One phone call can change everything.
As a mother and daughter work to organize a food drive in the kitchen of a synagogue, we can hear service continuing in the distance. The world outside this seemingly small back room goes on and faith is strengthened amid the donated boxes of pasta and cans of vegetables. There is something peaceful and ordinary in the goings-on of this day in Daniel Solé’s curious, carefully plotted drama, Say As I Say. We think we know where the drama is going, but we are surprised at its emotional destination.
Miriam Silverman’s Raquel is keeping a watch on her daughter, Maesie Kost’s Eva, as they sort through the robust donations. It seems that Eva might be hung over, but Raquel does not lecture or berate. When the phone rings, Raquel answers and it’s Eva’s time to watch how her mother reacts. The voice on the other end informs Raquel that there is a bomb inside the synagogue, and it’s set to go off very soon. Raquel hangs up but she does not signal to anyone what is happening. Is it a prank? A distasteful joke?
Say As I Say detours on our own fears, but it asks us to look inward in how we react to threats or even things that may happen. It acknowledges how powerful words can be while knowingly shows how we have become reactive.
“It started as a feature-length script in one location, but the bomb threat was not part of that story,” Solé says. “The whole film took place in a synagogue over the course of one afternoon, but it had similar themes to the short. At some point, I realized I needed to do that classic thing of making some kind of short. Maybe working backwards is a little more atypical, but I was playing with plucking characters from the family. The moments with Raquel and Eva and their work on the food drive plays a part in the feature script, and it sort of came out of this experience when I went to a Jewish day school growing up in San Francisco. It was a really nice community–imagine all the parents are Grateful Dead fans–and it was where we would do our Thursday morning service.
Every once in a blue moon, I have this memory of service being canceled because there was a bomb threat. Even as a kid, there was something about it that struck me as just odd that we were almost playing this game. I always thought that if someone was calling in to say there was a bomb that there must not actually be a threat. So one of the ideas that came out of it was wondering what it would be like if someone called bullshit on it. At the same time, there’s something really disturbing, I think, about watching someone ignore that as well. I am not trying to dictate what the right answer is in terms of reacting to a scenario like that, but I thought it was a compelling seed for a story.”
“That was something that intrigued me coming on to the project, because I am not Jewish,” Polk, one of the film’s producers says. “That conundrum that Daniel’s talking about was so unexpected. Growing up, we never went to church, and I have been there maybe ten times in my life. The fact that the story could be taking place in a synagogue or a mosque or a church or a community center segregated from religion was something that I wanted to help explore. I loved both of Daniel’s scripts, and the feature is not just a longer version of the short. It has the vibe and the essence of it, though.”
I recalled to Solé and Polk that how I found a bomb threat written on a stall wall in my high school, and I reported it to the office. This was just a few years after Columbine, so the administration investigated this threat with the utmost caution even though there was not a date included in the writing on the wall. The beginning moments, and the phone call, reminded me also of the tragic incident in Pittsburgh in 2018. Solé’s research revealed how most threats to not end in actual violence.
“I discovered how companies or institutions react when they receive a bomb threat, and I remember finding an article where a security expert was advocating more for this kind of non-responsive or minimal response to threats,” Solé says. “He said something like, ‘There are people who make bombs and there are people who make bomb threats–they are never the same people.’ He had studied attacks going back to the seventies, and I think he said there was maybe one incident where someone called it in and then actually attacked. It’s not a common thing. So it raises a question of when do you decide to do something? Obviously, I am not advocating for being reckless and it’s better to be safe than sorry, but that’s something else I wanted to get across with the story. There is a cost to reacting so many times.”
“There is so much in Raquel’s response to not respond,” Polk adds. “You can tell that this is not the first time she’s gone through this.”
When Say centralizes its story on the relationship between Raquel and Eva, we realize how rare it is for a short film to take such an emotional, alternate route. This could have been a thriller about a mother and daughter connecting in the face of violence, but Solé’s script is much more intelligent than that. One of the biggest triumphs is the casting of Tony Award winner Miriam Silverman and Maesie Kost. You begin to feel that both women observe things in the same way, as if they absorb with their eyes before they open their mouths to speak.
“I will be honest that I was unfamiliar with Miriam before I reached out to her,” Solé admits. “I Googled her after that recommendation, and I thought, ‘Oh, shit, she just won a Tony. After she read the script, we met up for coffee. Sometimes you don’t need to have someone read for you–you just know the vibe is right. The way that she spoke about the charcter really struck me, and she told me that she connected with the elements of it being a mother-daughter story and how it holds your attention. For Maisie, we had a great producer on board, Marlena Skrobe, who has a real passion for casting kids and young adults. She took it upon herself to cast a wide net and fielded self-tapes and submissions to help me whittle it down.”
“There was a clear consensus between Daniel, myself, Marlena, and our other producer, Adam Chitayat, that Maesie was our best choice,” Polk says. “She’s got the eyes and there is a dry, teenage affect to her.”
“From the moment that we started rolling, I remember all the stress about the performances melted away,” Solé says. “Gearing up for the actual shoot, you are worried about so many things, but as soon as we started filming, I knew that Miriam and Maesie had it. From the very start. I felt so at ease letting them taking it from there.”
After the first phone call happens, Raquel takes a moment to move some boxes, and we see her alone in a large ballroom. She takes moment to herself, and even though we only see Silverman from behind, it’s very affecting. There’s something about the stacked chairs and the large chandelier–this is a room to hold a celebration or a major event. It’s my favorite shot in the entire short.
“I will credit our third producer, Adam, who very early on suggested that we have this whole moment where Raquel walks away,” Solé says. “The way that I had it written in the script, I never had this tracking shot in the early draft. It was more about her pausing by the phone before she walks over. I think the script had her doing something with the dishes in the sink to distract herself before she walks back. Adam had brought up this idea of what if it was this longer moment where she goes out, looks at the security guard, and we stay on her for a while. As soon as he said that, I knew it made so much sense. Once we found the location, we couldn’t not use this ballroom space. The area with the boxes is the landing area for the food drive [donations], so after she gets the phone call, Raquel can go out to the lobby, check on the guard, walk back and place the box down. Even in person, it’s a very striking room–I almost wondered if there was a way that we could do the whole short in there but that didn’t make sense.”
“We had full run of the synagogue, and there were maybe one of two people who stayed in their office and asked us if we needed anything every six hours or so,” Polk says. “They were so welcoming with their space and let us lind of do whatever we wanted and needed for the shoot.”
“I spoke with Mat [Bastos], our incredible DP, with what we wanted to do with Miriam in that space. Once she gets into the ballroom, we will stop at the camera to almost watch her. Keep it a wide shot. There’s something about wanting to see her alone in that moment. She’s isolated. I didn’t tell Miriam anything about her body language, but when she had that setup, she knew exactly what to do. That’s Miriam. She knows’s how to communicate to the camera even when it’s not a tight close-up.”
Even as the narrative shifts to something more intimate, we cannot help but think of the other people in other areas of the space. Raquel took it upon herself to react to that threat while showing her daughter something that she will be able to take with her into other avenues of her life. Would other people react in the same fashion?
“In post-production, we talked a lot about the congregation singing off-camera and how much we could hear it,” Polk says. “The very subtle change of being able to close the door and muffle the sound a little was one of those things that as you’re running through and rehearsing the look of a tracking shot that ended up being so satisfying. It’s my favorite sound moment of the entire film–that slow push and shift in the sound.”
“The closing of the door came on the day of the shoot, and it’s like Raquel needs to almost separate her decision from the rest of the people in the building,” Solé says. “She decides to be on her own with her choice.”
