Exclusive: Giving Birth to a Butterfly Director on His Dreamlike Film

If anyone is complaining that Hollywood has “run out of ideas” and that everything is a remake or sequel, they’d do well to research a small but burgeoning new crop of post-digital indie films that tap into the dread, anxieties, and sometimes comical surreality of our present age. These movies are often a little creepy, boldly ambiguous, a bit hazy, and a potent antidote to mainstream cinema. Embracing 16mm film, unique aspect ratios like 1.2:1, shorter runtimes, and small stories, these independent films couldn’t be more different than the bloated three-hour-long CGI spectacles in theaters.

In the past two years, Enys Men, Funny Pages, Falcon Lake, Tahara, Skinamarink, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair have exemplified this new post-digital style, and one of the producers of that latter title, the surprisingly successful World’s Fair film, has now added to the movement with his own film. Theodore Schaefer‘s debut feature film, Giving Birth to a Butterfly, is a dreamy and unpredictable film with quiet humor and sometimes creepy moments of awkward absurdity.

Schaefer, a frequent producer and assistant director, collaborated with author Patrick Lawson to write the film, and directed his debut with an offbeat and poetic aesthetic. He spoke to MovieWeb about the inspiration, meaning, and production of Giving Birth to a Butterfly.

Therapy Gave Birth to Schaefer’s Butterfly

Giving Birth to a Butterfly follows a perhaps dysfunctional family as they take in Marlene (Gus Birney), the pregnant girlfriend of their son. The matriarch of the family, Diana (played by Annie Parisse), suspects that she’s a victim of identity theft after her credit card is denied. Marlene drives Diana to the address of the company that has charged her too much money, and the two bond over a quietly bizarre road trip which culminates in a surreal visit to two elderly twins who change their lives.

The impetus for the film is just as strange. Schaefer’s therapist was also writer Patrick Lawson’s therapist, and thought that Schaefer would be the perfect person to make a film about Lawson’s life. After a while, they ended up connecting and began a furiously artistic collaboration that resulted in seven different film scripts, including Giving Birth to a Butterfly.

“It was weird,” said Schaefer, recalling the moment his therapist suggested he reach out to a fellow patient. “I think my initial reaction was like, ‘Oh, this is strange,’ because it was originally like, I should make a movie about this guy’s life. Especially when you’re young, I think if you’re getting into film, everybody who doesn’t really know that much about film wants to help you and tell you what you should make your movies about. [So my therapist] was like, ‘Oh, you should make a movie about this person.'” Schaefer continued:

He gave me one of Patrick’s books, and I read it and was just immediately drawn in. It was a combination of poetry and interviews with Patrick that kind of told the story of his life through both the poetry and his interviews, and he has had a really fascinating life. So I sat on it for about a year before I called him and was like, “I have this idea,” and I wanted to see if he’d write it with me […] There was something about this where somehow our brains just clicked. I’m not quite sure why. But we finished writing that first script, and we were like, “Let’s just keep doing this.” We’ve made a handful of shorts together, and we’ve written a ton of features, and this was the first one we were able to kind of get off the ground.

“I don’t even know who wrote what at this point,” continued Schaefer, “because our brains just kind of melded.”

The Meaning of Mina Loy

Ironically, that same disassociating sensibility and lack of discernible ego is expressed in the film itself. Identity, names, and ego are all big themes in Giving Birth to a Butterfly, where characters bleed into each other and Marlene and Diana’s identities seem powerfully intertwined. A lot of it started with the titular poem by Mina Loy, a part of her Love Songs from the early-to-mid-20th-century:

Like the film, this poem is beautiful, sad, infinitely mysterious, and kind of hopeful. It resonated with Lason and Schaefer. “So that came pretty early,” explained Schaefer. “I had come up with a seed of this idea years ago, and brought it to Patrick. And then usually what happens is one of us has a seed and then we both start kind of using that to jump off, and we throw ideas on like a Google Doc. He was preparing a presentation on Mina Loy at a poetry conference. As often happens when we write, as soon as one of us has an idea, or somebody’s doing something in their life or has seen or read something, the other is just like, ‘Well, this is just like this other thing.’ It’s like this serendipitous thing.” Schaefer continued:

And so we started learning more about Mina Loy, because he had to and I was intrigued, and he’s like, “I think there’s some significance here to kind of what we’re writing.” So that came pretty early, and it was a great jumping off point as we were thinking about this character of Diana, because that’s sort of the seed. And as soon as you start thinking about Diana, everybody else grows out of it. I just felt like it was the perfect setup, and the perfect tone-setter; and thematically, the very beautiful love poem has so much in common with the themes we were already exploring, so it felt like — what a perfect match.

Explaining Giving Birth to a Butterfly

Like many titles in this post-digital new wave of indie cinema, this radical 16mm reaction, Giving Birth to a Butterfly doesn’t lend itself to just one easy interpretation. Does Mina Loy’s poem have some cogent, linear, intellectual interpretation in which everything makes logical sense? No, and neither does the film titled after it. “It’s tough, because there’s obviously intentionally not just one interpretation,” explained Schaefer. He continued:

I do think it changes for me; it sort of depends. I think the way we wrote it, what it meant most to me then was different from when we shot it, and it’s different now, having come out into the world. A lot of it stems from Diana and her sort of individuation through splitting. And I realized a lot of our scripts can have a similar kind of motif of a character kind of having to be strung in two to in order to become whole […] consciously, it’s the idea of trying to find that other part of yourself as an external thing. It’s a really interesting image to us, because I think that maybe it’s sort of a utopic image, the idea that somehow you can kind of find the whole you.

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There is no real easy meaning to Giving Birth to a Butterfly, which has led to a variety of interpretations and distillations. People like to use ‘buzzwords’ or create similarities in order to ‘market’ a movie to someone. One such buzzy line for the film came courtesy of Film Threat when Schaefer’s movie screened at the Fantasia International Film Festival, “Donnie Darko meets Twin Peaks.” In spirit, those two great titles do feel distantly related to Giving Birth to a Butterfly, but not stylistically or emotionally, not whatsoever. The film has an entirely distinct aesthetic of its own, but that hasn’t stopped people from comparing it to token “weird” and “bizarre” directors, like David Lynch or Lars von Trier.

“I understand, I think, why people make that connection. It’s something easy to sort of give you a general sense,” said Schaefer, who credits masters like Aki Kaurismäki, Chantal Akerman, Jim Jarmusch and the patient Edward Yang much more than Lynch or anyone else. “I was like, Lynch would never make anything so happy. It’s kind of a happy movie, I think. I think it’s got hope to it, which I don’t see in Lynch, except for Straight Story.”

Theodore Schaefer Is Living the Dream

Schaefer’s filmmaking future looks hopeful, too. He’s part of this post-digital indie movement, not just with Giving Birth to a Butterfly but with the great 2022 film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. “We finished shooting this, and Jane [Schoenbrun, the director] reached out to me, and I’ve been doing this for years, and we’ve been good friends. And they were trying to put this together and asked if I could help, and I was like, ‘Yeah, definitely.’ And I was working at this company, Direct Productions, and we were able to come on and help put it together and be a part of that process.”

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We’re All Going to the World’s Fair has been perhaps the most successful film of this small, loose movement. “That success was such a strange thing,” said Schaefer. “I mean, I think it really is life-changing for Jane, but even for us, it was like, ‘Whoa, this is kind of blowing up.’ It’s opened a lot of doors, it’s made certain things a lot easier. It’s also just taught me a lot about the industry in both positive and negative ways.” The filmmaker continued, echoing the ethos of a new movement:

Our intention was, “We’re gonna make these small movies that feel really personal and director-driven.” That was the whole conceit of our company. Sure, at some point it’d be great to make a movie that has great success, but let’s start by building a community. Then the first movie, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, came out, and we’re like, “Oh, well it seems like there’s a real hunger for a certain type of film.” It kind of proved that a lot of people like that stuff, so we should just keep doing what we’re doing. Jane’s career is going to explode, but I think and hope we’re going to continue working with them on other projects, so it’ll be fun. Being a filmmaker and having the ability to help other filmmakers is the dream.

The dream will surely continue in future ethereal, haunting, and fascinating films, and the dreamy Giving Birth to a Butterfly is set to digitally premiere on May 16, 2023. Cinedigm will release the eccentric fantasy-like drama as a streaming exclusive on Fandor, the company’s indie discovery platform, and it will be available on major digital-on-demand platforms in the U.S.