Madeline's Madeline (2018) on Netflix
Madeline, a teenager, performs with an experimental theater troupe led by Evangeline, who draws on the actors' own lives. Her mother, Regina, does not understand her.
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- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb6.3/104,412 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
Madeline is a teenager in a professional acting company that is devising an experimental performance about The Three Little Pigs through improvisation. She likes the other performers and their director, Evangeline, and she puts off going home, where her mother, Regina, starts arguments and misreads her. In rehearsal Madeline describes a dream in which she pressed a hot iron against her mother, and Evangeline has the company act the dream out. The exercise leaves Madeline shaken by how much her life and the work have merged. She slips out of the theater; Regina, searching for her, learns that her daughter has run out of a medication prescribed for an unspecified mental illness and tries to get it refilled quickly.
Cast
- Eva Steinmetzas Claire, Woman in Pig Mask
- Lolo Hahaas Aart
- Jorge Torres-Torresas Alejandro, Craps
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Madeline's Madeline (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Josephine Decker met Helena Howard in 2014 when she judged a teen arts festival; 15-year-old Howard performed a monologue from David Harrower's Blackbird, and Decker cried so hard it made Howard cry too. Decker told her it was the best performance she had ever seen and that she wanted them to make a film together.
- Decker devised the film in workshops, using techniques she learned at Philadelphia's Pig Iron Theatre Company; she, Helena Howard and eleven other actors met about nine times over seven months, improvising scenes, many cut from the final film, and drawing on the performers' own experiences such as mental illness.
- The story began as a fictionalized telling of Helena Howard's own life, but Decker also wanted to explore her own anxieties as an artist, having seen artists tell others' stories in ways she felt were exploitative on her earlier films Bi the Way and Flames.
- A draft of the script included a real event between Decker and Howard; when Decker realized it crossed the line between the character Madeline and the real Helena Howard, she pushed the script toward fiction, then gave the character Evangeline a desire to cross such boundaries.
- Cinematographer Ashley Connor built a custom camera rig that let her manipulate focus in new ways, giving the film what IndieWire's Chris O'Falt called an almost liquid-like focus, with images often slightly doubled or warped and blurred objects at the edges of frame.
- Editor Harrison Atkins made over a hundred cuts of the movie in four months before leaving for another show; Decker took over editing, spent six months unsatisfied, brought on producer Liz Rao for five weeks, then David Barker to fix the ending two weeks before the Sundance deadline.
