Amanda Kramer has long been fascinated by the strange, often funny ways we perform ourselves into being. With By Design, which finally makes its way to the UK, Kramer takes this curiosity into the realm of objects with the story of a woman (Juliette Lewis) who desperately wants to to swap bodies with a wooden chair, raising questions about obsession, imitation and objectification. As I sit down with the filmmaker on an online call – mind swirling with thoughts of object-oriented ontology and the theatre of the everyday – we delve into body-swap movies, female envy, the craft of turning raw material into furniture as being even more orgiastic than cinema’s most seductive images, and the honour of working with the legendary Udo Kier.

LWLies: You’ve described this as a body-swap film, but where most of those stories are about learning to appreciate the life you already have, Camille [Juliette Lewis] discovers the opposite. 

Kramer: We’re always swapping bodies with other people. Why? Other people have the same problems that we do, basically. Why wouldn’t you want to contain the multitude of a thing that has the love, the respect, the honour that I might give an old music box a friend gave me in 2006?  I love that thing so much and I gaze at it as an object of beauty. I don’t ask anything of it, and there’s no question about it. The film is a tribute to the way that we love our things over the complex relationships we have with other humans, and also not wanting to be that complex yourself sometimes. Wanting a vacation from yourself. The thing about a body-swap movie is it’s very Christian in its nature. You wish to become someone else, you become them, you’re sad that you’re no longer yourself, you return, you’re grateful. Fuck that! Why not wanna be something else, just wanna stay something else? 

There’s something about being a woman and being asked to perform a function while our interior lives remain inaccessible. Is the chair an evolution of that idea? 

Have you ever been to a party where someone orders a sushi on a woman? Like, a woman is laying and you’re eating sushi off of her body?

Personally no, but I know what you’re talking about.

I struggle to think ​‘how dare they,’ you know? It feels almost like an artistic endeavour and I would never want to take away the intention of the woman underneath the sushi. For a long time women have been likened to furniture – not just literally but also conceptually, not just conceptually but also literally! Housewives in the 20^th century probably felt like, ​‘I’m the personification of my vacuum [cleaner]. I’m just a vacuum. I’m just a table.’ We’re in that tension no matter what as women. I write every single thing from the place of being a woman. I cannot help it, I am thinking that way always. And often men will come up to me and say ​‘this is about me, this speaks to me,’ which, on By Design, I can’t tell you how many men have said this to me! I think people are starting to feel unseen, they’re feeling invisible, they’re feeling objectified, like they wish they were objectified. This is also a sexual tension that many people have, kinks where they do wanna see themselves as an object. 

Like in Secretary.

Yes! Iconically when [Maggie Gyllenhaal] crawls towards [James Spader], her body is shaped like a footstool. A footstool as well is something a woman has been literally and figuratively in art. This is an ongoing conversation that I want to be a part of. There’s no answer, I can make no judgement. If you want to be that, you should be that.

When I was growing up, I had a friend who was so beautiful, she had the kind of beauty that poets write about. She embodied this beauty, but the way the world projected onto her was very overwhelming to her. She would always say, ​‘I wish I looked like you,’ and I would think to myself ​‘do I feel good about that? Do I feel bad?’ but what she was saying was, ​‘I want the simplicity of being less beautiful.’ I relate to that sentiment even though it was a crazy thing to hear when I was 12. This is all wrapped into Camille and this feeling of, if I wanted to be the most beautiful thing in the room I would probably not want to be the most beautiful woman. I would rather be the most beautiful painting. I would rather be the most beautiful tree in the park. There’s less fear. Being a beautiful woman has fear inside it.

In the film you’re making beauty feel almost sinister, but you’re never condemning it.

That is so true, there’s something I’m mocking about it obviously, and everybody in this film is so beautiful at every age and shape. It’s beauty everywhere, but it’s a way of engaging with it. Unlike other things that are beautiful, a chair is a utilitarian thing. An empty room where you can’t sit is an uncomfortable room. A room filled with chairs is inviting, it says come and sit. A chair also provides us with comfort and respite. I think about the way that women will say to each other ​‘I feel as though I’m being used’ and ​‘use’ as a verb is so interesting to me. To feel used is an emotional heaviness, but a chair exists to be used. If I’m personifying a chair, it says ​‘If I would want something I would want you to sit on me’. The character of Camille is like, ​‘I would like to be sat on, I would like to be needed, I would like to be used, I would like to be purposeful. I was a chair I would be needed out of purpose, without having to be a brilliant person.’ 

Did you think much about the relationship between furniture design and filmmaking as forms of arranging bodies and attention in space?

There’s something so elemental and sexy and organic about material. I yearn for that and I have none of it in filmmaking. I have visual and aesthetic energy, I get to engage with a lot of human beings who are artists, but filmmaking is not an artform of touch. I look at furniture makers as people far more in touch with their bodies and therefore the things they make I might think of as more orgiastic that cinema – which has boobs and asses and fucking! But it’s so mannered, and there’s something so unmannered about getting in there with your material and building. If you’re touching something in order to make it, the object has the energy of you and your touch. You are inside of it. And I am inside of my films, but it’s me and 100 people, and you’re interacting with a lot of decisions, and some of those aren’t mine if we’re being honest. Hands, making – it’s elemental, it’s ancient and it has a historical context within it. There’s a holiness there. 

Moving furniture around rooms and the way we display it in homes and storefronts and warehouses, to me that is theatre. We are expressing a minimalism, a maximalism, designing our lives around where we place these things. If you see a chair, you know a person belongs to it. If it’s by a window, you know it’s meant for a person to sit and have sunlight. These are things that are working on deeper levels than we’re conscious of. The chair brings you in, sits you down, places you in your moment. No more pacing, no more flitting about. Just being. It is still and it asks you to be still.

People discovering themselves through imitations is something that’s very consistent in your work. Do you see identity as fundamentally imitative? 

I think it can be bought and sold. I think it can be grabbed at, carved, hallucinated. In our childhoods most of us were not able to be a pure self because our parents were placing on us, name it – religion, gender, sexuality… As we get older, we try to seek that pure self – it’s hard to get back to, hard to find. So we carve these identities and personas and we ally ourselves with other personas. We go online and say, ​‘I want those boots, that vacation, that dinner, that pizza oven.’ If we’re good at the imitation, we become that kind of person. It doesn’t mean we don’t have souls, but the transference of our personality is a choice for most of us. Most of us are some level of Warhol. We’re aping. All of my work is about that imitation.