The Holy Vow: Margaret Betts on "Novitiate" | Interviews

I have to give a huge amount of credit to Kat Westergaard, my DP. We worked together on my documentary and short film, too. We started talking about what this should look like three years before, when I was still writing it. We thought that with a nun movie, a religious movie, people might expect grays and a heavy, cold-feeling environment and that would make it not very appealing. We wanted, borrowing a lot from Fred Zinnemann’s “A Nun’s Story,” to make it over-glamorous, lush, with pageantry. From a technical standpoint, you have the monochrome, the black and white, and it’s very difficult to expose so we can see the faces. Some scenes are very dark and it took so long to figure out how to light it. You’d have this line of nuns and it was all black and white, this monochromatic world, and then we would halo Margaret [Qualley’s] face a little. Any rooms we could paint ourselves, like her childhood home, we used color to help her face pop more than the other people.

You mention “A Nun’s Story" in the film. One of the girls says that seeing that movie made her want to become a nun.

That movie inspired a whole generation of girls to become nuns. It was released during the same time period where our movie was set. 

I wanted to make an edgy contemporary “Nun’s Story.” I loved Audrey Hepburn. She was my favorite when I was growing up. I loved “Sabrina,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and for “The Nun’s Story,” the novitiate and wedding scenes in that film, the ones I watched the most, inspired parts of “Novitiate.” As did a documentary of that era on YouTube with a newscaster interviewing girls who are becoming nuns. 

What kind of research did you do?

I found this whole canon of ex-nun memoirs, and they mainly describe being young girls, sharing a last cigarette in the back of a cab before they go in for the first time or sneaking out to the sanctuary in the middle of the night to drink the wine. But they were in love with God. They talk about Jesus like a matinee idol. They project every ideal and quality on their idea of Him. It was important that the girls in the movie seem like teenagers.  

Also, in that era you would either marry a guy from high school or be a spinster. The images of marriage they saw around them scared the hell out of them.