INDIE SPOTLIGHT: An Interview with ‘Bolivar’ Writer-Director and Actress Nell Teare

Maggie is struggling to keep her life together after the death of her mother when her addict brother shows up, forcing her to make sense of a reality that may not be what it seems.

The story of Bolivar gives a candid look at self-reflection and discovery, all while on the untamed and murky wanderings that come with the journey of grief. The calm in the storm and the twist ending will leave you with a flood of emotions - and I'm pretty sure that's exactly what tour de force filmmaker Nell Teare wants to leave her audience with.

Nell recently spoke with Script about the seed of the story, tapping into her personal story to feel her way through writing the script and her performance, her filmmaking journey, her creative collaboration with her cinematographer Julia Swain, shooting on film, and so much more!

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: So, this was originally based on of a short story from your fellow actor, James Walsh?

Nell Teare: We had an idea, we never did anything with it. We wanted to play siblings. And it never came about. But we kind of toyed with the twist at the end. The short idea was extremely different and it was just that moment. It was more like, ‘Oh, let's tell a ghost story.’ And then six and a half years later, I think when I finally kind of processed my mom and her death, I just took all of that and took that last little moment and I went, ‘I'm gonna use this twist. And I'm going to tell this story.’

So, then I sort of crafted this whole other family and based on the dynamics of my own family, but not the situations. Like, for instance, Sonny's character, and the mother character are the two parts of my mom, because she was a horrible alcoholic. And when you lose an addict, you lose the addict to the addiction, you lose that person, like I lost my mom. But she just happened to stay on the planet for 25 years. And then I lost her body, I lost her physical presence. And so that was sort of the kind of the idea between those two characters is that I split my mother up into these two people, but then I infused all of the memories of the things that I loved about my brother and sister and our experience with our mom and dad growing up. So yeah, it came out of that twist that Jimmy and I were thinking, ‘Let's do something.’ And we never did anything. [laughs]

Sadie: It worked out. What’s great about this film is how you approach the grieving process and all of the messiness of it. But you’re able to keep a very consistent tone for the film. Once you started writing in and fleshing the story out, and getting these characters down on the page, what was your North Star, and making sure you’re staying true to it and also not giving that twist away? You certainly drop hints, and once that ending hits, you’re like ‘Oh, that makes sense now.’

Nell: Exactly. You go back and you're like, ‘Yeah.’ It was really interesting. I think because I knew where we were going. I knew what the end was. The trickiest part was the beach, because I knew she was going to go to the beach. But I didn't know how that was all going to go. Because in my mind, I had it going back and forth, and back and forth, spending the day with her family there. I didn't know exactly how I was going to get there.

The first of it really kind of came pretty quickly. Having experienced it, it was sort of out of sync for me and my own experience, like, my mom got sick the first time, and then I got married. And then I divorced. And then right after my divorce and moving across the country, and kind of blowing up my whole life, then she was diagnosed with stage four throat and mouth cancer, and then she was gone six months later. So, all of these things kind of were together. But it's difficult to kind of keep your head above water. And so, when I was writing it, I knew where I was going. And it just sort of all fell out.

And one of the things I was really conscious of, and what I really wanted to do in the piece was not to give so much specificity to each of the situations. I think one of the things I'm most proud of is that when people see this, they put themselves in, they experience their own aspect of this. We don't know what the dad did for a living. We don't know what the mom died from. We don't know why they're getting a divorce. We don't understand exactly everything that went down with Sonny, we know he was an addict, obviously. It's like an open-face sandwich or something, you can kind of build it yourself. But the specificity I found really important in the way she is experiencing it in the feelings that she's having in the very specific memories that she's having.

Sadie: In terms of directing, you're running the whole show, and you're in front of the camera. What was that process like for you, and just making sure that you had a tight knit team behind you to make sure that you could also perform and get into that emotional headspace?

Nell: So, I'm going to say Julia Swain is so responsible for allowing me I guess, just the confidence, because it really is about confidence in that situation. And Julia and I, when we shot this at that point, I think we've made like 50 projects together, be it a short or commercial. For a time, the way I fed myself, like my job was that everybody brought me their short. And I just directed everybody else's stuff. I didn't have any time to direct my own. Julia was always who I basically dragged along, 'Come on, Jules, let's do it.' And she's like, 'Oh, my God. OK. Another one?' But we had a blast, and we developed this unbelievable, sort of unspoken bond. And what's terrible is that, since this film, we haven't really been able to shoot anything together because I've been directing a bunch of these voiceover dub-type things and she's just been shooting a ton of commercials or whatever. We are attached together on three more projects coming up, I hope. But she really is my work wife.

When I sent this to her I said, ‘Look, I have a psychological plan for this. I want to sit down and I want to figure out every frame psychologically,’ because I don't know if you notice, and I don't obviously want to give anybody any spoilers but you never see Maggie with any bit of Sonny in the frame, and you never see Sonny without any bit of me in the frame. And we did a lot of really specific stuff that way. And we had the pandemic, we had months where we didn't have any other project, we just got to sit in the backyard, like me at one end of a huge table and her at the end of the other one in the backyard like, 'OK, what do you think about this?' And then I would sketch something and I push it across the table, and she'd go, 'OK, oh, yeah. All right. Well, if we do this...' and she's so brilliant, and I trusted her.

The thing about shooting on film, as a director, directing themselves, I couldn't watch playback. So, there's no crutch. So, if I didn't feel it, I just assumed nobody else could feel it. So, if I couldn't get there, we would do it again. And luckily, because I understood this character so much, because I sort of crafted her out of a bunch of different aspects of myself and people that I know, and my mother, and my sister and my brother, and all of these things, I was able to get in there and direct the actors in the scene together. So more of asking questions of like, ‘How does that feel to you? I'm feeling connected to you, do you feel connected to me?’ Bottom line is I had a great team that I trusted, and I knew had the film's ultimate best in mind. I didn't think anybody was gonna be like, 'Let's move on.'

Sadie: I think the key word here too is feeling. You have to feel it on the page, especially when you’re writing. Do you try to get as much of that emotion on the page first or because you know you’re directing and acting, you’ll get it day of?

Nell: I think as a writer-director, I'm probably less descriptive on the page with movement and action. When I wrote the script, I knew that I was going to emotionally be invested in this piece, because I cried the whole time I wrote it - it took me three weeks to write it, because I was dreaming it and I had it all in my head. And then I just sat down and it just poured out of me and I was crying and all of the scenes while I was writing it, and I thought 'OK, well, I got it. We're gonna do it.' And one of my good friends at the time, I gave it to him to read and he's a writer, and he's very particular, has a lot of opinions about everything. And I gave it to him, and he just looked at me and he goes 'It's good.' And I was like, ‘OK, it's good.’ Then I got to spend all the time during the director aspect of it. And then I got to really be just the actor in that moment, and sort of bring to life what I saw in my head. I'm not an overwriter. If anything, I have to go back and fill in spaces because it lives in my brain.

Sadie: There’s a wonderful texture to the film, this kind of overcast layer that sticks out. What were those creative discussions with Julia about the look and feel of the film from interior shots to going to the beach?

Nell: Certainly, with the stuff in Texas on the peninsula, I mean there's not a lot down there, it really is like the end of the earth, it's where I grew up going to the beach. Anything that was outdoors was very bare bones. But Julia has a brilliant lighting brain. I mean, she's just unbelievable. So that house was actually lit all the way around. We crafted every piece of light that you see, in that she really was very meticulous about like, what is our night look like? What is our morning look like? That scene when Maggie sort of falls asleep, watching the old movies on the couch, and she wakes up to that static - we did wait for that sun, that moment was very important to us. Julia, just her brain is brilliant. And she's one of those people that if I tell her what I want it to feel like or look like she goes, 'OK, got it.' And then she just does it.

We also shot on film. I'm such a romantic. Film is this organic, medium, right? It's going to be different every time you shoot on it. And I love that because it's so like life. And a lot of people were like, ‘Why throw an extra variable into the thing? Why?’ And my thing is like, ‘Well, why not?’ I mean, it's such a beautiful medium. And it kind of brings everybody up, when you're like, ‘Oh, we're shooting on film, there's no margin of error.’ If you mess up, if you make a major error, then you're done. You're toast for the day where you've lost $3,000 - this is what we're doing. This is what we're painting in. Julia and I talked about 16 millimeter for the memories, we warmed up a little bit, and the 35mm we cooled down a little bit so there's like more of a crisp feeling to the present-day stuff, a coldness and with the 16 millimeter and like in the kitchen with her mom and on the beach with the hermit crab and the reds of like the bucket and the softness of the skin tones we really wanted the memories to be where she wanted to be. So that when you come back to the present, you're sitting in this bistro with your ex-husband trying to make sense of the divorce papers and it's so isolating.

Sadie: What piqued your interest in wanting to become a filmmaker?

Nell: I started performing with my mom on stage. I was a musical theater performer pretty much my entire life. I think, probably age five or six was my first performance and then I was in dance class, I went to the Performing Arts High School in Houston, I went to Tisch at NYU. I was touring until I was 28 is when I moved out to LA. And I came out here and I think the last two musicals I did, were the Randy Newman musical at the Taper in 2010 and The Next Fairy Tale at Celebration Theatre. And around that time was when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and she passed away in 2011. And when she did, I'm still trying to make sense of it, I think maybe it was too sad to do musical theater anymore, even though it was the love of my life.

But it was kind of, you know, fate, someone asked me to direct a one-woman show at that point, and I never directed, and I was always that actress that was like, ‘No, I'm not director. I'm an actor.’ [laughs] Which is so silly. And everybody's looking at me and they're like, ‘I don't know, Nell, you're really bossy, I think you're a director.’ And so, I directed this one-woman show. And I shot this little thing to go with it for the Kickstarter. And I was transported back to my six-year-old self in the living room, like, 'OK, everyone put the thing up here and mom make the popcorn. They're gonna be here soon.' And I went, ‘Oh, I've been doing the wrong thing.’ You know what I mean? And then I immediately enrolled myself in a course with Miles Watkins, it was like an invite-only course that was attached to the studio I trained in as an actor out here The Jocelyn Jones Studio. I did this three-month course, I wrote, directed, edited three of my own films, and I was just absolutely hooked. And then after that, people started asking me to shoot things for them. And then I started directing cinematic book trailers. And I think, I don't know if I still am, but at one point, I had directed more cinematic book trailers in this country than any other director for Film 14 and Penguin.

And then I went to Scott Williams at NCIS, who's a friend of mine, and I said, ‘I want to do this, how do I do this? Help me? What do I do? Should it be your assistant? How do I get into TV directing? I think I need to do this.’ And he's like, ‘Well, let's get you shadowing,’ and I said, ‘OK.’ So then I started shadowing for CBS. And then that sort of turned into understanding more, and then I fell into the dub directing for Netflix and Amazon and Disney, through my agency, they hooked me up with that. And then the pandemic happened, and I finally had time to write and make my own feature, which was a blessing, because everybody was like, ‘Are you ever gonna make a feature?’ And I was like, ‘When?’ [laughs] 

Bolivar is now available On Demand.