When Savanah Leaf turns 30 in November this year, she will have already notched a number of professional titles few people could dream of possessing, including both “lauded filmmaker” and “Olympic athlete.”
While those two pursuits may sound different, for the British-born Leaf, who makes her feature directorial debut with the enthusiastically received A24 drama “Earth Mama” a decade after playing volleyball for Great Britain at the 2012 London Olympics, they’re really not so far apart.
Leaf’s first feature, which IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio hailed out of Sundance as a “sublime” drama that “defies all cliches,” follows Gia, a young Black mother whose son and daughter from an all-but-nonexistent father are in foster-care limbo while she recovers from drug addiction. As Gia (played by first-time actress Tia Nomore in a stunning performance) makes her way through the various requirements of reunification while also being heavily pregnant with her third child and struggling to make ends meet, Leaf unspools a shimmering (and occasionally surreal) tale of a mother’s love.
Like many budding filmmakers, Leaf grew up watching plenty of animated films — her mother, Alison Leaf, is an animator and set dresser who has worked on several Pixar films, including “WALL-E,” “Up,” “Turning Red,” and the last two “Toy Story” features — and Leaf still fondly remembers watching “Babe: Pig in the City” as a kid. (It was one of her mom’s very first credits, a “big one for her.”)
While she said she didn’t get too into auteur-driven films until she was making her own, even as a teenager, Leaf had good taste: she was “obsessed” with Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “Love & Basketball.” Given Leaf’s artistic chops and athletic prowess, that affection seems like an obvious slam dunk.
Though Leaf was always an artistically minded kid, once she got to middle school, most of her extracurricular time was spent playing sports like volleyball and basketball. “When I got to high school, it was like, OK, I’m going to be able to go to college for one of these sports, and I knew I was better at volleyball, so I verbally committed to go play in college my sophomore year of high school,” Leaf said during a recent interview with IndieWire in Manhattan. “I couldn’t have paid to go to university any other way. This was giving me a full ride. So that kind of took over everything.”
Leaf started her college career at San Jose State before transferring to the University of Miami for her sophomore year (Leaf closed out her collegiate career in high style, graduating as the 2014 Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year). She’d hoped for a “more art-leaning major” in college (she was already interested in everything from photography to painting before she left home), but her volleyball obligations kept her far too busy.
Eventually, she decided to major in psychology, which ended up — funnily enough — suiting her artistic ambitions. “I feel like that’s really related to film,” Leaf said. “Film feels like a combination of psychology, working in a team environment, and artistic expression. For me, the transition didn’t feel as wild as maybe it seems on paper.”
After she graduated from Miami, Leaf played professional volleyball in Turkey and Puerto Rico before an injury led her to take a year off. That time away from the grind of professional sports reignited her creative fire.
“I was taking lots of photographs, I was really interested in art, but I was trying to figure out how I could do that,” she said. “I got injured playing volleyball, and I just kind of dove into working at a music video and commercial production company. I was basically asking different people, different companies, whether or not they would hire me. I had nothing on my resume. One company hired me, and it enabled me to see directors and how they pitch and how they write and what references they’re pulling, really up close. That inspired me to think that I could do it as well.”
As Leaf started to feel out her filmmaking aspirations, she directed short films (including “F Word,” which deals with child abandonment, and “The 4th Wave,” about Italian rapper Alessandra Prete, aka Priestess) and music videos for everyone from Gary Clark, Jr. to Common. She was also beginning to formulate what would become “Earth Mama,” as influenced by another major life event that happened when she was just 16: the adoption of her little sister.
“It was just me and my mom throughout all my upbringing, and she really wanted me to have a sister,” Leaf said. “When I wrote the first draft of the film, I was thinking about my relationship to my sister, and I was thinking about her birth mother, and what she was going through at the time. I kind of imagined myself in her shoes, and how I would handle the systems in place.”
Leaf’s initial script eventually led her to make the documentary short “The Heart Still Hums” as a kind of “emotional research.” The women she and co-filmmaker Taylor Russell interviewed for the documentary, which follows five mothers fighting to regain custody of their children, “gave texture to the script and it grounded it in a different way. The film started from a very personal place, but then expanded into a sort of collective voice,” she said.
Leaf is very cognizant of the fact that “Earth Mama” is not exactly her story, and Gia is not exactly her (or her sister, or even her sister’s birth mother), and the intense care and empathy she applied to making the film shine through in every luminous frame. (She also spent significant time interviewing women, speaking to experts, and poring over literature on the subjects the film touches.)
“I haven’t been through this specific situation, but I think a lot about how I handle stress and obstacles,” the filmmaker said. “I try to think of Gia as me and how would I handle this situation, how would I handle seeing my children for a couple of hours a week, and that’s your window of opportunity to connect with them. It might not be my specific story, but I think the way in which we handle it is about not thinking anybody is other, everybody is us. It could be me.”
Casting first-time actress Nomore, best known as a popular Bay Area rapper, in the film’s lead role “took a few moments,” Leaf said. “The first time she read the scenes with our casting directors, she was very present. She was looking and responding and listening very honestly. That really stood out, because I think a lot of people, when they’re acting for the first time, they try to put on a show. She wasn’t really doing that. I was nervous, because when you’re rapping, you’re putting on a show, but she has to pull away from that. When I saw her and she was willing to go there and be vulnerable, that was really exciting.”
Their next meeting? Leaf carefully termed it “not necessarily great.” Nomore came to see the “Earth Mama” team after a rap performance, “and she came straight from it and was all done up, and it was hard for me to really see her then,” Leaf said. And the meeting after that? “She took all that makeup off and she just became more grounded again. That was really the moment, because I could see her, yes, she might have this other side to her, but she’s willing to pull it all away.”
Nomore was also willing to go deep and to get extremely personal, even down to the ways in which her own body reflected Gia’s journey. “She had just had a child a year prior, and she was still breastfeeding,” Leaf said. “Her body, physically, was very much in touch with how it felt to carry a baby and how it felt to go into labor. She was training to be a doula, so she was hearing a lot of other people’s stories at the time, and I think that made her very sensitive to the story.”
Leaf kept Nomore even more present during filming by not showing her star the entire script. “She saw like 70 percent of it, and we had discussions on that, how she felt about it, and she really didn’t want to see the full script,” Leaf said. “She was eager to stay as present as possible. I think that helped, just thinking about it from scene to scene, thinking about how would I handle this moment, how would I handle this moment? The character is quiet and holding a lot in until the end, and it’s not that she’s not angry, but it’s just bubbling.”
Leaf’s younger sister, who is just 14, has seen the film and “really loved” it. (She even appears in a handful of scenes as a background extra.) “At that age, I don’t know how much you’re thinking about the full depth of the film,” Leaf said. “But to me, it’s kind of an ode to mothers and what they have to go through, and recognizing that it’s not as simple as it’s told to you or as we initially think it to be. Hopefully, as she grows, she’ll look at it in different ways and feel like it commemorates her in a respectful and authentic way.”
And their mother? “She really loves it,” Leaf said. “I was very nervous to share it with both of them, and my mom never read the script or anything, because I didn’t want to adjust it for anybody, I wanted it to feel honest. And then when she watched it, I think she was really surprised and happy to receive it.”
Up next, Leaf has plenty of balls in play: the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in downtown Los Angeles is currently hosting an exhibition titled “American Gurl” that “showcases video art, film, and performance to unpack and re-envision the American Dream through the lens of women.” Leaf’s nine-minute “self-portrait” entitled “run” is part of the program, which goes through the end of the month.
And, yes, she also wants to make another feature, and she hints that one is already percolating in her brain. “I have an idea about a project that I’m really excited about, and so I’m kind of currently diving into that,” Leaf said. A sports metaphor, naturally.
A24 releases “Earth Mama” in theaters on Friday, July 7.
