Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez premiered their new film, Invention, at Locarno last month, not quite sure what kind of life or reception it would receive. Of course, no one can predict a new film’s reception, but in the case of Invention, which balances a delicate investigation of personal grief with a playful and, for lack of a better term, inventive turn of cinematic form, there is a lot lurking inside its formal quirks ripe for misinterpretation.
The film is, as the following conversation with Stephens and Hernandez will conclude, a metafictional look at the death and mysterious lived circumstances of a doctor, and the daughter, Carey, played by Hernandez, trying to piece together answers about who the man once was. Some of Hernandez’s own life story is indeed material for the film’s story, as is Stephens’. But this isn’t a biopic, or a documentary, though it plays with both of those forms to ironic effect. When you watch Invention, you come to learn, quite quickly, that the most important elements are not the particulars, but the ways in which they’re delivered to us.
As conspiratorial thinking and paranoid insecurities infiltrate Carey’s unstable impression of her own father, it becomes clear that the questions the film asks us, about familial grief and loss, about the machinations of capitalism and exploitation, and about the fragility of our national, even global, mindset, are best approached with questions of our own, even if they’re ultimately left unanswered.
Quick disclosure: I know Stephens, having met and spoken a few times in contexts outside of this interview. Because of this, I took a chance to send her and Hernandez a short essay film/lecture by one of Stephens’ former collaborators, the scholar Robert Pietrusko prior to our conversation. In his essay, Pietrusko coined a concept called Dark Optimism, which raises the progressive possibilities of the conspiratorial mindset. That essay has been in my mind for over a year, and given the content and form of Stephens’ and Hernandez’s new film, it would be silly to miss out on the opportunity to talk about it.
Our Zoom call was going smoothly until just before our conversation started in earnest when, as often happens in these spaces, Stephens froze and it was way too long before either Hernandez or I realized.
Callie Hernandez: Before we got on I was brushing up on Ong’s Hat. Do you know about this conspiracy theory? It started in New Jersey, and it’s one of the first instances of online conspiracy theory revolving around academia, I think. But basically, four people just made up these narratives and then posted things on bulletin boards and printed magazines starting in the ’70s, but really gearing up in the 80s, CD-ROMs and everything. But the made-up narrative is that one person gets stuck in a parallel universe. That’s kind of what just happened with Courtney [laughs].
Chris Cassingham: What’s the conspiracy? Ong, like O-N-G?
CH: Yeah.
Courtney Stephens: Weren’t we told the other day that our film was a word I hadn’t heard before? Portal-core or something like that? Or maybe it was “portal kink”.
CH: [laughs] Let’s call it a portal yarn.
CC: I don’t know about the TikTok-ification of this film. I don’t know if we want that. But a yarn is a great old school term that fits.
CH: We’ll come back to the essence of the thing.
CC: I’m not blameless. I invoked the 1940s in my review.
CS: Yeah, you called it a noir.
CC: It is! I wanted to go further and talk about it in relation to Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, because there are some similarities in terms of a seemingly clueless detective character trying to piece together the life story of a dead man, but decided against it.
CH: That’s actually really astute you picked up on that because Courtney’s obsessed with Nancy Drew and the noir aspect. I mean, if we’re talking about Invention conceptually, there was a darker element to it when we first started working on what it eventually became.
CS: Yeah, and there was a plot.
CC: Noirs are often helped by a plot.
CH: The essence of the thing was definitely leaning more toward something with a more solid genre. My character was going to be called something else before, too; I think it was Astrid. And we were like, “Oh, we can’t do that.” And I was definitely more sleuthy and trying to get to the bottom of things.
CC: Courtney, another thing I refrained from mentioning explicitly was the film by Jon Davies that you starred in a few years ago, Topology of Sirens, which is in a very different emotional register than Invention, but shares a lot of interesting qualities about death and mystery and questioning.
CH: Well, I did my homework and I watched the video essay, and then I realized that you and Robert had collaborated, Courtney, so I’ll let you guys talk mostly about it, because I’m curious about what he is trying to say.
CC: My basic assessment of his lecture is that people who believe in conspiracies have an inherent belief in the interconnectedness of systems and institutions around the country and world, and that progressive movements need to harness that understanding again. Essentially, understanding that interconnectedness is crucial to changing those systems and improving the world.
CS: You know, it’s so intuitive, Chris, because, Callie, I don’t know if you remember the origin of this, but I had visited Robert’s class in Philadelphia, which is all about conspiracy as form, and it turned out to be a major early inspiration. He encouraged students to think about conspiracy as form, an idea we kept returning to to orient our own interests, along with the form of the film. It helped to remind us not to get lost in the coordinates of conspiracy, but to think about how it functions as a medium for making sense of things that seem impossible to make sense of.
CH: Yeah, conspiracy as a form was definitely the touchstone while we were working on Invention. There are myriad subgenres we could have gone and explored, but I think we were always on the same page that it wasn’t necessarily what it was, but how we got there, or how one gets there. And not even in a way that’s politicized. Just, what is conspiracy and how and why does it enter in our lives? And what is it in service of?
CS: And what is it offering relief from?
CH: We don’t have to jump into this, but it was surprising to me to find that Invention was equal amounts of hopelessness and optimism. Just riffing on Robert’s lecture video, it is optimistic in a certain way, but I’ll never say it’s delusional, because it’s not. If you don’t have a hope for something, the pilot light goes out, you know?
CC: If you had to assign a form or a shape to the conspiracy in Invention, how would you describe it?
CS: It’s interesting because I would almost say I don’t know about the shape, but there’s a lot of talk of energy in this movie. And somehow the machine Carey’s father invented is also functioning energetically, which is an amorphous idea. But I think for the character, Carey, it’s almost like the film doesn’t get that conspiratorial, it’s not jigsawed together that way. But there is this feeling that maybe there’s something to investigate and that energizes what was a pretty despondent state of mind into something that can be active. It gives you something to work with. The possibility of a search, the possibility of an investigation, the possibility that there’s more than this information that’s just disappointing and horrible. So, in a sense, it’s energy that wakes the film up and wakes Carey up.
CH: Not to get super meta, but one of the people we were working with on Invention was really into these conspiratorial videos, which I have no sensitivity to whatsoever, and another guy on set was like, “Why do you keep watching those?” And he said, very earnestly, “I’m just really hoping one of these is true.”
CC: Oh wow.
CH: I thought that was heartbreaking. And also it shows you where things have failed. But there’s also nothing to do about that failure, necessarily, except be hopeful. And for Carey, the engine is the hope. The hope that something maybe isn’t what it seems or what she thought, or that there’s a different perspective out there that makes sense. And that applies to the character, but can scale up to ideas about the country and the world, too.
CC: We’ve talked a lot about the film already, but I want to go back to the conception of the film and of your collaboration. You’ve said in another interview that you met about 10 years ago, but it seems like whatever you started that turned into Invention came much later than that.
CH: Terrence Malick was the centerpiece of that whole like nine degrees of separation — both of us have worked with him.
CS: Yeah, Callie, you were in one of his films, and we also had mutual friends. So we had met a long time ago, and then kind of ran into each other in New York at a Hong Sang-soo screening much later.
CC: Do you remember what Hong Sand-soo film it was?
CS: The Novelist’s Film. And after, we were like let’s make a movie for nothing!
CC: In terms of points of inspiration for a film the size and scale of Invention, that’s not a bad one to go off of.
CH: It was all very full circle. I think I remember Courtney saying her birthday was the next week or something, and I thought, “Oh, my birthday is next week!” And then we realized our birthdays are two days apart.
CS: One day apart! That’s when we realized it’s a conspiracy to get us to work together.
CH: We had another meeting point that winter, and we started talking more about just — I guess we were talking about our dads more than anything.
CS: I lost my dad 17 years ago, but Callie was still in the long aftermath of dealing with that. But we were really just talking about making a fiction, without autobiographical stuff. And it was funny, because as we were peeling back the layers of what we were interested in making, more and more nonfiction started to make its way into it, to the point that it’s in a really ambiguous space now.
CH: I was also in a place of feeling fresh off my dad’s death in 2021, but really wanting to make films. I had rented this little house in Massachusetts, and planned on making as many movies as I could while I was there. And the more Courtney and I started talking, the more it seemed like this was something that I definitely wanted to make, and that she was the right person to make it with.
CS: I saw our DP, Rafael, the other day, and he was like, “Yeah, I remember I was flying out the next day, and we still didn’t know what we were gonna shoot the first day.” We were really like…
CH: I had to drive someone to the airport in Albany, and then came back, took a shower, and then the camera was up!
CS: It gives new meaning to the phrase “run and gun.” We were writing as we went, being responsive to what we were shooting, and who was showing up, and what ideas they had. We were sculpting as we went through this thing, with a hope that it would fit together. But I think maintaining a faith that was centered around one idea, which was the question of grief, and the architecture of grief, gave us some security that even if the plot stuff fell away or didn’t have a traditional arc, that there would be some sort of honesty at the core. We kept our eye on that.
CH: Grief in and of itself, and riding the waves, is not really that linear. So I think we were both comfortable enough to sit in that unknown space and let it do its thing. I’ve made films this way quite a lot now, and it does require a belief, or at least foundational understanding of where to return when you get lost. None of it was linear, I would say. Except we shot in order, though, which we had to do.
CC: Courtney, when was the last time you directed actors on a set? Was it at AFI?
CS: You mean with the intention of making a fiction film? Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s elements of performance directing that happens in nonfiction and documentary, but this film was definitely me learning and experimenting. At our premiere, a friend of mine in the audience was like, “Courtney, this seems like a real departure from your other work. Can you talk about that?” It’s exciting to try and do something you’re not really sure you can do. I think it helped that, in a way, it started bleeding more into nonfiction. Some people on set were non-actors, but most people were actors. But because there wasn’t exactly a script, we were drawing out people’s experiences. It was in a slightly fuzzy space, and I think that was more comfortable for me than trying to execute someone else’s script or something like that.
CC: I wonder if there is ever a friction between your aims of expressing ideas, which we’ve talked about already, and the business of telling a narrative story, which in this case is a little unconventional. Did you encounter this, and what do you do when that happens?
CS: I don’t know if it’s friction as much as balance. It was a balancing act to let those vapors of ideas enter the film but not let them eclipse the personal throughline — except that those kinds of ideas, and the fact of family ideology, were part of the personal story to begin with. And I definitely felt like we would experiment with some scenes where I was trying to ram some idea or even a phrase in there and realize that just wasn’t working dramatically. So it was definitely something I had to contend with. There are a lot of planted ideas. Some of them are coming about through editing or through juxtaposition, and a lot of people are talking about ideas. And one thing that is on the table in this film is ideology; not any particular ideology, but just the entire concept of people’s belief systems, or parents’ belief systems, the way in which we’re indoctrinated into them, and the struggle against them. So, we did want to have free-floating ideas that the film was not going to condone or take a stance on, but were there as propositions and proposals. I think a major theme in the film is having to live with a certain amount of uncertainty and irresolution, not just to life, but to loss.
CC: What is your read on the film’s reception from people, whether at Locarno or in the press? Are they responding to the film’s ideas or stuck trying to answer the unanswered questions about Callie’s personal life?
CS: It’s hard to say because not everybody talked to us. But we are reading the press, and certainly it seems like writers are interested in teasing out a lot of those ideas and going with them. But we’ve both been excited that people writing about the film have talked a lot about ideas framing something that is ultimately personal and emotional. Callie called it an artifact, and I thought that was so right on. It is an artifact of its own conception and of a time period, and I also think it’s very right now in terms of stuff that’s percolating, and was even percolating on set. I do think it’s interesting to probe the seams of something that holds together and see how much you can sniff that’s wafting up from between those seams. We’re always asking ourselves what is the genre of this film? It’s been invited to festivals that are fantasy genre festivals, documentary festivals. It’s played as fiction, you think it’s a film noir [laughs], and people have called it autofiction. And Calllie was suggesting metafiction.
CH: Going back to your earlier question, I think we did run into some soft corners. I felt such an immense responsibility for my dad, and I felt genuinely okay in many ways of living in this kind of unknowable space. That’s the space that we agreed to live in, in a certain way. But also it’s been interesting seeing the varied responses from other press. One person called me Carrie Huntington, or something. But I realized that the film becomes this whole new third thing, because it is a total blend of fiction and a lot of very personal things. So one outlet said the other day that my dad was an inventor living in New England, and he wasn’t, he was a doctor living in Texas. But at a certain point, it takes on a life of its own, and you have to let the film be what it wants to be, and live in that uncertainty. But I even felt protective of Courtney the other day because somebody said, “They both lost their dads last year,” which isn’t true.
I wouldn’t say friction is the right word, but the experience with Invention has been about trying to make sense of it and orient yourself enough in the process of it, and, even more so in its reception, to be able to speak honestly about what it is. It’s a blend of these things though, and that’s what the film is. Metafiction feels more accurate because the film isn’t doing a Dear Diary thing. A lot of the subject matter really is like driving a car for me, because I grew up with it so much. But now I get to see it from a different vantage point. You just keep tugging that yarn baby, and see where it goes.
