Director Lisa Joy began writing Reminiscence after years of working in a writers’ room full of men. Being the only woman in the room, Joy felt disappointed as her male counterparts wrote female characters from the point of the male gaze. Frustrated with the constant misogyny she encountered, Joy eventually made her exit and decided to write her own screenplay. Studios had expected her to write a romantic comedy, but Joy had other things in mind.
“I've tried to follow the things that I'm excited about,” says Joy on a Zoom call with IGN from her home. “There are so many genres that have belonged to men, like the Western, [film] noir, and sci-fi. I just didn't want to stay in my lane. I wanted to just follow those things and try to look at the genre [of noir and sci-fi] itself from a new point of view.”
Reminiscence is set in a futuristic Miami where the coastline has sunken under rising tides due to climate change. Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) and his assistant Watts (Thandiwe Newton) run a business that allows people to relive their fondest memories via tech. Bannister’s life is turned upside down with the arrival of a new client, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson). What starts as a whirlwind romance turns into an obsession; after his lover’s sudden disappearance, Bannister searches her past, unearthing dark secrets and a conspiracy that connects them all together.
Although Bannister is the narrator of this story, and Jackman is front and center in all of the posters, Joy wants to make it clear that not everything is what it seems: Bannister is not the story’s hero. Memory is a fickle thing. You never know what is truly real, and who is the hero or the villain, because of the subjective biases placed from the narrator’s perspective.
“The thing I was trying to explore was like, ‘how do you be a full person in a game that is so dictated by men?’” says Joy. “In a world, even for me professionally, that's so dictated by men.”
After years of working with men writing from their perspective, Joy wanted to take ownership of the male gaze from the perspective of a woman. She wanted audiences to see beyond the first impressions — that people may not appear to be what they show on the outside. Mae is this mysterious, seemingly perfect woman who enters Bannister’s life, but as he digs deeper into her past, he begins to unveil the truth behind the woman he loved.
“That's the girl you're supposed to want,” says Joy. “But, that's no girl. That girl doesn't exist. There were layers to her that, because [Bannister] was so besotted with that image of her, that she had to hide because it didn't fit into what he wanted her to be. I think that's [...] a really difficult thing that women face.”
This is what Mae represented to Joy. The character became a way for Joy to deal with all the difficult things she went through while in that writers’ room.
“That was really this exploration of something that had really hurt me,” Joy reveals. “[It is] where a lot of times I use writing to explore something I've gone through and see how someone else [Mae] can navigate [it].”
Joy made sure to also include the indictment of the male gaze towards the film’s sex scene, in which Mae seduces Bannister in her home. Like all-important fight scenes, Joy found it essential to carefully craft the sex scene. Joy explains, “It’s just about blocking. It’s about lines, composition, emotion and feeling.”
Joy did extensive research on famous sex scenes in films to see what’s considered steamy and sexy. She was disappointed with the results.
“If you Google ‘sex scenes’ or whatever, what you see is a lot of very sexy [and] very handsome people engaging in coitus where the woman is just getting banged,” Joy explains. “Basically, they’re just having sex and it looks sexy and quite aerobic, but the interesting thing for me was, if you were to fade to black there, but continued watching the sex scene, there’s literally no way, anatomically, that woman is going to have an orgasm.”
Annoyed that most sex scenes allowed only for men to achieve orgasms, Joy wanted to direct a sex scene that made the most sense for women to have the greater chance to orgasm while retaining the scene’s sex appeal. She worked closely with Jackman and Ferguson to ensure they were comfortable, carefully choosing the angle that Ferguson would approach him and position herself. Joy knew she also wanted to keep Mae’s clothes on, because the sex scene shouldn’t be about a beautiful woman naked.
She reveals, “It was about seeing a woman in full possession of her body [and] claiming pleasure for herself.”
Reminiscence stars Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton, Daniel Wu, Cliff Curtis, Angela Sarafyan, Natalie Martinez, and Marina de Tavira. It is now playing in theaters and on HBO Max. Be sure to read our Reminiscence review.
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“I've tried to follow the things that I'm excited about,” says Joy on a Zoom call with IGN from her home. “There are so many genres that have belonged to men, like the Western, [film] noir, and sci-fi. I just didn't want to stay in my lane. I wanted to just follow those things and try to look at the genre [of noir and sci-fi] itself from a new point of view.”
Reminiscence is set in a futuristic Miami where the coastline has sunken under rising tides due to climate change. Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) and his assistant Watts (Thandiwe Newton) run a business that allows people to relive their fondest memories via tech. Bannister’s life is turned upside down with the arrival of a new client, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson). What starts as a whirlwind romance turns into an obsession; after his lover’s sudden disappearance, Bannister searches her past, unearthing dark secrets and a conspiracy that connects them all together.
Although Bannister is the narrator of this story, and Jackman is front and center in all of the posters, Joy wants to make it clear that not everything is what it seems: Bannister is not the story’s hero. Memory is a fickle thing. You never know what is truly real, and who is the hero or the villain, because of the subjective biases placed from the narrator’s perspective.
“The thing I was trying to explore was like, ‘how do you be a full person in a game that is so dictated by men?’” says Joy. “In a world, even for me professionally, that's so dictated by men.”
After years of working with men writing from their perspective, Joy wanted to take ownership of the male gaze from the perspective of a woman. She wanted audiences to see beyond the first impressions — that people may not appear to be what they show on the outside. Mae is this mysterious, seemingly perfect woman who enters Bannister’s life, but as he digs deeper into her past, he begins to unveil the truth behind the woman he loved.
“That's the girl you're supposed to want,” says Joy. “But, that's no girl. That girl doesn't exist. There were layers to her that, because [Bannister] was so besotted with that image of her, that she had to hide because it didn't fit into what he wanted her to be. I think that's [...] a really difficult thing that women face.”
This is what Mae represented to Joy. The character became a way for Joy to deal with all the difficult things she went through while in that writers’ room.
“That was really this exploration of something that had really hurt me,” Joy reveals. “[It is] where a lot of times I use writing to explore something I've gone through and see how someone else [Mae] can navigate [it].”
Joy made sure to also include the indictment of the male gaze towards the film’s sex scene, in which Mae seduces Bannister in her home. Like all-important fight scenes, Joy found it essential to carefully craft the sex scene. Joy explains, “It’s just about blocking. It’s about lines, composition, emotion and feeling.”
Joy did extensive research on famous sex scenes in films to see what’s considered steamy and sexy. She was disappointed with the results.
“If you Google ‘sex scenes’ or whatever, what you see is a lot of very sexy [and] very handsome people engaging in coitus where the woman is just getting banged,” Joy explains. “Basically, they’re just having sex and it looks sexy and quite aerobic, but the interesting thing for me was, if you were to fade to black there, but continued watching the sex scene, there’s literally no way, anatomically, that woman is going to have an orgasm.”
Annoyed that most sex scenes allowed only for men to achieve orgasms, Joy wanted to direct a sex scene that made the most sense for women to have the greater chance to orgasm while retaining the scene’s sex appeal. She worked closely with Jackman and Ferguson to ensure they were comfortable, carefully choosing the angle that Ferguson would approach him and position herself. Joy knew she also wanted to keep Mae’s clothes on, because the sex scene shouldn’t be about a beautiful woman naked.
She reveals, “It was about seeing a woman in full possession of her body [and] claiming pleasure for herself.”
Reminiscence stars Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton, Daniel Wu, Cliff Curtis, Angela Sarafyan, Natalie Martinez, and Marina de Tavira. It is now playing in theaters and on HBO Max. Be sure to read our Reminiscence review.
Continue reading...