by Liam Ridolfi
Gloriously hilarious, Stress Positions cements first-time filmmaker Theda Hammel as a riveting talent to watch.
Stress Positions, the intriguingly titled feature debut from writer, director and star Theda Hammel tackles race, sexuality and identity, all within the backdrop of the New-York Covid lockdowns.
With this being your first feature film, why this story?
“It happened very much by accident. I was in the middle of writing a thing for theater during lockdown, and I took a brief break to write a 15 page thing that I sent to John Early [below], the actor who is a long-term friend, because I needed a birthday present for him and I couldn’t think of anything else.
“So, I wrote him this short little thing and he liked it. We were initially just going to shoot it in a very low budget way with very low stakes, very low consequence. And then, for whatever reason, I guess we got very fortunate. One thing led to another, and I felt totally out of my element or out of my depth the whole time. But it was a very exciting position to be in. And now that I’ve made one movie, I guess I would love to make another one. It’s very rewarding.”
Your characters were our favourite part of the film. They are larger than life and unique. How much of these personalities were taken from real life, whether it be people that you know or even parts of yourself?
“I think that people are less subtle than they would like to think of themselves. We actually do, in our lives, behave in a cartoonish and exaggerated and almost caricatured way. And so, sometimes I felt like I was being almost verité. I felt like I know people more who are basically just like Leo [John Roberts], for example. But that reads as one of the most exaggerated characters in the movie. So, I think that I was happy to lean into caricature and exaggeration a little bit, just because I think that’s how people actually are in their lives.”
The film portrays intersecting identities and struggles in such a nuanced and empathetic way. Was that a difficult process in the writing to approach each character with such a focused authenticity?
“The writing took a lot of care and time, basically because there was an initial birth of inspiration early on – the idea of John in this part. But then, as soon as Bahlul [Qaher Harhash] came into the script as an idea, it was like, ‘this is a character who’s very different from myself and I will need to be very balanced in this portrayal’. And so actually, that was just the first step, as you flesh out that character, it calls for balancing from other characters. I just took a lot of time. I think also, the key was to let people behave badly without necessarily judging them or moralizing them at a script or camera level. Letting them be free to make mistakes, seeing how that ripples through the scenario, but not trying to punish them in the way they’ve been written about or portrayed.”
When did the narrative find its centre within the paranoia of Covid and how did the backdrop of the New York lockdowns, inform the setting for you as the writer?
“I think that at first it was incidental. That was the world, more or less, that we were still living in. We weren’t in lockdown, but in early 2021, you could see all the signs of Covid and lockdown and the ongoing pandemic were still everywhere you looked. What I figured was, if you point a camera at this world, this will show, so you might as well incorporate it into the subject matter. The thing for a character like Terry that John plays is, this is somebody with no idea how to behave ethically or morally in life. No real idea how to socialise. And it’s not just that, ‘oh, you’re raised in a bankrupt culture that doesn’t teach you how to relate to other people’. It’s also that he’s just come down in position. He was the arm candy of a wealthy older man, and then he aspired, more or less, in that role. And so, he doesn’t know what role to play. What the lockdown does for that character is it gives him almost a mission. Suddenly, he has a role to play in life, and that is the role of the hypervigilant caretaker.
“He’s not really doing a good job of that either, if you think about it. But I do think that for Terry, it gives him the opportunity to seem courageous. When really, the tragedy is for good reason, the imperative of that time equated courageousness with withdrawal from life. So, he can basically function as a hero to himself by staying inside and ordering food and delivering food.”
What ways do you see the film reflecting broader cultural and social shifts that have occurred as the result of Covid?
“I think that the part of the theme of the movie is to position millennials, to which I belong, as basically having their youth phase bracketed on either end by 9/11 and by Covid; these two big world historical events. And what I noticed most of all is millennials cling to youth and youth culture and maybe got away with it for too long. But coming out of the lockdowns, it’s very clear that our purchase on youth culture was totally gone, that the streets belong to someone else. A new generation has come of age, and that is the hinge point – one of the things that really marks a little bit of a generational conflict or a generational antagonism between an age of a millennial sort of in decline and a more innocent or naive younger group of people who are at their mercy.”
There is a moment in the film where Bahlul sits in the cabin and he has a line, and we’re paraphrasing, but to the effect of ‘I’ll go back and rewrite my life this time full of magic and adventure. Why should I be this person? Anything is possible. Fiction is freedom’. Can you talk a bit about that idea of writing your own path and crafting your own identity and why that was so important to have as a focus in the film.
“I think for that character, who is in a transitional state in life, who, like a lot of young people, their possibilities are open in one sense, they haven’t decided or committed one way or another, but also their options are very limited. There’s the option represented by his mother, which is she is blocking any sort of return to origin because of how obsessed she is with the east and the exoticism of her own son. So, he has to individuate by moving in the opposite direction, and in the opposite direction you have his Uncle Terry and these sort of dissipated New York people, and that option isn’t very good either. Where we really leave him is in a moment of actually trying to decide for himself what his fate will be, taking control of the authorship of his own story, which actually means for the sake of us, as the audience and me as a writer, it means breaking out of the story I’m writing for him. I don’t go into what that might look like because I think the character, in theory, needs to be outside of my influence at that point in order to actually self-author.”
What do you hope audiences take away from the film regarding the film’s themes, particularly in the context of race and sexuality and perhaps this post-Covid world?
“I feel like there’s a difference between empathy and sympathy. I think empathy is when you share in somebody’s feeling, you participate in an unmediated way in the things that they’re feeling. You fear what they fear, you are sad for what they’re sad about. And then I think there is the experience of sympathy, where you might not feel exactly what they feel, but you know where they’re coming from. You see them at a little bit of a remove, and you more or less, take pity on them. I think that the people in this movie are flailing for the most part, and they are the kind of people that we would probably denounce in our day-to-day life. And what I hope is that for about 90 minutes, that it’s not that anybody needs to love them or even to pity them, but that you can sort of see them as specimens of a certain culture, of a certain generation, of a certain moment, and to just linger in their company for about 90 minutes.”
Stress Positions is available on Digital from 19 February 2025
