Darkest Miriam is not trying to create any major, dramatic waves. It is a quiet film about a quiet woman, having a quiet life. Miriam (Britt Lower, Severance) works at a small Toronto library branch, has a lunch routine, a cardigan at her desk, and although she is alone she does not seem particularly lonely. Director Naomi Jaye brought the character to screen after staging an immersive art experience based on the novel The Incident Report by Martha Baillie. At Fantasia International Film Festival in 2024, we sat down with Jaye to talk about Darkest Miriam, casting, and cardigans.
I relate a little too much to the character. I had a medical emergency last year and I needed to go to the hospital, and they needed to ask for my emergency contact. I live by myself and my sister lives abroad. I had to put down a friend.
Well, that is almost verbatim something that happened to me.
How much of you is in this character?
Not a lot. It’s based on a book. I didn’t write the story. I didn’t develop the character. But there was something about the book that drew me in immediately. I literally opened the book, read the first page, and called the publisher while I was still in the bookstore. Something spoke to me about the character. But no, it’s nothing to do with me.
Is there something very specific that you related to, or did you find it universal?
I think that the answer to that is both. What I feel is true nowadays is that when I was growing up, I felt like I was alone in my feelings and thoughts. And now, the internet has changed all that because you’re like, “Oh my gosh, all of these very particular feelings and things that I thought were so strange, or things that I did that were so unusual, [it] turns out thousands, hundreds of thousands of people do the same thing.” So the particular, is the universal. I think that there’s a lot of people who can relate to her.
There was something about the language and her inner voice that, obviously, in the book is very, very present and I hope in the film as well. But in the book, I mean, it’s all internal dialogue, so it felt really familiar. Not like, “that’s me,” but this is a world that I would create. This is a character that I would create. This is the language that I would use. And even the particulars of how the book is laid out, the design of the book, is so intriguing and beautiful. The quality of the paper, it just felt familiar. I would’ve made this book just like this. Not that it was me or the character felt like me, but it just felt like a world that was really a world that I knew.
There is that affection for the physical books themselves that she has. But it’s never just the books. Libraries are so much more than that. How much research did you do into libraries?
I didn’t do any research when I was writing. Martha [Baillie], the woman who wrote the book, is a librarian. I believe that everything in the book that has to do with Miriam Gordon, the character and the love story, is invented. But these patrons and these incidents, they all happened. So I felt like I didn’t really need to do a lot of research. It was all in the book. But then once we were getting into pre-production, we had to be very specific because we had to build the library, the stacks. The main floor of the library, that space we built in a storefront in Hamilton, Ontario, and then all of the shots in the stacks were the local university.
We had two sets that we stitched together. Of course, we had to get very specific about the library at that point. And then Britt [Lower] and I set up a library school for them. They went with Martha and we went to the branch and they spent days at the library just talking to people, seeing how things worked. And so, in that sense, the research was done once we started pre-production in order to make sure that we got all of these things.
Did you try to find a library that would have everything?
Yes. Couldn’t find it.
Did you have Britt in mind for casting Miriam? Have you worked with her before?
I did not have her in mind, and I had not worked with her before. We were working with casting director Rori Bergman, and at a certain point she brought Britt forward. I didn’t know who she was, so Rori said, “Watch Severance.” I did, and this woman is amazing. Then she liked the script and I wanted to work with her and we liked each other. Once we found her, it was relatively easy, smooth sailing. And then I actually cast Tom [Mercier] early, because I knew I wanted him because I had seen him in a film.
There’s a film called Synonyms, which came out in 2019. But the funny story is I hadn’t even seen the film when I knew I wanted him. I saw the trailer at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, and I was like, “Oh my God, this guy, who is this guy?” I was like, I’m going to get him. And it was years before. When we actually came to casting Miriam we didn’t know exactly who that was going to but I know who Janko is. By the time we were ready to shoot, I had been talking to him for over a year.
With the two of them specifically and the relationship, it feels just like there’s so much visual intimacy and not just nudity. Just them existing in each other’s space for a certain degree of time without a lot of dialogue. Was there anything that the actors brought to the characters that informed them slightly more? Or was it sticking to the book?
Oh no, they brought a ton. You write something and you have people in your head for a very long time. I had them in my head for a very long time. And then you actually have humans who are really good at what they do, and then they bring specificity and detail and they question you about things. “And why would she say that? Or why wouldn’t she say anything?” Because Miriam in the script is quite mute. Britt’s like, “Why don’t I get to say anything?” So they brought a huge amount–a huge amount. They are really good at what they do. They really were invested and cared, and were curious. It’s not like a list of things they did, but they just brought these characters off the page, made them real, made them grounded, made them three dimensional–really interesting, complicated people.
Was developing this dialogue-light character a challenge?
Believe it or not, this film has a lot of dialogue for me. I make films where people just don’t talk. I really do. The first three films that I made, no one says a word. They’re literally silent films, but there’s a lot of sound. And then the first feature I made, there’s not a lot of talking either. So for me, everyone’s talking so much in this film. I guess you don’t really need to say a lot because everything is told differently. People can speak volumes without saying anything. So no, it didn’t feel like a challenge. They were actually talking more than people usually do in my films.
Can we talk about that blue sweater of hers? Everyone has that one work sweater that just lives on their desk.
We call that Cardi B. So it’s twofold. I worked with a great costume designer, Emma Doyle. She is amazing. First, Miriam needs a cardigan. She has a uniform at work. Number two, it’s always freezing cold. I had this crazy weird office job, and in the middle of summer, it would be so ridiculously cold in there that I would have a cardigan always on the back of my chair. And so did all the women. It’s very real, and people do that. There was something kind of cozy about it for her. She would envelop herself in this cardigan. It was too big. It was to do with character and place, and also to do just with the reality. I want to be able to move scenes around in editing.
It also would’ve felt slightly different if this character was painted as someone who’s in a brand new outfit every single day. That’s just not how people work. The costume designer was like, “Please, can we just have at least four changes?” You get two, but in the end there were four. I like that it’s just people. How many outfits do you have? For Miriam, that’s not where she’s at all. She has clothes and they’re practical and they serve a purpose. And she probably has clothes she really likes, but at work, she has two shirts.
You adapted the book first as an installation piece. Can you tell me about that?
That was the first version, but this was a very long project. I optioned the book in 2010, and then I made another film where no one talks. And then in 2013, I started working on this one. And then in 2016, I started doing a Master’s. I still didn’t have a producer for this film. I was going to explode from not being able to make this film. I was going to do something else. I thought, “It’s going to be my thesis, and it’s going to be an installation based on the same book.” So that came first. I had written a script for this, but then this was the first thing that I made, which was a nine screen, multimedia immersive experience called Miriam’s World. In some ways, it is much truer to the book because it wasn’t a linear narrative. It was this impressionistic, visceral experience of what this woman’s life was like in this library every day, that ran on a 20-minute loop. Her day is just over and over and over and over in an interesting way. That definitely informed the ultimate version of this film, which is much more non-linear impressionistic than it is plot-driven movie.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the description of the film online, but they make it seem like it’s a genre film.
At first I thought this was a bit of a mismatch. But I don’t think it actually is. I never thought of myself as a genre filmmaker.Then I was like, “No, this actually does make sense.” I think it’s an interesting one. And when some of the reviews from Tribeca said it’s a genre-less film, you can’t really place it. I think that’s more to the point: it doesn’t fit squarely into anything. So in a sense, it can be anything. It’s not horror, but it’s not strictly drama, either. It’s not strictly romance. It’s many things at once. I hope that’s one of its strengths that absolutely it plays in all these different ways.
