How everything changed for Carly Stone as she became a mother while working on her film North of Normal

Cutaways is a personal essay series where filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This TIFF 2022 edition by Carly Stone focuses on her film North of Normal, an adaptation of Cea Sunrise Person's 2014 memoir about her counterculture youth in the wilds of 1970s Western Canada.

Directing while eight months pregnant in the pandemic was no joke. Directing while eight months pregnant in the pandemic in a bug suit definitely felt like one. But that is how I spent the summer of 2021.

On location in Sudbury, North Bay and Mattawa, I was often surrounded by poison ivy, and experiencing the joys of shad fly season. I loved every minute. 

For four years prior, I'd been working with Alexandra Weir, our screenwriter, on adapting Cea Sunrise Person's memoir, North Of Normal. One of our producers, Kyle Mann, had given me the book when we were working together on our last movie, The New Romantic. I read it in one sitting. Cea writes with humour and pathos, and her world — and the characters that populated it — captivated me. The book thrilled me and inspired me to bring this visually rich and emotionally charged story to the screen.

At its core, North of Normal is about a mother and her child. But over the course of developing the material, my relationship to the story changed.

When I first read the book as a young female director who was not yet a mother, I had related to Cea's ambition and feminist spirit. But then I became a mom and felt more empathy for Cea's mother, Michelle, despite her flaws — or maybe because of them. I felt protective over both Cea and Michelle's complexities: two strong female characters expressed in entirely different ways, infinitely intertwined with each other, forever defined by one another. My goal was to capture that.

We were supposed to shoot the movie in the spring of 2020, but when the pandemic shut things down, we were forced to push the project indefinitely. A year later, when things ramped up again, I was in my third trimester and hadn't been within six feet of anyone outside of my household in a very long time.

The first person I hugged outside of my family was my cinematographer, David Jones. He'd just come out of a two-week quarantine after flying in from the U.S., so I deemed him huggable. Kyle and I, on the other hand, sat on opposite ends of a park bench at the beginning of pre-production. He had flown in from Vancouver and wasn't required to quarantine. My hands were raw and red from overusing those little purple bottles of natural, organic, fragrance-free, not-tested-on-animals sanitizers. They were my safety net, real or imagined. I was a blast to work with.

When I arrived at our first location scout, my department heads caught sight of a disassembled crib in the back of my car, and then glanced at my stomach. They thought my plan was to give birth during production. I reassured them labour was reserved for the edit suite; the crib was for my two-year-old.  You see, I had convinced my family to hit the road with me. Staying in five different rentals over the course of eight weeks wouldn't disrupt anyone's sleep at all!

My husband and I soon realized our son didn't understand why I suddenly had to leave the house to do my job. When I came home after my first day of prep, he told me he didn't love me anymore. During breaks, I would rush back to our Airbnbs to try catch my son's bedtime. During my days off, I would get my prenatal blood-work done at the Lifelabs in Sudbury. It elevated my connection to the material to make a movie about motherhood while so deeply immersed in it.

Before the vaccine, the idea of directing this film pregnant, while living with an unvaccinated toddler, felt impossible. But when time and science meant that I was double-vaxxed and acclimatizing to other humans again, my fear transformed into exhilaration, adrenaline, delight. For me, the only thing that beat directing North of Normal was getting to edit it over Zoom, in my bedroom, while my newborn slept on my chest.

This year's Toronto International Film Festival runs September 8–18. Find showtimes for North of Normal here.

Missed it at TIFF? Catch it at the Atlantic International Film Festival (September 15–22), the Edmonton International Film Festival (September 22–October 1), the Calgary International Film Festival (September 22–October 2) and the Vancouver International Film Festival (Sept 29–October 9).