‘Madeline’s Madeline’: Josephine Decker Talks The Spiritual Process Of Acting Troupes & More [Interview]

How would you say you balance fostering collaboration while still protecting your personal vision?
Truthfully that was hard and something that I’m learning more and more about myself is that I love input. I love, love, love input. That’s the thing I love about making films the most is collaboration, all these voices coming together, all this creative strength from all angles of people who are good at different things.

The first drafts of the script were very “Alice in Wonderland,” weird adventure after weird adventure that were all kind of based on the improvs we had done. Eventually I had to let go and focus in on the stuff that was most exciting to me personally, because I had to admit, “I’m writing this, there’s no movie that has twelve main characters, well maybe “Short Cuts”…’

There have been a few tries…
It’s hard. So if I’m really centering it on this main character, what is her journey? I had to really try to forget that we’d spent all this time workshopping all this stuff. In a way, what came out was that the stuff that was the most resonant and meaningful to me from this journey that we’d taken with all the actors, were these deep conversations that we’d been having around the ethics of making and looking at our own process deeply and that became its own backbone to the film.

Do you think you could have made this movie without your own acting experience?
No. I think this was deeply grounded in both my experience in acting in other people’s films and my experience in going to this performance intensive, spending the summer in this kind of clown…it’s called Pig Iron’s Summer Intensive.

I’d love to hear about that.
I did their summer intensive in 2013 I think, and we did neutral mask commedia and then clowning. It was transformative for me in that I felt like I was using my body in new ways, but it was also just seeing the impact it had on these people who were really unraveling, unspooling these aspects of themselves. It was so exciting. I’ve always had this feeling that there is a dearth of sacred spaces in our culture right now and that we are deeply craving community and transcendence and we have almost zero avenues to reach that.

We don’t practice ecstatic dance, we don’t have rituals as part of our culture, religion has faded and I think one of the true last bastions of spiritual practice is acting troupes. Because they are a small group of people who regularly encounter each other for many, many years, they are about exploring the other, it’s a very spiritual thing and they encounter all these parts of each other. They have to hold that with love if you’re going to continue to be relevant over a long period of time, you stick together I guess you could say.

There was this incredible voice teacher that came from France who was also all about unlocking your primitive voice. Oh my God, I was obsessed.

How intentionally were you channeling that with the animal masks and some of the chanting, what kind of mindset were you trying to put the audience in with those scenes?
It’s so funny, you know how some things just feel right for a movie even though you don’t know why you’re doing them. All of these choices, we thought about how can music emerge from the body? A lot of the music in the film is music that…

There’s so much breathing.
There’s a lot of breathing, a lot of purely vocal music, there’s a lot of the actors themselves making the music of the movie just with their own bodies. The funny thing is that the animal stuff… I was just so inspired by those masks, I think a lot of actors study mask work and there’s something about accessing your inner creature, and putting that creature in different forms, being a lion, or a spider, or a cat, that you kind of talk to the history of evolution and all of those creatures are in some ways inside of you.

My last interview said ‘What’s up with the animals?’ I don’t think it was intentional, like I really wanted to make a movie with animals, but I was really inspired by those pig masks and I really wanted to put them in this film. My friend made those masks and I just thought, ‘This is a movie! I have to make a movie about these masks!’ But I didn’t really know why. I think they’re so human in a certain way and something I’m desperately interested in is when is the human inhuman, and how do you allow the inhuman parts of yourself out, because those are the parts we’re most disconnected from.

“Madeline’s Madeline” is in theaters now in limited release.