Lensing a Rorschach: Writer-Director Tayarisha Poe Talks Free Form in ‘The Young Wife’

There’s an optical trick called a Thaumatrope. It is a single card with two pictures on each side, famously a bird and a cage. It spins and the two separate images merge creating a third image - one that exists in the mind’s eye. Usually, one image is a trap for the other. We cannot see the hidden image without that motion.

This is the spell and the approach of Tayarisha Poe’s The Young Wife, where the longer you gaze into the disjointed, chaotic movement of a party the more you sense a third image emerging.

A pressured, hypnotic fable, the film sprints along with Celestina (Kiersey Clemons, Dope) a bright, self-made woman helming a non-wedding party for her and her beloved, River (Leon Bridges, First Man). River’s capricious nature serves up ire in some, but Celestina thirsts for his enigmatic freedom. Through a storm of guests cornering and doubting her, the tenacious bride handles all comers. She clips through this Cassavetes-like odyssey, but soon the spinning illusion suspends in mid-air.

In this interview, Script Magazine talks to Poe about capturing emotion, not plot, fables as her starting point, and the illusion of freedom.

SHEENA MCCANN: The film is a frenetic waking dream. How did you find the narrative structure?

TAYARISHA POE: I knew going into making the film that I wanted to make something that felt narratively and structurally free. My first film Selah and the Spades was structured in terms of plot to imitate the genre of mafia films. I knew what needed to happen and how it needed to feel.

So I knew coming off of that, I wanted to make something that felt, in its writing, was following a structure of a woman getting married on the day of her wedding and you know what's going to happen.

But then intentionally through visuals, choreography, or sound, what you think you know is going to happen is disrupted. I wanted that disruption to capture the emotion of this character.

In order to break myself, the cast, and the crew of our dependence on this idea of a narrative structure, we kept asking in every shot, scene, and setup, 'Am I capturing the emotion?' That led to this collage feeling in the edit and it just felt right.

SM: In developing this project, what films inspired you?

TP: I was very inspired by Melancholia (von Trier 2011). People sometimes catch that because it's about a wedding, but it makes people feel uneasy. The inevitability of an end of something and the choice you make to be calm in the face of that.

Another film was Birdman (Iñárritu, 2014), I'm obsessed with that movie….obsessed. In that film, the camera is invited to be a character. Not just a character: a witness.

I wanted the camera in The Young Wife to feel and to be actively a part of the choreography of movement. There was a rule that we had about movement in the film, where nobody can turn clockwise except for Celestina. All of their motion, anytime they go around the couch, enter a room, turn over their shoulder to talk – everybody was turning left. Celestina is turning whatever way she wants to. It’s representing the constant out of sync nature she’s feeling. It's so simple, but when you see it, you feel this unease. Like, 'Oh baby, you're going the wrong way.'

SM: Everyone Celestina talks to, she talks to so differently and they each affect her so differently. The story enfolds you not just into Celestina but those around her.

TP: That was the reason we were constantly talking about how to express the emotions that she's going through, because that's what gives people permission to feel and connect their own emotions to this fictional person in this fictional world. We want this film to feel like a portal to whatever emotion you are trying to turn away from. It's hard but that's what Celestina has to do. She has to turn to what she is trying to turn away from.

SM: There’s this feeling that won’t go away and she doesn’t know what it is. At one point, she feverishly says, “I don’t know…I don’t want to die?!”

TP: I think all of Celestina's fears are a reaction to the realization that because she is alive, she will die. So much of our society turns us away from that fact. A lot of her conversations and actions, to me, read as someone who is deciding to welcome death as a companion to life, not the adversary of it.

SM: In regards to the script, was this a new process of writing for you?

TP: I wrote it the way that I usually write, which is with an outline. I like to let the story unfold itself and tell me what is happening. That tends to be the starting point. I did that with this.

But I always knew when I was writing it that I wanted to edit it together differently. How it was going to be edited, was not necessarily how the script was laid out.

The script needed to be clear, it needed to read like a fable. A fable is a very simple story and through it, we attach a lot of meaning based on whatever is going on around us, or the answers we are searching for. I felt if I left the story really simple, then through how the story is told, I could make that feel as complex as it feels to just stand in a room and be a person alive in the world.

SM: As the director, did you consider the budget or the direction while writing?

TP: I don't think about the budget as much. I try to think about it in terms of the direction. It helps when I get into those budgetary conversations. By thinking from a directorial point of view from the beginning of writing, I know that I have different solutions to accomplish the same sentiment.

Not like a plan A, plan B, plan C, but I'm aware of different branches that will form a similar tree on whatever kind of constraints come up. I made a movie before I made this, so I know that stuff is going to happen. I don't forget the director part of myself when I'm writing, I just put her to the side and let her observe - to be ready when the time comes.

SM: Women in Celestina’s life urge her to protect her self-made successes and independence.

Celestina wants to break free. River, like his name, is free, flowing, and capricious. The women create that impression of him. Celestina gravitates toward River. But at one point, she turns to River and speaks the same way to him as the women spoke to her, You can’t just be free.

TP: There’s actual, true freedom and then there’s freedom that comes because people are taking care of things for you. The freedom Celestina is seeking is not the sort of freedom that comes from other people taking care of you. That’s not what she desires.

When she's trying to express something along those lines to River, who people think of as the free person, he can only understand it to a point because he isn't free, he's just taken care of.

There are people who know a River: a type of man who is enlightened, sweet, emotionally intelligent engaging, creative, open, and free. But if you talk to the people in that man's life, usually the women, it's because they took care of all these things.

For River to say, 'Oh, you don't need to worry about things, somebody will take care of it' is this reminder that she's trapped in a cycle. She thinks she is escaping the cycle, yet she's trapped in it still.

I think it is a stunning moment for her.

The Young Wife is now available on digital.

The film stars Kiersey Clemons (Dope, “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”), Leon Bridges (Grammy-award winning singer/songwriter), Kelly Marie Tran (Star Wars franchise, Raya and the Last Dragon), Michaela Watkins (“Transparent,” Paint) with Sheryl Lee Ralph (“Abbott Elementary,” “Moesha”) and Judith Light (“Poker Face,” “Transparent,” “Who’s the Boss?”).