Interview: A BANQUET director Ruth Paxton
In A Banquet, a widowed mother (Sienna Guillory) is radically tested when her teenage daughter Betsey (Jessica Alexander) experiences a profound enlightenment and insists that her body is no longer her own, but in service to a higher power. Bound to her newfound faith, Betsey refuses to eat but loses no weight. In an agonizing dilemma, torn between love and fear, Holly is forced to confront the boundaries of her own beliefs. In advance of the film's February 18th release in theaters and on VOD, director Ruth Paxton sat down to talk with Caitlin Grant from BGH and the Plug It Up podcast. We present an excerpt of the interview here, but to hear the full interview, as well as an in-depth discussion of A Banquet, download the latest episode of Plug It Up wherever you get your podcasts.
BGH: First off, I really enjoyed the movie and wanted to get a little background on how this came to be, how you got involved.
Ruth Paxton: Sure, well, it was at a general meeting with a producer called Leonora Darby and the point of that meeting was really for me to talk about what I was writing, because I typically write what I direct, and for her to tell me about potential projects for us. We ended up talking about A Banquet which was a script that she had developed with Justin Bull, who's an American screenwriter.
And when she described it to me, she pitched it as a film that was like a cross between Rosemary's Baby, Hereditary, and Take Shelter. I like those films, so I really wanted to read it. She sent me that script that day. I sent her my latest short film, which was a pretty dark psychological horror. And I think what's quite funny is that we both consumed them simultaneously and by the end of the day I'm like “I really want to do this” and she's like, “I really want you to do this.” So we then met with Justin and everything just fell into place. It was a very harmonious, collaborative process. It was an unusual thing as well because it was my first feature and it came out of nowhere and it all came together quite quickly.
BGH: So for my day job I work for an eating disorder treatment facility and although A Banquet is not necessarily about an eating disorder, I will say that it gets those beats, from my experience, exactly right. I love the themes of psychological horror here, and I appreciate that you've explored them in your work, themes of mental illness. I appreciate that you've done it knowledgeably and tactfully, and also just being unafraid to look into the darkness a little bit. Do you want to speak any more to the themes of psychological horror?
RP: Ultimately, it's a bit of a survival thing for me. I've always been drawn to exploring the psyche in my work, looking at what our subconscious does. That's something that's been there from when I was making work as a student. I'm 38 now and when I was 30 I was diagnosed with a mood disorder, which obviously has been there since I was young. I went unmedicated and a big part of coming to terms with that was trying to manage it. Learning about mindfulness and practicing CBT and talking therapy and all that. There was a journey towards becoming medicated, let's say. But one of the things that helped me the most was reading about thought processes and how our brains work and how we function and survive as humans. Trying to understand the beast, as it were, really helped me live better and I think that's what I'm committed to exploring in films.
This film, while I didn't write it, is a confluence of themes and experiences that I and many women have gone through. You know, that very specific relationship with our mothers and our ideas about food and body. I had a period of not eating that was a result of the anxiety that I was experiencing. I just stopped eating, got really good at not eating, for a couple of years. So for me there was something that I could really relate to in Betsey’s complete commitment to this. I think one of the things that people don't understand about disordered eating and anorexia is that it goes beyond body image. It's not about that, it's a mental illness. You genuinely think something bad is going to happen if you eat. That's what's really hard to understand from the outside, and I suppose what my mum really struggled to understand. So you get the image of the mother going. “Why won't you just fucking eat the peas?”
And it's like, “Because I can’t!”, and it's not because I think I'm going to get fat, that's not how it works. That for me was very powerful about this script and the breakdown of the family unit as a result of what Betsy is doing was familiar to me too. I mean, it's not direct experience and I was quite worried about how to portray the disordered eating on screen in earlier versions of the script.
There were moments where Betsy did become skeletal and I did a lot of research about films that have portrayed eating disorders narratively and really that’s dangerous territory, so I tried to navigate that as best I possibly could. But yeah, I was conscious that it wasn't about showing Betsy not eating. You know, apart from when she doesn't want to eat the pea, and that's a power struggle. We don't see any kind of bingeing behavior or restriction behavior. It's just kind of ambiguous.
A Banquet opens in select theaters, on digital platforms and VOD on February 18th