Esme, My Love Cinematographer on Forest Inspirations of Thriller

Posted in: Exclusive, Horror, Interview, Movies | Tagged: Audrey Grace Marshall, Cory Choy, Esme My Love, Fletcher Wolfe, Stacey Weckstein, Terror Films

Cinematographer Fletcher Wolfe spoke to Bleeding Cool about her latest thriller in Terror Films’ Esme, My Love, filming, and inspirations.

Cinematographer Fletcher Wolfe has been a Jill-of-all-trades behind the camera for over 15 years since her debut in 2007’s Black Irish. She has an eye for the natural and cerebral in her work, which was why she was ideal for the Cory Choy thriller Esme, My Love. The film follows Hannah (Stacey Weckstein), a mother who notices the symptoms of a terminal and painful illness in her aloof daughter, Esme (Audrey Grace Marshall). She takes her on a trip to their abandoned family farm in a desperate attempt to connect before they have to say goodbye. Wolfe spoke to Bleeding Cool about getting involved in the Terror Films project and trying to be resourceful on a tight schedule.

Bleeding Cool: How did you get involved with ‘Esme, My Love?’
Wolfe: The film’s director and writer Cory Choy and I went to undergrad film bowl together, so we’ve known each other for a long time and have been friends ever since. And yes, my first feature, I said yes.

Could you break down bringing screenwriters Cory and Laura Allen’s vision to life?
On the creative and interpretive end, the difficult part was when doing a script breakdown of what was going on with these characters and where the emotional beats were. Why are they doing things? The tricky part was finding the rules within a world where someone is losing their mind. We can’t show the trust-breaking. We’re trying to nail down what we were trying to say, what visions we were privy to, and what the camera could see. That was a tricky part on that side. Tight budgets always make things tricky. This was a small budget, and the small crew ran on a tight schedule. We always had a mind towards what we would like to do and then what version of that we can achieve with minimal time. We had 13 shooting days and principal photography. We wound up adding three more pickup days. It was 16 days in total.

Was there any inspiration visually that helped guide how the film looked?
Corey and I offered different references for different inspirations. From the beginning, he talked about Kelly Reichardt’s first feature film and how simple it was. It’s two people in the woods, but we also had this magical realism element to weave in. We also talked about ‘The Babadook’ (2014) because of how it builds tension in this mother-child relationship. I also referenced ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ (1992) for the look of the woods and how they honor the Northeast Woodlands, where we were also shooting in upstate New York. There were several different references for different aspects of the film.

Was there a particular sequence that stood out more than others?
The underwater sequence. I don’t want to give too much away, but that presented some technical challenges. We tried to do it upstate in Lake George, and we got some of the water stuff. The water was too murky to see anything under there, and there was a leak in the underwater camera housing. It was freezing cold by late September upstate by this point. It was chilly, and we were all wearing wetsuits. Because of various things, we couldn’t get all the footage we needed, but we wound up doing pickups in a pool later where things were controlled, and it was warmer.

Esme, My Love is available on digital.

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