An elderly woman enters a Manhattan subway station only to find herself sitting on a bench beside an elderly man of roughly the same age. As they sit and wait for their train in silence, two complete strangers on a bench, what the audience soon learns that they themselves don’t know, is that they once shared the happiest day of their lives, playing together as children. Yet it’s now too far back for them to remember anymore, too far back for them to recognize each other anymore. The story then shifts back and forth between the breathtaking landscape of their unconscious’, as Isabel Lucas and Oliver Ackland play more youthful representations of how they see themselves inside, and search for the memory they once shared.
In 2014, Isabel stared in a 25-minute short film directed by Maggie Betts, about two elderly strangers attempting to re-discover a mutual memory as they wait to board a subway train. The film premiered on March 31st, 2014.
Screen captures
Trivia & More
- Maggie Betts, the director, says the project came about because she “wanted to do something intensely visual but that still had real narrative arc.”
- The film was shot partially in the Berkshires, on an 800-acre plot
- Prabal Gurung was the costume designer for the film, and it was his first foray into costume design for a film. “What you see on a runway versus what you see in a movie is completely different in the way that it’s photographed,” Gurung said to Vogue Magazine about the experience. “A camera adds volume, so there were a lot of considerations that I had to take into account while designing.””
- The dress Prabal designed for Isabel’s character is first seen from afar—a white dot in a lush, green field. As the camera pans closer, it settles on the frothy ruffles of the airy frock. “I typically think of Prabal’s aesthetic as very urban and modern, and this was so ethereal and dreamy and very much the opposite of what he usually does,” said Betts, “but he totally nailed it.”
- This is Betts’s second film, the first being The Carrier, a feature-length documentary about mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
- “Engram has elements of a documentary only in the sense that it’s very free-form. At certain points we just kept the camera rolling and the actors stayed in the moment,” Betts said about the film to Vogue.
- Because the short film was an experiment in “orgasmic imagery,” Maggie Betts created an 80-page reference book/storyboard for the 20-page script. The board included Sally Mann photographs, the Andrew Wyeth painting “Christina’s World,” and stills of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, which in particular inspired Isabel’s white dress.
- Betts claimed that the original inspiration for Engram was derived from the experience her mom had as a survivor of a hit-and-run accident in her youth.
Promotion
Engram premiered with a special screening at the Museum of Modern Art on March 31, 2014 in New York City. Isabel was in attendance with her co-stars and the writer/director Maggie Betts. Ahead of the screening, the cast held a dinner party in New York.
