Interview - Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project

Exciting emerging voices in documentary film, New York City directors Jack Youngelson and Peter Sutherland spoke to Jane Elia about the Tribeca Film Festival’s world premiere of Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project. They discuss the evolution of their moving portrait of the eponymous art photographer Tierney Gearon and her relationship with her mentally ill mother.

Jane Elia (JE) What did you want to capture with Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project?

Jack Youngelson (JY) The relationship of Tierney and her mother are the driving force of the film, but I think there are other ways in which this theme resonates in her life and in this film: her relationship with her own children, the process of having another child. Tierney says all her images are portraits of herself.

JE What drew you to Tierney as a subject for a documentary?

Peter Sutherland (PS) I admired her photography from the beginning. She uses only available light to take her photos. She’s got this unique, controlled chaos approach: she’s not too intrusive, but she will step in to direct the subjects a little and she’s able to get amazing results. Her pictures always leave you wondering, ‘What’s going on?’

JY From the beginning there were few barriers as to what we could or couldn’t film. We were surprised, every time, by something new we would discover. It was a very organic process. We spent so long on the film, almost four years. We didn’t necessarily know what the end result or focus would be, until we were a couple of years into it.

JE How did the idea for the film come about?

PS My photographer friend, Matt Jones, introduced me to Trish [South – co-producer of Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project and Tierney’s agent]. She thought someone should film Tierney’s life. So I filmed Tierney working on a commercial fashion shoot in New York.

When she shoots, there’s almost this tornado of activity going on around her. She might have all her kids, her friends, nannies, whoever else; it’s very unconventional! But from then on, I was intrigued. We didn’t even know she was photographing her mother at that point. It slowly evolved.

JY The relationship with her mother was something she was exploring through photography. I knew about the controversy with the images in London [photos featured in the Saatchi Gallery’s 2001 ‘I am a Camera’ exhibition, investigated by police as child pornography], and we started filming in February 2002, just under a year after that event. That was when she started these journeys to her mother.

The first thing we filmed was on the lake in upstate New York, where her kids, Emily and Michael, talk about their experiences being in front of the camera. And then the first trip to her Mom, where she’s yelling. It’s kind of remarkable that those ended up being the first scenes of the movie, because it was the first time we met her, and we captured so much essential to the story.

JE The film was shot over three years, and it seemed that Tierney got pregnant with her third child unexpectedly in the middle, then moved to LA. Did this change the course of filming?

JY I think she wanted to have this child, and she’ll tell you that. But obviously this was a big upheaval in her life, with her shift from London to Los Angeles. She’d lived in London for 12 years. At that point, there was a gap in our filming.

JE I especially liked the emotional scene of Tierney taking the photo of her baby son in the hot sun, next to her oblivious mother…

JY It’s the emotional centrepiece of the film, how Tierney reacts; the catharsis that she experiences. In a lot of her work, she doesn’t have a premeditated idea of what the image represents for her. It’s more instinctual. Typically, she would hate if I asked her, ‘What are you doing in this picture? What’s the meaning of this?’ It was more like she would feel something and then in the moment, the image would be taken. Maybe she would come back when she was printing it later and recognise something in it. So for her to make those connections in the process of taking the picture wasn’t something that [usually] happened.

And in terms of her Mom’s illness, we really tried to understand the rhythms of what that means within the family, and to listen to the interaction between Tierney and her mother and her children.

JE You each brought different skills to the film – Jack with your writing and producing experience and Peter with your photography and directing background. Did this help you collaborate as co producers and directors?

PS This is gonna sound funny, but we never argued about points of the film. There were little things where we’d say, ‘This isn’t working’ or ‘That isn’t working’, but it was a pretty fluid process. Our tastes and sensibilities matched up in the end. We took separate scenes and rough cut them ourselves, then worked together on the edit. When we got back together, we came up with the same kind of thing, which was pretty amazing.

JY Sometimes there would be Peter and me, and I would be doing sound, and Peter would be filming. Or I would go by myself and do the filming, and likewise, Peter would sometimes be by himself. We were shooting on the small pd150, and with Super 8. That way we could become almost invisible with the family. We also wanted the aesthetic of the filming to match Tierney’s photos. We didn’t want to have to light interviews and do things that were very slick.

JE What was the best part of making this film, and what was the most challenging aspect?

PS I really admire Tierney’s work, her aesthetic, her sensibility, her approach to photography. Just being a part of that process was amazing. The best thing was capturing her working, literally matching our frame to her frame, which was a magical thing.

You could call our approach, ‘filming the paint dry.’ It was shot over four years, and we didn’t exactly know what we were doing. It’s a tedious, long disorganised way to shoot, but we ended up capturing all these moments of her taking the real photos that will be shown in her exhibition.

The most difficult thing was the editing. It was tough; it took a long time. I’ve worked on projects where things fell into place right away, but with this, it required a lot of rethinking. In the end I’m really happy with it. I like things that are difficult to define. I don’t think there’s such a true line between the beginning, middle and end. There is in a sense, but it’s kind of loose and emotional. I’m excited about that.

JY The best thing was that we could make the film we wanted to: we had the final cut on it. The challenging aspect was that whole timeline of material. We did different cuts, with other storylines, and bits of information on her and her mother. But the strongest material, the most emotionally connective for us was the relationship between Tierney and her mother. Once we discovered that and aligned ourselves with it, things really started to fall into place with editing and storytelling.

JE Why is your production company called Jordanville Films?

PS We took the name from where Tierney’s mother lives, a small town in upstate New York. There’s a little cross-roads when you’re driving to her house: if you turn right, you’re in Jordanville, turn left and you’re in another town. So, we’d always get to that sign, take a deep breath, and then turn right and see Tierney’s mother. It’s a cool landmark for us.

JE Do you plan to work together in the future?

JY Peter and I have been working on a film about atomic veterans: guys who worked in the nuclear testing arena in 1950s America, placing animals at test sites. The experiments were conducted after the bombs were detonated in the South Pacific.

JE What kind of reactions have you had from Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project so far?

JY Tierney has really embraced the film. But we don’t really know how audiences will react. A friend of mine said that he and his friends talked for two hours after seeing it, about these dark secrets from their relationships with their own mothers, stuff they hadn’t really shared before. That’s what is special about it: that it resonates.

For more information on Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project please visit the website at www.themotherproject.com