When I was a child, I often went on vacation with my family in Sanibel Island. We documented these excursions with photos and videos. These trips are so vivid in my memory, even more than the other places we went to. I can almost close my eyes and be on that beach as a child building a sand castle with my brother. In Nell Teare’s feature debut, she captures a time like this in her life for the characters in her film. The story is not based on a true story, but the way she plays with memory within these characters feels like it’s based on real memories, real dreams. When I asked Nell during our interview about what inspired this film, she said her mother.
The film is an emotional flurry of memory, and shows the tough transitions we find ourselves within adulthood when we deal with loss. Grief is a powerful emotion, and the way it paints memory is fluid. This is beautifully captured by cinematographer Julia Swain, and the original soulful music. Philip Sheppard was the composer on this film, with an original song called “Tides Roll In” was by Maesa Pullman. I’m grateful for a film that doesn’t fill in all the gaps, but connects with the viewer in a symbiotic way. “Bolivar” follows a woman struggling to come to terms with her mother’s recent passing and her brother’s journey through addiction.
“Bolivar” is now available digitally and on DVD.
Can you talk about what got you involved in filmmaking and what brought you to this particular project?
Basically in a word, that would be my mother. My mom was an onscreen and stage actress. She was on the Dean Martin show in the sixties and was one of the The Gold Diggers [a female and singing dance troupe]. She was sort of the Southwest region’s onstage Mary Martin’s protege, so she did all of those roles in ‘South Pacific’ and ‘Peter Pan.’ She was amazing, but she gave up her bigger career to have a family, and it didn’t go very well. She should have stayed true to herself. So I grew up with her, and by the time I was twelve, she was an alcoholic. We lost her when I was twenty-nine from cancer.
For me, I started performing with her onstage when I was five or six. Then I went to a performing arts middle school and high school. I went to Tisch, and continued with musical theater. I was singing and dancing my way across the country. Then I got married too young, got divorced, moved across the country to LA, I did a couple musicals out here, and worked with Celebration Theater with one of their new musicals, ‘The Next Fairy Tale,’ right around 2010 or 2011. And then my mom was diagnosed with cancer and passed away.
At that time, someone asked me to direct a one woman show, and I ended up shooting a kickstarter video to go with it, and I edited with my friend Bobby. We put it together with music and just fell in love with the process. Then I was like, ‘oh, this is what I am!’
I think, of course, there were also other things, the idea of performing and singing, and dancing on stage without my mother on the planet anymore was kind of sad. That was our bond. So then I started directing. I enrolled in a course, and started to do all of these cinematic book trailers for Film14, for my good friend Adam Cushman. That turned into directing everybody else’s short projects, from doing a web series to doing a music video. I started started directing dubbing. I do a lot of those, and I’ve worked with Disney on several projects.
In the midst of all of that, people were asking, ‘Are you ever going to shoot a feature?’ I was like, ‘I’m trying, when do you want me to do this?’ So then the pandemic happened and it afforded me that, and that’s how we got here. So I finally got to write and direct. And the acting in it really came out of the fact that I wrote this role based on my own experience of losing my mom. I don’t think I could have had anyone else play the main role, it wouldn’t have been fair. I was so emotionally close that I knew I had to play the part.
But it worked out so well in terms of having Robert Pine play my father. It was just a really beautiful experience. My mother had always dreamed of us making movies together when we were little. Like when I was seven years old and eating cereal, she’d be like ‘we’ll do this movie, and we’ll do this film together.’ It was kind of just like this longing she had to go back into the world and really do things. And ten years after she passed, I was able to make that dream come true.
It was a family affair. My brother plays the flashback dad, and my sister plays the flashback mother. My niece and nephew play little Sonny and little Maggie. So we had the whole family all right there.
I love how you take a photograph and vacation, and use that as the backdrop to the film. I feel like I can relate to that in a way. My family would travel to Sanibel Island when I was young, and it was so well captured by photographs and videos, more than really any of our other trips and excursions. So I attach a lot of my younger memories to that place.
That summer it’s based on, I mean obviously it’s not my family’s story, but we did live in Bolivar for a summer. It was just one of those magical times. So I put that in the script and kind of made that their place as well.
Can we talk about working with your cinematographer Julia Swain? The film is so gorgeous, and I love that you had a female cinematographer.
She’s such a genius. This year, she was put on the ASC rising stars list. She’s incredible. She’s shooting so much. We have projects where we are attached together to do, so hopefully those will come into fruition next year, and we’re going to get back together.
Can you talk about the music in the film, I really love that element too.
It was a very cool process. I feel this is how I will do films now from here on. And it just happened to go this way because of the timing of the pandemic. My producing partner Jerry Kope is dear friends with Philip Sheppard, who is the man who did our score. We reached out to him and sent him the script, and he goes, ‘guys, I love it, I’m in, can I start composing some tracks?’ This was before we shot the film. And I was like, ‘please.’ And Maesa Pullman wrote the original song that happens at the beach, “Tide Rolls In.” She wrote the song after reading the script and before we shot the film. Then they sent it to me.
So when I was shot listing and I was coming up with what I wanted to do, there was this kind of back and forth with the musicians which was valuable. And I think I will always do it that way because it turned out really well. Of course, there were moments where Philip would write new stuff for different parts, but it was really special. Philip Sheppard is a genius, and so is Maesa Pullman.
And then Jesse Lynn Madera, who’s been my best friend since the second grade, we played one of her own songs, “7 2 H V N,” when she goes home with the bartender. And then George Stanford, we played his song, “Another Late Night.” So I used a lot of indie musicians who have a soulfulness to them. And then, of course, her memory, that song by 10,000 Maniacs, “Candy Everybody Wants,” which was really important to me, and they were so wonderful to let us use that song.
What do you hope people see in your film?
I hope they see themselves. That’s one of the reasons I kind of wrote the script the way I wrote it. We don’t know everything about the characters, especially the supporting characters. We don’t really know what her dad does for a living, and what he does currently. You don’t know what her mother died of. You don’t know what actual drugs Sonny was addicted to. You don’t know why Maggie is getting a divorce. But you see this very specific behavior. That is what I think is really important to me about this film is that it is an experience that we unfortunately all have to go through. We lose things everyday, on a large scale and on a small scale. And I wanted people to put their own story within this story, because it really is based on memory play. It’s about how our mind does this to thing to us, you know?
