The Novice Director Lauren Hadaway Chats Sports Dramas, Surrealism and Diversity in Cinema

First of all - and I bet you’re sick of hearing this by now - congratulations on the directorial debut, it’s a really good film. It feels personal to your own experiences, am I correct in thinking this?
Yeah. I was a rower like Alex, the film's main character. I went to university, I walked into the team by chance and it ended up consuming the next four years of my life. My world revolved around rowing. I was researching and taking notes, tracking times, doing workouts. And then one day I graduated and it was all over. The initial draft of this script was catharsis for that time because it was such a great but traumatic period of my life - so I took four years of rowing, then ten years of coming-of-age, and compressed it into about a year. 

It found this found a sweet spot between the-coming-of-ager and the sports drama. Were there any films that served as a touchstone for The Novice?
I’ve always really loved the ‘obsessed artist' genre. I’m an ambitious person, I’ve always felt very driven and competitive, mostly with myself. But with a film like Whiplash or Black Swan - which comes up a lot when talking about this film - there’s this external force that’s always pushing them on, a coach or a mother. I’ve never been driven by the external so much, it’s something internal and inexplicable, so I wanted to do my version of these obsession-driven films that I love so much - where the protagonist and the antagonist are essentially the same person. Alex is kind of the hero and the villain, and that was a challenge too because the film isn’t a novel, you can’t write what she’s thinking. For anyone who’s seen it, it’s not what you think of when you see a sports film. It’s kind of weird, but I wanted to put the viewer into the subjective experience of this person, both in terms of helping to understand the sport but also the intensity of her obsession.

The collaboration with your Director of Photography Todd Martin really captured the mystique of the sport while providing a melancholic, angsty portrait of college life. What were some of the conversations you had about the way you shot the film?
The thing that we most talked about is this idea of playing with dynamics and juxtapositions, so the idea that she’s either feeling very claustrophobic or very isolated. We have a lot of closed focus shots where she’s coming in and out of frame, and we have a lot of green and dirt and grime. And with the exteriors that are expansive, where she feels really alone, we were always wanting to emphasise that loneliness. When we were doing makeup tests with one of the lenses, Isabelle leaned in and made a funny face, and we noticed when she did that the background became fucked up, and that the lens was actually broken. I think that’s the beauty of filmmaking, finding these little things that come along and being able to roll with them. Todd and I looked at each other and we were like, ‘Holy fuck, this is actually really cool’. We could have sent the lens back because it was broken, but we kind of made that our crazy Lex lens for those special moments when she’s in a certain headspace.

In terms of the lighting, he took total command of that. I come from this world of sound and post, and a lot of my hesitation with directing was that visuals is something I never got nerdy over. You know, when you go to film school everyone’s like, ‘Ooh, the camera! The lens!’ And I’m like, ‘Okay...’ But Todd is that nerd and we had this beautiful working relationship, where I would make this ‘look book’ to capture the tone and the vibe and the feel with the shortlists, then I would let him go and do his thing. Rarely did I have any notes; I just let him capture what was in my head. Then, again, it became about the subjective experience. Not the objective thing. 

I loved how the film meshed together this visceral realism with surrealism. What made you implement this kind of storytelling in this genre?
I had a sound mentor that said a couple of things to me that always stuck. One was, ‘The best directors have intention with everything they do.’ Everything you’re adding, a dog barking or cutting a certain sound, if you can’t tell me why that’s there or what it's adding to the story, don’t put it in there. The story is first. The surreal aspects go back to this idea of how you get into the head of a character who isn’t narrating what she’s feeling or doesn’t have an antagonist to work off of. The surreal stuff captures the emotion that she’s feeling. It becomes about framing this story loosely, this romance between Alex and this boat, so you have the initial attractions, the clunky beginnings and the first time making love - which is the slow motion scene where she’s in the spotlight. In this scene, I was like, ‘Isabelle, I’m going to objectify you.’ Then there’s the falling in love, which is very peaceful and serene, and then the slow and toxic descent where stuff gets weirder and weirder. The vision between the real and surreal gets muddy. 

Isabelle Fuhrman is an absolute powerhouse as Alex Dall. What did you see in her to make you think she was right for the part?
She came in through auditions, which stood out, but it was also meeting her. I was looking for someone who had the physicality, because I was clear from the beginning that there are no doubles. This isn’t a sport you can pick up in an afternoon, so it needs someone who is hardy and excited by the challenge. Even though she’s full of life and still in her early twenties, she’s got this ferocity and this intensity. I could sense the strive and the ambition in her, and that is what I thought was needed for the character of Alex. 

It’s rare that we see a female led underdog story like this, let alone a queer one. How important is it that audiences continue to be exposed to narratives like this?
One of the reasons why diversity is still important is we get diverse storytellers who write what they know. I wrote this movie that’s about women and a queer character, I was on a rowing team and I am a queer woman - therefore, this is what you get. What’s also important about the queerness of this film is that there’s never a message narrative, it’s never a moment of her questioning her sexuality and it’s not commented on, and that’s what I wanted. While we need stories of the hardships and all of that, we need stories where being queer, being a woman, being whatever just ‘is’ and it’s not explained, it’s not a plot point to make people feel like these elements, these ‘different’ parts of yourself, define you. I am a woman, I am queer, but those things don’t define me, I hope that they aren’t the most interesting thing about me. Sometimes the media makes it this subject of,  ‘Ooh, a woman can do what a man can.' But that’s not how I feel, so hopefully this is a fresh view.

The Novice is available to watch in cinemas and on digital platforms on from Friday 1 April 2022