By Lisa Horan.
Leah Yananton
Lust. Greed. Selfishness. Immorality.
It isn’t hard to find stories that center on some of society’s greatest ills, while sidestepping the negative consequences that inevitably result. Filmmaker Leah Yananton wasn’t interested in creating a film that celebrates decadence.
On the contrary, Yananton’s Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie, emphasizes the dark side of moral failures and one woman’s journey through brokenness and to a path back to the integrity that was destroyed as a result of her own poor choices.
As it turns out, writing the screenplay and realizing her dream of producing the film became a nine-year journey that would nearly bring Yananton to her own breaking point.
Christine Ryndak as Sophie and Vincent Piazza as Jimmy in Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie
Step 1: Experience
Sophie, the central character of Surviving Me, (portrayed by Christine Ryndak) is a college junior struggling to navigate through a volatile social scene that is defined by hyper-sexuality and unscrupulous behavior. She isn’t a bad person. She actually means well, but her morals become compromised as she allows cultural pressures, her own self-centered desires, and insecurities to severely impair her moral compass. The consequences are devastating.
From fabricating an unfavorable story about her parents to overcome a financial aid crisis, to engaging in a love affair with her married poetry professor (played by Fredric Lehne) – at the expense of his kind wife (played by Mira Furlan) and Sophie’s adoring boyfriend (played by Vincent Piazza)– Sophie’s choices produce consequences she isn’t prepared to handle. “My goal was to identify the true cost of bad decisions and to show that, if you behave the way the world wants you to behave, everyone loses,” explains Yananton.
While the original idea for the story came to Yananton in a dream, she drew upon what she was witnessing around her – at Columbia University and society – to write the script. The time was post-9/11, and Yananton describes the environment she found herself in as chaotic and confusing.
“I felt like everyone had lost themselves, and I had fallen into the River Styx,” she explains. “Girls who called themselves feminists, weren’t acting in their best interest sexually. People were hurting themselves and each other under this banner of liberation.” Writing became a way for Yananton to fight for boundaries and assert her own ideals on integrity.
Christine Ryndak as Sophie and Vincent Piazza as Jimmy in Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie
Step 2: Surrender
Her greatest fight, however, would be the one she had with herself, as she had to take drastic measures to ensure that her ideas made it onto the page. “Even though I was excited about the story, I was extremely antsy during the writing process and found it very difficult to sit in one place to get my thoughts down,” says Yananton.
Her radical solution: tying herself to a chair with a clothesline to prevent herself from getting distracted and getting up too often. “I basically had to seat belt myself to the chair and set a timer for 20 minute increments so I wouldn’t get up so much,” she explains.
As passionate as Yananton was about the story, her less than accommodating living situation also fueled her desire to complete the screenplay. “My writing desk was a hodge-podge sculpture of broken closet storage shelves with exposed staples that I had held up with a file cabinet and cinder blocks, and the view from the window of my roach-infested New York City apartment was a 6 inch-wide sliver of sky. Needless to say, I was determined to write my way out of my surroundings,” explains Yananton, with a chuckle.
Excerpt from a sketchbook for Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie
Though radical, the strategy worked, and Yananton was able to complete a first draft in three months. Then, she put her script through test after test, acting scenes out herself and with other actors, creating collages of her visions for the story, drawing out a web of different causes and effects in her sketchbook, writing the story from different character perspectives, and trying out multiple endings.
Not only did the process help Yananton to identify the emotional through-line of the story, but also uncover just as much about herself as a writer as the characters she had created. “One of the most important revelations for me as a writer was the need to get outside of myself, and that was only possible when I opened the door in my mind and heart to surrender control,” she says.
“Sometimes a story can take the writer on a very unexpected (and thrilling) journey because the story has a life of its own. I believe that my role as a writer was to be a humble servant to the story. I found it was only when I surrendered control that I was able to allow the script to find its own light and truly find my characters, and they told me what they wanted to do.”
Excerpt from a sketchbook for Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie
Step 3: Toil
Yananton didn’t have anyone to surrender control to during the filmmaking process. Instead, she had to find a way to balance the multiple roles she had taken on – writer, director, producer, actor. “There were definitely times I asked myself, ‘What have I had gotten myself into?’” recollects Yananton. “I knew I wanted to write and direct, but my screenwriting professor told me that if I really wanted to learn how to write, I’d have to learn how to act.” Yananton followed suit by attending a part-time conservatory program over the next three years at the Neighborhood Playhouse and used what she had learned to dive headfirst into the role of Kiera, Sophie’s wild, overly-promiscuous friend.
Then, Yananton spent what she describes as two solid years of “obsessing” over the film and its every facet. She workshopped the script at NYC’s prestigious “Our Workshop East” after begging Artistic Director Lenore DeKoven to be a part of it. She practiced shooting test scenes with actors and discussed at length with DP, Larry Engel how she wanted the film to look. She became consumed with raising money and finding investors.
The burden of identifying financial backers for the film became the biggest challenge for Yananton to overcome. Like the character she had created, Yananton found herself navigating through Dante’s Inferno, as she had to find a way to finish the film in spite of setbacks in financing, scheduling, and post production. “The film had become my baby, and I had to fight with everything I had to get it completed,” says Yananton, who was able to secure a job as a fitting model after moving to LA to help her stay afloat financially. “I didn’t mean to be as ambitious as I wound up being, but I grew a lot through the process, and I’m grateful for the journey and the incredibly immersive experience it was.”
Christine Ryndak as Sophie and Vincent Piazza as Jimmy in Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie
Step 4: Fulfillment
Albeit grueling, the journey ultimately led Yananton to a “dream come true” experience when the film celebrated its world premiere at the Hollywood Film Festival. “I was incredibly honored because the mission of the Hollywood Film Festival is to recognize films that have messages with a social impact, so the fact that they recognized the message of my movie was amazing,” says Yananton.
She was also incredibly gratified by the audience’s response to the film. “They laughed at parts that I had hoped they would laugh at, and gasped at parts they should have gasped at,” says Yananton. “I thought, OK, I can die now!”
Especially moving to Yananton was the way the film resonated with people who represented different backgrounds, races, and ages, who expressed how the story “spoke to their souls”. “I’ve been through some tough shit, and I wanted to talk about it and give my interpretation of the college experience,” says Yananton. “It’s not pretty, but it does tell a story about shedding childish behavior and taking responsibility for actions.
The thing was, I had worked in isolation for so long, I didn’t really know how the film would be received, so the fact that these people – who weren’t family members or friends – heard what I was trying to say and got it, added years back to my life. Everything I went through became worth it at that moment. ”
At this moment, Yananton no longer uses that homemade closet storage shelf desk to craft her stories. The desk in her LA apartment is, instead, an old vintage 1950s kitchen table that she pulled out of dumpster. “I guess I will always thrive on a little artistic chaos,” she admits, “but, I have a cat now who keeps me in check, so at least I don’t have to tie myself to a chair any more to get my stories written.”
