When “Bonjour Tristesse” premiered at TIFF last September, director Durga Chew-Bose described the indie film’s Toronto producers Katie Bird Nolan and Lindsay Tapscott as “very persistent.” And even a glance at the trajectory of their production company, Babe Nation, shows that their persistence has paid off — they’ve been pursuing this film for nine years, almost as long as they’ve been a company.
“Bonjour Tristesse,” out in cinemas May 2, is an adaptation of the beloved 1954 French novel by Françoise Sagan. Starring Chloë Sevigny, Claes Bang and Lily McInerny, it centres around 17-year-old protagonist Cécile and her inchoate notions about womanhood, sensuality and freedom. The story unfolds over one formative summer when Cécile’s father, his girlfriend, and her late mother’s longtime friend all come together under the same roof. After its world premiere at TIFF, the film continued on a festival tour with stops at Palm Springs and Goteborg, garnering buzz along the way.
Babe Nation’s story begins with a chance encounter straight out of the movies. Katie’s mother and Lindsay’s father had been “close hippie pals” in the 1970s but eventually drifted apart. Decades later, their daughters happened to meet in a Montreal clothing store and discovered that they, too, were kindred spirits.
“One of the things that Lindsay and I bonded over was the fact that we both thought we were theatre kids but we were wrong,” said Bird Nolan. “We were much happier being behind the scenes and it brought us a lot of joy to let other people be in the spotlight, hence why we’ve championed emerging directors and writers as hard as we have.”
Actually, they haven’t so much championed emerging talent as taken huge gambles on first-time women writers and directors who’d never worked on a feature film before. That would be a risk for any production company, let alone a fledgling one still establishing itself in the industry. But they bet on Aisling Chin-Yee, who directed their debut feature project, “The Rest of Us,” starring Heather Graham; Mary Nighy, director of “Alice, Darling,” starring Anna Kendrick; and Chew-Bose. Where does that kind of confidence come from?
“We just wanted to work with them and we knew that they could do it,” said Bird Nolan. “So many of our decisions are gut instinct decisions. We’re trying to get a little better about being logical in our decisions, especially as our budgets get bigger and our talent gets a little bigger, but it’s the same kind of kismeti feeling.” Their connection enables this kind of instinctive process. “It’s just kind of a telepathic understanding between me and Lindsay that this is the person [for the project] and it’s going to be great and we’ll do anything we can to get it done.”
That was how it went with bringing Chew-Bose on board as the screenwriter for “Bonjour Tristesse.” The pair began toying with the idea of making the film in 2017, while in development for “The Rest of Us,” just after Chew-Bose’s book of essays, “Too Much and Not the Mood,” came out.
“Her writing is so visual and so precise and intimate. We read her book and just had this feeling that she would do a beautiful job of this adaptation,” said Tapscott. “There’s so much interiority in the book, and Durga writes about girlhood and being a woman, which are things that Cecile in the book grapples with as she comes of age. So we had a feeling that she would do something really special with it.”
Here, their aforementioned persistence came into play. They didn’t have a single feature film to their name when they decided to cold contact the book’s publisher, Éditions Julliard, to inquire about the rights — and were promptly turned down. Undeterred, they periodically sent long, ruminating emails “into the abyss” — aka the inbox of Delphine de la Panneterie, who oversaw audiovisual rights — full of anecdotes from their own lives and musings about their relationships with their fathers. On a trip to Paris a few months later, Bird Nolan dropped by the publisher’s office unannounced. “I just knocked at their door and was like, ‘Hello, it is I from your email, can I have coffee with you please?’” She was able to persuade de la Panneterie to consider selling them the rights if they could find a screenwriter the publishers approved of. (Spoiler: they did.)
It took some convincing to get Chew-Bose on board — after all, she had never written a screenplay before — but she soon understood their vision, and realized they would set her up for success.
“They made it very clear that the orbit of support around me would come from a lot of people, and that’s how a movie is made,” said Chew-Bose. “They prefer to say yes before they say no. That creates a very open environment and also instilled some confidence in me, because imagine having never done something, and then every question you have, or request or dream, someone says no — you start to lose confidence in yourself, and maybe lose confidence in the people surrounding you.”
Equally important is the ability to accept — even embrace — when things go wrong. After a few directors turned down “Bonjour Tristesse,” Tapscott and Bird Nolan finally decided to listen to the little voice that had been telling them that Chew-Bose shouldn’t just be the writer of the film but the director as well. Through some further fortuitous twists, they also ended up with the actors they’d initially had in mind for their dream cast: Chloë Sevigny, Claes Bang and Lily McInerny.
“I think we’ve gotten to the point now where we don’t take nos personally,” said Bird Nolan. “I know a lot of producers, especially when starting out, get really discouraged. We always say if this is what you want to do, you’re going to get way more nos than yeses so you have to learn how to make the nos feel like a win somehow. Like, ‘Oh, thank god they said no, which means we get to go in this direction’ or ‘Thank god they said no because it means we can do it at this budget level.’ There are so many different ways to look at it.”
Chew-Bose appreciates this deeply. “So many moments in making a movie present you with heartbreak,” she said. “I think they’re really good at managing what it’s like to acknowledge bad news, but then also making extreme amounts of space to move on and to generate new possibilities. That’s what makes them really great producers.”
It’s been over a decade since Bird Nolan and Tapscott began working together at the kitchen table in their shared apartment, a cosy corner dubbed “babe nation” by Bird Nolan’s now-husband. But their mission remains intact.
“All of our projects to date, and certainly the ones we have on our slate currently, are all love letters to women,” says Tapscott. “We are truly making movies for all of the wonderful, smart, nuanced, mysterious women in our lives.”
