The Canadian writer-director Naomi Jaye’s work frequently probes eccentric characters who pursue a peculiar agenda of routinized loneliness. Her first short, the madcap A Dozen for Lulu (2002), uses a stylized soundtrack (blaring alarm clocks, squeaky chairs) and an agile camera to depict two oddballs who share an enthusiasm for sprinkled donuts: a cheery, rollerblade-wearing ballerina who works at a hardware store, and a man in a fur cap who, with academic precision, nails the pastries to his workshop walls. Two of Jaye’s subsequent shorts, both starring the excellent Adrian Griffin, provide more subdued portraits of solitary souls. In The Raindrop Effect (2003), Griffin’s character, outfitted in a frumpy robe and brown loafers, endures the doldrums in his empty home—until he begins to forge a restorative relationship with the rainwater collecting in his leafy backyard. Arrivals (2007), also a single-location piece, deals with a man who perpetually hangs around an airport waiting area, looking on in hushed awe at the hordes of travellers reuniting. Arrivals leaves the reasons for the man’s loitering unstated, but The Raindrop Effect includes a touch more context for the despair. The man in the robe rummages through old crates bearing mementos, toys, and photos of a family at Christmas time. He dons a motorcycle helmet and stares at himself in the mirror—perhaps revisiting a particularly important memory.

Jaye repeats the stages of her characters’ anomie, stacking the details in a nearly hypnotic way. In Arrivals, she fixates on the chair the man unfolds and sits in whenever the intercom voice announces the latest incoming flight. In The Raindrop Effect, she shows the loner turning the light out every night and filling up the coffee pot at the sink each morning. This obsession with mundane procedures materializes anew in Jaye’s latest movie, Darkest Miriam (2024), her second feature. Its central personality, Toronto-area, cardigan-clad librarian Miriam (Britt Lower, of Severance fame), marks another intense introvert in the Jaye corpus. She lives alone, bikes to and from work, and eats lunch solo at nearby Allan Gardens, taking in the bucolic splendor while people-watching. Despite Miriam’s isolated tendencies, her job itself demands an unremitting array of community engagement: performing with paper-plate masks during a children’s storytelling hour; fielding wide-ranging complaints at the front desk; discovering the sticky residue of a patron’s masturbation. These short, off-kilter workaday episodes—which Jaye adapted from Martha Baillie’s diary-like 2009 book The Incident Report—form the fulcrum of Miriam’s dejected days. That is, until she strikes up a connection with kindly Janko (Tom Mercier), a Slovenian cab driver and painter.

In between her early shorts and Darkest Miriam, Jaye released her first feature, the World War II–era, Yiddish-language The Pin (2013), about two Jewish teenagers in Eastern Europe who cross paths in an abandoned barn where they’re both evading Nazi captors. As in Arrivals, a pair of distraught strangers meet in a closed-off space, sharing the environs in silence before gradually opening up to each other. The Pin contains several of Jaye’s signature motifs (apples, close-ups of hands), and also affirms her interest in body language. She carefully tracks the youngsters’ various postures around the barn, whether they’re leaning against the beams and exchanging stories or hiding frantically beneath the floorboards.

Jaye’s curiosity toward duration and physical mannerisms—“I love films where you are able to sit and watch,” she told me recently over Zoom—can perhaps be connected with her work as an installation artist, where she has explored the form of the body in intimate, vulnerable settings: an MRI machine, a changing room at a community pool. (She in fact first mounted The Incident Report as an installation, in a version called Miriam’s World, with eight screens featuring the panoply of Baillie’s disgruntled patrons.) During our discussion, Jaye—who studied at the Canadian Film Centre, holds an MFA from York University, and lectures at Toronto Metropolitan University—talked about the nuances of audience behavior that separate cinema from installation. She also reflected on her affinity for isolated characters and her long journey adapting Baillie’s book.

 

 

 

I always tell stories about people who are confined in some way, emotionally, and it's usually a self-imposed isolation. And how they're able to, in small ways, break open and break free and choose to engage with the world.

 

 

 

I wanted to start with some of your early shorts, which have a real sense of visual whimsy, especially A Dozen for Lulu. How was that sensibility formed early on? Did you have any influences you were aware of?

What was I into at that time? It was so long ago, I really didn't know what I was doing. Because I had studied theater design. I had never made a film, and then, as a complete whim, I said, “I think I want to direct.” But I didn't know what that meant. I hadn't studied film at all. So I didn't actually, oddly, know what a director did. Then I went to the New York Film Academy, and I just fell in love with it. It was a two-month intensive course. We were shooting on film and cutting on flatbeds, so it was this really material way of making films. And because of studying theater, I had seen scripts, I had seen theater scripts, but I didn't know what a film script looked like.

Then I had a dream one night, while I was in New York, about a guy who was hanging donuts from his walls, and I wanted to make it into a film. The script had no dialogue, so it wasn't really a script as I would know a script now. It was just a description of the images that I saw. It was this first effort, which felt very difficult in some ways and very easy in other ways. I just saw it. I could close my eyes and see it. I didn't have the language for how to speak about any of it, but I knew what I wanted it to look like. So I would just describe in words what I wanted it to look like.

Because I hadn't studied film, I didn't understand, intimately, editing. So it was shot with these long, single takes. I didn't do any coverage, and then had to go back and cover one particular thing. It was a kind of wonderful ignorance. But I was really into films by Almodóvar, I was a huge fan. I don't know how I got exposed at a young age, but I went to see Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown when I was 14. Also Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Again, I don't know how I heard about his work, but I loved his films. I would say they were kind of influences.

You touched on this a bit, but your shorts are almost nonverbal. Your characters do these mysterious things, and there’s not much explanation. Even in The Pin, it takes a while for the two characters to meet and for there to be a need for talk. What appeals to you about avoiding dialogue or not fully revealing these circumstances?

There's so much that can be said without speaking, and I was obviously very into that in my early films. There's so much beauty and tenderness and heartache and humor that you can get across. Words, in a sense, complicate it. There's a purity to having just images. A purity and a simplicity—just images and emotions that come together and say something. It felt less complicated, especially because I didn't have a lot of experience. I hadn't seen the canon of work that everyone talked about.

I was into Fred Astaire when I was young, because my mom was into it. I was into those films from the ’30s and ’40s, the musicals and comedies. There was something I found so enthralling about them, and so romantic too. But there was a lot of talking in those. [In my shorts], because I see things so clearly in my mind, it was quite easy to—not easy, it was very difficult—but easy to translate that, if you can find the right collaborators and have them understand what you see in your mind. Characters speaking seemed to complicate something that could be so clearly transmitted through someone's face or an image.

There are a lot of interesting ways you position bodies within a space. Arrivals is all in one setting, and you position the characters against the surroundings: chairs, beams, walls. That also happens in The Pin with the barn. What's your process like for breaking down the angles and the positioning, especially when you know you're working with one location?

With Arrivals, we found the space, which was, at the time, an abandoned storefront. It was a heritage building in downtown Toronto. These were all Arts Council grant films I was making, The Pin as well, so you're working with a relative amount of freedom. You're not working with funders or investors, and you are working with quite an open timeline. Once we found the space, I was able to go in with a DP. I had a clear idea of how I wanted to shoot it. But then, of course, you bring in another person, another brain, and it becomes a collaboration. We went in and photographed every shot. We had two people come in with us as stand-ins, and we had this huge wall where we placed all the photographs, photo storyboards for everyone to see. It was such an effective way to do it, and we really could see what the film was going to be. Of course, you always find beautiful things on the day, and things change, but we had a good starting place and a good common language to speak.

In terms of the framing, it's interesting now to be at a point where people are interviewing me, because I actually don't know what to say about it. It's just how I saw it. I haven't seen these films in a long time, but I remember distinctly there were these arms coming from either side of the frame passing an apple. It's just how I saw it, an uncluttered frame. That film was one location, two people. The Pin as well, one location, more or less one location and two people. There's something so simple and so controlled [about it]. You can find something and light it in a beautiful way and have a moment, hopefully if it's successful, have an impact or have a feeling.

It's funny you mention the apple because that comes back in The Pin, and then isn’t there one in Darkest Miriam as well? And speaking of the hands and arms in Arrivals, hands are also important in The Pin.

I don't know how other people function, but I don't function in this overly intellectual way. It all just feels like it comes out of nowhere. Of course, you end up seeing patterns in what you do and what you create. But it's not like I'm thinking, “I'm definitely going to put an apple in this.” The images all just emerge somehow. It's a symbol of love, in a way, love and sexuality. If you look at it from a Judeo-Christian way, apples were the forbidden fruit. I guess! In my films, it’s always between a man and a woman, and they're sharing a fruit.

I've had this long-standing obsession with people's hands. It's calming down as I get older, but I was really obsessed with people's hands. I find hands to be very beautiful and very interesting. And the way people move their hands, I find fascinating. You can do things to disguise your face, or to hide emotion, or to change your face in a way, but you can't change your hands. I mean, you can change your hands, obviously, but not a lot of people would bother aesthetically changing their hands. So they're a kind of tell. They can say a lot about a person, the way someone moves their hands, what their hands look like. It’s another way, an access into emotion that people think about less, and therefore would be less likely to mask.

 

 

 

 

 

The Pin and Darkest Miriam both have these interstitial shots between scenes of trees and nature. In The Pin, the nature is brittle and broken-down. But in Darkest Miriam, the gardens are so bright and colorful. What do you make of that tendency in both films to piece together those images throughout?

If I work backwards, in Darkest Miriam, both the library and Allan Gardens and the greenhouse, where they meet for lunch and [have] the park scenes, are characters in the film. So there was this idea of—again, not intellectually—but once I step back and look at it, it's this idea of the library being a place of confinement, a prison that she's recreated from her father's experience. Her father created this kind of library in his garage, and then killed himself in the garage. She has recreated that. She has surrounded herself with books, much like her father, and is not a literal suicide, but an emotional suicide. She's not living her life and engaging with people in a real way. She keeps herself very closed and very safe. So you have that as one element, and then you have the garden representing life and sensuality, just trying to open her [up]. They represent the two parts of her world, and the interstitials of the greenhouse are the power and vitality of life as an unavoidable force. Life will continue. Nature will continue.

I've made so many films with Canadian Arts Council grants. They make you talk about your journey as an artist and what it is that makes you make films and what you are exploring. After writing a lot of grants, you finally figure out what you're grappling with. I always tell stories about people who are confined in some way, emotionally, and it's usually a self-imposed isolation. And how they're able to, in small ways, break open and break free and choose to engage with the world. For Miriam, that's exactly what she does. She is in this confined space and breaks free, and the garden and the park and the lavish plants are all about that sensuality and sexuality coming back into her world and life, just the force of life.

In The Pin, it's not dissimilar. The barn is definitely a character in that film. The trees have no leaves and are brittle. It's a very oppressive, lifeless environment they find themselves in. But between the two of them, they find some kind of life and sensuality. Similarly, the shomer—the older man in the room with the body—has locked himself up in this kind of prison, literally with death. Then, in the end, he leaves and takes a breath. That's another thing in a lot of my films. In the end, people just take a breath. They’re choosing to engage with the world. Life is hard, and life is beautiful. I've said this a lot talking about this film, but if you're lucky, if you're leading a good life, I think they come in at around 50-50. If you're leading a very difficult life, then that balance would change. Everyone has to go through painful things and suffer. But there's also so much beauty. If you can choose to see it like that, like there is so much beauty despite the fact life can be really hard, then that's a beautiful thing. Take a breath and choose to live.

With many of your characters, there's a pattern of people dealing with grief and doing it with these routines that can seem a little strange from the outside. But Miriam, while isolated in her grief, has such a public-facing job. How did you handle that juxtaposition, where she's in her own head but has all these uncomfortable interactions that can add to her stress?

Yeah, it adds a stress, definitely, because there are people who are living very marginalized kinds of lives who use libraries as the last true public space they're able to go to and just be. A lot of it can be very funny. Devastatingly funny, but funny—that's what attracted me to the book in the first place. Of course, in the book, there are so many more incidents and so many more characters. Some of them are just hysterical. But they're funny because these people do such odd things, and they do such odd things for devastating reasons. So it's this push-pull between humor and tragedy. Charlie Chaplin is the master of that, of holding those two things at the same time. That's Miriam's life. It's funny, in the library, but it's devastating. And difficult, too, as a person who is dealing with that kind of weight. To have to be on all day. Exhausting, I would imagine, dealing with people all day, which is why she kind of cocoons when she goes home.

There is one extended shot where she comes home at the end of the day and removes her clothes. It reminded me of this focus in your work on duration or waiting—just sitting with a moment.

I think that's an aesthetic thing. I love all kinds of films, but I love films where you are able to sit and watch. I find it endlessly fascinating. I know a lot of people don't, they find it quite boring. But I am endlessly fascinated by people, by watching people. I love people doing things and watching them, and it gets to the point where it's uncomfortably long. Then it's always a question of: When do you have to cut? How long is too long? I have many people, editors and producers, saying, “This is too long, oh my God,” so there is a fine line there. But I love watching people. It's beautiful to see the small movements and actions that make up someone—how they are and what they do. Maybe that ties back to the hand thing, really watching people's hands or how they move their hands, or watching people in private moments or quiet moments. It tells you a lot about who they are. It allows you a little bit of access to their soul. There's something so quiet and beautiful about it. Which also ties back to The Pin and the shots of the trees—you pull out from the characters and you're just watching a tree. Which, for me, wouldn't that be amazing? To go sit in a forest and watch a tree for two hours?

As an artist who works in multiple forms, can you talk about your process of pairing subject matter and medium? Is that a logical process, or is it more a visceral reaction, like you hear a story idea and then right away have a feeling what format might be best?

Definitely visceral. I'm not prolific enough to say, “So my next project, I'll do this.” It's always these things that just bubble up. Like with many people in the arts, it's a way of expression. It's a way of being. It feels integral to who I am and my identity. It’s something that I have to do. I have to create in order to maintain me, in order to maintain who I am. So it doesn’t feel like an intellectual process. I’ll just have an image or a thought, and it already is an installation. I haven’t said to it, “You must be an installation.” It’s just, that’s how it will come out.

With the exception of Darkest Miriam, actually, which I optioned to make into a film. I optioned it in 2010—a long time ago. In 2016, I started doing my master’s, and that’s when I decided—well, it was already bubbling in my head, “This is not necessarily a feature film.” The book is so particular in its design. It felt like a representation in book form of how I experienced the world, which is what I found so enthralling about it. And what I find so enthralling also about—maybe it's not such a direct line—but Krzysztof Kieslowski’s films, where you find these tiny little moments or incidents in someone's life. And it's not until you step back that you can see that all the moments are connected and made up a life. A momentous thing that has happened in these tiny little grains of sand. So I already had that feeling of, “I think this would be told better in a different way.” Because it's not a strong narrative. It's not a plot-heavy book. I did end up making it into an installation first, because I couldn't get the funding, I couldn't find producers, I was just waiting. While I was waiting, I was swirling with these thoughts and made the installation. Then, finally, things came together and it was made into a film. So that's the one instance where things maybe were a bit more intentional. But otherwise, no, ideas come, and it's one or the other, installation or film.

 

 

 

 

Did you write your adapted screenplay soon after you got the rights, or did that come later?

Yeah, so I optioned the book in 2010. Then I made The Pin. We shot in 2011, and then early 2013, it was out in the world. And once it was out, I started writing The Incident Report, because it felt like a bigger film. It felt like a bigger budget. The Pin was a chamber piece. It was so contained that it felt like something that could be done on a lower budget. So I held off on the Incident Report [project] for three years, and then I started writing. And we [finally] shot in 2022. It wasn't like I was writing for nine years. There's an ebb and flow to these things. I did a draft, I got an Arts Council grant, and wrote a draft. Then it was swirling, it was flowing for a few years, and then it was stagnant for a while. When the producers came on board, it started up again.

You're generally faithful to the book, but you created a recurring motif of a construction pit that Miriam falls into. What did adding that to the story unlock for you?

Through this whole development process in the early days of working on the script, I was part of the Torino AdaptLab, which doesn't exist anymore. They just have the Torino [FilmLab] now, I think. But at that time they did have it, and I was working with a bunch of people from all over Europe. The woman who was heading our group, Isabelle Fauvel, was saying to me—just forget the book. You have to. I was so in love with the book, and I couldn't see my way past it and make it into a film. She said, “Don't look at the book. Just make it into a film.” And that's when it came. Somehow through her really encouraging me to forget about the book, the image of this hole came about. Again, it's not this intentional intellectual exercise where I'm thinking, “How can I externalize internal emotions?” But that's what it does. It's a way to show what is happening to her. She is literally cracked open when she falls into that hole. If you want to speak in scriptwriting terms, that's the inciting incident. That's when it all starts. That's when she decides to go and talk to Janko. That's when things start amping up with the letters. It becomes this kind of refuge for her as well. A huge part of the hole for me was also that from that vantage point, she could look up at the starry sky. It takes her out of herself and her own world and her own pain to see the earth, the sky. [It] brings you into the larger frame of all of this. The hole served the dual purpose of her being contained and inside something and also expansion—for her to see the sky and be able to get out of herself and out of her pain.

Has the way you've worked with actors changed over the years? In those early shorts, there’s so little dialogue, while Darkest Miriam probably has your most dialogue in a film. Do those modes require a different kind of collaboration?

In terms of actor experience, the actors I worked with on my shorts were quite seasoned actors. So it did feel like there was a lot of collaboration and conversation. But then when you got down to it, when I need to shoot your arm holding an apple, it becomes … I don't know how wonderful that feels for an actor, for me to say, “Put your arm here and hold an apple.” With The Pin, the actors were extraordinary, but very new. They didn't have a lot of experience, so that was a different process. Plus, [we had] zero time. It was a really intense shoot in Yiddish. The whole thing was quite bonkers. They were in Yiddish lessons for a year leading up to the film. Neither of them spoke Yiddish. I don't speak Yiddish. We had a translator, a Yiddish teacher, a Yiddish speaker on set checking their pronunciation. Then we went back and had to ADR a lot just to perfect it. It was a whole thing. So that felt a bit harried. The actors and I spent a lot of time together beforehand because there was such a long Yiddish lesson process, and we had an amount of rehearsal time, but on set it felt like, “We just need to get all of this stuff.”

With Darkest Miriam, I was working with very accomplished actors who understood their process and their bodies. Specifically with Britt, we had rehearsal time together, and we would spend a lot of time talking. She was incredible at just embodying the process of transferring words into action and emotion. Because directors have a tendency to talk a lot, and it is not very beneficial for actors to just talk at them for a long time. And then they have to somehow translate that into action and emotion. But we talked a lot before. But on set she would say, “I don't think Miriam would say this. What about this?” “Absolutely.” So it felt like a beautiful back-and-forth in order to elevate and make Miriam come alive. Britt was really engaged and involved in that. I hope she feels like she had a lot of agency, because it did feel like this true collaboration.

There is one line in the book that says, “Sounds are more convincing than most of reality.” That was interesting to read after watching your films, because I feel like you emphasize sound a lot.

I really do. I mean, film is picture and sound, right? It really does take both to immerse you. But I'm particularly fascinated by sound. It's so evocative. With my first film, A Dozen for Lulu, we actually didn't record any sound on set, nothing. And then in my complete ignorance, I didn't understand or know what I was doing, I found the sound designer and said, “OK, let's do it!” And he said, “You didn't record anything?” I said, “No, let's start building!” So we built everything. He was amazing. We sat in a room together for a week, and I would do Foley or he would pull a sitar down from the wall and start playing it. Everything was built together, and sound was so important, especially in that film—it was almost comedic, cartoony. That experience set a path for how I was going to work moving forward. Obviously, I started recording sound on set. Creating such a textured and detailed soundscape, it immerses you, it brings you close, especially when you have detailed Foley. I find sound endlessly interesting and such a huge part of the storytelling.

Looking at your upcoming projects, there is one called The Common Father, which stood out because the father is such an important presence in Darkest Miriam. And there’s an installation about Parkinson's disease, which sounds like it could connect with your other installations about the body or medical procedures. Could you talk about where you're at with those projects?

The installation is called Slow. I'm putting it together now, and we're hoping it's going to be mounted next April. My father has Parkinson's, and there was something about the way he moved before we understood what was going on, this slowness. It was heartbreaking to see. My mother had passed away not so long before. I thought, “Is this just intense grief? What is happening to his body?” There was a kind of beauty to it, but it was devastating. Then we understood he had Parkinson's and everything made sense. So this [installation] is like a zoetrope, a human-powered zoetrope. People have to spin it in order to get the images to move on the sides of this zoetrope. It's about Parkinson's and the aging body. Again, back to the slowness of movement and the beauty of people's small movements. It's these almost mundane things, actions. It's kind of like a dance. There's a choreographer I work with, who's worked through all my installations with me. We're working together, creating this dance language of Parkinson's and the Parkinson's body. It's these very small gestures and movements you see a man doing. The more people that spin the zoetrope—it's four meters by two meters, it's massive—the more robust the image of the man is, the more information and detail in the image, and the faster he's able to move. So when people uphold people with Parkinson's, they're able to do more and move more and have a better life. Spinning the zoetrope is an act of service, because if you're spinning it, you can't see the screens that are right up by you. But there are people around you who can see. When the cylinder is static, the man makes these very small micro movements. It's the most complicated installation I've done so far because there's a lot of programming and coding involved in order to get the video loops to react in real time to the speed of the cylinder.

Through my master’s degree, I've been interested in audience engagement and architecture, and how architecture creates engagement. And I guess that's the real difference between film and installation. With cinema, it can be visceral and it can be engaging, but you're static, you're sitting. In a sense, it's a passive thing. Whereas installation, people have to engage with it in order for it to function. Slow is pushing that the furthest I've done so far. If you don't move it, it will not work.

The Common Father was written with a friend I met at the New York Film Academy. We were roommates and then we lost touch, and we got back together after having not seen each other for a long time. He pitched this idea to me. It's a project that has been in the air for a long time—we'll see where it goes. Basically about a woman who believes her father is dead and then finds out that he's not. He's been alive and has this whole other family she didn't know about. So she goes on this journey of discovery of who her father was and what happened.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about the difference between audiences of films versus installations. Even watching the installation videos on your website, it's amusing to see people walk into one of your rooms and they're kind of like, “What's going on?” It's just very different than, yeah, if you were to sit in a room with filmgoers and everyone's sitting still.

It's so interesting now that I've kind of broken the seal and I'm in this installation world. Because of course people understand a lot through architecture. With film, there are a whole bunch of seats and a big screen, and everyone sits in the seats and faces the screen. Just through the architecture, you understand what is going to happen. With installation, it's interesting to see how people behave and what they do. I have an installation called MRI, where people have to lie down on a bed and watch a screen above them that is attached to the ceiling. It's actually quite close to them so it also feels claustrophobic, and they watch someone on the screen who is inside an MRI machine. [But] to get people to lie down on those beds! I always feel I don’t want to give people any instruction. I just want to see what they will do. But no one would do it! No one would lie down. So we had to put up a didactic to explain: “Please lie down. You can experience this in different ways, but the best way is to lie down to hear what's going on, to see what's going on.” But people are so reticent. I think maybe this reticence is a North American thing, a little bit, maybe Canadian more than American, wanting to be polite and not touching the art.