Actor and writer/director Michelle Ang has released a short film about the reality of motherhood.
Actor and writer/director Michelle Ang has released a short film about the reality of motherhood.
Michelle Ang might be the most successful New Zealand actor you’ve never heard of.
She’s worked with Steven Soderbergh, Jane Campion and Jason Gunn, and has appeared in Star Wars, Grey’s Anatomy, and Neighbours. She’s won best actress at the New Zealand Film Awards, been nominated for a Logiefor her role on Neighbours and been nominated for an Emmy for her work on American zombie drama Fear The Walking Dead.
Ten years ago, she says, it was her dream to “make it” in the US as an accomplished actor. For a long time, she seemed to be on the cusp of doing just that. But in 2016, after years of hustling hard in Los Angeles, riding the city’s notoriously useless buses across its famously gridlocked road network from jobs to auditions and back again, she became a mother, and two years after that she returned to New Zealand, her life changed forever, aware that the dream had taken a back seat.
Co-parenting a child, she quickly learned, is not conducive to working in an industry where 10-to-12-hour days are standard and you might start at 5am one day and finish at midnight the next.
Next month she turns 40. As she enters middle age, she’s noticing a change in the types of roles available to her, and the fact there aren’t as many of them. “There’s an age-out process”, she says.
She says her skin has become thinner as she’s become older and the ridiculousness of the reasons offered by casting directors for rejecting her - wrong hair colour to give just one example - have become increasingly clear to her.
“You don’t book because you’re skilful,” she says. “You book for a bunch of other reasons, a lot of which are outside my control.”
Ang describes the current period of her life as “a funny chapter”. There is a sense of melancholy, for what she might have done or been, and what is now gone: “On a bad day, I’m like, ‘What was it for?’
“I have been doing it for a long time, I guess, and I’m not sure if my contributions have shifted the needle that much.”
Partly as a result of the changes in her life, and partly from a desire for artistic fulfilment that she was never able to get from acting, she has begun to take more of an interest in working on the other side of the camera.
Audiences can see the results in her first short film, Nai/Milk, which has its New Zealand premiere at Show Me Shorts this month. Ang has been nominated for Best Actor and Best Director at this year’s Show Me Shorts Awards.
Nai/Milk could be viewed as a hybrid of what the ideal co-parent film-maker life might look like: A film-maker writing, directing and starring in a film in which her child is the co-star and all the action takes place in their home.
But Nai/Milk presents anything but an idealised view of a single parent’s existence, Ang’s character struggles to cope with having her life upended by her son, and in one particularly disturbing scene, has to restrain herself from smothering him with his toy panda.
Discussing that scene, Ang says: “It’s not like we all suddenly become angelic when we spawn. We f*** up, and we still have terrible moments or instincts, and we are sometimes not the best versions of ourselves. And there are dark moments. And I think for myself, who was experiencing the whole gamut of emotions, I just wanted to put that out there, to complicate the stereotype of the perfect, nurturing mother.”
She says she made the movie from a cathartic need to express her conflicting feelings about her experience of motherhood. Prior to giving birth, she says she’d had the freedom to daydream, to prioritise her mental health and artistic needs, to unplug wherever necessary and live life at a slower pace.
The all-encompassing nature of parenting, and the selflessness required came as an abrupt realisation for her: “I was just sort of dragged into the acknowledgement of what parenting looked like, kicking and screaming,” she says.
A still from Michelle Ang's Nai/Milk short film.
When she made Nai/Milk, her son was still a toddler, but he’s now 6 and the requirements of a child change radically in those few short years, as do the lives of their parents.
Ang is long over the initial shock that she portrays so powerfully in the film. Parenting has brought a better balance to her life, she says: “Because my priorities did shift and it’s actually created probably a better lifestyle.
“The slow life has never felt more appealing. Now that I’m a parent, I just feel like that is the speed that cultivates the most nourishing environment, where you get to be the best version of yourself as a parent and also as an artist, and for whatever reasons, the challenges – economically and otherwise – that we’re all facing.”
Still, the struggle is real and it is ongoing. Lately, she’s been having a difficult time mentally, although not for any obvious reason she can discern.
“I think it’s a combination of existential crisis mixed with just an assessment of how the screen industry is, with the strikes over in America and trying to navigate what that looks like for us at a local level.
“It’s just that sort of normal – I mean, it’s not normal – but I think it’s that artist thing of wanting to contribute and wanting to make something and then finding it hard to see a path to be able to do that in the way that you want.”
Then again, she says, looking out her window at the early afternoon sunshine, there’s a lot to be grateful for: “it’s spring and I’m grateful to be in New Zealand and to have a community of fellow film-makers to talk to.”
And after years of being at the whims of others, and having to fit into whatever stories they’ve wanted to tell, now she feels able and ready to tell the stories that matter most to her.
She wants the industry to change, to move away from the idea of what a star looks like, to embrace a wider range of stories featuring a wider range of people, “regardless of what their Hollywood star rating is”.
It’s time to change the “algorithm” used to determine what a star looks like, she says.
“There are deep stories that are ready to be told, but the collaborators needed to be able to tell them, to make them truly sparkle, don’t fit into the existing frameworks.
“I know, myself, when I go to a film festival, it’s so much more about the experience of the story and film as a whole. I know that I might be rare, but just because Scarlett Johansson is in it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to go see it.
“I think in the case where people are allowed to be their truest, shiniest, most authentic self, then the product has always found an audience.”
Show Me Shorts Film Festival opens on Friday, October 6. Nai/Milk screens as part of Love Unconditional on Saturday, October 7, at the Hollywood, Avondale, Auckland.
