From our director, Paulina Lagudi Ulrich…

Dress is a film with many points of view. At first glance, it might appear that there are only two perspectives in the film, but, really, there are three: Megan’s, Susan’s as a single woman, and Susan’s as a grandmother. Instead of forcing the lens into each of those perspectives, I approached the film from a fourth perspective: the audience’s.

To keep the story cohesive and focused, I approached the scenes like we are a thread sewing the story together. I went about this by creating mostly steadicam ‘oners’ that push us through the scenes and wrap us around the characters. We are floating through time and the story as we’re led to the final scene that stitches everything together.

Time is an interesting theme in this story. Time manipulates our memories and perspectives on things, so I wanted to have a subtle feeling of the past haunting the present. The production design played a significant role in creating a subtle retro, vintage-styled world that creates a sense of timelessness as we are in the present while also addressing the past. This is also the reason we decided to shoot on super 16mm.

That ever so slight haunting feeling is also there in the sound design of a grandfather clock as well as a creak in the floorboard every time Susan looks at herself in the mirror. That creak in the floorboard is a similar device to the dissonance we created in the film’s score. The score opens with a very lovely, pleasing tone, but every so often there’s a very subtle dissonance with one-off string. We wanted to create this feeling that Susan is still tied to her past by one final string that she needs to let go of and cut free. That string is her guilt and her resentment.

I want audiences to walk away with a similar experience as I had the first time I read Dress -- They will smile at the sweetness and satisfaction of a story wrapping up in a neat bow, but then will find a loose thread poking out as they think about the story more and more. They will pull that loose thread, and find it unravel in the form of questions and emotions that maybe lead them to looking at themselves in the mirror of time.