DEEP CUT: INTERVIEW WITH FILMMAKER BROOKE BERMAN
by Sofia Reecer
Brooke Berman (Barnard ‘92) is an independent filmmaker, playwright, and author whose debut feature, Ramona at Midlife, released to streaming on Tuesday, February 11th. Ramona follows the story of Ramona Lee (Yvonne Woods), a one-time bestselling author who, in her 40s, is now a single mother working at a veterinary clinic. When Ramona finds out that her life—and her literary career’s unrealized potential—seems to be the subject of an up-and-coming filmmaker’s new project, she must confront her past to reclaim her own story and take back control of her future.
Over winter break, Brooke took the time to talk with Double Exposure about the process of making Ramona, her journey as a filmmaker, and her time at Barnard and Columbia.
SR: Brooke, this is so exciting! To start, can you give us a bit of background on who the great Brooke Berman is, and how Ramona at Midlife came about?
BB: Sure! I’m a playwright and memoirist and filmmaker. I was an American Studies major at Barnard because I loved my American Lit professor (Robert O’Meally) and my Women in Religion professor (Vivian Nyitray), and I basically said to Dorothy Denburg, my advisor, “What kind of major can I do where I can have them?” When I got out of school, I worked as an actor for a while, but I had always written. And while I was at Barnard, I started performing monologues I had written at Postscrypt, and at parties at the ADP frat –
SR: Oh wow, a deep cut!
BB: – and then I went off to study with Anne Bogart, who’s currently running the directing program at Columbia. At the time, she was running Trinity Rep Theatre in Providence. She was the first person that let me know I could do all the things and be a generative artist without having to get into one lane. I was writing and performing, and then in my twenties I got less interested in performing and more interested in writing. I wrote my first play and produced it, and I really fell in love with that process. I went back to school at Juilliard and studied playwriting. I had a bunch of plays produced all over the place, but I had always wanted to make a movie, and I didn't know how. I optioned one of my plays to Natalie Portman, and when Natalie came into my life and suddenly there was a movie star who was writing me a check, I could say things like, ‘Well, I’m going to do the adaptation,’ and she said, ‘Of course,’— so I learned how to write screenplays.
I got notes on that first draft from Natalie Portman, which was amazing, and then I was determined to master screenwriting, so I moved to LA. I’m a very experiential learner, so I like to be around the thing that’s being made. I learned how to pitch, and I learned how to outline, and I learned why screenplays are different from stage plays. I lived out there for five years, and I realized that if the writing [of a project] was separate from production, it didn’t light me up. Screenwriters are out of the process really easily. We write our screenplay, we get a lot of notes in development, and then it’s gone, and somebody else takes the script and gets it made. Film is really a director’s medium. So during those years, missing the theatre, and missing production, I realized I would have to direct. And I made a short film still out in LA, and that was an amazing experience, and then I moved my family back to New York City, because I wanted to be back around the theater. I’ve been here for the last decade.
Photo courtesy of Brooke Berman
Ramona at Midlife is my first feature as a director. There was another project I was in development with for six years that was an adaptation of one of my plays, and I cut my teeth learning the process of self production on that movie. Like, ‘what’s a budget? and how do you break a script down for production? and what’s a lookbook? and how do you put a feature together?’ And then when the pandemic hit and production shut down, I realized, it’s been six years. That film was not getting made. So I put a feature together the way I put my short together, which is I know a lot of actors. I wrote a movie my friends could do, and I raised the money myself. It was a three hundred thousand-dollar SAG ultra low-budget. I called on every favor from every friend, and I did a bunch of work exchanges, and I set about learning how to put an indie feature together. And that’s Ramona at Midlife. We shot in June of 2022, we premiered in June of 2023, we did the festival circuit, sold the film, and it’s premiering on streaming February 11th of 2025. It’s been a five year journey; I started it in April of 2020.
Zarah Mahler, Yetta Gottesman, Catherine Curtin, and Yvonne Woods in Ramona at Midlife
SR: So awesome! And how did the specific idea for Ramona come about?
BB: I’ve been making my living teaching for the last twenty odd years. Whenever the writing thing isn’t paying, I teach. Sometimes when the writing thing is paying, I teach anyway because I like it. During the pandemic, I got a call from a master teacher that I study with occasionally, and she invited me to join a writing workshop called Writing Through the Change. The idea of Ramona was old, I had kind of created this character years ago. I was in LA with my friend Yvonne Woods, and we were talking about success, and how our ideas of success were changing, and the relationship between success and commerce, you know? Because at a certain point—when you’re young, success gets defined by who’s working on the coolest projects. And then when you’re older, success very quickly gets defined by who’s making money. We were talking about that, and this character showed up in my brain: Ramona. And so for years I had known who this character was, but I never really knew what her story was. I knew she was divorced, I knew she was a mom, I knew that she had published one book a very long time ago that was very very successful, and that she was furious—but I didn’t know why. And so Joan Sheckel, this master teacher, called me in April of 2020 and said, ‘I’m putting together a writing workshop, would you like to come join us?’ And I closed my eyes on the first day of class and went into a writing exercise, and Ramona showed up. She looked like my friend Yvonne Woods, and she was putting lipstick on to go see her ex-husband who was there to pick up her daughter, and we were off. Every day I would sit down to write and a new piece of her story came through.
Yvonne Woods as Ramona Lee
SR: And since this was your first feature, and it’s an independent film, how did you fund it?
BB: The very first thing I did was hire somebody to make a budget for me, and I learned to consider the cost of every choice surrounding production. I learned that that’s why you see so few children and animals in indie films—children and animals are really expensive, and I wrote a mom who works in a pet clinic! That was a lot. So first I had to figure out what it would cost. And then, I interviewed a lot of independent micro budget filmmakers to find out what they did to keep their costs low, and then I started looking for a producing partner. I hired a producer, Kristen Vaganos, who’s great. We went through that budget and tried to bring it down as much as we could, and we created a pitch deck and sales documents, and then I made a spreadsheet of everyone who’d ever supported my plays. People who I knew loved my work and supported my work. And I just started asking them, one by one. I sent a bunch of emails pitching, basically. Pitching the investment. We worked with a great female-run company that does business affairs for indie films—they’re called E/S Collab—and so we had investor paperwork and documents and it was all legal. The investors will get their money back plus twenty percent. And we had different levels of investment, you know, ‘if you invest this much, you get this, and if you invest that much, you get that.’ I got some seed money going, and I got my first investor, and then I was really lucky because one of the people that I spoke to introduced me to an investment team. They came in and did a third of the budget, and then I went to a theater producer I’d worked with who I really liked, and he did another third. And I think we got the last pieces of the budget through a site called Slated, it’s like match.com for investors and indie film.
It was a patchwork of ‘who can bring in this piece, who can bring in that piece, and, you know, do they want to come and do a set visit.’ I think it’s really an extraordinary process to ask for money, because it’s really the final taboo, especially for women. We’re not supposed to talk about money, and we’re never supposed to ask for money. I think there’s a lot of stigma around looking desperate or being tacky, but that’s how these things happen. And then when people say no—and I’m still working on this—it’s important to know that it’s not personal. You’re allowed to pitch someone, and they’re allowed to say no, because it’s a business decision.
SR: What was the hardest part of getting Ramona made?
BB: Well, the hardest part was not the money. The money flowed. I’m raising more money now for a PR campaign - but that’s a stamina question, right? You just have to have the stamina to go raise money and to let people say no a lot. The hardest part for me was that I’d never done it before. There were things that Kristen and I as filmmakers weren’t prepared for—things you can’t know until you’ve actually made a film. There are weird things that happen in production. We got a house donated for our first week of production in Forest Hills, and it was in a private neighborhood, so we had parking passes. We’d given all of our crew tips on where to park so that it would be legal, because there’s only so many passes for the neighborhood. We carpooled and drove some people. But then there was this one day when everyone’s car got towed because Netflix was shooting Maestro in the same neighborhood. Everybody was pissed about Netflix being there, and they had all these trucks, and they thought it was us… so the patrol cop came and towed all of our cars.
SR: Oh my god. That’s insane.
BB: Or, we didn’t know Forest Hills Stadium was nearby, and there was a night we were doing these quiet, tender putting the children to bed scenes, and there’s a concert down the road, and it’s loud. And so the sound guy has to block that sound out—things we couldn’t have known going in. And then with the edit—the edit was really complicated, and we didn’t have a lot of time. We worked with incredible people, but because our budget was so tiny, we could only pay them for very specific hours. So that was really challenging, just getting that edit done, and having time for notes, and having time to think everything through. The edit’s the final rewrite, so it was really then that I started to understand what the movie was. I had never done that before. I was a little bit at a loss, because I’m supposed to be the team leader, but it was my first time.
Photo courtesy of Brooke Berman
SR: How long did you shoot for?
BB: Fifteen days.
SR: Oh my god!
BB: That was the other thing. We shot for fifteen days, right? And we were incredibly efficient. I was so proud, because you can’t go over. In film you pay people by the day, so if we had gone over our fifteen days, it would have upped our budget. And if our budget—we did it at the top of SAG ultra-low scale—if our budget went higher than that number, we’d have to pay everybody a higher day rate. But then we got into the edit, and our first editor said, ‘You know, by the way, you have no establishing shots.’
SR: Oh—
BB: So then we had to budget for an extra two days—a pickup weekend—where we went and shot all these exteriors, like the outside of the house, and the outside of the pet clinic, and Yvonne had to drive in from St. Louis, and we had to go get the costumes back, and she had to just walk in and out of houses.
SR: Do you have a favorite or fondest memory from set?
BB: I mean I enjoyed all of it, but it’s like entering bootcamp, you know? One of the child actors, Scarlett Sher, who plays Ramona’s daughter, turned 8 on set. That was really fun. We had a birthday cake for her, or cupcakes, maybe, and we sang happy birthday.
And I loved the day we wrapped. It was the two girls and Ramona, and my friend Jan Leslie Harding, she plays Patti Smith. I just remember we got the final shot, and there was a rainbow in the sky, and a family of, like, I don’t know, swans or something swam by. And I started crying, because it was like a dream come true.
SR: That sounds magical.
BB: Everyone got really worried, like ‘oh my god, why are you crying?’ But it was really special, yeah.
SR: And then you navigated the whole distribution process. What did you learn from that?
BB: I got a real education in the distribution landscape. I went to all the webinars, and I read all the newspaper and magazine articles, and I got on everybody’s Substacks, and I really started learning, well, what is distribution? How did it used to work? How does it work now, and what’s the best path forward?
Ramona’s distribution process was fraught, because my film premiered during the WGA strike, and I am a WGA writer. I was not permitted to sell the film until we settled our strike deals. Back in like 2005, maybe, you’d premier at South by Southwest or Sundance and there’d be a bidding war, and everybody wanted your movie. That is not the landscape right now, and I didn’t premier at one of those festivals. I premiered at the Bentonville Film Festival, which is amazing. Geena Davis started it, it’s in Bentonville, Arkansas, it’s all about diversity and women and underrepresented voices. It was such a great place for this movie in particular, and they were so good to us. And so that was an amazing experience, with the caveat that as a WGA member, I couldn’t really do a lot. Kristen, my producer, is not WGA, so if anybody wanted to talk to us, they had to talk to Kristen, and she couldn’t talk to me about it. So Kristen would sort of gather information and keep it in a file, and when it was time then we could go through it together. We started doing that in the fall after the strike resolved, probably late October, early November of 2023. Then we attached a sales agent, and he went and sold the film.
Kristen Vaganos and Brooke Berman at Bentonville Film Festival
There’s this frustrating thing that people in the indie film community keep saying: ‘Either you want to use this film to get your next job, or you want to make money, or you don’t care about those things and you just want eyes on the film.’ Well, okay, obviously everybody wants all three of those things. It’s like saying, do you want to eat, do you want to sleep, or do you want to breathe? Everybody wants all of it! But then, in 2023 and 2024, they would say things like, ‘Well nobody’s making money.’ My agent said, ‘Stay alive till ‘25, there are no jobs.’ Or, to the ‘do you want eyes on the film?’ question, they would say, ‘distribution’s broken.’ So in the same breath, they’re telling you to define your goals, and then they’re telling you none of those goals are achievable. At the end of 2024, everybody was saying: Just do it yourself, self distribute. That didn’t feel realistic to me, so I took the best deal that we could get—and I’m really happy with it. I learned how to do something called ‘carving rights out.’ I maintained certain rights that I can execute on my own, and I gave the distributor streaming rights. That ended up being perfect for Ramona, because I think the majority of working parents who are going to want to see this film are not going to the movie theater.
SR: So I know Ramona is very much about celebrating Gen X women, which is a demographic that does not always get its flowers. But since this interview is going to be published in Columbia’s film journal, what do you want the college-aged viewer to take away from the film?
BB: I want the college-aged viewer to think about a couple of things. Number one, the most important thing, no matter how old you are, is to tell your own story. Don’t let other people tell your story for you. If it feels like somebody else is infringing on your story, make sure that you take that story back, and tell it and tell it the right way.
And: when I was your age, I thought that all of the questions of becoming, and self discovery, and reinvention, and how I’d make a living, and who to be next—I thought all those questions get answered in your forties, and then you just kind of kick back and ride it out. That's not true, and I think that’s a good thing to know at twenty. I think you need to know that you are never done evolving, you’re never done asking hard questions, and you’re never done reevaluating and reinventing yourself, because the world keeps changing.
Yvonne Woods, Alysia Reiner, April Matthis, Brooke Berman, Zarah Mahler, and Kristen Vaganos on set
SR: A lot of people in our club—and a lot of people who read our work—are students who want to go into the film industry themselves. What advice do you have for young people who dream of one day making their own first features?
BB: I have two pieces of advice. One of them is: get a camera and make something. Just make it. Write your movie. Sean Baker, who’s going to get an Oscar this year for Anora, made his movie Tangerine on an iPhone. So get your iPhone and go make a movie with your friends. Make a short film, put it on the festival circuit. I just think you learn the most through making things, and building a body of work, and finding your collaborators, and knowing who you’re going to make this work with over the next twenty-five years. Because that’s the goal, right? You want to find your tribe, and then you want to make stuff together. Paula Vogel says ‘circles rise.’ As you find your circle, you keep elevating each other. Everyone’s going to keep getting better through working together.
And the second piece of advice I have for those people who are not writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, but people who want to go into producing, is: Please reinvent the industry. The old industry as we knew it is gone, and anyone looking to step into what you think it was before the pandemic is going to be disappointed. So please reinvent it, and please reinvent it better.
SR: Reinvent it better and keep making stuff.
BB: Exactly.
SR: And my final question is, now that Ramona is out, what’s next for you?
BB: So last year, I wrote a coming-of-age comedy set at my high school. I went to Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook Illinois, alma mater of John Hughes.
SR: Oh, wow!
BB: When I was a freshman, John Hughes sent the Breakfast Club actors to our school to observe us. So apropos of telling your own story, I wrote this coming-of-age story about the kids in the drama club who are expressly told by their drama teacher, ‘You’re not allowed to be extras in the John Hughes movie if you want to be in the fall play. You have to choose.’
SR: Oh my god. That’s awesome.
BB: So that’s the next one, and then my passion project—I wrote a movie probably eighteen years ago called Major Minor Details, it’s a road trip love story. I sold it to The Mark Gordon Company in 2008, I think, and they had it for a couple of years, and it almost got made a handful of times. At that time, I wasn’t a director yet, so there was just a very long process of attaching movie stars and attaching directors. Now that I direct, I’m ready to take that one back. I did a rewrite last summer, I made a lookbook, and I’m ready to tell that story.
SR: We’ll be keeping an eye out!
April Matthis, Alysia Reiner, and Yvonne Woods
Ramona at Midlife is available to stream now on Prime and Apple TV. You can read more about Brooke’s work here, and subscribe to Ramona’s Substack to stay up to date! If you like the movie, you can leave a review on Letterboxd or Rotten Tomatoes (or both)!
