CHICAGO — In the 2021 indie drama “Violet” from writer-director Justine Bateman (which had a limited release in theaters last fall), a Hollywood development executive played by Olivia Munn experiences intrusive thoughts and self-doubt as she goes about her daily life. On the surface, Violet seemingly has it all: Beauty, a job that she’s good at and a hunky best friend who seems interested in more. But her colleagues and acquaintances are none the wiser to her quietly unrelenting inner turmoil, which manifests on screen in different forms: Sometimes it’s a running monologue of negativity in her head (voiced by Justin Theroux), sometimes the sentiments are more plaintive (arriving in the form of handwriting words on screen, as if a journal come to life) and sometimes we simply witness everything fade to red as Violet becomes overwhelmed by the moment.
Part low-key satire of the movie business, part psychological portrait of a woman gradually finding a way to push through her anxieties, “Violet” is the directorial debut of Bateman, who initially established her career as an actor, notably on the 1980s TV comedy “Family Ties.” She is a producer here as well and will be screening the film Thursday at Northwestern University as part of an ongoing schedule of events organized by the new Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Creation of Mental Health via Cinematic Art, a program aimed at encouraging aspiring filmmakers and screenwriters think about issues around mental health — specifically how it is portrayed on screen — in a more nuanced way. Public events in the coming months include a lecture on the depictions of women with bipolar disorder, another on portrayals of disassociation and yet another that examines the ways race is often equated with trauma in pop culture.
Bateman, however, was adamant when we spoke that, “For me, the film is not about mental health at all. It’s just about the human condition, and are you making decisions out of fear or out of instinct? Because I do believe we all inherently have a guiding instinct within us and that fear can obscure our feeling of connection with that instinct. So that’s where I’m coming from. I don’t know about mental health, I’m not in the mental health conversation. I don’t have anything to do with that.”
Fair enough.
The idea for the film, she said, is loosely inspired by her own experiences.
“Years ago, I made a lot of fear-based decisions in my life and wanted to get out of that,” she said. “So for me it involved really digging in and finding out: What was the root fear? I would be in a situation, going on along feeling like myself, and then I would say or do something or wear something that just wasn’t really me. And I’d have to ask myself why I went off track there.”
Ultimately she’s created a film that immerses you in that kind of head space. “I wanted the viewer to feel like they were getting in a car and being driven,” Bateman said. “Or putting the film on like a coat. I didn’t want it to be the kind of film where you sit back and watch some actors go through this, I wanted the viewer to feel tapped into it.”
One of techniques the film uses is Theroux’s voice-over. “Something that made a big difference in my life,” said Bateman, “just as an experiment, was relating to these negative thoughts as if somebody else was saying them to me, instead of me saying them to myself. And that helped me get a lot of objectivity.” Which is a key reason why Violet’s inner voice is male. “I wanted the voice to be as different from Olivia’s as possible — change the gender, change the tone, even change the location in the speakers in the theater so that it’s not coming from the same place as all of the other production sounds. Because even if you just absorb that subliminally, I want the viewer to come out with two things: Oh my God, everything is a lie, and what if I treated all of these lies more objectively? I wouldn’t give them so much validity coming from somebody else, so why don’t I treat them like that? And then I can analyze them and go, ‘How much do I think this is really true that nobody at this party wants to talk to me,’ for example.”
(Though it’s not the point of the film, it makes a strong argument against your typical office environment, where interactions can be deeply unpleasant despite a polite surface.)
The film’s devices — the voice-over, the words on screen, the fade-to-red — all follow specific internal rules. “When does the writing come in, when does it leave? Everything had to have a rule to it otherwise it’ll just look like a bunch of interesting devices you’re using, but you’re not using them to emotionally engage the audience,” said Bateman.
“So the red is when she is zoning out because it’s just becoming too much; the voice is talking to her, she feels like she’s in a pressured situation and the only way she can see to get out of it is to just numb out into and allow what the voice is saying to her to just come out of her mouth.
“And this is something people do all the time. I use these visual and audio devices to really amplify these moments, but I could have had none of these things and it would have seemed like somebody’s normal day. This is somebody’s normal day. When somebody’s being critical toward you, a lot of times it’s because their negative voice is attacking them so much and they want to find a way out of it, and trying to put you down is one of those options and one of those ways that it can allay those uncomfortable feelings.”
Up next for Bateman is a film adaptation of her book “Face: One Square Foot of Skin,” which is about “women’s faces getting older and why that makes people angry. The format of the book is 47 short stories, so I took 14 of those and kind of wove them together.” She’s currently in the process of raising money for the film “so we’ll see how long that takes me.”
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