Article: BUCI MAIL: Conversations with Friends / ISSUE 04
BUCI MAIL: Conversations with Friends / ISSUE 04
Malina is wearing our Pollen Dress in Ivory and Lily is wearing our Mlini Dress in Cream.
WHO IS MALINA PAULI WEISSMAN?
Malina Pauli Weissman walked through our tiny showroom in Chinatown after a quick Instagram DM exchange 4 years ago. She needed a dress for an event and we were excited to meet her.
She felt like a sister right away. It was one of the few fittings we did at that time that left us energised and inspired. She felt safe, she felt like an extension of us, she felt like family. Malina was born in New York and grew up in front of the camera. She is perhaps best known for her role as Violet Baudelaire in A Series of Unfortunate Events, as well as Kara Zor-El in Supergirl and young April O'Neil in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She is also now starring in the upcoming Disney Series Coven Academy. She also happens to be the most creative, generous, fearless, and kind woman I have ever met.
WHO IS LILY SPEISER?
Lily Speiser is an Australian-born, New York-based actress and filmmaker. After graduating from Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute she continued on to co-found Trollina Productions, a nonprofit dedicated to telling female stories.
Lily has been part of Buci since the very beginning, our first model, first Buci supporter and my best friend. It is hard to put into words how much she means to the brand. When Buci was a one-person team and we had 200 followers, Lily wore our early poorly sewn samples around the city with pride.
She shocks and impresses me constantly with the fearlessness with which she creates and her ability to throw herself completely into whatever world she chooses to enter. She is fiercely loyal, the hardest worker, and without a doubt the smartest person I know. She has many stories to tell, and the talent, work ethic, care, and creativity to tell them all.
WRITING & FRIENDSHIP
(M.W.) What's your favorite writing routine when the three of you are writing together? How do you take care of each other and keep each other motivated?
(L.S.) Our writing process was precious, almost always in Coco and Mishka's West Village apartment.
One of us would prepare dinner. I would usually make ragu with salad. Coco would often cook steak. Mishka bought a slow cooker and became hyper-fixated on short ribs. After a long day, each of us working on entirely different things, we would come together, take care of each other and transition our minds into BUCI! BUCI! BUCI! over a beautiful dinner. Mishka would light a beeswax candle, clear our dinner plates and put out Honey Mama's for dessert. She would pour each of us a tea with honey from her bees. Sometimes the girls would have an espresso. We would often write at night, sometimes until 1 o'clock in the morning. Coco would drift in and out of sleep on the sofa as we ideated and fantasized about who these characters could be. And I would look forward to this feeling. There was something addictive about entering this very specific creative place, where the time, season or our commitments outside of the world of Three Sisters would cease to exist. I will cherish our writing sessions for the rest of my life.
(M.W.) What are the most romantic things you do with your best friends?
(L.S.) We went to a yurt in a small fishing town near Boston where a healer placed crystals on our bodies as we held hands and allowed higher forces to connect us, clear us and allow us to collectively create without blocks or infrequencies. We cooked for each other most nights and had breakfast most mornings. Mishka would prepare yoghurt bowls in beautiful porcelain as I made us each a matcha. We woke up at 5.45am to go to hot yoga together before we started working. We drove back and forth from New York to Boston a lot. Especially in our pre-production phase I remember Coco was driving and had a deadline for work so Mishka read aloud a manuscript of an unreleased novel for Coco's work. She read the whole drive long despite her eyes getting tired or feeling carsick. The story was about girlhood. These little ways of supporting each other and living as family are really romantic to me.
GIRLHOOD & FEMININITY
(M.W.) What were some little feminine details you wanted to bring into the film and the script, as both a writer and actress, that you think a male filmmaker might not have noticed?
(L.S.) Apart from the wardrobe being Buci and therefore inherently feminine, a lot of the feminine details came to life from the art direction and set dressing. The hat boxes draped in silk scarves. The vintage shoes scattered across the floor of Irina's bedroom. The handwritten letters from their parents on paper from La Colombe d'Or. Hand-painted shopping bags and birthday cards with bows and doves. Pastel pink! Lots of pink! It was very important for us to emphasize the femininity in the set dressing of the house to reveal the character's internal state. Namely, they are orphaned and their brother has abandoned them. They no longer have masculine influences. Masha (the middle sister played by me) holds on to this by wearing her father's watch and listening to his favorite records but that's the extent of it. The script also reflects the feminine aspect of sisterhood in the way we experienced it. Jealousy, stealing your sister's perfume or diary or makeup, sharing secrets and excluding one sister, varying sexual expressions- Masha having an affair to numb her pain versus Olga's sexual repression, wound so tight to protect herself. I can't imagine a male filmmaker knowing this experience as honestly as we do.
(M.W.) This film has so many objects, clothes, colors, foods, flowers, and beauty rituals that almost become their own language. Was that something you were thinking about in the writing process, or did it come more naturally through filming?
(L.S.) The food was always very clear to me. We had the pleasure of integrating Mishka's family bakery into the film in a few ways. Instead of an extravagant birthday cake, Anfisa has made a loaf of bread in the shape of heart. Dinner rolls at lunch. Incorporating the bakery into the film felt special, a piece of Mishka's identity woven into this intimate story of family. Also, the Prozorovs are out of money. Their brother Andrey has gambled away the last of their inheritance. This was a fun dynamic to play with in terms of the props and food. For example, the girls are served basic lemon soup and wilted radishes in china. They are drinking red wine and Rakia, the last bottles left in the family cellar. Old money traditions contrasted with the lack of new resources. These girls are nostalgic for a world they can no longer keep up with and continue to delude themselves until they can't deny it any longer. These details became clearer to us through filming. I think this happened because we had created a clearly defined world in the writing process, a world that became engrained in us and allowed these details to continue to develop almost unconsciously.
THE HOUSE & MEMORIES
(M.W.) We filmed in such a special home. Did it feel surreal to turn real memories into fiction? Did you guys write the script knowing we were going to film there?
(L.S.) Yes! When I first pitched the idea to Mishka I knew we would have to film in her childhood home. Beyond the sheer beauty of the house, blending fiction with reality in a space that has such a strong nostalgic value was really exciting to me. It did feel a little surreal to turn real memories into fiction. As an actor, we are always drawing upon real memories, using them in an almost secretive and sneaky way, never known to the audience apart from the emotional outcome. However, writing was a completely different experience because it's not so private anymore. In some ways we had to air our dirty laundry in order to get to the truth and that can be confronting. I am really proud of the script we wrote specifically because of how we braided our memories into Chekhov's structure and world. I think having three distinct writing perspectives and memories hopefully helped construct a story that was meaningful for many people. Sometimes I feel like when you are writing on your own, your memories feel special to you and don't necessarily land the same way with the audience. The influences were multi-faceted and hopefully more universal!
(M.W.) I know what it felt like to be inside this little universe while we were filming, but what did it feel like to bring the writing to life?
(L.S.) I felt overwhelmed with pride and yet a little insecure and nervous that all of these incredibly experienced and talented people were showing up to set every day to work on our little idea. It's an incredible gift to be surrounded by a cast and crew of this calibre. Filmmaking is truly an art of collaboration and every individual who touched this project brought their own genius and story to the project, making it that much more meaningful.
Mishka, Coco and I would have internal table reads for months while we were in the early stages of writing. Mishka would read the stage directions and Coco and I would take turns reading different characters. I remember our first official table read, we were so nervous to bring the words that we had spent so long editing off the page. I remember wanting to cry when I heard you read as Irina for the first time. You were everything I could have dreamed of and more for Irina and it's so rare that a character feels so effortlessly true on an inItial cold read! That was a surreal and special moment for me.
(M.W.) What room did you guys know immediately had to be in the film?
(L.S.) The bathroom! I had spent a lot of time in the house with Mishka over the years of our friendship and would always look forward to having a bath in that tub. It's one of the most beautiful tubs I've ever seen. I knew I had to write a scene specifically for it. There was a time we were contemplating cutting out that scene in post and I am so happy we kept it in. Even though the framing is tight and you don't really see the full beauty of the tub, you can feel it.
THREE SISTERS & MAKING IT YOUR OWN
(M.W.) What made three young women look at Three Sisters, a story written more than a century ago, and think, "There's something here that still feels like us"?
(L.S.) I had studied a lot of Chekhov while I was training at Strasberg. All Stanislavsky-driven acting methods revere Chekhov. It's often described as perfect. There was some sort of protection in that. When I first read Three Sisters I thought of Mishka. She is the youngest of four sisters and there were many similarities between the families, some more subtle than others. I felt really excited to share this story with her as I know how important family is to her and to BUCI. Her sisters, her grandmother, her parents are her muses. There was an undeniable synergy between this story and her world. That was the initial pull to explore Chekhov in this way. I myself had also experienced the loss of a family home. The house is almost the main character in this play, in our film, and I felt deeply connected to this specific feeling of loss and nostalgia. I think having experienced something similar to these girls allowed me to remain honest in both acting and directing. Once we started exploring on a deeper level, we all fell in love with the world in our own ways and of course made it more personal. The themes of loss, grief, growth and change are ever-present and defy time and place. I feel the significance of Chekhov in a similar way to Shakespeare- writing that has been immortalized as permanently relevant.
(M.W.) What did you want to keep from Chekhov, and what did you feel completely free to make your own?
(L.S.) To the best of our ability, we wanted to preserve the feeling of Three Sisters. We held on to the arcs and objectives of the sisters, the symbolism of clocks and time, character names and a play-like quality in the shot list. We then wanted to break the rules of dialogue, making our film more colloquial and contemporary. Initially I pulled dialogue directly from the play and over time we found the language that made sense for our world. Sometimes lines would be left over from the original play and eventually they would stick out like a sore thumb. It was important for us to make the dialogue witty, humorous and yet retain meaning to move the story forward. We also changed the time and place- from Russia to a fantastical, fictional place called "Metis Falls" and in moments where we could, we would lean more Serbian than Russian to adhere to Mishka's heritage. Additionally, I was really drawn to the character of Anfisa, who in the play is a less integral character. For our story we desired the sisters to be dependent on her, almost crafting her as an extension of the house and the old ways in which they lived.
THE PROCESS
(M.W.) What were you most unprepared for?
(L.S.) Post-production. As an actor, I feel most comfortable during rehearsals and on set. Pre-production was really fun and exciting and I had worked in that capacity before. Post-production took me by surprise. The process of editing, sound deign, and color was more laborious and testing than I had anticipated. It was difficult to get the three of us in the same room and sometimes on the same page! Ultimately, this was a huge lesson for all of us and I'm so excited to do it all again learning everything I now know.
(M.W.) When you're all old ladies and you put this film on, what do you think you'll remember that the audience will never know?
(L.S.) Coco box dyed my hair on the floor after we had spent hours hand painting and drawing every artwork and prop. There are lengthy handwritten notes on the walls, hidden under books, that the audience will never read but hopefully can feel. For our first film, we really wore each and every hate. And in all honesty, that was my favorite part.
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