Interview: Laura Moss on the Mothers and Monsters of Birth/Rebirth

“Dignity and motherhood don’t always line up,” observes Judy Reyes’s Celie in Birth/Rebirth. She offers this pearl of wisdom, an encapsulation of the film’s thesis, with an air of encouragement to Emily, an expectant mother played by Breeda Wool. The rest of Laura Moss’s film, though, is seldom as sanguine when approaching the subject.

Birth/Rebirth restages Mary Shelley’s Romantic-era creation story Frankenstein within the trappings of modern motherhood. Dr. Rose Casper (Marin Ireland), informed by her struggles to conceive, throws herself to experimental research aided by her access to body parts as a morgue technician. This sets her on a collision course with Celie, a Bronx-based maternity nurse, following the unexpected death of her six-year-old daughter, Lila (A.J. Lister).

Rose’s reanimation of Lila brings them into an unconventional co-parenting situation as each alternates between appreciating and abhorring their shared project. The richest drama within Birth/Rebirth comes from watching these visions of motherhood and medicine clash. Moss, who uses they/them pronouns, casts a wary yet wondrous eye toward the inherent contradictions of womanhood exposed by the two characters’ desperate efforts to keep their creation alive.

I spoke with Moss prior to her debut feature’s theatrical opening. Our conversation covered why their backgrounds in production design and serving as an EMT prepared them to lead a set, where the film’s medical adviser aided in the storytelling, and what Frankenstein means as the starting point for Birth/Rebirth’s thematic exploration.

What keeps you interested in the modern mythology created by Mary Shelley?

They’re such elemental themes, specifically around creation and legacy. That was what grabbed me when I first read it, and that’s what keeps me interested in it. Of course, my take on it involves the question of what it means to create life when you can actually gestate life with your body. That’s a whole other element to the Frankenstein story that, it could be argued, might be in the subtext of the novel. I think we’re also entering a period where scientific advancement is at once incredible and happening exponentially in a way that we were having to develop new language around the ethics of gene experimentation and regenerative medicine. Science fiction is becoming science fact, and so I think Frankenstein keeps bubbling up in its relevance.

Is there at all some element of hopefulness, or at least possibility, that the film points to? There’s something around using science and innovation to expand who can bring life into the world beyond those born with a womb.

I mean, I wouldn’t call the film hopeful! I am, frankly, you know, always more interested in the psychology of relationships than I usually am in the technical or, in this case, the scientific. Something I did really want to explore in this film was how many different ways there are to be a parent and a mother, and also kind of the value of non-traditional parenting relationships. If that’s something that’s taken away from the film, I would be thrilled.

Were Celie’s and Rose’s journeys, almost swapping dispositions as it pertains to science and motherhood, always moving in such equal and opposite ways?

Yeah, they were. They weren’t always getting along as well as they do in the final version. I wanted to explore how they’re building their identity, their own sense of self, around very different things. For Rose, it’s her science and legacy. And for Celie, it’s motherhood. I do think that, oftentimes, that opposition is imposed on women by society. You can care about your career or you can care about being a parent, and that should define you. I did want to explore the story of two women who deliberately took what could be viewed as opposite paths, what makes them similar, and what makes them sort of necessarily bonds them to each other.

I loved how Emily’s decision to deliver at Lenox Hill on the Upper East Side becomes the breaking point for Celie. Were you always thinking about how race and class factor into these anxieties around reproduction?

Oh, boy, yeah. There are definitely issues of race and class that are undercurrents of Rose and Celie’s relationship. When you get into the story of birthing in America, you’re inherently wading into issues of racism, especially around Black and brown women who are egregiously underserved by our medical system. I’m a lifelong New Yorker, and it was important to me that this wasn’t set in a nebulously random place. The Bronx is actually a character in this film, and [it was important] that the social dynamics of our reality in New York City weren’t ignored.

You said in describing your short film Fry Day that the obsession with serial killers stems from people wanting “to control chaos and understand the psychology of someone who would do something like that so we can be safe.” That sounds a lot like what you’re exploring in Birth/Rebirth. Did you see these two projects as having connective tissue?

That’s so interesting. On a surface level, Fry Day isn’t related to Birth/Rebirth because it was an actual proof of concept for another feature that I had written. So I don’t think about them as the same, but I think of both of these films as horror-adjacent. They play on some horror tropes and maybe attract people who are fans of horror…or so I’d hope. What I’ve loved about horror since I was a child was its ability to explore things that grown-ups didn’t talk about, like social taboos and dark situations, so that you could confront them head-on in the safe environment of your home. In Fry Day, we have a character who’s photographing this Ted Bundy barbecue [a celebration outside the execution of the serial killer], and her gaze on the situation is definitely related to Rose’s unflinching gaze on bodies and viscera. I mean, the feature begins with her taking photographs of a body, so there’s definitely some connection.

What is the effect of co-writing with Brendan O’Brien, who you credit with helping add dramatic structure to the film? Is it helpful to have a different perspective to help illuminate elements of the project?

Brendan and I have worked together on everything that we’ve ever written and probably will write. I have no interest in writing without a co-writer. It’s a necessary part of my process. The idea will usually generate from one of us, and we brainstorm the idea together to come up with a rough outline. Brendan is the one that does the first vomit draft, which, frankly, I’m too self-critical to ever be able to do. If that was my job, it would never get written. And then I come with my structural and visual eye to do a lot of scalpel work. It’s a process that works really well for us. I’m in awe of people who do it by themselves.

You came up to make your feature debut through production design. Are you able to think tactically like a craftsperson and thematically in the big picture like a writer-director simultaneously?

One of the benefits of being a production designer before a director is that I just got to watch a lot of directors’ work. Being a director is quite lonely. When you’re the director on set, you’re never really in a community with other directors. So, as a designer, I got to see great practices—and maybe not-so-great practices—of other directors. Production design is also filmmaking. You’re trying to make aesthetic choices that support the journey and psychology of the characters. I really do think it’s a helpful step on the journey to directing. It’s also really helpful when you’re an independent filmmaker because, as a production designer, I know what things cost. I know how to make the most out of a dollar, really. I always valued the directors who had a sense of what direction they’d be shooting in so that we didn’t have to dress the set in 360 degrees. I put a lot of thought and care into that when I’m prepping as a director now.

What did you take in terms of set management from some of the productions that you’ve worked on to inform the way that you ran Birth/Rebirth?

It’s funny, before I was in film production, I was an EMT. I always say that was the best training for directing that I received—learning how to work under pressure and trust a team implicitly to get things done when people are literally screaming “emergency!” at you. But maybe the best experience that allows you to be confident is just learning that films are made one shot at a time. Working in production for so many years just demystified the process and made me less intimidated and more able to believe in myself. I’ve seen how it’s done and that it can be done.

How did your EMT background play into the scientific elements of the film? Where did you need a medical adviser to push the knowledge further beyond your own?

My certification lapsed a long time ago. Having that experience, I knew enough to know how little I knew. And it was after the first draft of this script that Brendon and I realized we had come as far as we could with basic research. We had read a couple of books and several articles about stem cell research and regenerative medicine, but we were in over our heads. I was able to connect with Emily Ryan, a pathologist who eventually became our on-set medical adviser. I told her to please redline this script. She pointed out every inconsistency and questionable detail but with the mind of a storyteller. She wouldn’t just poo-poo our ideas, she would say, “I see why you need this to happen in the script. Here’s a more accurate way that you could make this happen.” She was a real creative partner in the process, and I feel really lucky to have her.

Were those details of medical realism as much for you all in making the film as they were for the audience?

Balancing the jargon was hard because we didn’t want to overwhelm the audience. Frankly, [their] understanding the details of the science wasn’t our aim. It was to create this bed of realism that was strong enough that when we asked them to go to crazy places with us, the audience was able to go there. We just really didn’t want the average person questioning the science that was proposed. That’s my hope: that the audience isn’t overwhelmed by the medicine, but that they’re also not pulled out by something that they can sniff out as bullshit.

Do you have to tap into a different set of skills when it comes to directing actors?

It’s a little different because you can be miserable and still do your job as a crew member. Because their faces don’t lie, actors require a certain amount of comfort. You need to create an environment of play, which is a difficult thing to do on sets that are essentially construction sites. There are so many logistical things that need to happen and often so many time pressures. A huge part of the director’s job, I believe, is being expansive and creating space for actors so that they don’t necessarily feel the pressure and the pain that the rest of us are experiencing.

Marin Ireland’s performance as Rose is so perfectly dialed up. How do you find the right level for something that can be a little heightened in the trappings of genre but still needs to be believable in reality?

That character is based partially on me and partially on certain other people in my life. I shared my experiences with Marin, and she certainly shared her experiences with me of people in her life that this character reminded her of. But I think the most essential thing, and Marin does this naturally, was to make sure that Rose was only ever being helpful from her own perspective. This is a character that does very extreme things and has blinders on. It’s a pretty myopic view of the world. The integrity of Rose’s intentions, her real dedication and belief that what she was doing was really an incredibly important good thing, Marin never lost sight of that. She’s never betraying or making fun of that character. She’s playing her with a lot of love and honesty.

Was it a challenge to calibrate Ireland’s performance opposite Judy Reyes’s arguably more grounded, realistic turn?

They really found their characters when they started working together. The first scene that we shot with the two of them was a few days into production. It was the pathology lab, the first time those characters meet as well. I remember a grip remarking to an electrician after the first setup that their chemistry was just electric. It was, and we all felt it. I really think they did a great job of bonding in a very short period of time and finding their edges by interacting with each other.