When film director Jay Rosenblatt’s daughter Ella turned two, be began a ritual that would last until she was 18. Every time she had a birthday, he would sit her down on the same couch and ask her pretty much the same questions.
He would film her answers. Now, his 29-minute documentary How Do You Measure A Year, made from all the footage shot on Ella’s birthdays, has made it onto the short list for the Oscars.
Ella’s answers, especially when she is very young, are playful, occasionally profound, and sometimes very disconcerting. She is a delightful and precocious interviewee.
“What do you want to do when you grow up?” Ella is asked when she is three. “Put on make-up and eat gum,” comes the definitive answer.
A year or two later, asked the same question, she replies: “I want to be a grown-up when I am grown up.”
“What is power?” Rosenblatt inquires every year. As a very young child, she seems to think she is being asked “what is powder” and comes up with a response so unexpected (and involving vaginas) that it startles her father.
“I did change them [the questions] as she got older a little bit. I continued them but I added to them,” Rosenblatt says. When she turned 10 or 11, he started asking her what she might like to say to her older self. “I didn’t ask that when she was very young because I think the concept is pretty difficult to get.”
“I don’t think I had the best questions. Looking back, I wish I had asked her some other things but, you know, that’s what it was!” he adds.
Since the director began the project, cinema technology has changed dramatically. Now, everyone has a camera on their phone. Rosenblatt shot almost all the footage using an old PD150 DVCam. “Because I wanted consistency, I stuck with that camera for 16 years, from age 2 to 17,” he remembers. In the latter years, he worried that the camera wasn’t working properly. He couldn’t check because he had vowed not to watch anything before she turned 18.
“Until I sat down during Covid to edit it, I didn’t know if I had a film,” Rosenblatt acknowledges. “I didn’t know if the sound was working. The camera was getting older and the sound seemed very temperamental. I wasn’t sure if the image came out.”
When he finally looked at the material, Rosenblatt was hugely relieved that most of it had come out OK. In two of the years, the image quality was very “washed out” but he was able to fix that through colour correction.
For the first five years, Rosenblatt had a friend who did the shooting for him while he asked the questions. The friend moved and he was left to take over the cinematography himself. “I had to do it on my own. I was doing everything. I am not technically very adept. I was always a little nervous about the project. I am just amazed it came out to be honest,” he sighs. When Ella celebrated her 18th birthday, he felt he was justified in upgrading and using a newer, better camera which had a different aspect ratio.
This is not the first doc that Rosenblatt has made with Ella. When she was very young, he made four films with her, two of which showed on HBO.
“I knew I could make a good film with her because she is very charming and funny,” he observes. “With those first four films, I stopped when she was aged five because she was really developing a personality and I didn’t want to invade her privacy and show her growing up. I didn’t want to affect her adversely at all.”
He didn’t start working in earnest on the birthday footage until she was already 20. He showed it to her and made sure she was happy for him to go ahead. Ella was invited to give feedback on rough cuts and make sure she wasn’t “too embarrassed.”
This, the director points out, is not a glorified home movie. It has a structure, a time frame and it has been very carefully edited.
“I was most surprised by just how dramatic the changes were from year to year,” he says of the birthday footage. “Some years, it was like it was somebody completely different, her whole demeanour, the look, how she composed herself…[But] each year is kind of a snapshot. It doesn’t necessarily represent the whole year. It just is that moment.”
When it comes to the Oscars, Rosenblatt is on a bit of a roll. He was nominated last year for his short When We Were Bullies [later picked up by HBO]. He hopes to repeat the feat this year but points out that he is fighting a David v Goliath battle against the streamers and the majors.
“I am repeating the exact same strategy as last year,” he says of his one-man Oscar campaign. “I am just inviting people I know to see it basically…hopefully it will pay off again!”
How Do You Measure A Year doesn’t currently have distribution but it has screened to acclaim at major festivals from Locarno to IDFA. International sales are handled by Submarine Entertainment.
