Microbudget Filmmaking and Authenticity: A Conversation with Writer/Director Hyun Lee
Images courtesy of Preliminary Materials Films.
French Girls isn’t a documentary, but it feels like one. If you’ve spent any time in a dilapidated sharehouse, engaged in small talk with cool fashion types, had a lazy boyfriend that you saw potential in despite never really proving himself, or friends who couldn’t be happy for you once you achieved success – then this film feels oddly cathartic.
Starring model and up-and-comer Mia Kidis, French Girls follows Mia’s (her actual name in the film) fast trajectory through the Sydney fashion world. However, what writer and director Hyun Lee does so well, is bring you on this journey in what feels like real-time. The audience becomes a fly on the wall in an industry that ebbs and flows just like any job – monotonous, sometimes exciting and often banal.
Yet, the film takes its subject matter and presents it in such a romantic lens that as a Melburnian you almost (almost) want to move to Sydney. When I tell Hyun Lee that I’m “obsessed” with the film because of this, she laughs and admits she hadn’t set out to make a love letter to the city at all.
“I didn’t really think about this or realise it until a lot of people were pleasantly surprised to see a film set in Sydney,” she tells me. “I was just like, this is the story. These are the people. This is the most convenient, cheapest place to shoot”.
“Lee’s characters developed alongside her actors, sometimes blurring the boundaries of what is fiction and reality.”
Shot for just $28,000 Australian dollars, French Girls is a true microbudget film. Lee borrowed camera gear, friends’ apartments and even used a $90 plastic pancake lens for filming. Lee’s characters developed alongside her actors, sometimes blurring the boundaries of what is fiction and reality. While most of the dialogue is scripted, Kidis adlibbed moments that made it to the final cut, like singing obnoxiously or trying to measure her friend’s head with a piece of string.
These moments make you laugh because it encapsulates the randomness of life. Nowhere is that clearer than in the fashion designer character with the missing front tooth, written after the actor called Hyun Lee two days before the shoot to tell her the news.
“He called me two days before the shoot and was like, ‘So I’ve got some news. My front tooth is broken off,’ and I freaked out and was like, ‘Oh gosh, can you do emergency dental?’ He was really nonchalant and was just like, ‘No, I think I kind of like the look. I might keep it that way.’
“I was really panicked at first, but then it was a real lesson in going with the flow because I love how that scene turned out. We ended up writing a scene to explain the tooth, and it helped characterise him so much more. It’s so funny and random, and life is so random, and leaning into it was the best thing we did.”
Mia Kidis in French Girls. Images courtesy of Preliminary Materials Films.
Across our conversation, we keep coming back to this idea of authenticity. What does it actually mean to produce an authentic film? How can we tell a character’s story without playing into tired cliches and genre conventions?
As someone who has worked in the fashion industry as a photographer, Lee wanted to show the fashion industry for its “everydayness”. “There is small talk, there is the humdrum. I think the fashion world is grossly misrepresented in the media, and I just wanted to show it for how it really is,” she says.
Despite sharing the same name and both being models, Mia Kidis and her character Mia were quite different in the beginning. However, throughout filming, Kidis’ own personality and interests shone through her character – creating the dimensionality that we see on screen. Many of the shots in French Girls are taken on a handy cam through Mia’s POV, inspired by Kidis’ own work as a video artist.
“We originally had a script that I’d written for this project many years ago, and the character originally was quite different to who Mia is as a person. I think originally she was a literature student or something like that,” Lee says. “We needed to find a way to give her [Mia] agency because her character by nature is quite passive.”
The addition of the handy cam footage allows the audience to see the world through Mia’s eyes, rather than just as a voyeur to her life. Through these scenes, we get a sense of who Mia is as a character. Like all women, she is more than just the projection or fantasy placed upon us by those who would never dare to explore our own vibrant inner-worlds.
“Why is it that models – a significant representation of women and femininity – are shown to be a certain type of person that’s so negative? And why is that so normalised?””
“There is this sinister undercurrent of why in mainstream media people are compelled to depict young women who are models as being these toxic, narcissistic, superficial and often unintelligent people.
“In my experience, I find most, if not all models that I’ve met are extremely self-aware and kind. It does make you think: why is it that models – a significant representation of women and femininity – are shown to be a certain type of person that’s so negative? And why is that so normalised?”
Images courtesy of Preliminary Materials Films.
What I find most interesting about French Girls is that it doesn’t explicitly tell you what to think or feel. A lot of the story is left up to interpretation. You can decide for yourself how you want to feel about the characters. When films take this approach to storytelling, it can ruffle feathers because audiences often want you to take a stance. Some Letterboxd criticism points this out, and asks for a deeper exploration of the fashion industry’s toxicity.
However, I would argue that’s not the point of French Girls. Life isn’t that simple. There are often two sides to every story. Fashion isn’t inherently evil and neither are the people that work in it. Women aren’t often afforded the same nuance that men receive in the media. We are portrayed as victims of a cruel patriarchy, or we are vapid supermodels who have nothing interesting to say.
It’s more complex than that though, and that’s exactly the nuanced take that French Girls provides. When you tell an authentic story, there is no black and white.
Follow Hyun Lee on Instagram and visit her website here.
Follow Mia Kidis on Instagram.
French Girls is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Saturday the 22nd of August. For tickets and more info, click here.