The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 101
An interview with Alison Maclean
on Kitchen Sink
Richard Raskin
You stated in an earlier interview that the story for Kitchen Sink came to
you little by little, and I know that you wrote a detailed screenplay for the
film. But did the story change at all along the way? Does the film depart in
any significant ways from the original concept?
I came up with the idea in response to a kind of brief on the New
Zealand Film Commission. They were asking for ideas for 13-
minute shorts. It was a set budget and a set length. And I literally
sat down one day and tried to think of a story that could work for
that kind of scale. And I thought: something involving a woman,
basically alone at home, where something might happen to her. And
then it really kind of came very quickly in sequence and I saw the
whole film. But the part that stumped me, that took me a long time
to solve, was actually the ending. The rest was very clear to me, I
could see the whole thing, right up to when this creature wakes up
as a man, but I really didn't know what to do from there. And that
probably took about four months or so, and I was mulling it over
and trying out different ways of ending it – like having him speak,
and making it kind of complicated – and then I finally thought of
the final image, that seemed to bring the story full circle. But that
took a bit of time.
Can you tell me anything about the casting of Theresa Healy and Peter
Tait in the main roles?
Peter Tait was an actor I had used in another film I did called Talk
Back. I just loved his face and his presence. Actually, in that other