A Celebration of the Weighty Minutiae: An Interview with 'Sometimes I Think About Dying' Director Rachel Lambert
The director’s Daisy Ridley-helmed latest feature is a meditation of the interior and exterior of a mundane life.
Near the end of Rachel Lambert-directed Sometimes I Think About Dying, Daisy Ridley’s Fran quietly utters a line that strikes me as weightily as apocalypse. After a night and day and night again that Fran spends on the floor of her living room, she comes into the little port authority office she works in on Monday morning with a dozen donuts. It’s her first time bringing donuts into work. As everyone huddles giddily around the sweet treats, passing around napkins and paper plates, Fran taps Robert (Dave Merheje) on the shoulder, asking him to follow her into the copy room. She has the supplies he ordered, she says. It’s a hushed ruse.
“Do you wish you could un-know me?”
She whispers this to Robert in the copy room, after a flailing attempt at small talk. As she utters this universe of a question, her face scrunches and then opens up, and her eyebrows rise in a way my own have done so often before weeping in front of another — it’s an expression that conveys a sense of frustration at the psyche’s tearful betrayal.
Ridley’s delivery in this final scene is spellbinding, so tender, carefully carrying within it the triumphant crescendo of a tour de force performance. As I write this, I feel these words are too grandiose to describe Ridley’s fine-as-gossamer performance within an equally fragile and sparse film, but they feel correct. Sometimes I Think About Dying provides a fine-toothed exploration of the intricacies of a small — fearful, hesitant, quiet — life, casting it in relief in ways few films have done before.
Sometimes I Think About Dying chronicles a few days in Fran’s life as she embarks on a romantic relationship with new hire Robert, which pushes her out of her comfort zone. Much more exuberant and extroverted than the quiet and observant Fran, Robert likes movies and making sarcastic jokes. For their first two dates, Robert does much of the talking, divulging everything about himself — his likes and dislikes, his two previous divorces. Fran listens attentively, hungrily asking him questions. But when Robert does the same, tries to get to know her, Fran shuts down, repeating again and again that there’s not much interesting about her. Fran’s reluctance to lay herself bare confuses Robert, who feels as though Fran doesn’t like him.
Near the film’s end, on a Saturday, the two attend a murder mystery-themed dinner party. Fran wows her fellow partygoers, especially Robert, with her imaginative performance. But the night ends in disaster as Robert, trying yet again to penetrate Fran, hits a nerve. Fran, overwhelmed by Robert’s probing questions and clearly unused to being asked about herself, calls Robert exhausting, blaming him for his failed marriages. Robert asks her to leave, and Fran goes home heartbroken; she spends the weekend on her living room floor.
Lambert’s film and Ridley’s uniquely whist performance, nonpareil in rendition, carry an intuitive truth that, for me, is as mighty as scripture and tender as a lover's letter, spurring an admiration for the film so deep within me. I attempted to convey this in my conversation with Lambert, though I wonder if I did so sufficiently. When Lambert hopped on our Zoom call, I found myself marveling at her eloquence as I stumbled over my words in an effort to express to her how much of myself I see in Fran. She laughed.
“It’s practice, I’ve got that up on you — I’ve had rehearsal,” she says with smiling eyes, referring to doing press for Sometimes I Think About Dying.
Speaking with Lambert, it becomes evident that her work as a director yields such a resonant result (eliciting emotions in audiences organically, almost preternaturally so), due to the freedom she allows her cast members to pursue their character’s emotional logic, excavating and inhabiting their psyches and consequences as they, the players, see apt. The fruitfulness of Lambert’s process is most apparent in the success of Ridley’s performance.
For the crafting of Fran’s emotional topography, from her mannerisms to her tone of voice, Lambert gave Ridley freedom, describing the actress as “such a technician, as well as [containing] her own sensitive depth.”
“I have material that an actor can lean on, hopefully, so they're not on their own paddling,” Lambert tells me, the respect for her actors evident. “I certainly consider actors department heads of their character. So once they are given that role, once they have that department to run, in this case, [Ridley] had Fran, she knows her, not me. Who is she? Tell me.”
“I had ideas, I had music, I had films, I had things — I was like, ‘Here's my stuff as food, as information that brought me this far, and here's the handover,” she says.
“That doesn't mean that I don't have anything more to say,” she explains. “That means that now this person who runs the department, like anyone running a department, can say, ‘I'm thinking this. What do you think?’ Or, ‘I kind of want to talk about that,’ or, ‘How are we interpreting that?’ And then it becomes a conversation. It's a dialogue. It's not a monologue, and at least I try to achieve that. I'm human. I'm sure there's times where I think I'm achieving it and I'm not. But that's my goal. I hope that that was the experience Daisy had, and I certainly got to learn a lot from her in terms of her diligence and her approach, and I'm really grateful for that.”
Fran is an endlessly complex character that, for an actor who is given so much inherent trust by her director, must be a challenge to cultivate and continuously navigate. She is all interiority — possessing a roiling and rife inner life, she watches in silence those who move around her, smiling at them perfunctorily when she passes them in a hallway. The film doesn’t examine why Fran is the way she is, rather it shows that she just is this way, and I think this is its intuitive genius. No point is belabored with Lambert and Ridley — rather, we are allowed into the life of a woman who thinks often and benignly of being dead, of her body being reclaimed by nature, of ants crawling over her unmoving, pale hand. To some, Fran might seem strange though still precious on account of Ridley’s poignant and intentional portrayal; to others, she might seem like home. I fall in the latter camp. I see my younger self in her entirety as I watch Fran — accustomed to silence and reserve, which bulwarked against fearsome rejection, I would survive each day all the while hoping to just disappear.
I see myself in Fran, and by extension I feel validated, seen in turn. But the crucial difference between my grim and uneventful reality and this film is its blooming ending.
Fran comes home from the dinner party and weeps in her dining room in a way so intense it’s like drowning: she huffs for breath as sobs choke her. In her mind, her meanness to Robert has been an apocalyptic event, a sort of rupture; in her mind, there is no recovery from the damage she has caused. Fran doesn’t say anything to indicate her internal state in this scene in her dining room, but watching it I feel as though I know her exact thoughts, having experienced her breathless weeping so often. She slips to the floor and cries until she falls asleep. The night turns to day and Fran is still on the floor; as the sun’s light ripens into evening, as the shadows grow and shrink along her walls, Fran stretches and yawns on the floor; turning to her side, she sleeps another night, and wakes Monday morning. Fran’s sleeping — it’s the closest to death a person can come; I’ve slept through countless days during any number of my suicidal episodes.
As she stands silently before her dressing table mirror on Monday morning, I can feel the dull ache of her dehydration headache, I can sense her desultory thoughts as her hands flutter about her, slipping into routine with resignation. I can feel the shame she must feel as she brushes her hair after a shower, shame at still being alive, at having to countenance the consequences of her actions. In seven minutes of wordlessness, Ridley expresses that which has always been so inexpressible to me about suicidal ideation: the mundanity of it all. The ache and thud and nothingness, how much we sleep, how we sometimes don’t cry and think and feel nothing but sleepiness. The utter and leaden dread of morning, of having to deal with the real world again.
“I would never take any credit for her work,” Lambert says of Ridley.
“She has so much emotional intelligence and depth,” Lambert says when I ask her about Fran’s voice. So often throughout the film and in the middle of her sentences, Fran’s voice goes from strident and clear, to a whisper, tapering off as if she has given up on communicating, as if she feels that her interlocutor doesn’t care, as if she has lost the energy to go on. This trait is Ridley’s own. “She [Ridley] would often say that Fran contains multitudes like any of us,” Lambert says. “People are not consistent. We're irrational, inconsistent, foolish animals, and that's what makes us so exciting to photograph.”
“I wasn't necessarily framing or thinking about Fran in relief of or in reference to anything else,” Lambert says. “I received Fran much as you did [as a viewer], as this sort of complex, compelling, sensitive character who I found incredibly beguiling and funny and challenging. And that's rare to get to see, let alone get to interpret and evoke. So I guess in terms of thinking about Fran, I just tried very hard to protect and cultivate the person that was given to us to bring to life. And Daisy I know felt, and I don't mean to speak for her, but I have heard her often comment that the scripted Fran on the page was also her doorway in. Honoring and building a human being around what we got on the page was super important.”
The film seems to exist on two levels: as Fran, and as about Fran. The film’s visual voice is one of romantic consideration, and also of romanticization. Lambert’s lens is not so much patient as it is careless of time, staying with Fran as she considers the world about her and within her: as she works, we watch her eyes flicker back and forth between her computer’s screen and her coworkers chattering about nothing at all; we watch her joining in because it would be polite but leaving as soon as their eyes, and expectations, leave her; we watch her staring off into space as she huddles within herself. We sit with Fran after work as she eats and drinks a glass of wine, as she plays sudoku and ignores her mother’s call, as she readies for bed and lies awake. All of this is life, it’s Fran’s life, and this is what the film is about, reminiscent melancholically in its gaze of a summery haze for its ruminative exposition. Lambert says she received a lot of her visual inspiration, taste and root structures, from fine art photography.
“Gregory Crewdson obviously was a huge influence in terms of some of the ways that we shot the film compositionally,” she says. Crewdson’s photography considers in-between moments — the moment after a precious rose bush is dug up and destroyed, a moment spent standing in the rain at the end of a work day on a rainy night before going home, a hair's-breadth of a moment before a confrontation — and gives them cinematic sweep, the dignity of consideration. Sometimes I Think About Dying is a bit like a Crewdson painting, a look at the in-between, not simply within Fran’s life, but at the in-betweenness of Fran’s life at all, a life that many often overlook, scanning over swiftly so as to all the sooner land on that which is loud and obtrusive. Lambert’s film elevates the in-between.
Lambert even adopted some of fine art’s parameters. “[Cinematographer Dustin Lane] came to me with the idea of doing 3:2, which is the true 35mm frame.” she says of the film’s aspect ratio. “If you bought an Eggleston photograph, that's the size you'd get. That felt right, and I think also contributed to the sense of elevating. There's mundanity. Okay. There's banality. Okay. There's interiority. Okay. But how do we lift it into the space that's elevated, that is transcendent, that is seductive sometimes, that is destructive sometimes, that is sweeping. That can also be in places of torpor. And so it felt like working in that level of photography would allow us to accomplish all of that.”
The elevated sense Lambert speaks of imbues the film with a tremendous amount of honor and respect for Fran, depicting her feelings with the gravity with which she feels them. The reason for spending two nights and a day on the floor of her living room might, to many, seem small, but to Fran it is world-shattering, and the film understands this — this is Fran’s life, these are Fran’s feelings, the film seems to say. And they matter; Fran matters.
The note of hope the film lands on carries a simple truth, but to Fran it is salutary. On the Monday morning upon which the film ends, Fran decides mid-stride to make a detour on her way to the office. She will buy her colleagues donuts. She heads to a café, and there she meets Carol (Marcia DeBonis). Carol used to work in Fran’s office, but retires at the film’s beginning, telling everyone she will go on a cruise. At the café, she tells Fran that she didn’t end up going because her husband had a stroke; he’s still alive, but Carol is crestfallen at seeing her hopes dashed.
“But everyday I get up and I see the day out there and I get my coffee and I sit here and I think alright, this is what I have right now,” Carol says to Fran, who listens with glassy eyes. “And no matter how much better whatever I imagine in my head, it’s not as real as what I do have. So it’s hard, isn’t it? Being a person.”
Fran’s images of suicide are beautiful and romantic, and the weekend she spends on her floor is quiet and uncomplicated — but both these things, though unimaginably sad, are still an escape from a world that is torrentially messy, that carries unavoidable consequences one must countenance if one wants to remain within it, matters one cannot bypass or daydream past. This is what Fran realizes after her talk with Carol, as she leads Robert into the copy room to apologize to him for what she said on Saturday.
“I was given such graceful permission by the writers to write the coffee shop scene,” Lambert tells me. “Because I knew that we needed a scene [to tell us] why Fran is going to that office with donuts, and she couldn't articulate it.” Fran doesn’t process information through articulation, Lambert explains. “She processes information by witnessing and observing, [and so] how she would get that lesson would have to be through observation.” Lambert brings Carol in at the film’s end not only to neatly echo the first act, but also because she has the knowledge that only age and experience can bring, Lambert says.
“Everything that Carol says is my summation,” Lambert says. “She's talking about time and she's talking about not taking for granted the magnitude of the minutiae that really makes up life. We're waiting, often, for something to happen to us, to make us better, to make us feel more full. I do that, but I actually think that the answer is in these incredibly minute simple things.”
“Do you wish you could un-know me?” is something I’ve so often asked those I’ve hurt with my sadness, and just as often I’ve been faced with silence, as though my interlocutor was too afraid to answer in the affirmative. When Fran asks Robert if he wishes he could un-know her, he tells her that he doesn’t really know her to begin with.
“There’s a crane I can see from my cubicle, and sometimes I think about hanging from it,” Fran replies to Robert. It’s the first of herself that she’s given to him. “Not because I want to, but because I wonder how it would feel. It’s just something I think about from time to time,” she says with tears streaming down her face and her voice small, a whisper. It’s a riveting and wrenching delivery from Ridley, the flourish of the restrained feeling she has been exhibiting as gracefully as a wave crests throughout the film. She carries such deft understanding of Fran, which Lambert has not only fostered but captured so tenderly in the film’s final moments.
Robert hugs Fran and songbirds begin to sing, the copy room around the two quite literally blooms to life. It’s a minute moment of forgiveness, small and meandering and quiet like so much of the film. But it’s a moment of hope, which in and of itself is like divine revelation — after the weekend Fran had, after the days I lost to sleep, seeing the world flower and flourish, it’s a moment of discovering a reason to be alive, so monumental a discovery that Lambert is able to capture in a film about the in-between; so crucial that I wish I could show it to my younger self.
“Human beings invented something that you can whip up in a bowl and fry, and make it taste like maple bacon, and you can go buy it anytime that you want,” Lambert says. “That's magic. That is actual magic in the world, and it's understandable why we would overlook that. I do all the time, but I also think that it's so hard to be a person, as Carol says, and I think it's these things we overlook — the Slack message, the guy in the coffee room, the guy who stumbles over the HDMI cable while he's searching for it — we ignore it [all], and we need to see it because I think that's the answer.”