It took years before Annika Marks admitted to herself that she was a writer. Known for her role as Monte Porter on Freeform’s The Fosters, Marks got her start as a stage actress in New York City before transitioning to film and television, where she came to discover her love for the development process. She references her experience working with a number of great writers over the course of her career, but admits to Her Campus, “It took me a long time to acknowledge that I was very intimidated.”
Luckily, she pushed past the fear. Marks’ debut writing project, Killing Eleanor, premiered at the Savannah Film Festival this past year, where it took home the award for best narrative feature.
The movie was inspired by a random encounter with a landlord in her 20s
The film stars Marks as Natalie, a young woman recently out of rehab working at her mother’s nail salon, struggling with addiction and convincing her family she’s clean. Jenny O’Hara stars alongside Marks as Eleanor, a terminally-ill woman seeking to end her life. “I was writing Eleanor for her,” Mark says of O’Hara. “She’s a tremendous actor, and I knew that she could do it — I didn’t know anybody else who could.”
Cashing in on an old IOU, Eleanor asks Natalie to help her kill herself. Natalie initially refuses, but when her family demands regular drug tests, she eventually agrees on the condition that Eleanor provide her with clean urine. What ensues is a cross-country road trip to the location where Eleanor wants to die; the script showcasing humor, heartbreak and humanity all at once.
“I thought it’d be interesting if there were two characters living these kind of ‘half lives’ that went on this journey together,” Marks explains, and the result is a film that explores addiction and dying with dignity with a delicacy that’s both empathetic and extremely powerful at once.
The inspiration for the film came years earlier when Marks was only 21, subleasing an apartment in New York City. The owner was showing Marks around the space she’d be renting before pulling out a yellow legal pad to draft the “lease,” saying, “You can have the place for free if you want to help kill me when I’m ready to go.”
“She was joking,” Marks reassures, “but I never stopped thinking about it.”
Healing through art
Marks and O’Hara both deliver incredibly expressive performances, bringing each character to life in a way that draws viewers into the people just as much as the story itself. It’s easy to root for their success. It’s just as easy to realize that their triumph means Eleanor dies and to suddenly — if not selfishly — hope that they get a little more time together.
But, “at what point is somebody no longer living? They’re alive, but they’re not living,” Marks muses. “That’s not a conversation we’re very comfortable having.” And maybe that’s the role of art in our society, to help facilitate the difficult but necessary discussions. Afterall, Marks grew even more invested in the topic after watching her grandfather die slowly and painfully due to a degenerative disease.
“I guess I’m of the belief that people are relatively similar,” Marks says. When one person struggles with something, it’s likely another does, too. “I think that’s the best thing about being an artist, that you take these things that you’re struggling with, and art gives you this way to explore those issues.”
It takes a village
Killing Eleanor came to life, in part, because of Marks’ vulnerability, but she doesn’t discredit the many other people that helped turn her words into a moving picture. Marks’ husband, Rich Newey, directed the film and championed for it from the very beginning. “You have to write this,” he told her.
“I had a million notes,” Marks explains, “but I didn’t have the discipline to really sit down and put the script together.”
In a press release, Newey said of the film, “My hope is to open up the conversation around dying with dignity — to shine a light on an often forgotten part of the population who simply want to maintain control of their lives, right up until the end. “
Jenny O’Hara also played a large role in the creation of the film. O’Hara was a mentor of Marks’ for years. “And then [she] became my muse, sort of,” Marks says. While she thought she might play Natalie, she was adamant from the beginning that if they needed a bigger name or different actress, she’d replace herself before replacing Jenny.
Increasing female representation in the film industry
In addition to the two leading roles, as well as two major supporting roles (Jane Kaczmarek and Betsy Brandt), being held by women, there was also huge female representation behind the scenes. Sixty percent of department heads were female, in addition to 50 percent of the producers. “We didn’t do that to check a box,” Marks says. “We hired the best people we could find, and many of them turned out to be female.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case in the film industry. In 2018, the New York Film Academy released an infographic highlighting gender inequality, finding startling numbers across various categories. Among the data, it was found that across the top 900 films from 2007-2016, only 30.5 percent of speaking characters were women, 7 times more scripts were written by men than women, and there was a 5:1 ratio of men to women working behind the scenes. Killing Eleanor defies these statistics.
While it’s exciting to see these changes happening within this film, it’s easy to wish Killing Eleanor was the norm, not the outlier. The Guardian once noted that female representation in the film industry was increasing, but there’s still a long way to go. Speaking as the writer, Marks notes, “I’m obsessed with women and women’s stories, and I think this is part of the conversation we’re having on a broader level about needing people to write their own narratives.” This necessity spans beyond just gender, but across all identities.
Marks theorizes that much of this inequality is due to people inherently wanting to help talent that reminds them of themselves. The film industry, like many others, has been run by men forever. “We need women in leadership positions, who are going to instinctively want to mentor younger versions of themselves, we need trans people in those positions…,” Marks fervently implores.
Part of this comes from the need for more mentors in the industry; people who are willing to share knowledge and experiences, and champion for those that come after them. “Everybody has a little bit of fear that there’s not enough room at the top, and that if they pull somebody up, they’re pushing themselves out,” she says. “I think that’s an error in thinking. I don’t think it works that way at all.” Marks hopes to be a part of this change, fostering more collaboration and representation over competition and uniformity.
For now, she’ll continue writing. “[Completing Killing Eleanor] validated something inside of me that was waiting to be totally birthed,” she says. If this experience has taught her anything, it’s not to limit herself., “Keep expressing and keep exploring,” she advises. “Everything we do as artists informs the next piece of art we make, and so there are no mistakes – there’s just expansion.”