Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother by Barry Sonnenfeld

Author:Barry Sonnenfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2020-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Elliott, Susan, and I filmed one more episode of HBO’s The Great Pleasure Hunt after I shot Blood Simple. It was a painful experience. There was a lot of tension, even though we were working in some of the most beautiful places in Europe and Japan.

Elliott and I bickered constantly. Susan and I were best friends, but she was Elliott’s wife and felt caught in the middle. She didn’t know whose side to take. It didn’t help that she was missing her little girls, who had been left with her parents in Texas.

Blood Simple was released to glowing reviews after making its debut at the New York Film Festival. Many critics called out my cinematography, often mentioning me by name.

Around that same time, Susan told Elliott she no longer wanted to globe-trot. She fretted about leaving their young daughters with caretakers and wanted to stay home.

He didn’t take the news well. He loved her and relied on her in many ways on his photographic assignments, often overseas. Eventually, Susan moved with Sasha and Amy to their weekend home in East Hampton to sort out her life.

Relationships are more complicated and more personal than this accounting implies. Although I was Susan’s best friend, I was not privy to the intimate details of their marriage, nor its undoing. What I did know is that when Elliott informed their mutual friends, “You’re either with me or with her,” I asked, “Can I choose her?”

It was an easy choice.

Elliott and my friendship, already shaky, ended quite badly with the breakup of their marriage, especially after I sided with Susan.

Susan and I were together a lot in the Hamptons—she and her girls at her home in the village of East Hampton, me in my “starter house” a few miles out, off Springs Fireplace Road.

As weeks became months became years—Susan and Elliott were in divorce court for five years—some sexual tension started to enter the picture. Sex and the fear of it went unspoken for a long time. We were both concerned it could ruin our perfect friendship. One night as we were watching television (probably The Miracle of Life on PBS, a favorite we’d watched many times), I turned to her and said:

“Welp, here goes nothin’…”

We remained best friends.

And now we were lovers.

And Susan became Sweetie.

I can’t help but wonder why I specifically pursued Elliott all those years. I could have called any of the photographers I admired—they all lived in New York. I only called Elliott.

If I had made one of a trillion, trillion other choices throughout my life, missing an elevator, opening up a color lab or video camera rental place, driving a mile an hour faster on the Saw Mill, stepping on a crack, I would not have been working for Soleil Productions on a SONY industrial and Jon Klee would never have suggested I call Elliott. Instead of being married to Sweetie for the past thirty years, I surely would be living with my mother, since whatever quantum reality kept me

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