If you’ve ever been an 11-year-old, then the feelings and emotions captured throughout The Fits, Anna Rose Holmer’s feature narrative debut, will strike close to your heart. The film is told from the perspective of Toni (Royalty Hightower), an 11-year-old girl dedicated to boxing. She practices with immense dedication with her older brother and the other boys at school. As deeply immersed as she is in this discipline, she finds herself gazing on her school’s dance-troupe practices, hoping to join the team. Once Toni commits to the dance team, she finds herself drifting between her life as a boxer and dancer, and maintaining her balance between the two distinct worlds. As if this weren’t struggle enough, one-by-one the girls of the dance team start convulsing into fits. The fits seem inevitable, striking a girl at any moment. The cause is a mystery.
We spoke with Holmer about the various meaning of fits, the talent that is Royalty Hightower, and working with the Q-Kidz dance troupe in making the film.
When you’re focusing on this particular time in a girl’s life, what was important for you to get across?
I co-wrote it with two women, Lisa Kjerulff, who’s my producer, and Saela Davis, who is my editor. So all of our early conversations were about sharing memories and making a Venn diagram of experiences and whatever fell in the center, like the locker room moment, these things that were really embedded in our memories. But also putting a complex 11-year-old girl on screen who drives action, and the entire audience experience is from her point of view, is just something I think is rare. We were excited about focusing on an aspect of girlhood that we don’t see that often.
The feeling you created was very authentic, even when it takes a more surreal and unexpected turn.
I think also the way we approach time, we wanted every scene to feel it could be an hour later or two days later. I think there is this collapsing and condensing of time, maybe that’s just memory, but there’s these moments when an hour can feel like a lifetime when you’re 11. So we wanted to play around with that and it does enter into the surreal because so many things are new and there are so many experiences, so many feelings, you haven’t had. It’s scary and confusing and surreal and there is this feeling that the older girls have almost magical powers.
Royalty Hightower was amazing. How was it to first meet her in the casting process?
We opened up casting originally only to the Q-Kidz, there are a couple hundred girls on the team. We cast 45 of them in the film, including Royalty. She’s been dancing on that team since she was six, she was the eighth girl that read on day one. She blew me away. It was more of a connection with her and her capacity to listen, really listen. Listen as an engaged, active, interactive quality, which I think most adults don’t do that. She needs to be able to reflect the world on her face. Royalty was a very generous, gifted actor. She’s not like Toni at all. She’s performing and her performance is spellbinding.
How was it working with kids so new to acting? Did going forth with that idea make you nervous?
Being really able to dance was a requirement, but also they are performers. They haven’t been in film, but they are elite performers, they compete nationally. Same with the boxers, they are all at the junior Olympic level, so it felt very easy to work with them. The challenging part was that each performer was a different type of actor and we needed to discover what that was through the process of making a film together. I think if you work with actors who have been doing it for a long time, they know their ins, they know their styles, they know their methods. For this it was a discovery process, so I think that’s where the work came in.
It’s amazing how every moment of the film is choreographed, even the fits themselves.
It’s a dance, in a way. They worked with a modern dancer, Celia Rowlson-Hall, on all of the fits and they were designed in isolation, so there was no right way to have a fit. I think that’s why they look so different on screen. They’re very individual experiences that were designed that way. And that was important to us because this is not a movie about conformity, so those moments should feel unique and very driven from those specific moments for those specific girls. But we see it as a dance film. From frame one to closing credits, it’s about movement and even breath.
The score works so well with that movement, as well, that eerie clarinet. What was your collaboration on how you wanted the film to sound?
The references that I gave to Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, our incredible composers, were very much using the instrument as a body — miking breath, miking the reed noises, miking the pad noises — and I think they really understood the idea that we wanted to clue the audience into this quiet storm that’s brewing in Toni. The other thing is I gave them all our choreographic notes, so a lot of what we talked about was body and breath, even when we were talking about the score.
I’m sure a lot of people have now come to you with their interpretation of what a fit is — what do you think of the various ways people view the fits and the film as a whole?
I think all answers are correct. It’s open for a reason. We’re inviting the audience to bring themselves to that moment. I think it’s very transcendent, very powerful. But in terms of a dance film, it’s also about letting go of control and really, in dance, you do have to know the choreography, you do have to have a deep muscle understanding of the movements that you’re doing so that you can forget it. So you can go beyond that and give up control to access this more subconscious element of dance, which is really freeing. And so I also see it in the dance genre. It’s not just about doing the steps perfectly, it’s about giving up control to gain something. To really be free.
What aspects of Toni do you connect with most?
When I see Royalty on screen, I really see so many things about myself with Toni. It’s very emotional for me, I usually cry when I sit through the entire film. One of the moments that gets me every time is the return to the boxing gym, when she sees her older brother now training a young boy, and it’s the reverse of the first time she gazes through at the girls and she’s not part of that world. And now she’s gazing at the boys and she’s no longer part of that world. The idea that things change is a very bittersweet moment. It always triggers a real strong memory for me. Same with the locker room scene when she goes in and changes in the stall by herself. They feel very much lifted from my memory. And then whenever you see the real joy of dance come on Toni’s face, I feel like I’ve had those moments when you feel so powerful and larger than life.
What was your fit at that age, in that time of your life?
I do remember I played saxophone and I was in a jazz band from fifth grade to eighth grade. I remember my first solo in jazz band felt like a very out of body experience. It was an improv solo, so it was getting to that very vulnerable, experimental creative place in front of a huge audience might have been my fit. But we looked at real cases of hysterics and mass psychogenic and conversion disorder, too. So there’s a metaphorical moment, but we were also looking at real cases of fits.
What attracted you to the worlds of drill and boxing?
I’ve always been obsessed with boxing as a very cinematic sport, and I wrote a paper in college on Raging Bull as a dance film. The qualities that make you a great boxer translate really well into dance, the footwork and the balance. And then with dance, we were searching for a dance form that was expressive and with drill, being able to fold in mundane movements, was really exciting to me. And really working with Mariah Jones, the drill choreographer, to fuse the narrative in the choreography itself. And then the inherent body mirroring with the stand battle, and the captain giving the call and her team responding with the stand, trying to bring the dance and the sport as close together as possible was always our goal.
