Based on Sian Heder’s short film Mother (2006), Tallulah (2016) tells the story of a young woman (Ellen Page) who kidnaps a baby from a neglectful and dissatisfied housewife. ScreenPrism spoke with writer/director Sian Heder about Ellen Page’s double duties as a baby wrangler/actress, the dark sides of motherhood and our deep instincts to form a family.

ScreenPrism: This film is based on your real life experiences as a nanny. What incident inspired you to write your short film Mother and the feature Tallulah?

Sian Heder: I had a lot of really weird experiences as a nanny. It’s such an intimate job, and now that I’m on the other side of it where I’m a mom and I have a nanny, I feel like she gets to witness every weird detail about my personal life, like fights with my husband or whatever else it is. Now I realize what a kind of weird insider job it is. I had one particular night with a woman who seemed very out of control and neglectful of her child. It was kind of absurd — there was something almost comical about her behavior, had there not been a little child who was the recipient of it.

I’m always interested, as a writer, in things that are both comedic and tragic at the same time and ride that line. So I just had this really weird night with this woman, and I felt compelled to take the kid with me when I left because she was passed out drunk on the bed, and there was no crib in the room, and it was just a mess. But I didn’t, and I felt heartbroken. I started thinking about why I didn’t, and it was because I was afraid of getting in trouble, and that would be kidnapping, and I live within the bounds of normal societal rules that tell me that’s the wrong thing to do. So that led to, almost, a wish-fulfillment thing of who would I have to be to take that child. I would have to be someone who lived a consequence-free existence, acting purely on impulse and my own moral compass. That’s where that character was born from.

Mother (clip) from Vincent Oresman on Vimeo.

SP: Is the character of Tallulah (Ellen Page) based on anyone in particular?

SH: Tallulah’s kind of a combination of two of my friends. I have a friend who I grew up with who was living out of her van for a long time, and a lot of the details — like her van’s name is Jim and she used to hustle pool halls to make money — were these kinds of things that I grabbed from her. And [I drew from] another friend of mine who’s just such a ferocious free-spirited person but also so charming and child-like at the same time. So Tallulah became an amalgamation of these two people.

Then you start to write a character and they take on their own life, so they kind of transcend whatever inspiration you started with. She started to be her own person who was talking to me and having adventures. That’s exciting as a writer because you start from someplace, and then the characters start to speak for themselves.

SP: You became a mother between the time you made Mother and Tallulah. How did that change your understanding of motherhood in the film?

SH: I had a lot more empathy for my villain. I really wanted to be a mom, and I loved kids, and I went into that process full-heartedly, and it just wrecked me for the first four months. I was so sleep-deprived. I felt like a zombie. There was so much sadness, and I don’t know if I realized before I had kids how much grief I was going to feel for this former self that existed — the person who could walk out the door and go to Walgreen’s to get something without thinking about another person and trying to figure that out. I guess I was so shocked by the conflicting feelings. And then you feel guilty about the conflicting feelings because you feel like maybe I’m the only person that’s having these feelings. Then you start talking to other moms, and you realize that’s what motherhood is. It’s guilt and shame and all these things. Among all the joyful feelings, there’s a darker side to parenthood that a lot of people don’t talk about, for both men and women. [I was] exploring the resentment and all these things in Carolyn (Tammy Blanchard), a person who just said the things people think in their darkest moments but don’t say out loud. She’s the embodiment of this dark inner life. It was a journey, an evolution for that character, and I rewrote the script, and she started to feel like a more three-dimensional person.

Director Sian Heder (center) on set with Allison Janney and Ellen Page

SP: The film explores the difficult and darker sides of motherhood and how some people aren’t ready to be or even meant to be a mother. Was it difficult to express that in the film?

SH: It wasn’t. I mean, it evolved. I think each character was dealing with the concept of motherhood in a different way. They’re all searching for mothers or becoming mothers. Tallulah was left by her own mother, and she doesn’t want responsibility in her life and doesn’t want human connection, and yet, in an impulsive and rash decision, she takes on that responsibility and has to learn how to do it. Some of the themes felt like they were overt, and some of them came out in tiny, little details that happened on set or in the moment. Whether it’s Margo when her turtle dies, and she has this huge emotional collapse that seems over-the-top for the fact that it’s just a turtle, but it’s grief for her son and the loss of her son and the turtle was this thing that connected her to him and now it’s gone, and it’s the idea that she’s a failed nurturer in general. She couldn’t keep her husband, she couldn’t keep her son, and now she can’t even keep this turtle alive. There were these little moments and details that felt like they were informing those big themes that I was getting at. For me, it was just paying attention to the details and making sure that those little moments of life those characters were having were saying big things about who they were as people.

SP: An important theme throughout the movie is connecting with people, as well as trying to find and fit into a family. The characters talk about floating off the earth, and there are two separate scenes where we see both Tallulah and Margo float away as they try to hold on to something to stay connected to the earth and to their loved ones. How did you come up with this metaphor of losing gravity to represent the lack of connectedness?

SH: I always lived in big cities — I never lived out in nature. But that’s how I reestablish my balance. It’s finding connections to the natural world, and so I always found places within those big cities. When I was in New York, it was going to Central Park and lying in Sheep Meadow or Washington Square Park and finding a little patch of grass where I can feel I can block out the city and feel the earth and the grass and look up at the trees and feel my body again, and get out of the urban rush that I was in. So ,in a way, those moments are about connecting to something quite fundamental about being alive.

And they’re very different. When Tallulah floats, it’s a panicked feeling. It’s her deepest fear of being untethered, even though she says she wants to be untethered. I think the reality of feeling untethered is feeling like you’re going to get sucked up into space and never get to have anyone in your life or any connection — or that she could disappear and no one would notice, basically. With Margo, I think that floating is an almost ecstatic, euphoric experience until she realizes that she might be leaving the planet, and then she desperately wants to stay. That’s a revelation for her character because she would have told you that she didn’t want to stay, and she didn’t want to be connected. So that moment of decision, of “No, I do want to be alive and on this earth, and I want to have this journey with all its pain” is a big moment for her.

Allison Janney as Margo

SP: Tallulah has similarities to 2007’s Juno (which also stars both Ellen Page and Alison Janney) or even 1987’s Raising Arizona. In all three stories, the characters are seeking a family, but they’re unprepared to become parents. How do you think your film compares?

SH: Tonally, it’s very different. Both of those films, in different ways, have a sardonic, wry humor to them. Certainly there’s a lot of comedy in this film, but it’s all laced with deep sentiment. But thematically, I definitely like the exploration of good people making bad decisions and having to live with those bad decisions. In casting Ellen and Allison, there was some fear of “Oh, there’s a baby! Is this going to feel like the weird sequel to Juno?” It’s not, but at the same time I knew that the two of them had this great history with each other and that you would feel that onscreen. There would be an immediate chemistry and love between them because they have a familial relationship in real life. So I don’t mind. It was a great film, and I embrace fans of that film to watch this film because those actors are so fantastic and their bond is real. It’s a very different story and a very different tone, but thematically it’s kind of aligned.

SP: Was the casting of both Page and Janney your intention from the start?

SH: It wasn’t. I just met those actors, and I fell in love with them both and actually had a moment of “oh no, do I want to do that?” because people are going to make that comparison. But, at the end of the day, they were exactly the right people for those parts, so I don’t give a shit.

Ellen Page and Allison Janney in Juno (2007)

SP: The role of Carolyn must have been difficult to cast, since she’s both antagonist and victim in the film. How did you find Tammy Blanchard?

SH: She came into an audition. She was the first person to audition, and she just blew me away. I was watching her perform the scene, and the thing you want most as a writer is when your actress comes in and elevates your work, and they show you something you didn’t even think about when you wrote it. She just had a quality about her work. She was so sexy, and there was something so dangerous about her. And yet she just felt broken and vulnerable. I just wanted to giver her a hug and wrap her in my arms and tell her, “Everything’s going to be okay.” So that combination of this person that felt dangerous and scary and horrifying but also that you care about was a quality that is so hard to capture, and she just had it. There was a lot of pressure to cast some big-name movie star, and I kept sending them Tammy’s audition and saying, “Watch this woman again! Watch her again!” I felt really lucky that my financiers and producers were open to giving her a shot at this because I think it’s such a revelatory performance.

SP: Of the three, do you relate most to Tallulah, Margo or Carolyn?

SH: I’ve been all of them. They’re all the same woman on some level, and they’re all totally different on some level. They couldn’t be more different yet they’re all the same person, and I have been each of them. There are moments where I feel like I’m all of them, and I think as audiences watch the movie and maybe watch it again, they might find themselves relating [each time] to someone else. I had moments of wanting to say “fuck it all” to the world and go escape and live in my van and have no ties and no phone, wanting to disappear like [Talluah]. Then I had moments of feeling like a bad mommy and feeling selfish, like I neglected my child [like Carolyn]. And I have moments, like Margo, of loving people in my life too much and feeling like I’m relying on them to bring me some kind of joy or happiness that I need to find on my own. I had moments of being each one of these characters, and that’s why I love them all.

SP: While filming, of course, you had a lot of babies on set.

SH: Oh my god. The babies almost killed us all.

SP: What was that like?

SH: It was so insane. There’s a reason you never see toddlers as leads in movies. I can count the number of movies on one hand that I think have a toddler as a main character, like Look Who’s Talking (1990)! It’s so difficult. They’re not an infant, which you can just swaddle in a blanket and switch out with any kid, really, and just have a kind of moving, crying thing, and you’re like, “That’s a baby.” And they’re not three or four, where you can actually talk to them and give them some direction and have them do what you want. They’re like these insane little aliens that just do whatever they feel like doing, and that’s what was so beautiful about it to me. I got to capture a kind of life that was happening that I couldn’t control and no one on set could really control, and so we shot with two cameras to make sure we could always be filming the baby and capturing the behavior.

Ellen Page became a serious baby wrangler. She was doing double duty as like a full-time babysitter/actress. She certainly had really strong arms by the end of the movie because she held that baby for hours and hours and hours at a time. Between takes and setups and when she went to the bathroom, she had to take the baby with her because she wouldn’t be separated from her, so she was totally my hero. And the parents were awesome. The fact that they gave me their kids and trusted me with that was huge.

Ellen Page as Tallulah with the kidnapped baby

SP: Is there anything you want audiences to take away after watching the film?

SH: A sense of hope. A sense of transformation that all of these characters have grown up in a way. It’s a coming-of-age for all three women. I would love people to walk out of the theater and look at people in their lives with a little bit more compassion. One of the women who interviewed me said, “I watched your movie, and then I called my single mom and said I understood why she made the mistakes she made.” That was huge.

If anyone feels transformed at all by the film, that would be my hope.