It’s never clear whether Slow Machine’s characters are telling the truth or lying. Were you as uncertain as the audience about the line between reality and fiction as you navigated the story?

Slow Machine’s characters are constantly shaping their narratives and making up stories around their identities, especially Gerard. I kept feeling like he was both who he says he is and not, and that’s also evident in the cinematography—Stephanie and Gerard’s scenes in that creepy room in Queens look staged and theatrical. Also when he shows up at her AA meeting and warns her about a subway bomb threat—I asked Paul whether that was true, and he was like: “I don’t know. What do you think?” And I said: “I don’t believe him. I think he’s using this to create some adrenaline.” But I also think Stephanie finds Gerard’s ambiguity titillating and enjoys the adventure he’s taking her on.

Although it barely shows New York, Slow Machine transported me back to my life there and specifically to the summer of 2016, when there was a tension building up in the city in the aftermath of major attacks in Europe. I’ll always remember how palpable the anxiety was on the subway. Did that paranoid climate consciously feed into your performance in Slow Machine?

Paul definitely wrote from a time in which the political climate was tough in New York. But I don’t think people knew how to identify that rising anxiety. It’s like COVID, which is affecting the way we move through life and the choices we make, but which remains a vague threat out there if you haven’t experienced it firsthand. But the paranoia is inherent in Slow Machine’s protagonist and amplified by New York’s unsettledness. I don’t think I would have known how to walk with anxiousness down the subway stairs [following Stephanie’s first encounter with Gerard] had I been living in Sweden at the time. It’s a different walk from that of the person visiting New York and thinking: “Wow, this is so cool.” When you go down into the New York subway, something takes hold of you, and you start clutching yourself and tensing your jaw because it’s both thrilling and nerve-racking.

Slow Machine’s nervous mood is enhanced by the underexposed slow-motion footage of you eerily staring into the camera while dancing. What does that image mean to you?

That image comes from a performance I created and performed in a downtown New York theater in 2014, before I’d even read Slow Machine’s script. Joe wanted to try out the camera and shot hours of footage of me warming up and doing weird exercises. But the way Slow Machine is assembled is uniquely Paul and Joe’s vision, and I could not have anticipated the look and feel of the film from the scenes we shot. Sometimes I was concerned about the story being too vague. But once the editing and soundscape came in, they offered me enough of the piece that I was looking for and made the experience more complete.

How did you experience shooting Slow Machine intermittently for several years?

Slow Machine holds a very dear place in my heart because I became a mother three months before we started shooting, and my daughter was about two and a half years old when we wrapped. So I know where I stood in my own identity as a mother at each stage of the shoot, and Paul and Joe were part of my daughter’s upbringing and had to work around it by letting me breastfeed on set. [Laughs]

Did you channel your own motherhood into the movie’s epilogue, in which Stephanie improvises a bedtime story for her daughter over Skype?

My main parenting trick is improvising fantastical stories that settle my children into a sleepy lull, though they don’t resemble the story I tell in Slow Machine. While shooting the scene, I remember feeling a great sense of grief of having failed as that little girl’s mother and being absent from her life. Stephanie’s a continuously unsettled person, which is why the father has primary care. I also remember I had to worry less about the meaning of the text and just focus on taking myself on the journey of telling the story. The character is so absorbed by her own storytelling that I think she’s meant to be a really good actor, in the sense that she can’t be fully in her body and has to try on these different skins over and over again.

There’s a similar trancelike feeling in the scene in which Stephanie gets drunk and sings loudly in Swedish in front of Eleanor and her bandmates.

That’s an old Swedish folk song I knew from when I was a teenager, and it’s about an impotent rooster. All the hens in the pen go on strike because they think he’s useless. Then another rooster arrives, and he’s super virile and makes love to all the hens. But there’s this one hen named Agda who’s very disappointed because every time they’re supposed to make love, he just plucks her feathers. So she asks: “Why don’t you make love to me like you do to the other hens and instead pluck my feathers?” And he replies: “Because I love you more than everybody else, and I will make sweet love to you, but I’d like to see you naked first.” [Laughter] I had a strange moment of dissociation while singing the song and evoking my adolescence through it, then looking around and seeing Eleanor and her bandmates, who had no idea what I was talking about. So it was once again this feeling of occupying several identities at the same time and not knowing who the true me was. •

Yonca Talu is a filmmaker and film critic living in Paris. She grew up in Istanbul and graduated from NYU Tisch. She is a regular contributor to Film Comment magazine.