The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Blue Heron.

Congratulations on this incredible feature debut. I was really taken with the finished look of the film, and I’d love to hear about that as well as the inclusion of what look like real photographs in the film.
Sophy Romvari: Thank you. They are real photographs. This is pretty thematic for me. In my earlier work, I made a lot of short films—which the Criterion Channel is currently streaming! A lot of that work is inspired by the fact that my dad, much like the dad in this film, photographed and filmed me and my brothers growing up. He had a very artistic eye because he studied to be a cinematographer in Hungary, but after they immigrated to Canada, he was not professionally practicing. So he kind of used me and my brothers as his subjects for his own artistic practice. Then he became a graphic designer, which is what you see in the film. I grew up with this incredible treasure trove of photographs, and the way my dad documented things is a big part of how I’ve been able to understand and piece together my own life. I made a short film called Stilled Processing, which is about his photography and about seeing the photographs for the first time on camera as myself. I wanted to insert into this fictional format a similar concept of capturing memories, capturing your childhood, and then having that be what you’re able to hold onto as an adult, something tangible that you can remember people by.

I wanted the film to have an aesthetic that felt intentional but naturalistic

You work with both professional and non-professional actors in this film. Can you talk about the casting and working with your actors?
SR: I’m happy to talk about the casting. It was a co-production between Canada and Hungary, and that’s chiefly because the two actors that play the parents are from Hungary. We tried to find Hungarian cast within Canada, but it’s quite a limited pool of actors, a certain demographic who can speak both fluent Hungarian and English. We worked with the Hungarian casting director, who found the parents, and then we cast the family as you do, to build off the parents. The parents needed to have a believable chemistry, which was how we started to cast with those two. Of course the family itself needed to look similar enough, but they also needed to have chemistry. Then we was cast Eylul [Guven], who plays young Sasha. It was her first audition, first movie, first everything. And she’s quite a talented actor. She was genuinely nothing like her character, actually… she’s very hyperactive and bombastic and intelligent. She’s really acting and it’s quite an experience as a director to work with a child that has such inherent talent.

Jeremy was street cast—he was literally stopped on the street by this casting company we worked with. They interviewed him on camera for about 15 seconds, asked him a few questions. Then I was sent a folder of like a hundred of these clips and I saw something in him, a presence. I interviewed him myself after that and we started to talk about the role. It turned out that he had a lot personal connection to the role of Jeremy. He himself was actually an immigrant from Kyrgyzstan to Canada, and he was adopted and had a very troubled relationship with his adoptive mother. He really felt like this was a fortuitous thing coming into his life; he’d never considered acting. And now he had a write up in the New York Times where they say it’s the best performance in the film, which is for him is incredible. He works at a flower shop. I trusted him and he trusted me. In fact, everyone in the cast really trusted the process and committed to the natural style that I wanted to make the film in.

Instead of rehearsing dialogue, most of the prep I did with the cast was spent creating real chemistry and bonds between the actors so that once we were on set, there was a familial sense between them. Like the two young boys. We didn’t do any rehearsals with them. I just sent them on play dates. I was like, go to the waterpark. Go play video games. I wanted them to have a world together. With Sasha and the mother character, we got together and made latkes, so they could spend time together. And I had the actor playing the dad film them while they were making latkes together. Rather than rehearsing dialogue, it was about creating an actual sense of history between them all. None of the dialogue was ever rehearsed before we shot the film.

I never thought about a Hungarian population in Canada. One of the themes running through this film for me was isolation. You shot Jeremy in isolation a lot, but he’s not the only one.
SR: I try to do as much as I can visually without having it be in the dialogue or without it being explicit and trusting that the audience will pick up on the nuances of the visual language. A big part of that was shooting on Vancouver Island. All the exterior locations you see in the film are set there and it’s a unique geography that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It’s where I grew up and I’ve never seen it in a film. To me, it felt like a very potent metaphor for this family’s experience of feeling isolated, while the backdrop of this very beautiful, striking environment serves as a juxtaposition. They’re also quite literally on an island. And this island is an almost two-hour ferry ride from the mainland of Vancouver. There’s this sense of being removed from the rest of the world, which can be magical, but it also has other implications.

How did you work with your DP? The cinematography is quite remarkable.
Maya [Bankovic] is an incredible cinematographer who’s very versatile. She’s done documentary, she’s done fiction, she’s done television. I knew I wanted the film to have an aesthetic that felt intentional but naturalistic—I didn’t want it to feel documentary, but I also didn’t want it to feel glossy. Naturalism was very important to me, so we decided to shoot a lot of the film on a very long zoom lens, which is a lens from the seventies. It’s an Angenieux lens where you can be yards and yards away from the actor and have this distance, which for me had two implications. One was that we didn’t have to have the camera in the faces of the actors, especially the children. That distance created more of a safe and inviting environment. This is something I learned reading about Cassavetes’ style and how he didn’t want to prioritize technical precision over performance. But I’m also really drawn to that aesthetic, which is a very 1970s kind of aesthetic, and that happens to align with our desire to have the film feel at times a little bit like a home video, but more elevated. We did look at my dad’s home videos as well, and Maya was really inspired by the way that my dad would shoot mundane moments. He wasn’t just shooting birthday parties and events. He was oftentimes like filming through a window without us knowing that he was filming. He was capturing everyday life. We applied that cinematography and that gaze to the film as well because it feels like the film is very much about this relationship and the dynamics in this family, but also about why and how a person becomes an artist or a filmmaker. What are the aspects in this character’s life that result in them becoming who they are? That’s something I’m really interested in, nature versus nurture. Why does Sasha turn out like this, and why does her brother turn out like that?