Pretty in pastels: Director Suzi Yoonessi talks about her some kind of wonderful, Dear Lemon Lima

June 22, 12:50 PMLA Alternative Movie ExaminerMarvin Miranda

Directed by feature-length first-timer, Suzi Yoonessi, Dear Lemon Lima is about the beauty and heartache of living the life of an awkward thirteen year-old girl set against the backdrop of the barely charted territory of Alaskan culture.  But unlike the big city, hyper-sexual awakening taken by such recent young teenager films (Thirteen, e.g.), Dear Lemon Lima's approach is one that seems natural and organic:  an emotional blossoming rather than a sexual eruption.  That's not to say there's no bitter in this sweet (it's hard to imagine that such an age would be depicted without that juxtaposition), but the casualties of pubescence in Lima are more in line with the real-life horrors of Stephen King's Stand By Me than with Hollywood's current exploitative bent, which is to say that few things in life are as terrifying as experiencing the loss of loved ones, rejection, searching for your place, and trying to interpret the world through the eyes of a teenager.

Director Suzy Yoonessi was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule promoting her film at this year's Los Angeles Film Festival to talk about a lot of what went into cooking up the bittersweet confection that is Dear Lemon Lima.

Marvin Miranda:  The best way for me to describe (in a nutshell!) Dear Lemon Lima would be:  a John Hughes "teen comedy" by way of Revenge of the Nerds, with a quick pit stop/fall on an Afterschool Special emotional land mine.  At the risk of undermining its feminist Weltanschauung (and sounding like a completely pretentious idiot), it's actually, in a way, like the "Pulp Fiction of teen comedies," where it's not just a re-tooling of the genre, but rather, a mash-up of a few sub-genres.  How did this come about?  Was it conscious?  Oh, yeah, and let's not forget throwing in a little of About Schmidt (as in the main character avowing to pen and paper) by way of Sadie Benning!  It all works wonderfully!

Suzi Yoonessi:  You are on the nose with all of my influences!  Writing the film, I was interested in subverting the family film genre because I feel that children are often talked down to in conventional family films.  Re-reading heartfelt passages from my childhood diary inspired me to write and direct a story that encourages love and kindness.  The diary is a rainbow-studded, tragic and funny compilation of letters written to my imaginary best friend, Lemon Lima.  These sticker-clad pages became the heart of the film.  It was a delight to create and capture this magical world through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl, using a sherbet color palette, sweeping wide-screen aspect ratio and infusing the world with love and kindness.

MM:  Despite the fact that it's a "teen comedy,"  it's really the 13-14 year-old set who are being represented here, as oppose to the more typical senior year that is conventionally depicted.  What do you think works with this specific age group that may not have otherwise worked as well with the older group? 

SY:  I believe that 13 is a significant, transitional year for kids as they transfer from the loving world of middle school to complicated high school life.  When I turned 13, I stopped writing in my diary and lost faith in my imaginary friend (Lemon Lima).  It was the year that I experienced the shocking cruelty of high school.  I remember being cast in a play of Snow White, and all of the kids in my class called me "Snow Brown."  I also had a brief stint dating a cool kid, and everyone would call out “CK” when we’d walk down the hall.  Being innocent and 13, I assumed they were talking about the fantastic “CK” ad campaign from the early nineties; I was wrong.  “CK” was an acronym for “Camel Kisser.”  I’m not sure if adults realize how impressionable kids are during adolescence.  They are sponges; hungry to understand the world, and 13 is metaphorically the year that you stop sending valentines to all of your classmates.  In an older age group, an element of that magical innocence and gullibility is gone, which is what I attempted to capture throughout the film.

MM:  I see that this is your own remake from a 2007 version of Lima.  How long was that short?  I couldn't find anything about it, really, except for a list of the cast, who, for the exception of Melissa Leo, seem like a completely different cast than the 2009 version.  How did that version evolve into the current one? 

SY:  The 10-minute short version of Dear Lemon Lima is distributed by Shorts International and available on itunes.  The short is my thesis film, which I directed while attending Columbia University’s Graduate Film program.  It was inspired by an early draft of the feature script and gave me the opportunity to experiment with the mise en scène.

Channeling my inner 13-year-old girl, I built a library of images, stickers and music that informed the artistic vision.  I was fortunate to work with my director of photography, Sarah Levy, production designer Kay Lee, and a group of talented actors to establish the visual aesthetic, palette, and tone of the film. Traveling through the film festival circuit with the short also taught me a great deal about the audience for the film, and that the film had the potential to fit in the Family genre.  In 2007, I participated in the Film Independent labs, which was where the feature script really took shape.  Regardless of the endless preparation, the filming of the feature was a constant learning experience that no film school, book, short film, or filmmaker could ever teach me.

As for the cast, the younger actors, particularly the teenagers, were no longer in the right age group for the film.  The remainder of the characters grew and changed from short to film, although a few, including Melissa Leo (Mrs. Howard), Eleanor Hutchins (Terri Lemor), and George Bass (the Spanish teacher), remained the same.  My lead actress Savanah Wiltfong is a non-actor from Eagle River, Alaska, so I was constantly coming up with different circumstances to enable her to discover an emotional truth.

MM:  The main character, Vanessa, is of Yup'ik heritage.  She's growing up in Fairbanks, Alaska.  These are not typical teen comedy situations.  Rather, to an extent, this is autobiographical since it's based on your experiences of keeping a diary when you were that age.  What else is autobiographical?  What isn't?

SY:  A couple of years ago, my ex-boyfriend stopped talking to me because he was scared that everything he said would end up in Dear Lemon Lima.  He was probably right.  I find it’s cathartic to write from life experience.  Dear Lemon Lima is a collection of my emotional truths, servicing a story that is essentially about learning the true meaning of heartbreak.

Many of the relationships in the film are autobiographical, plucked from both my own life and the life of those closest to me.  My sister’s ex-boyfriend literally said [as it's repeated in the movie], “Say you are a baker, and you make cupcakes for a living.  And then you quit.  And then you make them again.  And then you quit again.  You are still a baker.”  Neither of us still really knows what he meant, but Philip Georgey, the lead love interest in Dear Lemon Lima, certainly does.  Hercules' relationship with his pet is also autobiographical, drawn from a forced adoption of one of our cats and a rabbit that bit too often rolled into one animal.

I started writing Dear Lemon Lima  in earnest one summer while traveling in Alaska, a landscape which is unique, awe-inspiring, and desolate.  My imagination roamed, and I started wondering what life would be like as a teenager in one of Alaska's forgotten towns.  That is how the setting came about.

MM:  Everything about the Yup'ik culture seemed completely new to me, especially when it came to the portrayal of the WEIO (World Eskimo Indian Olympic) games.  How challenging was it to capture the authenticity of the games?  I mean, most of the time, I didn't know if you were pulling my leg and making stuff up or truly depicting something so esoteric it borders on the absurd.  I admit, I'm completely ignorant when it comes to the culture and I mean no disrespect.   

SY:  The first time I experienced the World Eskimo Indian Olympics was 5 years ago in Fairbanks, Alaska.  My sister and I were driving when I saw a large banner that read, “World Eskimo Indian Olympics.”  Intrigued, we pulled over, expecting a group of super competitive, sculpted athletes.  When I entered the gymnasium, I saw an old, Alaskan Native woman walking with weights hanging off of her ears. The next competitor was a teenage girl, stumbling forward as an announcement was made explaining the survival skill represented in the game.  The Alaskan Native elder was cheering for her competitor because the World Eskimo Indian Olympics encourages camaraderie.  The spirit of the Native games are based off of the notion that each person's survival skills contributes to the community.    

From the outset of Dear Lemon Lima, it was imperative that the Alaskan Native elements were authentic.  The actualization of this film would not been possible without the support of the World Eskimo Indian Olympics organization.  The film features WEIO games such as the blanket toss, the stick pull, ear pull, and high kick.  The actors had to learn proper techniques to carry out the games, as well as the cultural significance of each event.  We had the support of a female athlete who had actually participated in the Native games working as a supervisor overseeing scenes featuring the various games.  Some of the games were quite an athletic feat; we even employed the help of a high school cheerleading squad with a scene featuring the 2-man carry --a Native game in which a single person carries two other members of his/her team in a race to the finish line.  The “props” involved in the games are not easily reproduced, nor are they available from any prop house.  The WEIO organization generously loaned to the production these priceless items and brought the authenticity and recreation of the games to a whole new level.  The blanket toss scene features two walrus skin blankets from Alaska. These blankets are incredibly rare- there are only 10 in the world- and we were fortunate enough to have two blankets in our film to recreate a euphoric and heartbreaking scene in which Savanah's character reaches new heights before her deflating return to the Weight Room.

MM:  It's interesting that throughout the movie, Vanessa is somewhat reluctantly discovering her Yup'ik heritage.  "Yup'ik" means "genuine person" so, in a sense, she's discovering who she really is as a person or young woman, in, arguably, a heroic manner similar to the ancient heroes of Greek Mythology (love, adversaries, competition, mortality, brotherhood, etc).  Can you talk to us about the odyssey that Vanessa takes in order to find herself?

SY:  Vanessa begins her journey, as many of us do at that age, by trying to do everything she can to fit into the environment she encounters at Marlette [the private school she attends].  As she confronts her own lack of success in that endeavor, she continues to try to find new and innovative ways to make herself noticeable and loveable to Phillip.  As she goes on, she develops a curiosity in her own heritage as she learns about the families of her friends and wonders about her own family and upbringing.  Through her journey into finding her heritage, she finds her own voice and independence.

MM:  I know you mention several prominent visual artists (Sadie Benning, Sophie Calle, Hellen Van Meene, Yoshitomo Nara, and Loretta Lux) as being influences for both the pastel visual world you've created in Dear Lemon Lima and Vanessa's emotional disposition.  So I don't mean to fixate solely on Sadie Benning, but can you elaborate on how Benning's self-reflective work informs the character of Vanessa?  Especially since there's an intensity in Benning's work, in particular, If Every Girl Had a Diary, that does not come through in your movie.

SY:  The raw emotion of Benning’s work had a huge impact on me when I was a teenage girl growing up in a Riot Grrrl band.  Benning’s search for a sense of identity through the use of a video journal informs Vanessa’s journey to find her own voice in the pages of her rainbow-studded journal.  I hope Dear Lemon Lima resonates in the same way that Sadie Benning’s work did for me.  These issues of self-identity are colored in pastel pink and place in a family film, making the idea of self-exploration more palatable to a wider audience of teenage girls.

MM:  Getting back to the visuals, can you tell us about the color palette you chose to use?  Besides Yoshitomo Nara and Loretta Lux, is there another reason why you chose to work with pastels?  Was the color scheme a psychological choice? 

SY:  The color scheme was plucked from the color palette in my rainbow-studded childhood journal.  I believe that the production design and the pastel color palette set a loving tone, allowing the actors to play in this magical realm of the film.  It was really inspired by what resonated with me from that time in my childhood.

MM:  I know you also mention the "values of the '60s love generation" as being an inspiration.  In fact, from the movie's first scene, I immediately assumed the setting was the '60s.  Can you elaborate on your statement and how that influence gives the whole movie and its character, settings, etc., a visually anachronistic feel to it?   

SY:  Sarcasm is a killer of the human spirit and a character trait of our generation.  The ideals of Dear Lemon Lima are in line with those of the sixties in that there is an extreme passion, openness and desire to love and be loved.  The score of Dear Lemon Lima features two songs by Lavender Diamond that perfectly capture the heartwarming, happy-sad essence of the film.  A couple of year’s ago, Miranda July introduced me to the singer Becky Stark who I quickly fell in love with as she coined the term “Peace comedy.”   I think that phrase stuck with me throughout production.

MM:  You've worked with another wonderful performance artist, Miranda July.  You were an associate producer for her Me and You and Everyone We Know.  How much of an effect did working either with July or on her film have on telling this story?

SY:  I have been a fan of Miranda July for a very long time, as I grew up in a Riot Grrrl band, learning about culture through DIY zines.  I am inspired by the world that she tackles and the amount of heart she puts into her work.  She is able to make subversive topics palatable.  Working with Miranda on Me and You and Everyone We Know was a fantastic experience, the contacts I made were people that I collaborate with on this film as well.

MM:  What do you think a girl of 13-14 would see/feel/think when watching Dear Lemon Lima?  What are you hoping you're conveying to her?  What are you hoping she gets out of it?  What are you hoping everybody else gets out of it?

My hope is that the film inspires the notion that every human connection deserves the honesty, love and compassion with which a 13-year-old girl embraces the world. 

I hope the film gives girls the confidence to embrace their individuality and express themselves in writing.  Over the course of the shoot, Zoe, the adorable 7-year-old sister of one of the lead actors, became Dear Lemon Lima’s set mascot.  Bubbling with love and kindness, she embodied the spirit of the film.

On the last day of the shoot, I gave personalized diaries to each of the young actors.  The diaries were passed around like yearbooks, so cast and crew could write in each other’s pages.  Not to be outdone, Zoe also passed around her personal diary.  Flipping through the journal, one of my producers saw a familiar “Dear Lemon Lima,” scribbled throughout the pages.  It felt like everything had come full circle, knowing that my imaginary childhood friend had a new best friend.

The following is an excerpt from Zoe’s diary :

Dear lemon lima,

I'm so sorry about not writing to you this mornin'. Well, I got a warm bath & a cold shower but my pap's coming out tomorow. So, I love you Lemon Lima.

Love,

Zoe (ZoZo)

8/8/08