Interview
WAMG Interview: Karen Maine – Writer and Director of YES, GOD, YES
Vertical Entertainment is proud to present YES, GOD, YES, the semi-autobiographical debut from filmmaker Karen Maine, co-writer of OBVIOUS CHILD. YES, GOD, YES is a fresh, fun look at what solo explorations of sexuality can look like for a girl in the Midwest. Featuring a talented roster of young actors and comedy veterans, toplined by the enormously appealing Natalia Dyer (Stranger Things), the film premiered at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival, where it was awarded a Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble. Vertical Entertainment will premiere the film in Virtual Cinemas and select drive-ins on Friday, July 24, and the film will launch on digital and VOD platforms on Tuesday, July 28.
In the Midwest in the early 00s, sixteen-year-old Alice (Natalia Dyer) has always been a good Catholic girl. But when an AOL chat turns racy, she discovers masturbation and becomes guilt-ridden. Seeking redemption, she attends a mysterious religious retreat to try and suppress her urges, but it isn’t easy, especially after a cute boy (Wolfgang Novogratz) starts flirting with her. Alice’s sense of shame is spiraling when she uncovers a shocking truth about the retreat’s most devout. Desperate and confused, she flees and meets an unlikely ally (Susan Blackwell) who offers an alternative view of what it means to be good. For the first time, Alice realizes she can decide for herself what to believe and finally gets the release she needs. Here’s the trailer for YES, GOD, YES:
Interview conducted by Tom Stockman
Tom Stockman: Congratulations on your film YES, GOD, YES. I really enjoyed it. appreciated that it was and short. That’s good for a comedy.
Karen Maine: Thanks! I was pretty nervous at first with how short our final cut turned out to be, but my editor Jennifer Lee and I realized adding anything back in would just slow it down. We had the perfect cut and we didn’t want to make it longer just to make it longer.
TS: What filmmakers do you do you admire?
KM: I’m a big fan of Nora Ephron. I also really like Deniz Gamze Ergüven. She did a film in 2015 called MUSTANG, a coming-of-age film that was really good.
TS: YES, GOD, YES is your first feature film, correct?
KM: It is the first feature film that I directed and wrote. I did co-write the film OBVIOUS CHILD in 2014 that was based on a short film that I also co-wrote.
TS: Was OBVIOUS CHILD autobiographical?
KM: It was written by a group of four girls over a long length of time, and it wasn’t autobiographical to any one of us in particular, but it was influenced by women we each knew. We’d watched movies like KNOCKED UP and JUNO, and didn’t see the women we knew depicted in these films. It felt like the pregnancies were being used for plot devices. So we decided to make a film where a woman chooses to have an abortion but the film still has all the makings of an entertaining romantic comedy.
TS: OBVIOUS CHILD played here, but I didn’t see it. Did it get blowback from pro-life groups?
KM: I’m sure it did, but because it’s an indie film, I don’t think it reached too many pro-life groups. There were a few negative articles, for sure, but overall the response was largely very positive
TS: And then you made the short called YES, GOD, YES.
KM: Correct, I had actually written the screenplay for the feature of YES, GOD, YES before we made the short. I initially wanted to find someone else to direct it, because I never saw myself as a director. I had a filmmaker friend who I sent the script to, and she told me that I should direct it since it was based on my own life (YES, GOD, YES is much more autobiographical.) So we decided to first make it as a short and see how it turned out and it went really well.
TS: So then the short became a tool for getting funding for the future?
KM: Yes, and also to prove that I was capable of directing.
TS: Had Natalia Dyer just come off of Stranger Things?
KM: Yes, the show’s first season had premiered just a week or so before we shot the short and was just becoming a hit as we were shooting the film. I have been a fan of hers for a long time, since I had seen her in I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS. One of our producers had her email address, and sent her a cold email, and we cast her two days before we started shooting.
TS: I imagine her fame will help you in marketing your film. Everybody watches that show. Exactly how autobiographical is YES, GOD, YES?
KM: Well not 100% but I did base it mostly on my life growing up in Iowa and going to Catholic school for 15 years. We were taught the same curriculum as Alice is taught in the film. We were told not to have sex before marriage. Our sex education consisted mostly of graphic slides of STDs and a graphic partial birth abortion video, but we had no actual useful sex education. When you are a teenager, you’re discovering your body and I wanted to approach that from a young woman’s perspective. The focus is not the classic coming-of-age story. It’s not about losing your virginity, but about discovering yourself long before those partnered experiences. The religious retreat that she goes on is a very real retreat, but I changed the name. Although anyone who’s been on it will recognize it right away.
TS: I can remember a couple going to a couple of those religious camps in the mid-70s. There was some “Jesus time“ but I recall playing sports and riding horses and being outdoors. It was a very pleasant experience as I remember. The dialogue is real and clever in your film. I liked the story about the young woman discovering her sexuality by rewinding the sex scene from TITANIC over and over. Where did that dialogue come from?
KM: That’s all from my childhood growing up in Des Moines in the late 90s. The Internet was a thing then, but nothing like it is now. I had such a sheltered upbringing that the only things I could piece together about sex were from family-friendly films like TITANIC and AOL chat rooms, so to me, watching the sex scene in TITANIC seemed very scandalous. When you’re that age you’re intrigued and you want to see more but there wasn’t as much easily accessible information.
TS: My daughter attends Drake University in Des Moines and on the drive up there from St. Louis you see billboard after billboard promoting the pro-life position. It’s makes for a boring drive.
KM: Yes and there has been much legislation just over the last few years in Iowa that has shut down most of the abortion clinics, which is awful and such. But I remember seeing those billboards all over the state growing up. There’s even the occasional one in Brooklyn, where I live now.
TS: So describe your journey with faith and religious guilt?
KM: Growing up, everyone I knew was Christian or Catholic and conservative so it was hard to understand that there were other perspectives out there. Even when I was 18, I had a class with a teacher who told us that if we were gay we were going to hell. Fortunately I had friends who stood up to that teacher. That was the first time I realized that you could challenge someone’s teachings. From that point on I became less of a rule-follower. After I graduated from high school, I moved to Chicago, and then New York. I’ve been an atheist, probably just as a response to the intensity of my own upbringing. I am more open-minded now. My husband is Jewish and we celebrate Jewish holidays together. I like aspects of Judaism because they are so open to debate and it seems much more scholarly which is much more appealing to me .
TS: Did you study filmmaking or writing in college?
KM: I went to The New School in New York where I studied creative nonfiction writing. I wrote an essay about the religious retreat that is depicted in the film and that essay is what got me thinking about making the film in the first place. I did take a screenwriting course, but that was about the extent of my filmmaking studies. I’ve learned a lot about filmmaking from listening to interviews with directors like Yorgos Lanthimos and Greta Gerwig on podcasts like ScriptNotes and Fresh Air.
TS: How has YES, GOD, YES been received?
KM: Good. I think the most interesting thing is that I find other people at these film festivals that have been on religious retreats like this. That’s less common in New York, but when we show it in places like Texas and Georgia, I meet a lot of people who went on similar retreats and have similar memories about feeling guilty about their sexuality during their teen years .
TS: Where was YES, GOD, YES filmed?
KM: We filmed it right outside of Atlanta in a few different small rural areas.
TS: Were there any unexpected challenges in making a feature, after having just made shorts?
KM: Yes, it’s much more like a marathon, where a short is more like a sprint. We shot in 16 days with a low budget, which is not much time but we had a terrific cast and crew and we got everything we needed. It went smoothly. No big bumps, just smaller ones that might come up during any project.
TS: Was the dialogue totally scripted or did you let your actors improvise a bit?
KM: We mostly stuck to the script. We changed things a couple of times when we needed to. Tim Simons, who plays the priest, haw a comedy background so he was improvising a bit but most of the actors closely followed the script
TS: What’s your next project?
KM: I shot a pilot in London last year that’s being produced by the BBC . It’s called Starstruck and stars a New Zealander comedian. I’m going to go back next year and direct more of that series. I’m working on a few other things but they’re all in the early stages now.
TS: Best of luck with YES, GOD, YES.
KM: Thank you.
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