The Novice is a genre-bending sports film, which puts women front and center in the world of rowing while also delivering a psychological thriller-style gut punch. Isabelle Fuhrman’s tortured Alex Dall is a captivating character study of the college athlete's quest for perfection. First-time narrative director Lauren Hadaway pulled from her own life and experiences on her college’s rowing team. Like her protagonist, Hadaway was too small to be fully competitive but that didn’t stop her from putting in the work.
Now, Hadaway has put in an infinite amount of hard work again. Hadaway started her Hollywood journey as an in-demand sound supervisor, including on the sound masterpiece that is Whiplash. Now she's in the director’s chair with The Novice and scored a big premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival; her career feels on the fast track to success. Final Draft caught up with Hadaway to learn about the experience of putting audience members in the boat right there with Alex Dall.
Citing David Fincher's work in The Social Network as inspiration, Hadaway says that in addition to visuals, it's important to consider where the character is psychologically while making a sport cinematic.
"I loosely framed Alex and the boat almost like a romantic drama: the first time seeing each other and their clunky beginnings," Hadaway said.
"The first time making love and falling in love, and the bliss in being in that moment. The slow, toxic descent — how do you tell that to an audience? I feel that’s the beauty of cinema. You have all these tools at your disposal. What the character is feeling can be conveyed in just the bliss of a sunrise row."
Hadaway acknowledges that Alex's obsessive tendencies are a reflection, in part, of her own reflection of herself.
"The why and what drives Alex Dall; it’s a mix of nature and nurture. Why are people creative? Why are people this or that? I’m not a religious person but there is something existential about life and the idea that life has no meaning unless you give it your own meaning," she said.
"I’ve been listening to a ton of neuroscience podcasts and thinking about the why. The cause and effect of things in childhood. The things that are challenging for Alex is that she is sort of a dog that has latched onto prey and can’t let go. She’s got this irrational internal drive."
The details that make up Alex's internal landscape are matched by the breathtaking shots of the character's time on the water; at times sensual, and at times so tense.
"When I was writing the script I really tried to think of where Alex was gonna be sitting in the boat, and where can the camera be? The boat could be tipsy topsy so we used additional rowers as our training wheels to keep the boat steady. We’d move the rowers based on what we were shooting," Hadaway said.
"We also had a version of the boat with training wheels, pontoons, for the close-ups. There’s a camera mounted on the boat and it’s just Isabelle and the camera for a lot of those shots. Our [cinematographer] Todd Martin did an incredible job.”
The casting was also done well; particularly in the context of the chemistry between Alex and Dani (played by Dilone). Hadaway says she drew on advice she learned from Fincher at a Q&A, which was to figure out who the actor is at the core. "At the end of the day, he's not Batman, he's Ben Affleck, but his core fits with the character," she remembers Fincher saying.
"Isabelle’s audition was brilliant. She did an extra scene and wrote me a letter. We talked about how she ran from Las Vegas and back, and she just has this intense energy about her," Hadaway said.
"When I met her in real life, she showed up with a whole binder on Alex. She’s just really organized. She has an obsessive, neurotic drive, and I told her the Fincher thing. At first she was like, 'That’s not true about me' and was a bit defensive, but she has come around to it. Through the making of this film she realized she was working through a lot, and I think realized a lot about herself through the process."
Hadaway says her thinking is evolving about whether a queer character must be played by a queer actor, which was relevant when casting Dani.
"For Dani I really wanted someone who was queer and it is obvious when a straight girl is trying to be queer in an audition, but nothing felt right," she said.
"We also needed someone who could sing, and I had such a specific idea of a person in my head for Dani and nothing was coming through. We settled on Dilone last minute. She sent an audition in and the casting director was excited and when I watched it she was great. She just has this calm energy. Something about it added something to the character that I hadn’t thought of. It has an energy to it I thought was really interesting. I had a Zoom with Dilone and she sang to me on the guitar. It was her first film role, and my first time directing and we figured out a lot of Dani together."
Though it was her first time directing, films from Hadaway's past served as influences, including Whiplash.
"I am an ambitious person, and some people may get to the end of this film and say, 'what the fuck.' But for a long time, rowing was this external driving force in my life even though I was never gonna be the best rower, and I was never gonna go to the Olympics. ... But I wanted to do a film about ambition that’s about the internal drive and the tortured artist. [Darren] Aronofsky is also a huge influence, and Fincher. I would rewatch a lot of Fincher over and over throughout the writing process," she said.
For Alex, the film represents a sort of ending — "this really is her second chapter. We get Chapter 1 was her in high school as an overachiever," Hadaway said — but also a beginning.
"... She’s hitting a point that enough is enough, and her checking the boxes, and anyone who has her level of drive to feel accomplished, gets like, one second of bliss and then a void and an emptiness returns. Alex probably has a long way to go to find balance in her life, but this is a start."
The Novice is somewhat of a beginning for Hadaway, too.
"I’m working on everything from a lesbian sex comedy to a horror film to a historical fantasy," she said.
"I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I love the Coen brothers; everything they do is so different. To me, that is the lane that I’d want to navigate because my tastes are so varied, although I do think there might be a common thread of obsessive ambition in my work."
Hadaway would ultimately like members of the audience to walk out with some of that ambition; the desire to "conquer the world."
"I think I went into making knowing it would be somewhat divisive the ending. ... And some will be like, 'no thank you.' The thing that’s been interesting with COVID-19 is there’s more of a commentary on the American hustle, and this is film about that," she said.
"Doing the hustle until you burn out, that’s definitely a millennial thing. I would like to hope people examine if it’s worth it; examine does it matter where someone gets their meaning?"
The Novice releases in theaters on December 17.