Director's Statement
It started with a phone call. The entire summer of 2018 Zoe had been wrestling with a difficult decision. She didn’t want to see her mother again.
A model for Stockton to Table Rock’s Shelly, Zoe’s mother had been emotionally and physically abusive throughout her childhood. This Zoe could stomach. All the memories she had learned to accept. The beatings. The screaming. The sleepless nights. The moments when she had to hide. The moments when she had to fight back. The pervasive feeling of insecurity—that she was never safe and that anything could happen at any moment. Zoe could handle all of that. What she couldn’t handle was her mother’s flippant attitude and inability to apologize. You see, Zoe’s mother didn’t abuse Zoe; she made her tough. Or, Zoe wasn’t remembering things correctly. Or, maybe Zoe was making everything up…had she seen a psychiatrist yet?
When confronted with her behavior, Zoe’s mother responded how most abusive parents do. She denied, deflected, and lied. Zoe had had enough. In the dining room of our small rented house—rocking uneasily in a wooden chair as she controlled her breathing—Zoe told her mother that she didn’t want to see her again until she had given her an apology. That apology never came, and to this day, the two have not spoken.
During the years between that phone call and STTR’s production, I watched as my wife slowly came into herself. The first years of our marriage were shrouded in her mother’s presence. A constant source of tension and weight that lingered over family holidays and get-togethers. But, once her mother was gone, Zoe stopped having nightmares. She stopped descending into unexplained depressive episodes. She stopped hoping for an apology.
Hoping is the key word there. Zoe had been killing herself with it, pining for a mother that didn’t exist and would never live up to the imagined figure in her head. Even while her emotional life was improving, she still had this sense of loss—that she was mourning an ideal parent.
She wanted to make a movie about this feeling and asked me to write the screenplay. The idea made me nervous. Even though Zoe and I had been romantic and creative partners for a long time, the subject matter seemed too close and I worried that it wouldn’t help our relationship. Plus, there was the question of my approach. How would I—as a writer—get into the story? What did I know about abuse? How would I capture a mood that only Zoe seemed to understand?
The primary breakthrough was a simple one. The film would be 100% fiction. My screenplay would use Zoe’s memories as an inspiration to create an original story. The characters would not be the people Zoe knew but would occupy a third space between the two of us. Rori is not Zoe as a teenager, but an amalgamation of Zoe’s high school experience and mine. Shelly is not Zoe’s mother. She’s a new person who shares some of her DNA but also contains traits I saw in my years as a social worker.
Once the foundation was set, we worked through 17 drafts. I would write and then Zoe and our other creative partner, Chuck, would give notes. Throughout writing, the three of us settled on a point-of-view that would guide us through all phases of the production and act as a beacon as the team expanded to include audio/visual technicians and acclaimed actors. No matter what we did, we had to be honest. Characters were the most important, and we had to see them unflinchingly. We had to listen to them. We had to follow them down their crooked paths as they behaved in ways that horrified and intrigued us. We had to refrain from judging them, condescending to them, and giving the audience a cheap and easy moral lesson.
Ultimately, Stockton to Table Rock is about a state of mind that has no beginning and no end. Our yearning for a loving parent persists as long as we do—even if our parents are dead or (more sadly) we never had loving parents to begin with. The mother who rocks us to sleep, who reassures us, who supports us, who loves us, whether real or imagined, that woman is a permanent fixture in our minds. Her smiling face never leaves.