Jane Austen’s Period Drama
Written and Directed by Julia Aks and Steve Pinder
Tickets here

by Liz Wiest, Staff Writer

Film Festivals have always acted as a vehicle for provocative art to force audiences to confront controversy and difficult topics. And this year at Tribeca Film Festival, one comedic short dares to tackle the most unspeakable of them all: menstruation. On May 20th, I had the pleasure of interviewing writer/director duo Julia Aks and Steve Pinder of the effortlessly delightful period piece of pun-like proportions, Jane Austen’s Period Drama. I jumped at the opportunity to interview these two theatre community icons who crafted a piece that I genuinely adored and found to be unapologetically witty, feminine and necessary.

Liz Wiest (LW): I loved it, absolutely loved it. It’s exciting to get to ask questions about something that I feel passionate about. So first, easy peasy, in your own words, what made you want to put this project together?

Julia Aks (JA): The idea began just with the title. I thought it was a very silly, stupid pun. And when I say “stupid”, I mean that in the best way possible. It made me laugh! And then it was just supposed to be a three-minute sketch that was like: “Oh this is kind of a funny idea”, but then at Steve’s encouragement, both subtle and not so subtle, *laughs*, it just kept expanding and the more that I researched and the more that I reached out to other women in my life for funny period stories, the more I realized there is just so much stuff- funny stuff, heartbreaking stuff, tragic stuff, stuff I never learned about my own body that I was learning through doing research for this script.

Steve Pinder (SP): Stuff I never learned about your body-

JA: Yeah, Steve knows so much about my body! *Laughs*. So what came before the short film was, we had a feature length. What was supposed to be a three-minute sketch turned into a feature length script that at its core is a Jane Austen romance, but all the drama is derived from menstruation-related stuff. Then we wanted to make this short because the concept appealed to both of us of taking this classic world, flipping it on its head, and infusing it with a lot of heart and things that we both care deeply about. Coming from the sketch and parody world, as we step into narrative filmmaking as a duo, we felt it was the perfect story that encapsulated all the things that we love to do as storytellers in this little thirteen minute short.

LW: Like every theatre kid in the world, I’ve seen the “7 Rings” video. You folks really have a knack for centering fun period (pun intended) pieces as the world of your story. Why Jane Austen specifically? I know she’s by default the best feminist option we had at the time, but what about her world drew you in?

JA: Steve and I both responded a lot to the film adaptations of the late nineties and early 2000s. Like the 2005 Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley and one of Steve’s favorite movies of all time is Sense and Sensibility. We also wanted to make something beautiful and cinematic, period drama films are generally quite beautiful anyway, and we love cinema, and so the Jane Austen world felt like a very lush, beautiful visual world that we wanted to play in, if we had to pick a genre for a period movie. But then also Austen herself, like you said, was ahead of her time in a lot of ways. A lot of her main characters are self-possessed women who question the societal absurdities around them. So, the more we thought about it the more it felt like the perfect world to live in.

SP: You know what else just struck me, and I had never put this together, there’s something so unabashedly feminine about it. It gives women a space to talk about what happens with their bodies in a feminine space or one that has often been associated with femininity.

JA: As opposed to like, Dostoyevsky.

SP: Or like, I don’t know I feel like so many other period movies have this like *machismo grunt*.

JA: Exactly *machismo grunt*.

LW: I really couldn’t have vocalized that better myself. Tell me about the process of making sure that everything was period accurate.

JA: As a theatre baby myself, there is at my core someone who loves playing dress-up and playing pretend. But for the film, building on living in that lush, visual world, the Jane Austen film- is landscape, its interiors, its costumes, the hair, the people etc. You can create oil paintings of images that are so delicate and lush and creamy. It was a very appealing visual world, at least for me, to want to go and play in. I mean we tried our best in a short film to make it as accurate as possible.

SP: We wanted to invite the audience into a world and not have them be distracted by historical inaccuracies at least. That was the primary goal I would say. And then we had some serious limitations…like trying to shoot this movie in Los Angeles in July.

LW: Where did you shoot it? The location was fabulous.

JA: The interior was in LA. But there was a good hot minute where we were like: “Does this location even exist where we are? Within our budget?” We also shot this very quickly. We wrote it quickly, we got into production quickly, and luckily, we came across this wonderful home with these incredibly generous Location Managers and the house itself is not necessarily like, Regency-era architecture everywhere-

SP: It has Tudor vibes. Which is before Regency era.

JA: Yeah so, we’re like “Okay maybe the house was passed down in the family”-

SP: We made it part of the storytelling.

JA: But also, because it’s in LA it has hacienda flairs so don’t look too closely!

SP: Yeah, like “don’t point the camera that way”! There was a lot of that.

JA: It was a wonderful home that had a lot of production design already in it. They had incredible paintings with these ornate gold frames on the wall that had already been cleared to be filmed. So, our Production Designer, Dom, who didn’t have a lot of time or resources but was very game to max out everything that we were able to give him, wasn’t starting completely from scratch for those interiors. He was able to supplement and add and move things around. You do feel transported into a different world by that. Now shooting the exteriors, the first scene of the film takes place in the rolling green hills of Jane Austen’s England and Steve and I can confirm that those hills do not exist in Southern California in July.

SP: We looked everywhere.

JA: We really looked everywhere then were just like: “Who waters their lawns in July?” and the answer is “cemeteries and a university”.

SP: We decided it would not be appropriate to have people running across gravestones.

JA: We were like “Ellie (our Producer), what if we just snuck onto this cemetery and shot the scene?” and she was like “Absolutely not.”. So, we actually did end up flying to upstate NY because our cinematographer Luca lives in Connecticut and while Steve and I were desperately driving around dusty, crusty Southern California, Luca would just wander outside his home and take a picture and be like: “Oh, you mean like this?” and we’re like: “Well that looks perfect.” so it ended up being more cost effective to fly a group of us to New York to where it was actually green than to VFX Southern California to be green.

LW: Totally makes sense, and upstate New York is where it’s at right now, filmmaking wise. It looked fabulous. How long was the entire process from writing to camera wrap?

SP: Because we had been working on the feature, the writing process was quick. We started in May. May to halfway through August.

JA: We shot in the beginning of August. And we had a good feeling early on that if we were to make a short that this was the section of the feature that it would translate well. We adapted it, we obviously adjusted things.

SP: We removed a couple of characters…

JA: We trimmed things down because we also wanted it to be a standalone short. Something that didn’t feel like we made it as a proof of concept for something bigger. We wanted it to be its own thing, so we made sure the script did that. Its own little story.

SP: But pre-production was a beast. I mean it was a challenge. It was hard to move that quickly and get all the right pieces in place. That for me was the most stressful part of the entire process.

JA: Yeah, it was a lot. But I also think it was because “7 Rings” was on my YouTube channel and during that whole year of 2019, I was doing a lot of content creation for YouTube, and it then that Steve and I started to co-direct. But the pacing of social media and the scrappiness of not having any money to do anything was also a fun challenge and I think, Steve, I won’t speak for you, but it prepared me for this big vision and quick move into production. It didn’t feel foreign.

SP: Yeah, it just lasted a lot longer.

JA: It did last a lot longer, but we also seem to like to tell big stories.

SP: And we were more ambitious with the world building, with the production design and all those elements. We knew it was going to be scrappy, but we didn’t want it to feel scrappy once you were watching it.

JA: We wanted to level up from beyond social media and step into the cinematic world of narrative filmmaking.

LW: You certainly achieved that with flying colors. What can we expect to be similar vision-wise in the feature and what may seem a little different?

JA: The feature goes far beyond where the short ends. There are more characters, more drama, more romance and of course, more periods. There’s just MORE. At its core the feature, like the short, is a romance.

SP: There’s a lot more farce.

JA: A lot more farce. We love crazy characters and there are a lot of crazy characters that propel the story forward.

SP: We’ve fallen in love with all the characters, so it feels easy to fill out this feature because we want to see them live their lives more than they get the chance to in the short.

LW: What’s the most important thing that you want audiences to walk away from the short thinking or feeling?

SP: Joy! I want people to feel joyful. I’ve had lovely conversations after the screenings where women have come up to the two of us and started telling stories about their periods and then realizing that they’re telling me, a dude, then there’s this moment of awareness like: “Oh I’m talking to you about it” but they’re in the middle of the story so they keep going, but there’s this wonderful release like, we can all talk about this shit! Let’s all talk about it and talk about it joyfully because it’s just what our bodies do, who cares?

JA: And on the other side of that, what’s been cool for me is that I’ve had a lot of men come up to me and say how they felt seen in the film and how they’re like: “I used to be like Mr. Dickley, where I didn’t know anything and I had all these questions.” or they’ll be like: “When I had my first girlfriend, I didn’t know what was going on!”. Even some of my family members, I sent a screener early on and my cousin’s husband was like: “Yeah when she got pregnant, it was wild! It was like, ‘What is your body doing?’”. But it’s always with this sense of relief and joy, it’s so fun and cool and it’s been heartwarming. So, we hope there’s more of that.

LW: That’s beautiful. Do you feel like Tribeca is the perfect home to foster that sense of joy and relief into?

JA: My Dad is from New York so half of my family is in Brooklyn and I do feel a lot of my sense of humor comes from New York-based sensibilities. So, I’m really excited to have it play in New York for New York audiences and see how it lands because I think there are a lot of very silly people there who will enjoy the film in and amongst all the other programming there.

LW: There are a lot of goofballs in New York, whether they’re aware of it or not.

JA: That part.

LW: What makes you guys such a great team?

SP & JA: We’re not.

SP: It’s not going well. *Laughs*. It’s easy. We both prioritize our relationship over the project. There’s a lot of care, a lot of support…

JA: Our friendship, we’re not together.

SP: Oh, that’s right. Our platonic relationship.

JA: Yes, he’s my brother from another mother.

SP: And she’s also my sister from another mister.

JA: I thought you were going to say, “also brother from another mother”.

SP: Well, that too. We have a very constant and supportive dialogue throughout.

JA: We both see the same thought when we’re writing it. When we have an idea or we’re writing a scene, we both have similar desires to have the same kind of balance of comedy and heart, so our guidepost and our North Star are pretty much the same and it’s always been that way. And if one of us starts to get on a roll of: “Oh we can do this! We can do that! Then cut to that.” the other one is usually like: “YES! I see it, let’s write it.”. And then in the times where we differ on things, it’s always for the best of the story and we both know that. The way that our few conflicts resolve, it’s always something that we’re both happy with. It flows girl, flows like a period.

LW: Now onto the two questions I’m most excited about: what was it like working with a chicken?

SP: Thank you for that.

JA: This is the question.

SP: You know it’s not that often that we get this question. We don’t get it as often as we thought.

JA: Her name is Snow White.

SP: It’s both her real name and her actual name.

JA: It was perfect. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. She was lovely.

SP: Incredibly lovely.

JA: Yeah, she was. The handler was great, he brought a couple of different chickens with him based off personality because they knew what the scene called for, but it ended up being Snow White. Most of the time she’s very chill.

SP: The exact quote was: “Would you like one of our chattier ladies?” And we said…

JA & SP: “No!”

JA: So, she was great, very lovely.

SP: Very docile.

JA: The camera loves her.

SP: She shit on the carpet a couple of times.

JA: Just once or twice but you know, when you work with a diva like that…

LW: She was great. Get her a Best Supporting nod.

JA: We’ll let her know.

LW: Last question, how did you discover you could do a dead-on Julie Andrews impression?

JA: This guy, really! By chance! It’s how we met.

SP: I was at USC, and I was working on a Julie Andrews trailer parody that was also about climate change, it was very weird.

JA: He really packed everything in there.

SP: I was helping another friend cast his thesis project, there was a Casting Director in the room, and I was losing my mind because I had seen so many actors try to do a Julie Andrews impression and I was like “What do I do?” “How do I find a person?” and she says, “I think I have the right person for you coming in to audition for this movie in five minutes” so literally five minutes later Julia walks in, auditions for a completely different part and I went out and I talked to her in the hallway, and she was game to audition.

JA: He had told me the premise and even before I had read the script we got along well, and it just sounded like something that was so up my alley. As an actor you hope to find things that strike you at your core like: “I understand this tone, I understand what the filmmaker is looking for and it just felt like one of those serendipitous projects that doesn’t always come across your plate.” And then when he sent me the script I was like: “Oh man I really want this.” I felt right for the role, and I really wanted it. There were original songs in it…

SP: She came in and sang the songs and I was like: “Well there’s the singer there’s the voice.”.

JA: That was the first time I ever tried to do a Julie Andrews voice.

SP: The real moment when it was a no-brainer was when I had written a scene that was very camp noir, and I saw so many people and no one else got the tone of it. Then Julia walked in as though she had walked out of my imagination. I mean it was literally how I had written it on the page, down to the physicality of how she moved her body. I was like “There we are!”.

JA: So, we worked on that together. I mean it was a class project but per Steve’s usual, an incredibly ambitious class project. I mean original songs, original score, choreography, an action sequence, zombies- we just had an absolute blast. That was the first time I had ever considered doing anything Julie Andrews-related. I didn’t think or even knew that I could sound like her. So, it’s all his fault.

LW: Just like A Star is Born.

JA: I just wanna take another look at you.

SP: But you’re Julie Andrews and I’m not an alcoholic.

JA: Exactly.