Emma Higgins's debut film Sweetness centres on Rylee (Kate Hallett), a teenager who doesn't have much going on in her small-town life except an ever-growing focus on a rock star named Payton.Elevation Pictures
The new Canadian thriller Sweetness, about a teenage girl’s dangerous obsession with a pop star, is a film that could only come from someone who intimately knows the fizzy highs and jagged lows of the music industry.
Luckily, writer-director Emma Higgins has experienced it all. Before she made music videos for everyone from Tegan and Sara to Jessie Reyez, she experienced life in the less-glamourous trenches from her time inside a record label’s promotional department, where she got a first-hand look at the sometimes one-way engagement between musicians and their fans.
“I saw all the fan mail that would be sent in. It was just so pure, and there was a genuine belief that the artists would read them and not, you know, me,” Higgins says. “It made me sad for the poor souls who were sticking their hopes and dreams in those letters.”
Review: Sharp Canadian thriller Sweetness is Almost Famous meets Misery
Higgins has placed her own hopes and dreams, though, on her debut feature, which might be best pitched as Misery meets Trap meets Almost Famous: After an up-and-coming rock star named Payton (Herman Tommeraas) plays her hometown, teenage fan Rylee (Kate Hallett) resorts to desperate measures to keep the pop idol in her life. Ahead of the film’s release this weekend, Higgins and Hallett, the latter best known for her performance in Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, sat down with The Globe and Mail to discuss pop music and run-and-gun shooting.
The film had its world premiere at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Tex., last spring. What has the journey been like since then?
Emma Higgins: When we were in Austin, we had no distribution outside of Canada, no idea what was going to happen next. It’s been a big journey, just going the sales route, launching off the festival. And now it’s come to Kate and I doing TikToks and marketing.
Okay, I promise I won’t make you do a TikTok for me. But from your days in the music-video world, how have you found the promotional game has changed?
Higgins: It’s more of an even playing field, and I kind of enjoy it. We’re getting love from these people who are deep in the movie realm of stuff. And our social-media person has been helping us create content – the way he pitched me on it was that we have an opportunity to create something that doesn’t cost us any money, and might get our film attention. For a small film like ours, it’s incredibly important to find the audience without breaking the bank.
Writer-director Emma Higgins on set of Sweetness. The thriller was shot over two and a half weeks in North Bay, Ont.Jonathan Matta/Supplied
Kate, being a twentysomething, is this world of social-first promotion more of a comfortable space for you and your generation?
Kate Hallett: I don’t know if I’d say comfortable. I’m not one for posting on social media a lot. But I’m trying to have fun with it and play around to the best of my ability.
This may be a bit of a stretch, but there’s something of a parallel here because this landscape of social-media influencers seem like it’s made up more of fans than anything else, and that’s exactly what the film is speaking to: those murky online waters of devotees. Kate, did you explore that much to prepare for the role?
Hallett: I’ve been in fandoms before, for shows or other things that I’ve really loved. So I understand the feeling of being seen by artists, especially musicians. That was important for me when developing Rylee. But I don’t know that it was something I was actively doing while I was prepping.
Higgins: I did read some fan fiction when I was writing the script, which was helpful. But I didn’t go too much into the online stuff, either. Especially because I wrote the script 10 years ago.
How much changed between a decade ago and now? Fandom as a concept has certainly evolved a lot over the past decade.
Higgins: Part of my goal was to make something that didn’t feel specific to a time. Any time you put social media or online stuff into a film, it’s dated, it’s old. It’s more about the emotion of being a fan, which is a timeless thing, from Elvis to The Beatles to now. We still have that love and that need for belonging. It’s very easy to look at someone outside of ourselves and impress whatever you want onto them. That core emotion remained the same.
Canadian director Emma Higgins pulls back the pop-star curtain in dark SXSW thriller Sweetness
The film has the potential to just be a two-hander, with two characters in a single location. Yet you do take time to build out the world surrounding Rylee and Payton. How did you accomplish that over just two and a half weeks of shooting in North Bay, Ontario?
Higgins: You only get one shot at making a first feature, so I had my own delusional ways of going about things. It was also about getting the team who would go hard for this film and pushing beyond what was reasonable within the budget. It meant, for everyone, a strong commitment to just, well, not sleep. The only reason it was able to look and feel the way it does is because of the dedication of everyone who came onboard.
Kate, did you feel much responsibility placed upon your shoulders in that regard, given that you’re the lead on a film with such a tight shooting schedule?
Hallett: I was very nervous and had to be talked down from the ledge a few times. I didn’t want to be the weak link! But Emma was supportive of everyone on set. There was pressure, but it just drove us to work harder.
Higgins: I’ll say you were locked in. It was like the Olympics. Once you got on the set, you were in the zone. It looked like muscle memory.
This interview has been edited and condensed.