Transcription of Caitlin Fitzgerald for the show Motion Pictures, #106
Lisa: Many little girls when they’re growing up think to themselves, I think I’d like to be an actress. The individual who’s sitting across the microphone from me today actually went ahead and became an actress and in fact a nationally and internationally known actress. This is Caitlin FitzGerald who is an actress and a writer and a filmmaker who is from Camden, Maine originally. Thank you for coming in and spending time with us.
Caitlin: My pleasure.
Lisa: I must say when I knew you were coming on the show, I went back and I looked at all the various things that you’ve been in. I think my 17-year-old is going to be very impressed because, of course, you have the Gossip Girl connection. I am also astounded by the range of things that you’ve worked on. Masters of Sex hasn’t even come out yet on Showtime, but that’s an interesting and ambitious project.
Caitlin: It is an interesting and ambitious project. Yeah, we’re very excited and hopeful, as you say. It comes out the 29th of September. My hope actually is that it’s sort of controversial because I think it’s an interesting and hopefully stimulating in more than one way topic that will get people talking and conversing about this subject.
Lisa: Masters of Sex is about Masters and Johnson. They were the individuals originally who did the sex studies way back when. You play Mrs. Masters, which is interesting because Masters and Johnson, they eventually got together.
Caitlin: They did. They had a longstanding affair, and actually one of the stipulations for Masters hiring Johnson as his partner in the work was that she sleep with him as part of the science experiment of course. Historically, my character’s name is Libby Masters, became very close friends with Virginia Johnson, so there was this strange kind of love triangle that formed between the three of them.
Lisa: The work that you do from what I can tell is very relationship-based.
Caitlin: Yeah, that’s very accurate. I haven’t thought about that, but that’s true.
Lisa: While I was watching Newlyweds yesterday, it’s funny because I had just watched it not too long ago before I knew who you were and then I said, oh, I’m going to go watch this and oh, I just watched this. That was an interesting commentary on relationships and what it means to be in a long-term relationship. First of all, tell us a little bit about Newlyweds and tell us how this has impacted you as an individual.
Caitlin: Newlyweds is one of those movies. We made it for … we shot it for $10,000 and it was sort of barebones crew. It was mostly me and Ed Burns and RDP and a sound guy who also is a producer. We’d get together. We shot it over the course of three months whenever we had free time, and we shot it around Tribeca in restaurants and in friends’ apartments, and it felt so intimate when we were shooting it. Eddie had a script, but he would also let us improvise. It was developed as we went along. He wrote it as we went, depending on what we had found when we were shooting. It has to me a really natural and authentic feel about it. People come up to me all the time and say that they’ve seen it and they love it. I think part of it is it feels … the first conversation in the film is about how I think either my character or Eddie says I read once that if you don’t turn over and look at your partner at least once a month and think, who are you, I’ve made a terrible mistake, there’s actually something wrong with your relationship. I think most movies portray relationships as being these fairy tales. What’s interesting about Newlyweds is we start where most movies end, which is right after the wedding. It’s kind of like how it actually goes.
Lisa: There was a messiness to it. You have his half sister who has her romantic issues; comes back to New York, finds out that her former lover is now married with a child on the way. Then, you have your sister and she’s going through a divorce from her husband of like 19 years or something like that. It is. It’s just the messiness, and people moving in and out of the apartment that you’re sharing.
Caitlin: Yeah. And that when you marry someone, they come with a lot of baggage, and how do you negotiate that? How does it affect your interaction with your partner? It’s something we don’t talk about very much in movies I think.
Lisa: You’ve had the chance to work with relationships of a different sort and more specifically the friendship relationship. Most recently, you co-wrote and starred in a film called “Like the Water”, and it had everything to do with a friendship you had with Sabrina Seelig who died not too long ago but at a fairly young age and in a fairly tragic way. You’re young to have had to deal with that sort of thing. Talk to me a little bit about that situation.
Caitlin: Sabrina died I think four weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, and we’d been friends since we were 11 and 12. I think the experience of losing someone, especially your contemporary when you’re that young, for me, it felt like a veil had kind of been lifted on what the world really was. I’ve been living in a place of naïveté whereby we all got to live forever. Certainly, Sabrina, for me, was one of those people that I just … it was so assumed that I would know her my whole life. It was incredibly disruptive to my sense of reality. A few years after her death, I was having dinner with a group of friends and we were talking about collaborating on something and decided we wanted to make a movie in Maine, in my hometown of Camden.
Caroline von Kuhn, my co-writer, and I started talking, and she had similarly lost a friend, a best friend at a young age. We decided that it was a unique enough experience that it can be interesting to write about that. Also, that female friendships don’t often get explored in cinema and it feels like a big gap for me. We have a lot of male buddy films but not a whole lot about how meaningful those female relationships are, especially when you’re growing up and discovering who you are. Certainly, Sabrina is kind of knit into my DNA in this way. It seemed very appropriate to shoot it in Maine in locations where we shot at the elementary school where we met and we shot all over my hometown. It couldn’t have been more perfect in that way.
Lisa: Do you think that this film has helped you heal in some way?
Caitlin: I think one of the biggest gifts of being an artist is that you get to use the drama that happened to you and the triumphs that happened to you. You have a place to put them, I guess, into the world. You can make something out of them instead of just holding them. I will miss Sabrina forever. I will write about her forever. It was nice to be able to think about her and honor her and make something that I could hold in my hands about her.
Lisa: This is an interesting birthday year for you.
Caitlin: It is indeed.
Lisa: I won’t say what birthday it is.
Caitlin: I’m not ashamed. I am turning 30.
Lisa: Well, I remember when I was turning 30, and this was a little while ago, and I didn’t think it would hit me the way as hard it did. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but it just felt like a very big dividing line between sort of I knew I wasn’t in childhood anymore because by that time, I had some children and I was a doctor. It felt like something that I was crossing over.
Caitlin: Yeah, totally.
Lisa: Feel that way to you?
Caitlin: Yeah. I had a boyfriend in my mid 20s who was a few years older than me and we had this ongoing joke that when you turn 30, suddenly life was easy and felt really relaxed about everything and you had everything in perspective. I think that’s obviously not entirely true, but I do think there is a certain amount. You’re all laughing. I do think there is something, and I can feel it actually in this transitional sudden returns kind of moment of your 20s are hard and you go through a huge growth that is often uncomfortable. You make a lot of mistakes. I think, I hope, that my 30s are a time of kind of reaping the benefits of all that education.
Lisa: I know it’s not easy to be an actress. I think that’s probably an understatement.
Caitlin: Yeah. True.
Lisa: It’s something that requires a lot. It requires the ability to be rejected, I assume. I assume that you’ve had some rejections.
Caitlin: Lots and lots and lots and lots of rejection.
Lisa: How do you keep showing up and saying, you know what, I’m really passionate about this? I really still want to be an actress and I know that I have what it takes.
Caitlin: Well, I say I’ve had lots of rejection, but I’ve also had enough success to stay in the game and to feel like I’m in the right kind of place. I would recommend this for every actor out there that making your own work is vital and puts the agency of your life back in your own hands in a way, so you’re not turning overall all your power to other people’s whims. You find your communities. I’m part of a theater company in New York. They’re really wonderful and I do stuff with them. You find your people who can reflect back to you that you are in fact an artist and good at what you do even when it gets hard.
Lisa: Caitlin, how can people find out about the work that you’ve done, not only the feature that you created, “Like the Water”, but also Masters of Sex and all the other, Gossip Girls, Newlyweds, all the other movies that you’ve been in.
Caitlin: Well, you can go to my IMDb page which has all of my work. Like the Water, you can find on a website called Seed&Spark; that is a distribution and fundraising platform for Indie films that our producer actually launched following our movie, and it’s doing very well. It’s very exciting. Masters of Sex airs 10 PM on the 29th of September on Showtime following Homeland.
Lisa: We started this interview by saying many little girls dream of being an actress. Not every little girl becomes one. What advice do you have for little girls out there in Maine who are thinking this might be in their future?
Caitlin: Surround yourself with people who keep you really grounded and who really love you no matter what success or failure you have. Figure out what stories matter the most to your heart and tell them as loudly as you can.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Caitlin FitzGerald, actress, writer, and native of Camden, Maine. We really appreciate your coming in and spending time with us today, Caitlin.
Caitlin: Absolutely. Thank you so much.