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| Sweetness |
Emma Higgins' directorial feature début, Sweetness, follows 16-year-old social misfit Rylee (Kate Hallett), who has a chance encounter with rock star heartthrob Payton (Herman Tømmeraas). He's supposedly turning his life around after leaving rehab. When Rylee discovers that he has relapsed, she takes it upon herself to save him. Their encounter leads the pair into a series of frightening choices.
Higgins' previous credits include the 2015 short film The Last House On The Right, a comedy about the attempts of two young women to vanquish an intruder from their house, and God Hates A Coward, in which a man's business pitch is upended when he's poisoned by a hallucinogenic frog. In 2021, she directed the thriller The Northwoods, about two sisters who reconnect and confront their family's dark past. Higgins has also directed music videos for rock band Mother Mother and singer-songwriters Jessie Reyez and Ingrid Andress.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Higgins discussed the gauntlet of indie filmmaking and fulfilling the dream of directing her first feature. She also spoke about the empathetic treatment of her protagonist, quizzing her audience and the transformative and transportive nature of cinema.
Paul Risker: Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?
Emma Higgins: Cinema has always been a source of escapism for me — I think that would probably show in Sweetness. Even as a kid, I was really into movies and on a very personal level too. I was a bad sleeper, and I couldn't ever sleep at night. I remember my mom wouldn't let me watch movies after a certain time, but I watched them in my head. I remember doing that a lot as a kid.
I don't think I realised that it was just a way to go somewhere else for a little while. I love books too, but movies just stuck with me a little bit more. There's a love for how transportive they can be, and the thing that always gets me is that you can take someone somewhere totally different. You can give them a different experience or just let them leave their own life for a little while. You can completely change someone's perspective and that's what I like about movies.
PR: Picking up on your point about transportive experiences, Sweetness is about choice and, for better or worse, the consequences of our choices. Sometimes we can feel removed from who we are and where we want to be because of the decisions we make.
EH: The idea of choices is something that's present in the film and there are definitely a lot of bad choices. A theme that emerged for me was love. I call it a love story, but there's this power or narrative that I was interested in exploring too. That was a little bit about what I was fed as a teenager. There are these questions about what Rylee can do in the world and what her value is — it's not very high.
She has that speech about how she's not really good at things. So, she finds this thing that she thinks she can be good at, which is loving someone. This is fed to people, especially young girls. It's still a role, like being in service to a man. And if you can be good at that, then that gives you some value. She just thinks, 'This is the thing I can be good at.' It's love, and what could be wrong with love? And with that blanket, it justifies more choices because to love someone is so pure in her mind.
PR: I don't see Rylee as an immoral character. Instead, she's someone that has been caught up in the messiness of life and her own mind. The quote that sprung to mind was, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." It's a fitting quote to describe the film, which is more interested in the moral grey shades.
EH: I'm happy to hear you say that because that's certainly the intention. One of the pieces of feedback I've received is that I, as the filmmaker, empathised with the lead character. She's going off the rails, but I'm trying to have the audience show Rylee, who does horrible things throughout the film, empathy.
PR: What struck me about the set-up is how you ground it in a way that it's believable. It could easily have come across as far-fetched and absurd.
EH: I'm excited for people to watch it for that reason too, because when I describe the film as a one-liner, it sounds ridiculous. But when you watch it, I hope you can see how we got here.
That was the question I kept asking myself. I needed Rylee to be smart. She's doing the wrong thing, but she's not stupid. She's not doing it for the sake of simply advancing the plot — you can see a logical thought process there. I thought we could see how this could happen and how we could get to this point with Rylee. It's a wild accomplishment for Kate, who plays Rylee, because she takes her there. My direction to her throughout the story was never to play her evil and never to play her crazy. She's 100% the hero in her mind. She's not the villain, and you can see she exudes this sweetness.
PR; Rylee's relationship with her father is interesting because, in the beginning, it appears he provides a kind and caring home. As the story progresses, there's something unspoken about their relationship. What struck me was how you do not feel compelled to reveal every detail of your character's history. Instead, details are left undisclosed, and the family dynamics are teased.
EH; There's a lot that's not in the film that is my own backstory or the backstory that I worked on with the actors. And, you start to fail when you try and tell all the different stories. So, you get to see only this much, and we're alluding to a lot more.
With the father, I have my stories and Justin, who plays the dad, has his own dynamic in mind. There's obviously something broken there, but it's working. It also comes from my British family, where it's a "we don't talk about it" kind of situation. We'll show up for each other, but when something happens, we're not to ever speak of it. I think there's a lot of that in this film.
I don't think we have to talk about the father. There are a lot of dynamics, and again, the actors did a good job with, frankly, not a lot of screen time to communicate that relationship and explain what that dynamic is. Hopefully you'll understand that it's maybe not the healthiest environment for Rylee.
PR: Cinema is a shared language, and you inevitably draw on certain influences. One film that is difficult not to draw comparisons to is Misery.
EH: There are a lot of different homages. I think it's said that good art isn't born, it's stolen, right? So, you take your influences, and you make them your own. I know that I've taken a lot of influences from different things. Kathy Bates, for sure. Her character is iconic — you don't get any more iconic than that. And there's even a literal nod — one of Payton's tattoos on his arm is a sledgehammer.
We probably wouldn't be here without Misery. We get to do our version, but it's a different villain. Later on, Annie Wilkes appears in Castle Rock and other stuff where they do much more of a deep character study. But in Misery, she is just cockadoodie — she's cuckoo, right? There's no depth and I don't think we have a lot of empathy for her as a character.
There are a lot of different influences. I didn't go to film school, and so watching movies was my thing. I have a high school diploma, but I never studied cinema in any way other than studying it on my own. Watching movies became part of my language that I now express. I'm just an amalgamation of all the different things that have soaked into me over the years — I think we all are.
PR: The whole film is built around the horror of the lack of control, even though the characters make clearly defined choices.
EH: […] I don't know that I've reflected so much on the theme of a lack of control, but it's true. There's something very powerful about the process. This is my first feature, but what I've learned about art and filmmaking is that it reflects back at you. That's certainly something that I was very much exploring or have always thought about. That theme in particular comes out very clearly because it's a time of teenhood.
I always listen to music, even when I'm writing and directing, just to ground myself. I have a whole playlist of all the music that I listened to as a teenager that always brings me back to that emotional space. And as a teenager, that space, emotionally, is all about a lack of control. You don't have your own money or freedom or the ability to do anything. You're just stuck, or at least that was how I felt as a teenager, and that does carry on into adulthood in a lot of different ways.
PR: I've often considered that films start off being about the characters and end up being about the audience. Would you agree?
EH: It's still about the characters on screen, but we end the film breaking the fourth wall, so we are going inside the audience's perspective. It's a theme that was maybe a little more of a surface theme at first, which was this idea of our participation in fame and our role in the glorification of various things. I don't think it's as interesting of a theme to me, but I like to touch on it and, towards the end, we do pull the audience into the conversation. It's something that we can't avoid, but I'm less interested in that than I am in the psychology of Rylee herself.
PR: I watch Scent Of A Woman, and the regret of Al Pacino's character resonates with me more strongly than it did for my younger self. The same can be said about the father and son relationship in Tim Burton's Big Fish. I imagine where you are in your life will affect the experience you have with Sweetness.
EH: I was rewatching Gilmore Girls and when it was first on, I was a teenager, and now I'm the mom. It's the same thing as 500 Days Of Summer. With that, I think we have changed culturally too. Everyone was on his side in that movie and then, going back to it, I thought, 'This guy's a little bit of a creep now. Relax, sir. This is a problem that you've created. She was pretty clear with you.'
I'm always very curious to know where people stand, and whether they're on Rylee's side. Hopefully we leave some questions because the father makes some pretty big decisions about what he's going to do for his daughter. I like to ask dads what they would do if they were in this situation.
Another conversation that we don't see on screen, but I ask people if they believe happened, is, did those two ever talk about what happened or was it just never discussed again? I like that people can hopefully start to ask themselves what they would do here or have some sort of empathy.
PR: Looking back on the experience of making Sweetness, was it a transformative experience?
EH: Yes, it changed me a lot and mostly for the better. It was very challenging, and being an indie film it was this gauntlet. Making a movie was the dream, right? I've been making things for years, and it had been a long time since I'd been on set for more than a couple of days in a row. The physical and emotional challenge was daunting, having to hold down such a leadership position with such a young cast. At least now I have the self-assuredness that I did that.
There were things that revealed themselves to me that I didn't realise I was exploring — personal things. There's a scene where I was on set and I realised, "Oh my God! Oh, no! I wrote my own father." It didn't hit me until I was on set, because to me, this was a character I'd written. But there was something that came out that was true to my own bad relationship, and so, there were these personal breakthroughs.
I want to do this again because we had a great time. It changed me, and it was hard, but it's a lot of fun, and I was so blessed. This cast was the sweetest. They were so dedicated, and I love people who have passion, and I was surrounded by passionate people, like my editor, my production designer, my cinematographer and the department heads, who all love what they do, and they love movies.
We watched films every night during preproduction in our office. We watched Carrie, Misery, The Silence Of The Lambs, Ginger Snaps, Jennifer's Body, and Gone Girl. And, we had a song of the day that we played every morning so we could set the tone for the day. There was always some emo or something that spoke to teen angst. But just being in that space with people who were all willing to get on board with an idea that I came up with, felt like I was being pranked. It was crazy.
PR: What was the seed of the idea that culminated in your feature début?
EH: I was touring with bands at the time, and I was making music videos. There was some nugget of the idea that was discussed early on with friends, but yes, the idea was this modern-day version of Misery or just seeing how intense the fans are and how social media has started to make it even more intense. People always thought they were entitled to people's time in a really intense way, like, you owe me this time; you owe me a photo, or you owe me whatever. I started to write a draft, and it just transformed into something much more empathetic. I'd started out trying to write a horror movie about crazy fans, but Sweetness is not that.
Sweetness premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
