No Focus, No Filter, Just ADHD Muses

In the first moments of the new documentary ADHD Muses, Marika Thunder and Tessa Gourin rove around New York, reading lines from movies like Mean Girls and chatting with each other. Their conversations are often truncated by a passing thought, and scenes end abruptly. This introduction might seem discomfiting as a viewer, but for the film’s creator Bernadette Van-Huy and her muses Thunder and Gourin, that’s kind of the point: forcing the actors and the audience to consider their world deeply and at great length, through the lens of Thunder and Gourin’s skittish and strangely fascinating improvisation. 

Van-Huy, the namesake and enigmatic founding member of the anti-establishment artist collective Bernadette Corporation, is well versed in creative boundary pushing—both cultural and personal. Look at the current landscape of art in New York and you will find them everywhere, from magazines (their seminal zine Made in USA) to literature (Reena Spaulings, the 9/11-set novel written by 150 anonymous authors) to fashion (their longstanding collaboration with Supreme). Though the Bernadette Corporation has voyaged into cinema before, directing the 2003, Chloe Sevigny-led “anti-documentary” Get Rid of Yourself, ADHD Muses marks Van-Huy’s first solo film.

c
In keeping with the film’s subject matter Van-Huy, Gourin, Thunder and I emailed back and forth about the project for the week leading up to its premiere.

Tell me about filming. Bernadette, what was it like to work with this next generation? 

Van-Huy:  It’s just as rewarding and sharp an experience. Obviously a good gene pool. The film was spontaneous, improvised. And it’s like doing a sports competition, there’s a guiding image in your head, but your body is working intuitively. I recognized in Marika and Tessa something very powerful, and I just held that in my head, and all the processes would come about intuitively. It’s like sculpture, things get whittled away and refined, and then something remains that you hope achieves the thing you had in mind.

Gourin: It completely disrupted the usual rhythm that I approach a role for a narrative film with. It forced me to—God forbid—HAVE FUN!! During the interviewing process, my chaotic upbringing came up when discussing the way that my mind races. “ADHD” or whatever you want to call it. It is difficult for me to slow down. Bernadette, Jaxon [the cinematographer] and I ended up spending the day walking around the Upper East Side, where I was raised. It was cool to revisit a place I tend to avoid under the notion of making art. 

Van-Huy: Someone who worked in a bookstore told me this story which I always loved. Jon Voight was shooting a movie on location out on the street, and during the lunch break he wandered into the bookstore, really chomping on a slice of pizza. Many people rushed him and started talking to him, and he was holding court, seriously chomping on the slice of pizza. So I thought it would be fun to do the acting class scenes in a way that contradicts them, makes them a new thing. Some of the ideas were to do them while eating pizza, or perched atop ladders, or side by side in a police line-up.

Do you have ADHD?

Van-Huy: I’m so not ADHD. I have Attention Surplus Inactivity Disorder. 

Gourin: It’s funny, I don’t typically identify with diagnosis of any kind… But I definitely get distracted and caught up in my own thoughts. To say I am an over-thinker is an understatement. What drew me to acting in the first place was the idea that I could take all of the energy I have, which has historically overwhelmed both me, and others, and use it as a vehicle to reveal what a character is going through. 

Thunder: Bernadette, Tessa, and I are very different in our own ways, we make different types of art, but when we come together we each bring our own unique wavelength of energy. I feel Bernadette is so good at meeting the person where they are in their story. She brings forth the purest form of authenticity, one that is humble and quiet. It made the whole process feel very relaxed and fun, to me it didn’t even feel like we were making a movie. I mean that in a good way. I really resonate with Bernadette’s investigation of the function ADHD plays within society these days. As a collective, our attention spans are shriveling. What does that mean for the way we create things? How do new ideas come to us and how do we execute them?

Van-Huy: I think Tessa carries a heavy burden when faced with the mere fact of her acting, the enormous shadow of her father’s [Jack Nicholson] acting legacy and the problem of their non-relationship. When she forgets about that, you can see all her talent. I think she should do comedy first, or at least a role that takes her far away from her own situation, so that burden can be lifted for the moment. And what Marika said about it not feeling like making a film… At the start, when I was thinking about making a film, I decided to make a film that was underdone. It’s the same principle as making a B-movie—you stop yourself short of doing what making a film usually implies. 

Gourin: The entire point of this film is exploring what gets someone in and out of their head. For me, the ultimate goal of acting is to get out of my head, which is ironically, the hardest thing for me to do. It is undeniable that Jack Nicholson’s unparalleled success not only as an actor, but a cultural fixture at large has made my decision to pursue acting a complicated one. When I was a kid, I was drawn to performance as an escape from myself. But as one ages, naturally, you get jaded. That cynicism and fear has been both fuel, and a disservice to my acting, which is something Bernadette picked up on instantly. She’s an intuitive gal, like me, which is what made working with her so special, and she’s echoing something that many fellow actors have said to me: that I should lean more into comedy because not only am I funny by nature, but comedic material gives me less room to harp on my shitty non-relationship (as Bernadette perfectly phrased it) with Jack Nicholson. It can be quite stifling. But what can I say? I am naturally attracted to the darkness of acting: Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neil, Greek Tragedies. 

Van-Huy: Tessa, what are you jaded about? 

Gourin: The entertainment industry. Not all, but a lot of what I am seeing has become oversaturated background noise. Film, theater, the revealing of a character’s journey, should be told with passion and precision. There is nothing casual about that. I think that goes back to the whole thought policing societal thing that’s going on right now though. There is a fear of what might happen if, god forbid, you are misunderstood. 

Van-Huy: Maybe similar to the atmosphere of fear surrounding expression, is the motivation to appeal to a wide audience, or to secure attention and success as fast as possible because of how crowded and competitive the field is and how high the stakes are. But the flip side of that frenzy is that the “success” can be over as quickly as it began. 

What is the current state of the art world?

Gourin: We are in desperate need of a renaissance. Not just in acting, but art as a whole. The essence of making art is to be intimate enough to take a risk to have an effect on whoever is interacting with it. 

Thunder: Art deals with the ineffable and the subjective, and the challenge is to present these complicated, existential, and spiritual ideas in a way people can understand them. I think in today’s society everyone is trying to categorize and diagnose everything, and art suffers from that. When I received my ADHD diagnosis it was bittersweet because while it felt good to know I wasn’t alone, it also put me in a box and that limited my perspective to existing within that box. I’m a very kinetic person, so actively making something always seems to be my answer. Unfortunately, [an ADHD diagnosis] can create a self-fulfilling prophecy if that keeps you trapped in a cycle. Art to me is about freedom. There’s no simple answer on how to fix the current state of the art world, but I can tell we are on the cusp, (in some cases it’s already started) of a major renaissance. People want to get out of this hyper-curated while simultaneously unremarkable stage we’re at and see real authenticity and passion! Artists who do what they believe in, and not just follow a trend.

How do you hope people will receive this film?

Van-Huy: I’m so curious about its reception, because I’ve only shown it to a handful of people so far. And I was texting with a friend today about how different the release of a film is compared to an art exhibition. The art opening is the finish line, and you’ve been racing up to that point, and you go to the opening exhausted and barely standing. But I’ve had all the time in the world to think about this screening! I know what the work means to me, what the experience of it was, and what I learned from it. That’s all alive in me, and that’s what I take away from it. The reception of it is outside of my job. It’s like a conversation—I’ve contributed something to the conversation, but the response to it is beyond me.