“I’m Drawn to Ridiculous Extremes”: Mimi Cave on Housewives, Holland, and the Hyperreal

Few directors have been able to dissect the secrets that lurk beneath well-meaning visages as deliciously as Mimi Cave. Cave’s filmography consists of eerie music videos (“And Saints” by Sleigh Bells) and equally disquieting short films (Vessel), and her first feature, the 2022 thriller Fresh, was the perfect distillation of all of her artistic sensibilities. Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones as a woman who goes on a weekend getaway with a date she’s met through the apps, played by Sebastian Stan, Fresh took its character’s latent anxieties to histrionic extremes.. 

Cave’s second feature, Holland, came to her while she was still editing Fresh, and it continues her trend of exploring the twisted appetites and dark cravings that are often masked by status and power. Swapping a contemporary setting for the early 2000s, Holland follows Nancy Vandergroot (a hilariously bubbly Nicole Kidman), a school teacher who lives in Holland, Michigan with her husband, Fred (Matthew Macfayden), and her son, Harry (Jude Hill). On the surface, it’s a perfect suburban life, but Cave explores how all this comfort and contentment gives way to a sort of gnawing boredom. Nancy begins to suspect that Fred may be having an affair and recruits a fellow teacher, Gael García Bernal’s Dave, to uncover the truth, only to find that things are much more complicated than she had expected (without spoiling anything, it’s not cannibalism but it’s on the same mood board). A recurring narrative device throughout the film is the famed Tulip Time festival, a real tradition that takes place every year in Holland, where residents plant millions of tulips throughout the city and partake in parades, tours, concerts, and dancing to honor the town’s Dutch heritage.

After Holland’s world premiere at SXSW, I caught up with Cave via Zoom before she embarked on a series of in-person screenings across the country. We talked about how growing up in the Midwest shaped her aspirations as an artist and the titanic feat of recreating the Tulip Time festival with the help of some 500 extras.

———

ZACHARY LEE: How did it feel to have your film premiere here at South By? I know you’ve had projects here before.

MIMI CAVE: Yeah. I think because I’ve had projects here before, it felt like there was a trajectory of my own within the festival. I’ve gotten to experience every side of it. Next I’m going to go sing a song, I guess.

LEE: You have to hit all the different disciplines.

CAVE: Exactly. I’ll start a startup and see if we can go into the tech space, too. [Laughs] No, it was great. For this type of film, it’s a really great audience. It was kind of a match made in heaven for Holland.

LEE: You were in the middle of editing Fresh when Holland was sent your way, and it had been in development since 2013 or something. I’m just curious what made you want to jump right into a project that’s intense, but thematically similar in some ways.

CAVE: I was reading a lot and knowing I wanted to get something lined up as soon as possible. I’m a bit of a workaholic, so I was already worried about, when Fresh is over, the slump that directors go in. You’re needed and asked questions every day, then all of a sudden it’s crickets. You’re always like, “I’ve got to line my next thing up so I can avoid the void of silence.” After I finish a project, I put myself into it so much that I’m kind of looking for something with a different tone, something I haven’t done before, to keep me excited. I was getting sent a lot of female revenge cannibal dating thrillers after Fresh—and plenty of great scripts—but I felt like I wanted to do something different. I read Holland and I wasn’t totally sure at first, but it really stuck with me. I felt like I could find my way in because of the characters and where they lived and where I grew up. It just felt like a good fit and it kept gnawing at me.

LEE: The Tulip Festival, was that all in the script already?

CAVE: Tulip Time was always a big part of it through the different iterations we wrote. It became bigger and smaller, but it was always in there at the end of the second act. It was important for me, once I got the film, to go to Holland and really spend time in the town. I think I visited Holland maybe six or seven times before filming. We ended up shooting most of the stuff in Nashville, but I wanted to get it right and make sure there wasn’t something I was missing that would be really inspiring. I was there, not during Tulip Time, but during another parade on Memorial Day to get the energy of the Main Street. We did a lot of research about the history of the Tulip Time parade, making sure it was authentic to the Dutch traditions. My production designer and I drove around and went inside people’s houses to study the architecture. We got very detailed, so I hope that that’s portrayed in the film.

LEE: My friends were telling me that the costumes were based on historical clothing from one of the provinces in the Netherlands. So already, there’s a component where you’re trying to do the festival justice but choosing to set this in the early 2000s. I was like, “Mimi is really trying to give herself a challenge.” I feel like the festival would’ve been difficult to do on its own, but then also having this other time period element is a challenge.

CAVE: Absolutely. When we’re shooting, we were making sure that we were designing the main street of the proper time period. There’s certain stores that are no longer there in downtown Holland that we knew were there in 2000. We brought them back and tried to match it to the real thing. I think, also, the challenge of that scene—we had over 500 extras. They all had to be dressed in that time period, and they couldn’t have their smartphones out. Shooting the parade was a large undertaking, but really fun. I had an incredible crew. We walked away from that experience, which took about a week to shoot, and everyone involved felt like they had a good time.

LEE: Did you get to wear any of the wooden shoes during your time there? The clogs.

CAVE: Wooden shoes are really so uncomfortable, I have to say. Our costume designer, Susan Lyall, she’s Dutch. She still has family in the Netherlands, so when we were in prep, she went back and did a lot of research and brought fabrics from the Netherlands to dress people. It was just an incredible experience. Everyone really brought their all in a way. We had this huge warehouse of costumes, and we had an entire wall of wooden shoes. Every extra who had them got to bring them home. We went all out.

LEE: That’s a fun souvenir. I think having it be set in the 2000s for Gael [García Bernal]’s character, you could kind of play with the angst and tensions that he was feeling. But also, it struck me as being relevant to this particular time. Maybe it was just a swoop into the presidential administration right now, but it still feels really tremendous.

CAVE: It’s always striking when you’re looking at a story that takes place in the past and you realize how much we’re dealing with the same issues. They’re recycled, and it’s like, “Are we really still there? Are we worse than before? In a way, that’s one of the services of art, to be reminded of the way that we change as a society, or don’t. Holland is really similar to the town I grew up in in terms of the demographics of that time. There was like a 15% population of Hispanic people in Holland, so they were outsiders and they really had that feeling. Now, I think it’s a majority Latinx population. It will be interesting for the folks of Holland to watch it. Of course, I’m taking things into a hyperreal place because it’s a movie and they’re fictional characters. I only have two hours to drive things home. But it’s an interesting tension that was definitely more present in Holland, Michigan, in the year 2000, and that’s another reason why I felt like setting it back would hit a little harder.

LEE: And I loved how you’re exploring those tensions with Nicole [Kidman]’s character. She’s afforded a certain amount of freedom and mobility, which was the catalyst for a lot of the themes you’re looking at. You were making me think, “We all want an element of comfort and safety, but does being content mean we have to stop asking questions? Is there a way to have a happy, good life?”

CAVE: It’s that sort of American dream that I think a lot of filmmakers have explored, probably much better than me. It’s a promise of security and safety and comfort, tied up in a pretty bow, but realizing, as a country, that we couldn’t be further from that. Is that really what we want in the end, anyway? Do we want to be in a lull, or do we want to be alive and engaged and fighting for equality?

LEE: Yeah, it requires a willingness to dive into what’s messy. I loved thinking about Fresh and Holland in conversation because at the start it’s like, “Oh, things can’t be as bad as they seem,” and you’re like, “Not only are they bad, they’re worse.” With Fresh, you’re like, “Dating sucks, but what if it was a cannibal?”

CAVE: Worst-case scenario, yeah.

LEE: I love that push into the extremes.

CAVE: I do think they’re similar in that way. Who knows, maybe I’m drawn to ridiculous extremes to drive home what’s ultimately just a simple idea.

LEE: I’m happy you mentioned that because it was funny seeing the reveal of Matthew [Macfadyen]’s character. I was almost like, “Could he be in the same butcher business as Sebastian Stan’s character? Is he helping supply meat?” 

CAVE: That’s funny. I had not thought of that.

LEE: I loved how you were portraying community. It can be this gift, but it also can be a trap when it’s really small, right? Dave and Nancy can’t escape right away because people will ask questions and you have to think about stewardship and responsibility when you’re in a small, tight-knit town versus a city like Austin or—I’m from Chicago, so fellow Midwest connections.

CAVE: Me too. Where in Chicago are you from?

LEE: I’ve lived in the North Park, Albany area. 

CAVE: I’m from the suburbs.

LEE: Which suburb?

CAVE: I’m from St. Charles.

LEE: Oh, nice. How do you feel being from the Midwest shaped you as a creator?

CAVE: It’s funny, I’m getting older now so I’ve lived in L.A. and San Francisco as long, if not longer, than Chicago. I will say I’ve always been very envious of people who grow up in California. There’s all this stuff to do. In the Midwest, at least in the ’80s and ’90s when I was growing up, there wasn’t much to do. In a way, the Midwest forces you to daydream. Before there were smartphones, you really just kind of stared up at the sky. There’s a lot of people I know from the Midwest who’ve become artists, and I think it’s because they have a pretty vivid imagination. But I don’t know, that’s just a theory.

LEE: Being mindful of time and wrapping up, I was thinking a lot about your collaborators. It’s great to see Sebastian Stan have this great awards season, and Daisy [Edgar-Jones] being in more cool projects. What do you think of their rise? Can we give you credit for the ways a project like Fresh helped launch a new phase of their career?

CAVE: I definitely don’t think you can give me credit—

LEE: I want to say that for you, but I totally understand.

CAVE: I’m so close with those two wonderful humans and so proud and have been cheering on both of them from the sidelines. Sebastian and I will be doing a project again together, and hopefully Daisy and I, too. So, in a way, I’m the one benefiting from their success. They’re massive talents, and I will say I did know that when we were doing Fresh that they can do anything.

LEE: Well, I love that the tent has expanded and the community’s grown with the projects like Holland and all those people like Matthew and Jude [Hill].

CAVE: Gosh, I mean this cast. Come on. They’re incredible.

LEE: Seeing Jude at the after party, I wanted to lavish him with praise, but I didn’t want to overwhelm him either.

CAVE: It’s tough with younger folks, you know, because you want to protect them. But he is definitely wise beyond his years and a true professional. I really love Jude. 

LEE: A testament to you being able to create such a welcoming set in the midst of heavy subjects. Well, Mimi, thank you. I’m excited for more people to see this film.

CAVE: Thank you. It was so nice to meet you.