“Audrey’s Children” — in theaters Friday via Blue Harbor Entertainment — tells the true story of pediatric oncologist Dr. Audrey Evans (Natalie Dormer), who upended medicine with a new treatment of Neuroblastoma, an often-deadly childhood nerve cancer, all while standing up for herself in her field and caring for her young patients. With a script from Julia Fisher Farbman, the film is directed by Ami Canaan Mann, whose storytelling extends to many different genres in both features (the romantic drama “Jackie & Ryan,” the crime story “Texas Killing Fields”) and television (“The Blacklist,” “Power,” “House of Cards”). Mann opens up about the documentary that influenced her style on “Audrey’s Children,” the role that inspired her to work with Dormer and what she learned working on the set of “Heat” with her father, Michael Mann.
What inspired you to direct this film?
I was sent the script, and there’s a scene where the main character, Dr. Audrey Evans, is talking to one of her patients, a child at the hospital, and she’s trying to help this child understand their own mortality as a mode of preparation. I thought to myself when I read that scene, “My God, no adult wants to be in that position with a child, particularly a child whose life you’re trying to save, and you’re aware that you may fail.” I just thought it was such an egoless thing to do, and she did that as a pediatric physician daily, for decades. To me, that’s real heroism and somebody whose story I would like to tell.
When was the specific moment you realized Natalie Dormer was the right choice to play Audrey Evans?
I heard an interview with Peter Weir, who is a hero of mine, and he was talking about casting, and he was talking about how the idea is to discern the spirit of the character that you need in order to pull the narrative forward. Casting is really trying to figure out which actor can embody that and already has that spirit. Meryl Streep can do absolutely everything, and every one of her characters has an essential Meryl that she carries with her. For Audrey, I knew we needed somebody who had an emotional and intellectual passion and fire. At the same time … it sounds counterintuitive, but her spirit could also hold incredible softness and empathy with children. I saw the remake of “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and there’s a shot of Natalie and she has this power in her shoulders, and at another moment she turned very slowly to the camera. I was like, “Oh, that’s her.”
Natalie Dormer, left, and director Ami Canaan Mann on the set of “Audrey’s Children.”
Courtesy of Blue Harbor Entertainment
Which historical works or biopics influenced your approach to filming?
Weirdly, my biggest reference might be Barbara Kopple’s “Harlan County, USA,” in the gritty realism, the textural symphony that she has in that film. It’s a documentary, but it’s a deep dive into a very specific world with incredibly human characters and a humane ethos towards the narrative overall. That’s really what I was trying to go for in terms of the visual lexicon of this movie, that it was a textural world that felt like a real world. If it felt visually consistent because of the subject matter, it would be easy to go in a way that was a little bit too soft. If you can make the world visually consistent and compelling, perhaps the audience would want to stay with you through that hour and a half.
How are you able to approach a film about an overwhelmingly sad topic — in this case, very sick children — and make it have enough levity to be a well-rounded work that examines Evans?
That was the puzzle. That was the directorial challenge. Part of that was the visual language of film, making it seductive so that you wanted to be there. All of that was informed by it essentially being a character study. The criteria was anything that happened visually in terms of shot design, performance — I’m a pretty camera-heavy director because I come from a photography background — so all the composition, everything was coming from an awareness of the character herself, who just happened to be a woman who was pediatric oncologist, who happened to work with kids who had cancer. It was a story about a woman, a brilliant thinker, and watching how she moves in a flawed, and sometimes not flawed, way.
Is there a piece of advice your father gave you about filmmaking that you still consider while shooting new projects?
It wasn’t so much words of advice, because my dad and I just talk about dad-kid stuff. We actually don’t talk about films a whole lot, and I knew I wanted to work with him on one movie from the beginning to the end. The timing worked out so that it happened to be “Heat.” I didn’t actually work for him, I worked for the line producer as an assistant. He had another assistant who did assistant-y stuff, so I was sort of the, “Ami, go figure out the gyroscopic helicopter mount, now go figure out the infrared, coordinate with people in Folsom Prison so we can send Bob and Val to go there to interview inmates.”
I eventually directed second unit. What that did, though, was allow a distance from the show, from the directorial heart of it, but just close enough to see everything. Watching an A director move from beginning to end through an entire project, and watching that project evolve and watch his approach to it evolve … not so close that I wasn’t seeing everything I could see, but not so far away that I couldn’t watch that trajectory.
Watch the trailer for “Audrey’s Children” below.
