More than twenty years after debuting her very first short film at the Woodstock Film Festival, Emmy-nominated director Suzi Yoonessi sat down with Close-Up Culture ahead of a triumphant world premiere for her new feature, Mother Wolf.
Shot directly inside the soul-filled, handcrafted home of Academy Award winner Melissa Leo, this independent film dives into the radical, rule-breaking reality of modern grandmotherhood.
You’ve said Mother Wolf was partly inspired by your own mother, who you describe as hardworking, fiery, and funny. What parts of her found their way into Babs?
Suzi: My Persian mom has a ferociously generous spirit that absolutely found its way into Babs. Her generosity isn’t delicate or passive. Instead, it’s emotionally muscular. She completely throws herself behind the people she loves.
She can be incredibly kind and loving, but also hypercritical and sharp-tongued. Melissa understood that dynamic instinctively. Babs can be trading barbs with her daughter one minute and completely surrendering herself to her grandchildren the next. She can be sharp, funny, stubborn, and difficult, but underneath it all, she has an enormous capacity to love.
Babs is at a stage of life where motherhood is supposed to look very different, yet she suddenly finds herself responsible for her daughter’s children. What interested you about exploring motherhood beyond the years we normally see it represented on screen?
Suzi: I didn’t really understand what it meant to be a grandmother until I became a mother myself. My Grandma Nimtaj helped raise me and my sisters, and she was the real reason I became a storyteller. She would tell us these incredibly evocative Persian fairytales. As a child, I experienced what she gave us simply as magic, because I didn’t see the sacrifice underneath it.
When my son Quinn was four months old, I was called away to Salt Lake City for a production. I was navigating postpartum, directing, and trying to figure out how to be a mother all at the same time. My mom dropped everything and came with me. While I was disappearing into production, she created a little universe for him, turning chalk on the floor into an outer space adventure.
Suddenly, I was watching my own mother do for my child what my grandmother had done for me. It made me realise that motherhood doesn’t end; it just changes shape. I wanted to honour that evolution, but I also wanted to honour the cost. Babs adores her grandchildren, but they are also blowing up the life she thought she was finally going to have. Both things can be true.
The film also explores sexual awakening later in life, alongside family responsibility. What made you want to put those two sides of Babs’ life next to each other?
Suzi: I loved the idea that just as Babs thinks her life is closing in, it unexpectedly gets bigger. She has to abandon the retirement she imagined for herself. She has grandchildren to take care of, alongside bills she never anticipated. Then, through this wonderfully taboo side hustle, she discovers another part of herself entirely.
There’s something radical about allowing an older woman to be maternal and erotic in the same frame. We tend to separate those identities, particularly as women age, but they aren’t opposites. Without sexuality, there is no motherhood. Babs isn’t becoming young again. She’s simply realising her sexuality doesn’t have an expiration date.
Melissa Leo actually let you shoot in her own home in Woodstock. What did having that personal space as your main location give you as a filmmaker – and did it change the way Melissa approached Babs?
Suzi: Melissa’s house is almost an autobiography made out of objects. She has built so much of it with her own hands, filling it with mosaics, stone, and stained glass. You can truly feel the imagination of the person who lives there.
For an independent film, it gave us a level of production value we never could have cobbled together on our own. More importantly, it gave us history because the house already has a soul. I eventually realised what an extraordinary act of trust that was. I’ve had people film in my own home before, and it’s incredibly invasive. A film crew arrives, and suddenly this intimate extension of yourself becomes a workplace, complete with a stranger dipping their fingers in your morning honey jar.
Melissa allowed us into a space that was deeply personal to her. Somehow, she still had the discipline to stop being Melissa inside it and fully become Babs.
You’ve worked with Melissa before on Unlovable. What did you discover about her as a performer this time around that you hadn’t seen in your previous collaboration?
Suzi: I actually first worked with Melissa more than 20 years ago on my Columbia graduate short, No Shoulder. Because of that, I’ve had the rare chance to know her across different chapters of both of our lives.
What I hadn’t seen before was Melissa in a role that asked quite this much of her. Babs asks Melissa to go into territory that women her age are almost never invited to explore on screen. The role demands sexuality, humiliation, physical comedy, anger, and tenderness. There’s a tremendous amount of exposure in that, and she went there completely. Babs gets to be an earth goddess and a grandmother. She gets to be ridiculous and sexy, furious and maternal.
The title Mother Wolf suggests something quite primal about the way Babs protects her family. How did you want to explore the line between fierce maternal protection and going too far?
Suzi: I’ve always been fascinated by those almost mythological stories of mothers finding impossible physical strength when their children are in danger. There’s something primal that takes over when your child is threatened. Mother Wolf takes that instinct and asks a crucial question: is there actually a line a mother won’t cross for her children?
Babs crosses lines. She embarrasses herself, reinvents herself, and makes choices she never imagined she would make. From the outside, some of her actions might look extreme. From inside her love for those children, they are completely logical.
Ultimately, the film doesn’t believe there is such a thing as going “too far.” That’s what makes Mother Wolf both beautiful and a little frightening, like something straight out of a Grimm fairytale.
You’re bringing the film home to Woodstock for its world premiere after making it there. What does it mean to finally watch Mother Wolf with an audience in the place where so much of the film was created?
Suzi: The Woodstock Film Festival was where I screened No Shoulder, the very first film I ever made with Melissa more than twenty years ago. Now, we’re coming back with Mother Wolf, surrounded by the exact people who helped us make it.
This film really belongs to the Hudson Valley, which feels cut directly from a fairytale. It has the woods, the artists, the eccentricity, and the sense that magic might be hiding just outside the frame.
But more than anything, I’m excited to finally experience it with an audience. Mother Wolf is funny, painful, and sometimes uncomfortable. There’s a beautiful chemistry to sitting in the dark with strangers and realizing you’re all laughing at a shared truth.
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