Selective Perception Demonstrated in Love Is Blind With Director Monty Whitebloom

What was the chemistry like between Bess and her dad, Bess and Farmer, and Bess and Russell?
It was such a brilliant experience, the whole film. After the rehearsals when we went up to shoot, we shot mostly in and around the small town called Hudson, which is in the Hudson Valley or in upstate New York. The crew, the cast, the producers, and everyone all ended up basically living in this small little town for like a month. We did shoot and then we’d have dinner with Matthew Broderick, the sound guy, someone from the audio department, and just talk about life and talk about reality. We were super lucky to get to do that. It almost felt like Band of Brothers. We felt like we were all in this together. I’m playing this character both on the stage and off the stage, it wasn’t like that. It was very much being able to create that dynamic between Bess and her father, with Farmer, and with Russell. It was creating a very different dynamic between those three characters, which was loving, but also awkward. Bess lives her life internally; she’s living a life in an imaginary world. Part of it seems to be happening, is it really real, is it really happening, obviously inside her head, is it true or not true, all of that goes on with all her relationships. With her dad, that was the closest bond of reality, that was that touchstone. But apart from that, this is very much a feel of streams of consciousness of the movie, of multiple things happening at the same time, are we seeing the using the past, seeing the future, or seeing what somebody is thinking about or just seeing a representation of their inner dialogue.

“The crew, the cast, the producers, and everyone all ended up basically living in this small little town…”

How would you see Bess’s character or perception transformed, changed, or evolved through the course of the film?
Obviously, there are a few moments where suddenly she has a revelation that she realizes that she can see someone, see something right in front of her. That is tied up with her past life and tied up with this idea of returning back to the hospital and having these three experiences with that being her mother’s experience of the hospital when she had a crash, her father’s death, and then Russell returning back to the hospital. There are those traumatic, visceral experiences, which is the journey that she takes. We all stand right next to death the whole time. The only way we really repeat it a number of times for her over the course of the film did finally dawn on her that she started to get a realization that there was something more than just herself. There was someone else who she could connect to in this case Russell, and there’s even the opportunity to maybe she’s going to stop for now and connect with mother as well.

She was finally through these traumatic physical issues that she had at the hospital; she finally realized that she had to wake up. In some aspects, there is a fairy tale aspect to the film that she was this sleeping beauty, she’s alive and walking around, she’s half asleep, and only through this repeated medicalization situation that goes on is she really confronted by all these kinds of characters. One of these things we spoke about, why doesn’t her mother just shake her and say I’m here. Obviously, she had been doing that for the last 10 years. We just forward 10 years and that was the situation, there’s no point to continually berate her and continually say, I’m right in front of you because this is just how it is. There is that sense of only from these massive jolts. The death of her father was the biggest jolt and then followed quickly by Russell’s attempted suicide is that you then get the sense that she is starting to wake up from this eternal sleep that she’s been at since she was 10 years of age.