A Right to Tell Their Stories: Eliza Hittman on Beach Rats | Interviews

Both of your films are set in Brooklyn, and the borough seems really central to them. I was curious if you grew up there, and if you live there now?

I did. I grew up in a neighborhood called Flatbush. My parents still live in my childhood home. I live in a neighborhood called Kensington now. My grandfather ran a boys’ club on 6th St. and Avenue D for 40 years, so I also consider the East Village home.

Does the choice of music in your soundtracks reflect your personal taste?

With “It Felt Like Love,” we were looking more towards what the kids in the cast were listening to. There’s a kid who’s part of a collective started by Joey Bada$$. His real name is Jesse Cardasco. I didn’t have such a huge budget for that film. There’s not a whole lot of non-diegetic music in “Beach Rats,” but there is a little bit of a score that we found from a composer in Miami who’s about 20 years old named Nick Leon. It’s a mixture of the world and the interests of the people in the film.

Well, you went from using tons of hip-hop to electronic music.

The thing about the electronic music in “Beach Rats” is that it wasn’t specifically composed for the film. It was originally part of a hip-hop track and I liked the tension between the dreamy, atmospheric track and the harder vocals. That fit the mood of the film.

It did occur to me that if real 16-year-olds were doing a dance routine to Mykki Blanco, they would be amazingly hip.

That was originally a different song. I can’t remember what song, but that was a real dance troupe. We couldn’t afford the rights.

Both of your films are coming-of-age tales. What attracts you to this theme, and are there any autobiographical elements?

There are thematic elements which are autobiographical, but nothing event-oriented. The films explore themes from my life. It’s challenging, because obviously, all work is personal but not necessarily directly autobiographical.

Watching “Beach Rats,” I kept thinking how much easier Frankie’s life would have been if he could have kept on drinking beer and smoking pot with his buddies but then gone home and made love with one of them. Given what later happens, that’s obviously completely impossible. But he’s really living in a world where it’s impossible to live out his true sexuality. There’s the slogan, “it gets better,” and for him, it really doesn’t unless he’s able to completely change his life. I’m gay myself, and a lot of people have very naïve ideas about how easy it is to leave the milieu you came from and enter a different world and come out.

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