Cambridge native Sian Heder on why New York made the best setting for her debut film ‘Tallulah’
The movie premiered on Netflix in July.
As a writer and producer on Netflix’s crazy-popular series Orange Is the New Black, Sian Heder is an East Coast transplant living in Los Angeles. She grew up in Cambridge, attending Cambridge Rindge and Latin School before enrolling at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But unlike the Matt and Ben story that made two Boston boys so famous, her feature film debut, a movie called Tallulah, now on Netflix, was inspired by a different city.“I lived in New York when I first graduated from college and my feeling about New York was there were so many stories there,” Heder said. The main character in her movie, Tallulah, played by Ellen Page, is one such story. She lives out of an unkempt van with her boyfriend, until said boyfriend decides the homeless life isn’t for him. He bolts, and Tallulah (who also goes by “Lu”) sets out on a quest to find him, starting by knocking on the door of his mom (Allison Janney), who lives in New York City. Tallulah later steals an infant from a drunken Beverly Hills socialite at a hotel, passing the baby off as her own in a ploy to get her boyfriend’s mom to house her.Despite stealing a baby, it’s easy for Tallulah to fly under the radar.“It somehow makes sense in New York because you can kind of disappear in plain sight,” Heder said. “And there’s anonymity to being in the city and being a face in the crowd that I felt lent itself to the story.”Heder didn’t refrain entirely from calling back to her home state: Tallulah has Massachusetts license plates on her van. She also says she’s from Somerville.“I did give a little shout out to Boston,” Heder said. Medfield’s own Uzo Aduba also has a supporting role in the movie, playing Detective Kinnie, a child services investigator trying to help the mother of the missing baby (Tammy Blanchard). Aduba and Heder also work together on Orange Is the New Black.“That character, even though it’s a small character, is really the conscience of the movie,” Heder said of Aduba’s role. “She’s kind of the only grown up who is seeing things with clarity. So Uzo is so grounded and centered. And it’s ironic that she plays Crazy Eyes [in Orange Is the New Black] because she’s the polar opposite of that.”Some of the film’s most subtle moments are also its most human. Janney’s character, Margo, struggles to put on mascara while having to take her glasses on and off her face. It’s a clumsy and oddly relatable bit that makes Margo feel like she, too, has trivial, everyday struggles.In another, Tallulah is forced to watch the (stolen) baby while she’s bathing and casually asks the infant not to poop in the tub. Scenes like this, in which a character reacts to acute moments of dysfunction as if they’re asking someone to watch their bags for a second, are a hallmark of Heder’s filmmaking. “Our darkest moments are sometimes our funniest moments because that’s my experience of life,” Heder adds. “I surround myself with funny people, but have a skewed perspective of the world and so I think finding those comedic moments in the middle of a really emotional moment, I think it’s great. Even Shakespeare knew that in his tragedies, he had these intensely comedic characters who would come in and give the audience a break.”Tallulah is can best be described as a dramedy, its cadences and signals not fitting neatly into one genre. This kind of fluidity gives the work authenticity, according to Heder. “It doesn’t feel honest to me to try to make human beings fit into a genre,” she said. “I feel like life doesn’t fit neatly into a category.”
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