Casting Hilary’s Alters
Access to hours of found footage is a rarity, and a documentary filmmaker’s dream. It allows us to observe life without altering it by our very presence. Having access to a decade’s worth of psychotherapy tapes was both a blessing and an enormous responsibility. There’s a terrible intimacy to the tapes but such a wonderful, powerful mind revealed in them. The challenge was to imagine what it looked like inside Hilary’s brain; how to show her inner world. There’s an instinctual fascination for most of us with the old idea of one person presenting multiple personalities. For Hilary, our protagonist, it was always disturbing to see that her alters, in the psychotherapy tapes, looked just like her. That’s not how they looked inside her mind. So we asked Hilary and her therapist to cast young actors to play the alters in a few scenes so we could show them as Hilary saw them. For Hilary, and the crew, the casting sessions were a revelation: when the actors with the right energy entered the room, it was as if Hilary was reuniting with long lost children. And it told us that we were on the right track in re-imagining the inside of Hilary’s remarkable mind.