Callie Hernandez and Courtney Stephens’s INVENTION, a beguiling, mysterious, self-reflexive film that combines autobiographical fiction and archival video, is about a woman (Callie Hernandez playing Carrie Fernandez) sorting through the bureaucratic tangle and the deeper mysteries of identity and authenticity surrounding her father’s death. A self-professed visionary who claimed to offer holistic healing through the electromagnetic energy manipulation of handmade machines, the father was a combination of visionary, showman, and hapless entrepreneur who played on distinctly American brands of gullibility, optimism, cynicism towards conventional medicine, and conspiratorial thinking. Carrie’s journey takes the form of an oddball road movie in which she encounters and tries to make sense of the people who were close to her father. There are mysteries to solve, and mundane practical questions to answer, but ultimately, the journey is a way for Carrie to reconnect with this flawed man that she loved. Set in rural Massachusetts, and beautifully filmed in 16mm, this intimate, idiosyncratic film also happens to offer a timely microcosm of the country’s fragile political psyche.
Fittingly, this film that offers multiple perspectives on “truth,” is the result of a remarkable collaboration between two distinctive artists. Best known as an actress (with credits including SONG TO SONG, LA LA LAND, AND UNDER THE SILVER LAKE) Hernandez trained as a documentary filmmaker and has set up a production company to make microbudget films. Sloan grantee Stephens has received wide critical acclaim for her solo and collaborative essay films and experimental documentaries, including TERRA FEMME (2021), THE AMERICAN SECTOR (2020, with Pacho Velez), and the Sloan-supported JOHN LILLY AND THE EARTH CONFIDENCE CONTROL OFFICE (2025, with Michael Almereyda). With the varied experience and a converging sensibilities, Hernandez and Stephens have created a film about scientific invention that seems to be inventing itself along the way, laying bare the documentary and fiction techniques of the unfolding story so that we are constantly questioning what we are seeing and hearing, all while being deeply moved by Carrie/Callie’s emotional journey, which never stoops to easy sentimentality. In fact, the film is laced with deadpan humor and a playful approach to its potentially heavy subject. The filmmakers talked with Sloan Science and Film the day after their New York premiere at New Directors/New Films. The film opens in New York on April 18 at Metrograph.
Science & Film: I gather that this film grew from your discussions about losing your fathers. What were those initial talks like?
Courtney Stephens: The initial talks were just as friends, just sharing in a personal, emotional way. That shifted into this brainstorm about how to make sense of some of those things. There was a question about the experience, and what people don't talk about, and that fed into the tone of the film. There was an idea of the solemnity with which death is treated, and our feeling that a lot of the aftermath, especially in America, is embarrassingly bureaucratic, or indignifying, so those conversations led to what you see in the film, these very in-the-weeds types of interactions.
Callie Hernandez: We had known each other for a long time, but–weirdly–we reconnected outside of the Walter Reade Theater after a screening of Hong Sang-soo’s THE NOVELIST’S FILM, so it was very full-circle. My dad had probably passed away six months prior to that, and that spawned conversations between Courtney and I of her losing her father and then discovering that we both had eccentric father figures with complicated relationships, and then we started talking about how idiotic the bureaucracy makes you feel afterwards and how complicated it is and how there was a comfort, especially for me in that moment to be able to talk very openly about it and to laugh about it in ways that only people who have lost fathers can understand. I think that's where that conversation started.
I was renting a house and making a bunch of films there. I said to Courtney, maybe we should make a dead dad's film. And then that's how that started.
S&F: What is so amazing to me about the film is that the subject of the film is so connected to what you're doing with self-reflexivity. It’s a film about performance and about invention. The word invention can mean so many things, including the invention of identity. The issues that make it complicated to figure out who your parent is are connected to the issues you explore about telling stories on film.
CS: Yeah. This isn't something we've talked a lot about, but I think we would both say that our fathers were performers. Callie’s dad was on TV, and mine was a business guy and very public and extroverted. We both had the fallout of having fathers who were very public-facing, and we knew the intimate parts and those weren’t always the same. This idea of the surface of the person versus the unknowability of the person was part of the process that you see in the film of, like, seeking out people who are reflecting back versions that are not compatible with one another. We have this inside line because I think as a daughter of a father, that's a very unique relationship.
S&F: We learn more about Callie’s father in this film. I guess a big question about him is just like, what did he actually believe? How much was a knowing performance?
CH: I think he really believed in what he was doing. After he died, my sister and I found all these machines. He did not invent anything, but he was very into any kind of lasers, and energetic healing things. He was very mercurial and went through a number of different identities as a doctor. He started as an ER doctor for ten years and then he opened his own practice and it was more Chinese-medicine based and herbal-based. And then all of a sudden he was a hypnotist and then it got more and more eccentric, with a very niche part of medical technology that he was really into, especially by the end of his life.
The dialogue in the film about how he was working for a pyramid scheme outside of Utah, and using lasers to heal feral cats is true. That really was what he was interested in by the end of his life. He parked his trailer on his girlfriend's land, and that was where he was at. What he believed was very multifaceted, you know, but it just grew into this larger thing. And I know he fully believed in what he was doing.
CS: And I think that's the thing about a family member, when you love someone. Outside people, when they talk about the film, ask ‘is the machine a scam.’ At some level, when you’re a family member, you’re not that connected to that question. You understand a person's optimism and their kind need to feel like a visionary. It's sort of, you know, disconnected. It's almost like your ethical mind can disconnect and go fully into a compassion and frustration in the person that you love
S&F: Sure, a disconnect between the loved one you know, and the way the world sees them. Your character is grappling with that from the start. You’ve said that your performance is sort of wooden early in the film, but that felt so right for the character.
CH: Well, it was.
CS: It feels protective.
CH: It was. I approached it more as a filmmaker, not necessarily as an actor. Everything was so experiential for me to re-experience because it was very familiar. There is a sort of wooden-ness and quality of being protective of yourself. When you grow up in that kind of environment with a lot of eccentrics running around a lot of the times, and sometimes it works out for my dad and sometimes it doesn't… Sometimes he screws other people over or whatever. I was very protected even as a child, I guess. It felt experiential, not necessarily even intentional. It just felt like you just can't be that porous in situations like that. And you're protecting what you just don't know. You're not sure. There's a trepidation that comes with that and a closed-offness. And I knew that it would probably blossom more and more into a vulnerability because that's what happens. That's what happened for me, anyways.
Some feedback that I got last night; my dad was born deaf in one ear, and you can see on a large screen that it's messed up and I never noticed it. So many people came up to me afterwards and they said, ‘Was your dad's ear a deformity from the machine?’ I thought, ‘Wow, there's all these spinoff conspiracies happening. It’s so interesting.’ He was born deaf in one ear with a small ear and in the 1950s they took a huge piece of his skin off of his neck and there's this big scar and wrapped it around, I guess, to help with the optics, but also to funnel the sound a little more in some weird way. That's what he said. I don't know what's true or not true, to be honest. There's a lot of mystery around my dad's family. No, it's not a deformity from the machine, but that's so interesting that that's where people went with it.
S&F: When you bring up the idea of mystery, the film is built in a way that makes everything seem mysterious. Right at the beginning, you make us very aware of the mechanics of the fiction that we're seeing. In the first shot, you are seeing a church organ, and the music is suddenly changed. You realize that this is how a movie soundtrack works. So many choices in the film make us think about what we’re seeing and hearing. Could you talk about how that evolved? You obviously had archival material to work with, but you took an approach to narrative that really lets the viewer question everything they're seeing.
CH: I think that's why I keep using the word experiential. Because when we decided to make the film, I had the archival material and I wanted to make a film with it. I was really obsessed with this particular machine that my dad had, just because it felt like a weird portal or something. Then when we started doing this, I didn't realize that was going to be the film.
I have a varied approach to it. You know, some things I think are true and some things I'm not so sure. Some things I definitely know I don't believe in. It was really enlightening, watching it on the big screen last night, to see how much this collaboration was able to bring in different perspectives. We definitely didn't want to make a single-perspective film.
We talked a lot about conspiracy as a container for grief. The intention was that Carrie would be a sort of absorber of material, not a detective, although we did play with that a little bit. She was more just like a listener. She was gathering memories through other people's perspectives.
S&F: You [Courtney] have done a few collaborations in a row and the act of collaboration feels crucial here. Because there's not one perspective.
CS: The subject is sort of about the incongruency of angles on a person or angles on a situation. Documentaries can hold that kind of plurality of point of view. But people are grumpier about it. I think that there's pressure for the film to take a stand in nonfiction. I think that what was really liberating in the fiction world is people can have discussions where there's no resolution to the discussion. It's about rattling off each other, with different discourses or different emotional states.
We got a question last night in the Q&A that was pushing towards asking where the film stands on certain issues that arise in the film. I feel the film is really about the fact that, just on a political level, we're swimming in this stuff. We're swimming in media and angles on healthcare, the stakes of healthcare, and all this kind of stuff. It was really liberating to be in a space where that stuff could all just be like a pinball machine.
S&F: It is very weird now to be in a world where everything is a conspiracy theory, even whether people should take vaccines.
CH: The RFK era.
CS: There are people who worked on this film who didn't take the COVID vaccine. As Callie was saying, we have different histories with medicine. There was a research trip that we made where we were interacting with somebody more involved in this world. I thought it was kind of spooky and exotic. Callie was like, ‘Let's leave.’
CH: I remember driving there, and I felt Courtney's excitement. I said that this might be a little darker than you think. Then it was. It was a very quiet ride home afterwards. Sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's not so funny.
S&F: The people that you encounter in the film along the way, were those all based on specific people?
CH: Some of them were loosely based on specific experiences. That same question that was asked last night really had me thinking too. The film is not taking a stance, that's what it is exactly about. That you can love someone who's very ambiguous. These ambiguities can just stay. We really didn't want to make a political film, because it's apolitical. Love is apolitical in this way where I don't agree with my father on everything. I didn't want to talk about Pizzagate. I’ve reached an age where I either accept this person as they are and have a relationship or I don't. I had plenty of reason to never have a relationship with him, but I just didn't want that. There are no fathers anywhere in my family. They all died very young.
We could have made this a much more political film. I was very guarded when we were shooting about the fact that my dad actually died from COVID. Five other men in my family died from COVID in the same month. I felt really guarded about that because I just didn't want that to be the issue.
S&F: When you're talking about it, it reminds me of Fred Wiseman’s films, which are all about complexity. The more I see his films, the more I see how close they are to fiction. They are really about people and how complex they are.
CH: I guess that's why I keep saying the diamond thing. It’s so multifaceted and everything reflects off everything else. It creates a hologram sort of person.
S&F: I've seen it twice so far and I feel like I'll revisit it because there are mysteries to it. Each time you can get something different out of it.
CS: I think there's also this feeling that when you start looking at a subject, ultimately the human element inverts the subject into an emotional landscape rather than a topical landscape and that is exciting, I think, within the film.
CH: And truthful.
S&F: This is a technical thing, but the fact that you shot on film, what do you think that did, aside from affect the texture of it?
CS: It has an emotional timbre for sure, but I think that we knew that there was going to be a lot of archive that was digital inside the film. So, I think knowing that was ‘the real’ in some ways – the film is about the construction of things –and film is kind of a signal of the cinematic and fiction. It seemed nice to be propelled back into the film world, knowing that we're constructing a story, and this other stuff is more evidentiary. I think it differentiated the two looks in a nice way, and of course it affected filming and production a lot.
CH: Yeah, limitations. Which was nice and a nightmare. Rafa [cinematographer Rafael Palacio Illingworth] also wanted to shoot on film only, and I think we did too. We were pretty in line in terms of tone and aesthetics, but it was also a way to blend and differentiate. I think the limitations ultimately resulted in a certain candor in the film that was almost necessary. It's like another language. Or frequency, if you will.
S&F: The film has been winning prizes, it's getting a theatrical release, and it's playing here [at New Directors/New Films] but I'm wondering how you feel about what it was like to get this made in this environment. And I guess you're planning to do more productions in your house.
CH: Maybe. It's funny because somebody came up to me last night and they said, ‘Do you feel like this is a standalone work in your body of work?’ And I thought that was so interesting because I could see that is probably what the optics are. But I studied documentary filmmaking in college; that's when I made films before I ever got sucked into the studio acting world. And I was a punk in Austin playing punk bands. This felt actually like a return back. It was pretty intentional that I decided to rent that house and make a bunch of films because I had finished an HBO show [THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT] and was fried. It was this really bizarre moment in my life where I’d just lost my dad, and I just wasn’t sure that I wanted. I felt a need to return to my roots but also to expand them.
What feels successful is that it feels relatable. So many people came up last night and they said, this is exactly my mom, or this is exactly my father, or this is exactly my brother. They wanted to chat about it. That is what feels like it was all worth it. That's really beautiful and really moving, especially in a moment like this...in the world of filmmaking, and also in the world in general. That feels like we did something.
S&F: Courtney, you hadn't done a narrative film before, but this feels like an extension of your work. Do you plan to work more in narrative? This is a special movie; I feel you've tapped into something.
CS: I think it was really felt. It's funny. I went to the AFI for grad school. I studied narrative filmmaking then totally went at a 90-degree angle and didn't do anything like that. I think maybe part of that was just economic. It always seemed like the barrier to entry was so impossible. In a way, this film did have nonfiction production elements in the way we were going about it. Just finding somebody who let us shoot in their store, then involving the store, and then involving the people. There was a lot of documentary filming that I could adapt to this film, which was nice.
I think that emotionally, for a long time I also just felt safer–and maybe it was a personal limitation–to be in the world of ideas. The world of emotions felt trickier. I've made films that have a lot of personal sentiment in them, but they're not really tapping into real deep personal experience. They're more about the surface of experience.
That was intimidating, but also so much more rewarding when people get something from it. It's not just people saying ‘Oh, your film's so interesting.’ Here it's like you're working with fluids that are less predictable, and they hit people, who have this sudden set of associations that we couldn't have anticipated. That makes it just so much more rich. It was like walking a little bit on lily pads, not knowing if they would hold. It's super rewarding but I also I don't know how anyone gets films like this funded. It's kind of an act of magic.
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