Last Tuesday, I had the chance to sit down with filmmaker Becky Portman as we talked about her award-winning film “K-I-S-S-I-N-G.” Our conversation centered around Portman’s process, her connection to both the Jewish and Queer community and how love, awkwardness, and weird first kisses are universal.
“I don’t think anybody has a monopoly on any horrible first kiss experience or any good first kiss experience,” Portman said. “I think everyone is entitled to those experiences whether you’re straight, gay, or in between. There’s so much room and it surpasses identity and orientation to be able to connect to what a real, powerful first kiss is.”
Since debuting “K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” at the Tel Aviv film festival in 2024, Portman’s film has earned international acclaim, including winning best LGBTQ+ Short at The Festival of Short Film, and becoming official selections at the Berlin Lift-Off Film Festival and Stockholm City Film Festival.
Watch Portman’s hilarious and poignant, coming-of-age film here.
Below is an excerpt from the interview with Portman:
Matt Levine: As you were assembling this character, the main protagonist in the film, what pieces of yourself did you put in there? What pieces of yourself did you leave out and and how did you form this character?
Becky Portman: It's really challenging as a writer to take yourself out and put yourself in the right amounts. It's a recipe that you have to try and be able to take feedback on it. It's a very vulnerable thing to do, and it's very scary, but it's incredibly rewarding to be able to see kind of your most vulnerable and awkward and anxious anxieties put out onto the screen and people resonating with it. And I definitely felt very anxious and nervous about how my own past experiences. How I was in relationships and discovering my identity later in life, and how I felt less experienced or less understood, and less of myself because I had less exposure.
I felt this uneasiness surrounding those relationships. I wanted to explore that from its inception up until whatever point we're talking about, and what these preconceived notions of what is a correct timeline and what is not in terms of romantic relationships is. I think it's so scary to write yourself into something.
I had a friend recently who came and saw the film and said, ‘Becky, I love the actress that played you. I was like, It's not supposed to be word for word, exactly’ (laughs). Someone who knows me very well can be like, ‘Oh, I know who that’s supposed to be, who is in this story, and who you're referencing, and what place you are in life.’ So I definitely try to make a lot of references to parts of my life and spaces without being too direct.
ML: In the spin the bottle scene, for example, how did you know that was going to resonate with the audience? Do you ever put stuff in there and you're like, ‘am I the only one that experienced that?’
BP: For sure. I put a lot of stuff in the script that I thought, ‘Oh my god this is going to be such a bomb, this is so personal.’ I think the moment I realized it resonated with people is when we did a read through before we started shooting, and people were laughing and really understanding what I was saying.
Then I felt more comfortable to just really lean in as much as I could. In the first scene, we have our protagonist having the grossest first kiss of her life. And this guy [she was kissing]— I wanted real Hitchcockian, dolly zoom like slow motion everything—needed to have braces.
My art director was like, ‘How? It's expensive to get braces. We don't have the kind of money in the budget — fake braces are expensive.’ She found this hack online of lining each tooth with rubber bands. So we had him in these braces that he couldn't even speak in but it was so funny, and he was extra salivating. And I wanted everything. I just wanted more and more and more. Like hyper intense, hyper gross — something that felt super visceral.
Watch the full interview above.
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