Melanie Aitkenhead on Directing James Franco’s ‘Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?’

When James Franco approaches you to direct his lesbian vampire remake of a Lifetime classic like Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?, how could you possibly refuse?

That was the situation director Melanie Aitkenhead found herself in when Franco came to her with his project. I had the opportunity to chat with Aitkenhead about her upcoming films, her favorite on-set moment, and the collaborative environment of a James Franco creation.

Aitkenhead was born and raised in Guatemala City, Guatemala and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Advertising from Southern Methodist University before moving to Los Angeles in 2008 to pursue a career in filmmaking and attend a University of Southern California Master’s program.

The director felt as though her experience in advertising (mostly on the creative side, with copywriting and art direction) influenced her as a filmmaker.

“I think everything that I’ve done has really informed my filmmaking,” she said. She recalled a speech made by a director several decades ago listing everything that it takes to be a director. “It’s like ten pages of everything you can imagine, from knowing about cooking, music, dancing, fighting, all these things. Because as a filmmaker, the more rich you are in experiences, the better storyteller you’ll be at the end.”

Aitkenhead is an admirer of filmmakers like Derek Cianfrance, citing his film Blue Valentine as one of the films that inspired her as a director, alongside the award-winning Turkish film Mustang directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven.

Aitkenhead, like fellow Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? collaborator Amber Coney, had worked with Franco in the past, while completing her Master’s program at USC. “James was teaching a class where we were going to do an adaptation of his book, Actors Anonymous. Ten to eleven directors were chosen and each one of us directed twelve minutes of the feature film.”

The novel, in the form of a collection of “confessional tales” told by young actors in Hollywood attending an Alcoholics Anonymous-esque support group, blurs the line between autobiography and fiction. Fittingly, Franco himself appears in the movie, alongside Eric Roberts, Keegan Allen, and Scott Haze. The adaptation is expected to be released in late 2016.

Following the adaptation, Franco again approached Aitkenhead to work on his newest project, believing that she “had the sensibilities for it.”

“He called and told me that Lifetime had this project called Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? and he was asking if I wanted to direct it,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Yeah, send me the script!’ And then I asked him what it was about and he said it’s a lesbian vampire story and I was hooked.”

Like Coney, who wrote the screenplay based off of Franco’s outline, Aitkenhead wasn’t familiar with the original Lifetime film, starring Tori Spelling and Ivan Sergei, when Franco brought the project to her attention. “I had heard of the original movie, but I hadn’t seen it. When I agreed to do it, they sent me the original movie, and I watched it and got even more inspired.”

That inspiration led to the inclusion of little homages to the movie’s namesake, while not excluding viewers of the new remake who were unfamiliar with the original 1996 television film.

“There’s a scene with Julie [the mother of the remake’s protagonist, Leah], played by Tori Spelling. She doesn’t cook, so she does take-out dinner and she’s taking it out of the containers. That was taken literally from the original, so even though it’s like a complete revamp — ha! — a complete remake, the fans from the original will still be able to enjoy certain moments of similarities.”

Given that Lifetime movies typically have a reputation for melodrama, Aitkenhead was clear that her Mother remake was neither a spoof or played too seriously. Noting that Lifetime viewers typically expect certain things, she wanted the film to be “rooted in reality” while not taking itself too seriously and emphasized that when directing the cast and crew.

“We know it’s full of camp; we know it’s full of these ‘Lifetime moments,’ and it’s not that we’re making fun of it or that we’re taking it too seriously. The relationships are real, but there is still that little feeling that it’s a Lifetime movie, that it has that frame around it that you just can’t quite put your finger on,” she said.

“We wanted this movie to speak to the audience. Some people can take it really seriously, while others can take it for what it is, which is a fun movie that does deal with really important subjects but wasn’t taken too seriously.”

The film, which addresses subjects such as sexual identity and even sexual assault, tied the vampire aspect into its overarching theme: “Pearl [love interest of the protagonist Leah] is not only a vampire; she’s also lesbian.”

The use of a ‘monster metaphor’ is commonplace in many types of media, with the ‘monster’ character representing a form of real-life societal ‘otherness.’ “We dealt with queer theory and with the monster being misunderstood in society,” Aitkenhead said. “So we tried to weave in both important messages together.”

On the subject of working with James Franco on-set and directing him in a project he’d spearheaded, Aitkenhead had only positive things to say about the experience.

“James is such a collaborative and generous artist, and he always has amazing ideas. And he doesn’t really impose his ideas. He likes to have an open dialogue, and we worked really closely on the vision of the movie while we were on set working.”

Aitkenhead recalled a particularly humorous moment, when Franco unexpectedly pulled her from behind the camera to appear as an extra in the film, as the assistant to Franco’s character, a theater director.

“We were like ‘I think you need an assistant, you need someone next to you taking notes.’ And James was like, ‘Yeah, I need someone next to me,’ and then he gives me this look which meant that I was going to be the assistant,” she recalled.

“I start laughing and I’m like, ‘No way, no way…’ Because, you know, I just want to stay behind the camera. Then I was like, OK let’s do it, so five minutes later I’m going through make up!”

Aitkenhead couldn’t help but laugh as she was acting beside Franco, an acting pro. “[During the scene,] I’m really trying not to laugh. But everything he’s saying is gold. I mean, imagine all of a sudden, someone is like ‘Come play basketball with Michael Jordan, come play a game with him!’ It’s one thing to direct [Franco], and it’s another to act with him.”

The director’s favorite scene to shoot was one that they only had two takes to master, due to time (and fake blood) restraints. “We had a limited supply of that fake blood and we also had limited time because we shot the movie over sixteen days,” Aitkenhead remembered. “We had only three days at the theater [location].” 

The scene involved buckets of blood being thrown on Leah, the protagonist, as she is acting in a performance of her college’s stage play Macbeth. 

“We really only had two chances, and it’s my favorite scene because I really was so stressed about ‘Oh my god, what if we don’t get it, what if we don’t get it?’ And then we did get it, and we all just took a deep breath and were very happy.”

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Be sure to tune in to see the world premiere of Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? Saturday, June 18 at 8/7c on Lifetime.