Ann Marie Fleming and Sandra Oh’s latest collaboration asks audiences to ponder: what sacrifices are you willing to make to ensure world peace, environmental stability, and the elimination of poverty?
Fleming’s film, Can I Get a Witness?, which she writes and directs and Oh stars, suggests an alternative world where the sacrifice we must make to ensure this equilibrium comes at age 50, when we undergo euthanasia for the betterment of the world. Oh plays Ellie, a mother about to turn 50 and whose teenage daughter, Kiah (Keira Jang), coincidentally begins her new job as a witness — someone who uses their artistic talents to document the end of life ceremonies.
The thought-provoking premise posits more questions than answers, as intended, leaving audiences with a multitude of discussion points and opinions. The Asian Cut had the opportunity to speak with Fleming and Oh over Zoom to discuss some of these themes ahead of the film’s Canadian release.
TAC: My first question may be a little inappropriate or just kind of weird, but I personally have a real fascination with death, and I was wondering what is your relationship with death, and how has it changed over your lifetime?
Ann Marie Fleming: Gosh, well, I think I was born with death. My first funeral was when I was six months old. Children died when I was in school. My first boyfriend died. I lost so many people at an early age, and I continue to.
A lot of people were drawn to this film because we just don’t talk about death [in the West]. I didn’t think that my film was about death. I thought I was using death as a metaphor [laughs]. I thought it was about climate action. But, in fact, it’s all about death, and I think that it’s something that we need to talk more about and not have sadness [around].
I did an animated [short] film called Old Dog, right before this. I was looking at how it’s not the dogs that are sad, it’s us who are sad. It was about all these technologies [people buy to] try to make their [pets’] lives better. You try to make every moment you have with your aging pet better, but for humans, we don’t want to talk about it. Why can’t we celebrate our changing life [sic] and our deaths like we do for the pets that we love?
That’s probably not what you were expecting to hear. I’m dealing with a lot of that in my life right now, and through the whole making of the film, and the whole writing of the film. Death, as presented by the film…I feel good about it. I feel like it’s part of life. I feel like I can accept it in the film. I’m still struggling to accept it outside of the film, but I feel peaceful about it when I see the film.
Sandra Oh: I think a lot of our problems in the world are because we don’t have a relationship with death. If there is only one true fact to life, it’s that there will be death. We can barely hang on to that as an idea and as a concept. I think because we have so little relationship with it and so much fear around it, it causes so many external problems, like, “I get to live and you should die.”
We were very much in COVID time [when we started this movie], a lot of upheaval and unearthing of a lot of issues. So much hatred and anger comes from not having a relationship with death, and by not having a relationship with death, there’s no chance of kindness around it or even being able to look into solace. You get a smaller and smaller and smaller picture, the further away you come from death.
For me personally, I fear it tremendously. Because I know I fear it so much, I thought, well, I should investigate it. That’s the grace and great opportunity we have as artists to explore characters and subjects that really scare us in a safe way. I’m trying to figure it out like Ellie is trying to figure it out, it just so happens that there’s an entire camera crew capturing it. From an artist as experienced as Ann Marie is, and as thoughtful and as poetic as she is, I [knew she was] in the right place, and I want[ed] to do this material.
TAC: Sandra, picking up from what you just said, did you come away with a new perspective after making the film?
SO: For sure. I’m only in my early 50s, but I hope to continue living a healthy life, and I hope that when it comes to my time, I’m able to exercise a choice. I feel more and more aligned with being able to exercise choice for health reasons!
TAC: Absolutely. Dying with grace and dignity is, I suppose, the thing we all want. I’m going to switch gears here a little bit: Ann Marie, I know when you first approached people about this script, you didn’t get any bites because people thought it was a little too far-fetched. But then the pandemic happens and suddenly it’s more topical than ever. After getting the green light and after everything the world went through, when you went back to the script, did you have to recalibrate the story?
AMF: It’s such a tender time because of everything that we’ve gone through. Sandra was talking about our relationship to death…I think that the global fear of COVID over such a long time affected people even more than the wildfires and the floods and those kinds of things, because people could just move on to the next thing. But we couldn’t move on from COVID. We sat in it for so long, and it profoundly changed our societies and people’s mental health and how we think about things. We did not come out of it okay, and we did not come out of it thinking the same way. Oh my god, I just took a left turn…
Oh yes, so the only thing that I changed in the script was Sandra encouraged me to add a nod to AI, because that had become such a big thing. When I wrote the script, that was not a conversation at all. COVID, MAID [Medical assistance in dying], climate — all of that made the story more urgent and more relatable, if I can use that word, but, AI was something new. It was a thought experiment. I put something forward, and suddenly, my goodness, the world sort of caught up.
It’s very important that people see the film this year, because [in the story] the year is 2025 when everything changes and everything stops, and then this film takes place.
SO: I remember pushing back on Ann Marie — why don’t you set it more in the future? And she was very strong about that. She’s like, “It’s not pointing to the future. It’s happening right now.”
AMF: We’re on fire right now.
TAC: Literally.
SO: Where we are with AI and AGI coming into presence very, very soon, no one really knows what that means. I’m glad she did integrate it in a very tangential way, because that’s not what the film is about, but I do think that it’s going to have a very, very large effect on where our entire world and how we live goes from here.
