getting emails and messages.

I think what I love about it, and I what think is a testament to Dan’s story and his writing, is that people think about it for awhile, and then they’ve got all these questions like, ‘Is this what you meant to do and is this what it means?’ etc. I guess as a filmmaker, you want people to be walking away talking about it. Sometimes it’s not in a good spirit and not everyone’s going to love your stuff, but most of the time it’s been alright.

As someone who has attended his fair share of Q & A’s, there’s nothing scarier then when they hand it to the audience.

Stevie Cruz-Martin: We have had some scary questions for sure. You know, there was one question that came in London and it was a woman who had an invisible disability – That’s what she let us know – and she basically kind of said – it was kind of more of a statement – that it was along the lines of like, I just think that the BFI and the way that marketing this film is wrong, it’s not a disability film, it has nothing to do with disability and it’s just targeting the wrong people.

And you know, I’m looking at Dan and I’m like, do you want to take this, because you don’t want me to take this and I don’t have a disability. He also felt very strongly and passionate to talk about the fact that we’re not making a film for every disabled person in the world, just like we’re not making one for every gay person.

You can’t.

Stevie Cruz-Martin: You can’t and in the end, if you want to make your story, then you should make your film, you know? We were trying to make what was the truest form of Dan’s story and what he went through. You face those and it is nerve-wracking, you get sweaty and you’re hot and you’re like, how do I go about this? When you’ve got 600 people in the audience and you have to answer in a succinct manner and give them something where everybody’s not like “Oh no!”. But yeah, I feel like 95% of it has been pretty good so far.

When did you first meet Daniel Monks, and how did your filmmaking collaboration begin?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: We met in 2007, a long time ago – 12 years now! – we met at a P.A.C. Screen Workshop in Subiaco which was a workshop for writer/director and actors. We met in that and we really had a big love for each other straight away, but we’ve both been in as directors, so we had different groups. I was also shooting at the time and a few days before he was supposed to be on his shoot, his DOP got ill and he needed someone, so I shot his film and that’s where our love affair began, and then we’ve gone onto make about 11 short films together now.

After that, he moved to Sydney, as he got into AFTRS, and he was there and I was here. Then I moved over, so we lived together for three years, which was great because we’d wake up and have breakfast just talking about Pulse, (while we were in the midst of the writing process). In the first few years before he realized that he could act – which was always his dream – When he applied his disability, he stopped acting and he didn’t think that he’d be able to act or dance anymore. He became an animator and then moved up to directing. When we started working together, I was shooting more of his stuff, so I’d definitely say we’re kind of co-directing, but formally he was directing and I was shooting and then as our partnership went on, I was directing more.

His love is predominantly acting, with writing a very far down second, mainly because his writing is therapy for him, so he really goes into some traumatic things for himself through his experiences. It’s always going to take a while for us to go through that and it takes a lot from him. Whereas acting, you’re playing somebody else, so, even though he’s a method actor, he’s not going into those dark shadows of his past. After Pulse, it really became me directing and him acting, but you know, obviously still containing our partnership of working towards what’s next.

Has the success of this film opened up a lot of new paths for him now?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: Well what a lot of people don’t know is that Pulse was his first acting role. The film did take so many twists and turns, at one point there were three different stories of body swaps and then we kind of honed in just on the disabled teenage boy. It wasn’t until a few years in that he went, ‘I’m never going to act and this is the one role I could do, I can find myself’. He came to me and was like, ‘How do you feel about me playing the role?’ And I was like, Yes, nobody will play it better than you, I would love that. I love working with Dan already in a director-DOP way, but our partnership only strengthened when it developed into an actor-director partnership.

That was pretty, pretty amazing. It was his first acting role and after that he’s done so much theatre, so many doors opened, he was doing more short films. This year he’ll be in an STC [Sydney Theatre Company] show of Lord of the Flies and then at the end of the year he’s a lead in a West End show in London. He’s also done a few little day shoots in UK shows like Silent Witness, as he’s really wanting to get some more TV/Film work but unfortunately in Australia – and definitely not in America – it doesn’t seem to be as progressive.

You know, a couple of years ago, he had a lot of interviews with agencies and basically the overall gist was, if you weren’t disabled we’d sign you, which is really unfortunate, where in London, they have been progressive for a long time now. They’ve been ahead of the game for years, always very multicultural in their casting and progressive with disability, at least for the last decade or so now. He’s finding that he’s getting a lot more opportunities over there, but if anyone does get the chance to work with him, they’ll find that he’s just so dedicated and fearless.

Speaking to that sense of progressiveness, was this a difficult film to get funding for?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: Totally, especially when we began in 2013. If you think about it, the diversity surge that’s happening now has only really been around the last couple of years. When we were coming to the table with the script, it was not being taken on by anyone. I think I’ve spoken about it a few times, but we did have a discussion with a government funding body in 2013 and their feedback was that there’s absolutely no way that a lead character could be both gay and disabled – It’s to much for audiences to handle, it has to be one or the other they said.

That was a real big reason why we actually ended up not going with any of the funding bodies. We decided against it because we thought that, if at this early stage they were already trying to change things that are so integral to the story, we might face too much red tape and not end up making the film we want to. We knew it was going to be harder to do it with less money, but we had our core crew and cast and they were all willing to do it for deferred payments.

We sat down, Dan and I, probably in December or January 2013, getting ready to shoot in May – June. At that point – now it makes us laugh thinking about it – we thought that, after we’d chosen to do crowdfunding and had made a campaign, we put together the budget, which including catering, locations and things like flying a few about people over from Sydney, we thought we could do for $15,000. We were like, we’ve done the figures, so then started working towards a really strong Pozible campaign.

At that point in 2013, they were doing these really cool workshops around Australia about this kind of thing, except for Perth of course, we never get anything, which is annoying. After we did this campaign and shot Pulse, we actually took it around to quite a few of the universities here in Perth because we had this knowledge that we wanted to pass off.

But before all that, we did a few workshops and they tell you about what days to release it and about video content being more interesting in other countries. Another big point was getting real backing from anyone that you knew that had a following, so anyone that Dan and I knew between us, internationally and nationally, to help out. We really studied and got a strong campaign together and made a video, contacted everyone that we knew and said that at 10 o’clock – I think it was like 10am on a Thursday – we’re going to release it, we want everyone to release it at the same time.

And then we made $15,000 in 40 hours, which was really incredible. We didn’t expect that at all and then it went on to make $24,000 in 40 days. We had that, then we had a little bit of private investing from Danny, his mom and my parents, just to get the film over the line. Once we had shot it, we had amazing help from people like Ric Curtin, who does great sound production and Sandbox Productions, who loved the film, so they did our grade and our deliverables.

A lot of people have done a lot of favours for the movie because they believed in the story. It’s the way it has to go and you use your favours, you know, we have the track record of going to so many little film festivals, such as Palm Springs and a lot in Europe, where we’d met so many amazing filmmakers and have been supporting their films over the years, back in 2011-2012 especially, but this was the first time that we’d asked for some help ourselves.

I believe the film was adapted from Daniel’s short film Herman and Marjorie?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: Yeah, that’s right. Herman and Marjorie was one that we’d worked together on that he had made for AFTRS. At that point it was about an older couple that had gone through a body swap, which led into the feature at the beginning, because as I mentioned before, we had three different stories we’re following; One was an older man, one was a woman in her thirties, and then the other one was the teenage boy.

Marjorie was one of the earliest short films that we made together, I don’t think that it went on to do any festivals, but it really was the kernel that started everything.

What was it about that general premise that stuck with you?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: I think for Dan, it was a big thing because he really feels like he did go through a body swap. Up until age 11, he was able bodied and he was able to run and dance and perform, he was a very flamboyant child. After a simple biopsy that went so horribly wrong, he was then paraplegic and then now is hemiplegic. He really felt like that when he looked in the mirror, his body no longer felt like his own, and not only was he dealing with now being paralyzed, he was also dealing with coming out and his sexuality.

So he would often fantasise about what it would feel like if he was in a female body because the boys that he was interested in were interested in young girls. It was something he thought a lot about and he talks about that as being the kernel of the premise. You know, he didn’t realize it was going to be a film in Year 8 or Year 9, but it had always stuck with him that our body shapes who we are. It was that theme, in terms of how much do they make us who we are and, and where that fine line is between living through that vanity side or having stronger morals/issues.

Speaking to that, after Pulse, you and Daniel made another short together called Broken, that also stars Daniel. How do you feel Broken compliments Pulse?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: I think Broken for us actually was a really interesting one. We were so lucky to get the Create New South Wales funding for that, but Dan and I were both really busy at the time and we kind of didn’t have a concept, but Create NSW were really behind us and wanted us to make something.

We were glad and proud that we made it, but we also know that stylistically, for our partnership, it was the first film that we made that didn’t have a fantastical element, it was a straight job.

Although for me truth in performance is what really runs my work as a director, it was a darker drama for us and despite the fact that we like to explore darker themes, we do like to have our lightness in there as well. We don’t want to just make dire, doom and gloom stuff and looking back at that film, even though we’re proud of the performances and how we shot it, I think it confirmed our style of making dramatic pieces with fantastical elements, but grounded in something truthful.

Touching on that, the film tiptoes a tricky balance between hyper-realism and fantasy. For you, was this a difficult balance to achieve?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: I think Dan brings that as the writer and for me, I just wanted to make sure it was so grounded in truth through the performance, that’s why we didn’t heighten the science behind the body swap and I wanted it to be like we just live in a world where this kind of thing can happen. An inspiration for that was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where they didn’t talk a lot about the science behind it and it was just something that you could do, so hopefully the audience will just go with it.

That was a conscious decision that we did make, where we wanted it to be more about the journey of the characters, rather than the mechanical/fantastical device driving it.

Throughout the film, after Olly has switched to Olivia, each scene consistently switches back between the two actors. What were your ideas behind this decision, and what was the creative timing in terms of choosing when we’d see each one?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: We were really lucky to shoot some earlier scenes that were kind of like a proof of concept. When we were approaching producers in 2013 we thought, why don’t we shoot a couple of scenes from the script to show how we would do it. That was really beneficial and very helpful because at that point, I hadn’t stylistically worked out how to do it effortlessly and that really helped us. At that point, we were shooting all of it with both actors, which we still did with the feature – everything we shot with Olly, we also shot with Olivia. In the film it was kind of like we were hitting close ups and close ups and then mids and mids and after doing that and editing it together, it was feeling much more jarring.

So we decided to shoot a lot more of Olivia when he was almost being inauthentic. She appears when he might be using his body in an inauthentic way to get what he wants, not necessarily like he’s really emotionally feeling something – It’s almost a surface feeling. We shot with Jamie almost quite musically, It wasn’t like a set of close ups, we were kind of roaming around, which just helps so much more with the edit. There was definitely a reasoning behind it, but shooting those scenes before was a great help in knowing that our original body swap idea didn’t work as effectively as we wanted it to.

The decision was definitely to make sure Olivia was used more as an inauthentic veil, whereas when we’re seeing Olly, he’s showing his vulnerability and is in the state of feeling so emotional.

Did you feel that, when the other actors were presented with Olly or Olivia, that they reacted differently depending on which actor it was?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: What was really great was, I don’t know how much people know, but I was really lucky to have 18 months with the four actors before we shot. We all lived in Sydney at the time and it was actually a real beautiful collaboration from the beginning, they actually informed so much of the writing as we went on. Jamie wasn’t able to be there though, as we actually cast her really late in the game. It was very hard to find an Olivia, we went through two actors before that.

Dan’s a very fidgety person, he’s got a lot of energy, he’s always moving. He’s got a beautiful sense of humour and a beautiful heart and when Jamie entered the audition room, she already had those same physicality’s. I think what was so great about those previous 18 months, is that they really built these characters, they were so lived in that it didn’t really matter what direction or situation that we’re put in – be it Olly or Olivia in the scene. They just trusted their instinct, there were no hardships with their performances in that case.

With a film like this, a major goal I must imagine isn’t so much financial, but more socially-minded, using cinema as a tool to create conversation. What type of conversations do you hope Pulse starts with those who see it?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: For me I’d love people to leave the film thinking about their vessel and what they’ve been given and how they choose to connect to themselves, sort of physically and holistically – perhaps maybe what we take for granted. Also how we might’ve treat ourselves in those teenage years, which are so hormonally charged.

Dan and I’s biggest want for this film when we were making it was like, ‘How f*cking cool would it be if this was the film that Year 11 + 12’s studied in T.E?’ You know, that was a really big want for us and that’s kind of what got us through the hardships of making a micro budget film. We just kept thinking, ‘Think about the audience’, thinking that we could get this in front of 15, 16, 17 year olds, or even young adults that are still grappling and struggling with their identity, with themselves, with their gender, their sexuality, and being able to have an honest conversation about it. That was definitely our driving force.

What are the current national and international distribution plans for this film?

Stevie Cruz-Martin: We’re organising the Australian and New Zealand release right now, and our sales agents are in conversation with America talking about some deals over there, which we’re letting them handle. At the moment, we don’t know exactly when that’s happening internationally, but there are some deals on the table to hopefully be able to screen it theatrically.

We have had cinema releases in South Korea, Taiwan, India and other places which is incredible, but we were also just like, wow, we haven’t even had a cinema release in our own country. We’re looking at Europe and American releases now, whether it’ll be on video on demand or a theatrical release is the big conversation we’re currently having.

Film Inquiry thanks Stevie Cruz-Martin for taking the time to talk with us.

For those interested in Pulse’s upcoming international distribution plans, can find updates at it’s official website and Facebook page.