‘Rip it open’: Big Girls Don’t Cry director explores wounds of early love in film festival hit

In Big Girls Don’t Cry, the New Zealand coming-of-age film quietly devastating film festivals, there is a scene on a moonlit beach. It features the main character, Sid, played by Ani Palmer, and one of the cool older city boys who has come to the small, golden-sand town of Ōmaha for the summer. It is a deeply relatable, deeply uncomfortable watch; reliving the teenage negotiation – or not – of consent feels unsettling and validating.

“Yeah, an 18-year-old at the screening last night said, ‘I feel so seen and exposed,” director and writer Paloma Schneideman, 34, says. “I was like, whoa, that’s quite an astute way to think about it. One is cathartic and healing, and the other is quite confronting.”

Schneideman says she wanted to tell a story about the place “between consent and non-consent, where it was just something we felt we had to do”.

“It’s such a tricky space, and I don’t think we see it a lot. How do we make amends with the scars of that time?”

The global response to Shneideman’s debut film, which also explores desire, queerness and finding your way – in this case, through small-town New Zealand in the early millennium – suggests the need to feel empathy for our teenage selves is universally felt.

Since its debut at the Sundance film festival in February, the film has won the Nouvelle Vagues film festival’s Grand Prix – actor Kristen Stewart said it “unpacks the early 2000s, and subliminal trespass, and pain and strength … with such an astounding touch” – and has been shown at major festivals from South by Southwest to London’s BFI Flare. Variety called it a “gentle, rigorous, queer coming of age story”, while the Hollywood Reporter said it “pulses with a powerful sense of place and terrifically charged scenes of chaotic intimacy”.

Ahead of its general release in New Zealand and the US on 8 and 9 October, Shneideman is feeling grateful for the way it’s connected with audiences. “The most amazing part is seeing how many people take such ownership over the film, they think it’s for them. And it is.”

‘Sleepless nights’

The film’s protagonist, 14-year-old Sid, negotiates adolescence at a time of fledgling dial-up internet and brick phones, where options for connecting with like-minded people or exploring sexuality included booting up MSN messenger or flicking through satellite TV to covertly watch Red Shoe Diaries. It wasn’t a particularly safe moment to be queer, or a teenage girl in New Zealand.

“I found the one queer person in [high school] and they very quickly became my best friend,” Shneideman says. “There was a boy in the First IV [rugby team] who people found out had two mums, and it was the point of gossip and bullying.”

Shneideman developed Big Girls Don’t Cry while at Wave in the Ocean, the prestigious film school set up by Oscar-award winning director Jane Campion (The Piano, Power of the Dog) as part of its first 10-person intake in 2022. It’s the first feature film to be released by a graduate, and is supported by the New Zealand Film Commission.

“We were sort of these guinea pigs and we just had the best time, learning from the best practitioners in the country and if we weren’t doing that we were watching and shooting films and having mental breakdowns together,” Shneideman says. The script she began writing in 2019 kept evolving, even as it got into the hands of Palmer, Australian actor Noah Taylor, and American Rain Spencer in the 25 days it was shot between Ōmaha and Auckland early last year. “They’re all master improvisers, they meet me in this middle space between the script and the screen. Some of their best lines were theirs.”

Campion, named as an executive producer on Big Girls Don’t Cry, encouraged creativity – including a daily movement practice – and listening to intuition, Schneideman says. “She was very much ‘the precedents you set for yourself in your first film will stay with you for the rest of your career,’ so lead how you want to lead.”

As a result, Schneideman developed what she calls a “body gauge” during Big Girls Don’t Cry to help her discern if a shot, a performance, or a cut wasn’t right. ‘When the work’s not there, when the performance is not there, it actually just makes me feel quite sick. I can’t tell you how many sleepless nights I had, staring up at the wall being like – how do we blow that up and start it again and fix it?” she says. “My whole thing as a film-maker is to try and make you not notice any of the work, so as soon as something pulls you out, we’ve failed.”

She’s got a whirlwind of international release dates ahead of her, but Shneideman is already looking ahead. On a taxi-ride recently to LAX, she found herself running through scenes for the next film she wants to make, which she describes as an “anti romance,” exploring the wounds of lost love.

Will this be a hallmark of her career? “Yeah. Rip it open. Then when I finally feel healed, just rip it open again. We don’t want a film that’s just happy, and everything goes right. I think that would be deeply dissatisfying.”