Siân Heder on Being Heumann: "It was important for us to find Judy Heumann together"

After earning accolades for writing and directing the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black (2013-2018) and the Sundance film Tallulah (2016), Siân Heder went on to create history with CODA, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022. It also bagged the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, with Troy Kotsur becoming the first deaf actor to take home an acting trophy—for Best Supporting Actor.

Heder’s third film, Being Heumann, on activist Judith Heumann, known as “Mother of Disability Rights Movement”, was the opening film at the Toronto International Film Festival last week. Set in 1977, the Apple Original film is about a lesser-known but extraordinary movement for accessibility. British actor Ruth Madeley, who was born with spina bifida, plays Heumann, who led a group of Americans with disabilities to hold the government accountable, demanding a positive change in civil rights legislation for people with disabilities. In their aim to have the US Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano (Mark Ruffalo) sign the crucial regulations for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, they began by occupying a Federal building in San Francisco, and then went to Washington DC and even had a sit-in at Califano’s house.

A vital, transformative but also colourful and joyous documentation, Being Heumann is moving, inspiring, while being an unabashedly entertaining feel-good drama. The New Indian Express met Heder and Madeley at Toronto’s St. Regis hotel for a quick chat.

Being Heumann is a biographical film. Siân, did you fictionalize bits, or is it an absolutely factual account?

Siân Heder: Most of the real events of the protest and the facts of the protest were so funny and interesting and surprising that actually almost everything [shown] in the film really happened. There's a little bit of timeline moving. The one fictionalized thing in the film is that Judy and Califano never spoke or met. And I was like, these two have to have a phone call. She's called him 100 times. I need to have that [one scene] where he calls her back.

It's not an event that really has a real historical record. So I had to dig through all kinds of archives. There were oral histories done of some of the protesters by San Francisco University. I listened to all of those oral histories. There were cassette tapes that a protester had saved of their meetings in the building.

In Califano's book, he mentioned that when the protesters showed up at his house, he was so afraid that his dog Cinnamon would escape and bite the protesters. He had to climb out the back door with Cinnamon barking. So there were lots of amazing real-life details that found their way into the movie.

Ruth, how did you interpret Judy? And what has she meant to you as an individual?

Ruth Madeley: My first memory of learning about Judy was as an adult, and as social media became more and more part of our everyday life, with people sharing things about her. I was aware of her work and her advocacy and how she changed the world.

But then, to be able to play her, I learned so much more about her as we delved deep into all of her beautiful layers. Everyone knows there is this formidable character who was such a fighter and a warrior, but there were other sides to her that people knew from the stories that they shared with you about her being in the Federal building and her humour and her warmth and her deep, deep care for people and her cheekiness and her silliness and showing all of the uncertainty she had and self-doubt and that vulnerability, all of those beautiful layers that you can really play with as an actor and put into a performance.

Sometimes biographies have this way of becoming hagiographies, whereas Being Heumann was refreshing in how there's no virtue signalling. Was humour an aspect that you built on together?

SH: I remember we did the table read and I thought everybody in the cast, in the ensemble, was so funny and there was so much humour in the movie. And after the table read, I was like, Ruth, wait, Judy's funny too. We have to find all of Judy's humour.

In a way, she was so left out of a lot of the hijinks that were happening in the Federal building. She was making phone calls to Congress people while other [protesters] were partying with the Black Panthers [who had joined hands] and having dance parties and [were] in the sex tent. So in a way, Judy's like the straight woman in the movie. But I think it was really important for us to find her together. Who is Judy as a sexual being? Who is Judy when she's fearful and is not her forceful self? Judy had a lot of contradictions. Like she really cared about other people. The line in the movie, [when she is told] you never think about other people. And she said, that's all I think

about. I think that was Judy. She was so focused that I feel sometimes she could steamroll past people or roll over other people's needs. It was an interesting thing to find all those dichotomies in her.

RM: I found that one of the most exciting things was that, because so often disabled people, disabled characters don't get the space in shows or movies to be able to show all of those things. I loved the fact that she wasn't perfect. One of my favourite things as an actor, one of my absolute favourite relationships, is between actor and director, and to work on that together and find all of those beautiful moments that were so important to the story was great. I loved it. I had a great time.

Siân, if you were to look at the larger ensemble, you have non-professional actors, you have people with disabilities. How was the effort to kind of bring this huge, diverse cast together? And Ruth, for you as an actor and performance being a give and take, it must have been quite an interesting journey.

RM: I love working with actors, and I came to this industry untrained. I came as somebody who didn't have any formal training. So it was just such a position of privilege to be able to share things that I'd learned over the past decade of my career and help guide where someone needed extra help with learning about the job of acting and what days on set are like, and they're hard, and they're long. I felt privileged to be able to give a little bit of my experience and knowledge, but it was so exciting to see new actors come through, like Antwan [Tolliver, who plays Brad Lomax, a Black Panther and disability rights advocate] who has never acted before. I'm mesmerized by him and Charlie [Rush-Reese as the blind Dennis Billups] and so many great characters. I'm so excited to see what they do next.

SH: [It was exciting] to watch people come into themselves as actors. When we started, a lot of what I tried to create was about doing a lot of rehearsal, getting the cast really comfortable with each other, and having a really loose camera. I told the actors when we started, " You guys have to live in the building because you do not know if a camera's going to turn on you in a scene. So you need to always be in the scene. You're never off camera. I think that was really helpful in allowing people to just be themselves on screen and find real lived moments.

My favourite stuff of Charlie's in the movie is improvised, or it's like a little moment that he's having on his own, the way he said good morning to all the secretaries in the building when they were walking in. That is so Charlie, it's Dennis, his character, but it's also Charlie. When you work with non-actors, [it is important] to just create a sense of reality for them, because there are so many things that are artificial about us—the cameras and lights. So how do we create a space that feels like we're just all living in the building together? That is significant.

From CODA, which was more intimate, about a family, you have moved on to, through an individual, talking about a collective, a public movement. Did that influence the way you approached the subject?

SH: I think this movie is also about a family. It's about a movement, but that movement was as messy and dysfunctional as a family. That was my revelation while making the movie—that I do make films about dysfunctional families, though I don’t mean to. In a way, to me, connections that people made in the building were more important than the message of the movement.