Thinking back to her first feature, 2013’s “It Felt Like Love,” Eliza Hittman remembers being met with general apathy. “You know, the industry wasn’t interested in my voice,” she remembers. “I didn’t let it stop me.”
Though working on a tiny budget—“well under $100,000”—the process proved seminal for her filmmaking. “It was a very empowering experience to make something that was so far from the industry and so far from having a stamp of approval from gatekeepers,” she says. “It allowed me to find my voice and develop my sensibility.”
Talia Ryder on the Importance of Abortion Drama ‘Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always’ That sensibility is on full display in Hittman’s latest film, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” which debuted to rapturous acclaim in 2020 and has since been nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for best feature, among other nods. Following Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a small-town teen in need of an abortion, and the cousin who travels to Manhattan with her to get it (Talia Ryder), it is a story of resilience where there needn’t be any.
“Why should we have to, as women, shroud our experiences and keep them secret?”
“The inspiration for the film came from the death of a woman in Ireland named Savita Halappanavar, who passed away after being denied a life-saving abortion,” Hittman says. “I asked myself: How far would she have had to travel to save her own life?”
Most of the film is set in and around the Port Authority Bus Terminal, an intentionally gritty, depressing mirror of the girls’ circumstances. “It’s like a purgatory in a way. But it’s warm,” Hittman says. “These characters are navigating these liminal spaces throughout the story that are never entirely safe. It’s not a vacation. They’re there to do this very specific thing, and while they may want to go see the Statue of Liberty, it’s not that kind of trip.”
In addition to the positive reception the film itself has received, rightful praise has also been given to its two young leads, with each receiving an Independent Spirit acting nomination. It’s a particularly astounding feat for Flanigan, considering she’d never acted in any capacity before this film.
“I’d met her years ago while working on a nonfiction film,” Hittman says of her lead. “She wasn’t an actor—just a kid in Buffalo working at a supermarket. I had been sort of following her on Facebook, and she became a bit of a reference for the character. I asked her to audition, and she was phenomenal from the first audition. It was a big risk to pull a real person out of their life and ask them to do this, but she’s a musician, and I always believe those kinds of skills and [the] desire to perform can translate from one medium to the next.”
Though Flanigan was up to the film’s steep task, Hittman wanted to provide additional care for an actor who was inexperienced and, more crucially, young. So she found and paid for a therapist to help Flanigan navigate the more challenging content, especially the scene from which the film’s title derives.
“I wanted her to have a space that wasn’t with me to be able to find support,” Hittman says. “The themes that the film deals with are obviously very emotional and weighty, and she was doing something for the first time that was incredibly demanding.”
Notably, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is one of two movies that premiered last year that follow a pair of teenage girls forced to travel a far distance to safely and legally obtain an abortion. The other, Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s “Unpregnant,” is a raucous buddy comedy; apart from their shared concept, the two pieces could not be more different. Hittman sees that fact in itself as progress.
“It’s good that people want to talk about the impact that these barriers have on people’s lives, and the distance that people travel is real,” she says. “Why should we have to, as women, shroud our experiences and keep them secret? I think there’s this moment of people ripping away the veil.”
This story originally appeared in the March 25 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe here.
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