Stacy Martin on Amaretti, Her Directorial Debut

A real-life family drama inspired the star of The Brutalist to make her first short film, which premieres at Edinburgh Film Festival this week

For Stacy Martin, directing her first short film has been an itch she’s spent years waiting to scratch. “When you’ve done something for so long, wanting to do something else is quite scary,” says the French-British performer, who has worked with some of cinema’s biggest auteurs on the other side of the lens. “Plus, I have high standards!” she continues, laughing. “I think that comes from being quite Parisian and snobby. I just kind of thought, ‘If I can’t pull this off, it’s going to be a disaster.’”

Amaretti, which has its world premiere at Edinburgh Film Festival this week, tells the story of a woman in her seventies, Lennie (Diana Quick), who makes the shattering discovery that her son has been gaslighting her into thinking she has Alzheimer’s in order to cheat her out of her money. It sounds like a story ripped from the news, but in fact the film is based loosely on events that happened to Martin’s own grandmother. “You hear stories about families arguing over inheritance, but I never thought it would happen to my family until it did,” says Martin. “It was a confusing time; I had to really assess a lot of the things I was tethered to.”

Troubled by the notion that, when something bad happens, “we talk a lot about the perpetrator and not the victim”, Martin set about writing a film born of long conversations with her gran. “I wanted to create a story that would give her back her own identity,” says Martin, who adds that the experience helped her to see her grandma in a completely different light. “Suddenly she was telling me all these things as if I was an adult for the first time. I wasn’t really seeing my grandma who used to make me sandwiches in the morning; I was seeing this woman who felt completely bereft. It was a sad bonding experience.”

In the film, we meet Lennie in a police interview room as an in-house therapist, Lola (Emily Beecham), breaks the news about her son’s deception. Martin’s camera circles her leads as the weight of Lola’s words sink in; slowly, the ground beneath Lennie gives way as she blinks painfully out of one reality and into another. Later, when Lola offers to give Lennie a lift home, something shifts in the dynamic between these two women in a way that is never quite explained, building to an ending that makes you wonder whose story this was after all.

Shot on Super 16 with cinematographer Ula Pontikos (Weekend, Blade Runner 2099), it’s a smart piece of filmmaking that works to upend our assumptions about these characters. “Lennie and Lola both represent very specific things at the beginning of the short,” says Martin, who looked to directors like Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda in creating a sense of ambiguity in the piece. “I wanted to ask questions about how we view certain roles in society. Especially with older people, where we tend to think they don’t have a personality any more. And then with the therapist, who [we often think of] as people who have their shit together, but a lot of the time they don’t, they’re just human.”

Through her work with auteurs like Lars von Trier and Ridley Scott, Martin says she had “the best school” to prepare for making the jump to directing. For more than a decade now, she’s been part of writer-director couple Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s regular crew of collaborators, and clearly the experience has been instructive. “I like the way Brady and Mona not only run their set but also how they build the movie, how they set out to make it financially grounded in terms of what they want to do,” says Martin. Of their contrasting directing styles, she adds that Corbet (The Brutalist, Vox Lux) is “very good at giving you that Braveheart moment, of leading you into battle [on set]”, while Fastvold (The Testament of Ann Lee) is more about bringing people together in a softer, “Scandinavian” way.

Whatever her misgivings going into the film, Martin sounds energised by the experience of making Amaretti, and hopes it marks the start of a new chapter in her career. But it’s helped her see the beauty in acting, too. “As an actor you have no control over what happens when you’ve done your part in a film, which used to freak me out a bit,” she confesses. “But now I think it’ll be nice not having to wake up at four in the morning because you need to go through the shot list, or you need to go and see the owners of the house [you’re shooting in] because they’re worried about something. I can just turn up, do my work and leave!”

Amaretti screens at Edinburgh Film Festival from 15 August.