Let’s face it — disability representation is abysmal. On the rare occasions a disabled character is featured in the media, they’re often shown with harmful stereotypes. Thankfully, we have filmmakers like Liz Sargent fighting to change this. Sargent’s new movie, Take Me Home, is a deeply personal story centering on her cognitively disabled sister Anna, who plays a version of herself in the movie.
Against the backdrop of a Florida suburb, Anna’s aging parents (Victor Slezak and Marceline Hugot) care for her, and she acts as a caregiver in return. When tragedy strikes, however, their routine is disrupted, temporarily pulling Anna’s sister Emily (Ali Ahn) back into the fold. Everyone does their best with the limited resources they have, but the truth is, society isn’t set up for anyone to succeed. Though the topic is heavy, there are some great moments of levity peppered throughout, making for a much more joyful, hopeful watch than you might expect.
Fanversation got the chance to sit down with Sargent at the Sundance Film Festival. During the conversation, she broke down the film’s crucial message, spoke about working with Ali Ahn, revealed what inspired the movie’s bold ending, teased the project she wants to direct next, and more.
This interview contains spoilers for Take Me Home.
You’ve done several short films, including a proof-of-concept for this. What was the most challenging part of transitioning from the shorts world to a full-blown feature?
LIZ SARGENT: Well, there are so many challenges to that — I don’t even know where to start. It’s really finding the funding, because there’s so much more money and so many more people involved that you need to believe in the script and the concept and to take a chance on you to lead it. That’s the hardest part. This story is so personal and so clear to me — that wasn’t the hard part, even though this film was built in a structured but improvisational way. I always knew the heart of it, and I always knew that it would work and that it had an audience. It was just getting the pieces together that felt eternal.
Anna obviously plays the same role in both the short and the feature, but some of the other actors changed between the two. What went into the casting process?
I realized only recently that I was never questioned if Anna should be the lead. She’s 99% of the film — she’s all over it — and it was incredible to see her be number one. That felt awesome to me. And then, we cast everything around her, which meant that we were really looking for good human beings first. She responds to the humans and actors who wanted to be challenged in this way, in the sense of doing a structured improv and playing off of somebody else, and not being selfish in their own intentions and having expectations of the other person to play off of them in a certain way. A lot of them were people who had theater backgrounds who were really dedicated to the process and could do repetitions, so that was number one. In every part of this film, the people who responded to the material found the project, and it sort of worked out in that way.
Something that really stood out to me was the sisterhood dynamic. Their chemistry felt so authentic, from the shoplifting scene to when they’re smelling each other. I was like, “Yeah, that’s sisterhood right there.” You talked a little bit about the structured improv, but I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about how you developed that dynamic to make it feel so real on screen.
Ali is just awesome. They did their first rehearsal, and I was not sure how they were going to work together. I love her as a performer, and I’ve seen that she’s had such an incredible range. She’s got the vibe that I loved. I’m in love with her as a human. It’s embarrassing to be like, “You’re going to play sort of a version of myself because I love you and I wish I could be you,” but they immediately clicked, and Ali’s such a fucking gymnast in the way that she works. She just is so present and knows her craft so well and could shift and change around whatever Anna was giving her in the moment. I was like, “Oh, that’s what I need — that kind of playful energy and that kind of trust and giving back to Anna.” She’s not self-conscious; she knows where she is in space, and she could remember the continuity that we needed to have, even though it was sort of a wildcard of a process. That dynamic was easy. And Anna loves people — she loves good people — so I think I had good taste in casting people that she would respond to. The thing is, Anna’s magnetic. People love her. Everybody says that 90% of directing is casting, and I feel that so much.
They popped off the screen in such a beautiful, fun way. As someone who has a family member with dementia and lives thousands of miles away from them, I really related to Emily’s character. There’s this combination that I don’t feel like you see a lot: she’s overwhelmed, and she’s also feeling guilty, but she knows she has these limitations. That quote, “I can’t do more,” struck such a chord with me. Can you talk about shaping that character? I feel like that’s going to resonate with a lot of people, and that experience is something I don’t see depicted a lot.
The short was centered around the sisters, and then I looked at the feature, and I was trying to figure out what that would look like, and that part was so much smaller, because I didn’t want people to use her as a solution and to assume that it was the sister’s or the family members’ responsibility and problem. I think it’s a community thing — the services need to be available. To me, the reason I knew that I wanted to make this film, and I never wavered from it, is that this is the ethical dilemma of our lives. When I saw how Anna and Ali related to each other and what an incredible human and actor Ali is, her role sort of started changing and developing. Everybody’s did, actually. That happened with Victor, and scenes shifted. But the thing is, I never wanted her to solve anything, and I think there’s a moment in time — and maybe you have this experience for aging adults — where we know when we should step in, and that’s the hardest moment. You see it happening, but you have to give them their self-agency, and it’s this horrible moment of conflict that, usually, because we can’t talk about it, ends in some kind of disastrous moment. That is the only turning point.
This is such a small detail, but the fact that Anna’s wearing the I Love New York t-shirt when Emily leaves was such a cute little detail. I’m curious where that came from.
Oh my gosh, that’s Min Ji [Kim]. She’s the costume designer, and she is the best. She had so much love in the film. There were a lot of things I didn’t want, and she pushed back, and she knew it was right. I trusted her so much because I’m so trapped in the reality of, “This is Anna,” but she has such a big heart, so much love, and an understanding of the characters and those little details that are not heavy-handed but just enough to break your heart.
I also really love the dynamic between Anna and the neighbor. I’m curious if you can talk about that, because I really did not know where that was going, and I love that he turned out to be this sweet frat guy character.
That feeling that you had is so interesting and so revealing because I think it says a lot about how we feel about the safety of our communities — that we people, everyone, initially feel like it’s going to be horrible and disastrous, and this guy’s just a dude. He’s just a simple dude, but he’s not dangerous. He’s not bad. And he actually treats Anna like an equal. They just chill, and that’s all Anna wants in her life. That moment of being treated normally and like an adult who gets to be playful and badass and joke is all Anna’s striving for.
It also contributes to this message of appearances versus the reality of people, and I think that was such a cool other layer on top of that.
And Shane [Harper] plays that so well. He has a personal relationship with his brother. He made a film with his brother, who has autism, so he’s had a similar process to what I was doing with Anna. He had such a big heart, and they connected immediately. That was another thing where the magic’s just there, and they can do anything. He came on the second-to-last day, and he was so great that we were like, “We need to keep him another day.” So we added in more scenes just to make his character really make sense.
This film explores Anna’s desire and sexuality. That’s so refreshing and something we really don’t see a lot at all. I’m curious if you can talk about including that, even the porn scene.
As a sister, I love Anna so much. I believe in her. I push her. And that’s part of making this movie and what I wanted in the film as well. But also, I can second-guess her, because I’m family and I’m protective of her. Some kind of moment like that happened in real life, and I was shocked and taken aback — I felt so embarrassed, and it was so revealing for myself. I don’t know what Anna thinks about romantic relationships in her life, but of course, she’s curious. She’s a 36-year-old woman in this world wanting relationships, and nobody acknowledges that in her. So it was a little peek in there to show that she’s a fully dimensional human being, and she’s the same as everybody else.
All of the characters are multi-dimensional and flawed, but the only real villain — and you touched on this a little bit — is the healthcare system. I’m curious if you can talk about doing a commentary on that without it being heavy-handed or preachy. I feel like it was integrated in a way that felt so natural. It didn’t feel like an after-school special.
Thank you. That’s my worst fear. I never wanted to give answers or solutions or be didactic like that. I think I wanted to just spark people’s curiosity about what is available, because in my experience, a lot of people have said to me, “Oh, we’ll just do this,” or “Medicaid covers it,” and I’m like, “You know how hard that is? Do you know what the day-to-day is like?” I wanted to spark people’s imagination to start thinking about what their options are. I wanted people to identify with and love all of these characters, want more for them, and wonder how it could be easier. In that way, if we spark people’s imagination to shift what exists in this world, all of them can thrive exactly as they are — they can age into disability, they can have a disability, they can live their independence, and they can be a family. And that’s all any of us want or strive for, right? Mainly, my answer is that I just didn’t want to give solutions.
I wrote this line down: “If this was a different world, Anna, you’d be spectacular.” That’s what I was thinking of when that ending happened. Is that on the right track of what you were going for?
That was a piece of it. It’s also a thing that I think my mother has said before, and maybe, in some way, it all came together in this poetic way that things do when it’s so personal. I’m really inspired by Yoko Ono’s works — her imagined works like “War is Over! If You Want It.” I think it’s a power of imagination. If you can imagine something, you can think of a way to make it possible. If you can see what that world would look like, then maybe it will. I just want to leave the audience with that active imagination about how we could make this world without it being utopian — what that would really require. I think it just requires fresh air, good food, community, a little self-agency, and that’s it. There’s still conflict. We’ll still have bickering sisters. We’ll still have disability, and that’s okay. But that’s all we want. Don’t we deserve that? To love Anna and then see her in this world where she’s thriving, of course, you want that.
Has that always been the ending, or did you go through different drafts of that?
No, it was, it was very, very hard to find. But it’s the same thing as, I didn’t want to give solutions, and I didn’t want to sit in a hard reality, because then it lets people off the hook. They’re like, “Well, this is what life is like.” And I don’t think it has to be like this. The whole thing was really hard to calibrate, because I wanted to also keep Anna super, super human and equal.
I love a movie that ends with a very strong choice. I think it’s cool when you take a risk and do something that I don’t expect.
I really wanted to leave it open-ended. There’s this Jenny Holtzer quote that used to be at the end of the film, and it was, “In a dream, you saw a way to survive, and you were full of joy.” Anna’s dream is just to survive. All of their dreams — Emily’s, their dad’s — all we’re all doing in this world is just trying to survive. We just want one good day. Give me a break. Give us all a break.
What are you going to do next? Do you have something in the pipeline? Do you have a dream project you want to do?
I’ve always had, in the back of my head, trying to go a little bit more into genre and making an adoptee reunion film that is an examination of nature and nurture, and maybe goes into thriller, and it’s about confronting your dark side. I actually want to build this film with Ali. Take Me Home was built around Anna and knowing her, and now I’m looking at Ali and thinking about her immense talent and how to play and build and be inspired by that, and also use my personal experience as an adoptee and understanding myself and what that biological connection means to me.
I’m so here for this continued collaboration. I need all the projects with you two together for the rest of time.
Take Me Home is available to rent through the Sundance Film Festival until February 1st. Get tickets here.
— Taylor Gates