Every film tries to create a visual language that helps us understand and connect to its characters. But director Ami Canaan Mann wanted to take a much more detailed and systematic approach to "Audrey's Children," a new biopic released on March 28 about the pioneering medical work of Dr. Audrey Evans (Natalie Dormer). Mann wanted the look of the film to be born out of Evans' rich interior life.
"I feel like it was an opportunity to have a performance-platformed biopic about a really extraordinary woman where, essentially, it's a story about watching her think and solve problems," Canaan Mann told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. "It happens to be couched in something [a hospital drama] that I guess could be considered a genre, but what if the world of the movie was as visually specific as the woman herself?"
Mann's ideas call for an impressive level of specificity, as Evans's accomplishments stretch well beyond the frame of a 90-minute feature -- she is known as the "mother of neuroblastoma" for her work on making that pediatric cancer much more survivable, she and her team invented the cancer staging system that most of the world is familiar with today, and she helped organize the founding of the Ronald McDonald house to support families with patients in cancer treatment.
But "Audrey's Children" rises to the challenge, with a gorgeous color palette that consciously draws from the look of '60s photography, compositions that embrace patterns as a visual echo of the science Evans is seeking to understand, and camera choices that keep the viewer as focused as Evans is. Mann, cinematographer Jon Keng, costume designer Sarah Maiorino, and production designer Amber Unkle frame up everything from raindrops on a window to layers of wallpaper to create a world that is as richly textured and interesting as Evans' thought process.
"I thought about what it would be like to be somebody who, from a very early age, was able to see cognitively -- and have a desire to understand -- patterns of behavior in the world around her and how that translates in the world we see in the film, and then eventually into the work that she does," Canaan Mann said. "So you see the patterns on the wallpaper. She takes the wallpaper out. There's another pattern behind that. [There are] patterns in her dresses, which was also just authentically how Audrey dressed. I wanted to carry that through the film overall."
Arguably the most romantic-looking scene in the movie is the late-night notecard parsing session where Evans, her intellectual counterpart Dr. Dan D'Angio (Jimmi Simpson), and her colleague Dr. Brian Faust (Brandon Michael Hall) all analyze past cases in order to create a staging system for different cancer treatments, instead of giving all patients the same treatment. Arguably the moment that Evans looks the most beautiful is the one in which, just before a benefit dinner, she takes a young patient (Julianna Layne) up to the hospital rooftop to help the child think through her own mortality -- that is, to her, the most meaningful part of her job. Every shot is shaped by Evans' perspective on the world.
"What I do in prep is I have a wall of research photos. Not really clips from other movies; I don't really do that so much. It's more vintage photography and anything else that feels appropriate. And I put [these] in story order on the wall, floor to ceiling, so anybody can walk in, any crew member, and if we're having a conversation we can have the visual references there," Canaan Mann said. "What emerged from that for 'Audrey's Children' was [that the film] needed to be Ektachrome. You need to feel like you're in the '60s, you're in that vintage color palette: No primary colors, no black, no grey, very saturated."
Visually grounding the viewer in the time period and in the protagonist's perspective helped guide all the decisions that Canaan Mann and her team had to make, from finding the right locations to where and how to use the sound design to heighten Evans' connection to her work. It also led Canaan Mann and composer Genevieve Vincent to a lively jazz score.
"I knew I wanted mid-century jazz because I wanted something that just felt like thinking. That's again making decisions from the interiority of the character as opposed to imposing something on the character, you know?" Canaan Mann said. "So [the goal was] to be in the oeuvre of jazz, but in a way that was slightly disassembled so that it could segue into tonality when it needed to, but when we were in those moments where we have sustaining notes, it didn't feel schlocky because it felt like it was emerging from the jazz."
Avoiding schlock is a huge part of any director's job, but especially on a period biopic of this type. "Was it Steven Soderbergh who said that when you're directing, there's a bad version of the movie sort of running alongside you like a train? Maybe I made up the train part [but] your job as a director is to be continually pulling the movie from that bad version you can just see out of the corner of your eye," Canaan Mann said.
Canaan Mann's theory of how to do that in "Audrey's Children" is embedded in the visual design of the film. "If [the movie] could feel like a complete world -- visually, texturally -- then it would be a world that you would want to be in. If it was consistent, if it felt authentic, if you wanted to be in that world, then at the end of an hour and a half, you'll have been told a story about kids with cancer, which you might not otherwise have wanted to know about before," Canaan Mann said.