Halfway through making her 2010 documentary The Carrier, director Maggie Betts was already hungering to create a narrative feature. To stage a story not as is, but how it plays in her head became an alluring prospect that she couldn’t shake–and one that seemed doable based on three tenets a producer once told her to abide by.
Novitiate stars Margaret Qualley, (The Leftovers, My Mutant Brain) as a teenage girl who enters a convent in 1964, just as the Roman Catholic church was instituting seismic changes through the Second Vatican Council, informally known as Vatican II. Led by Pope John XXIII, Vatican II loosened the church’s longstanding strict rules, such as allowing the use of languages other than Latin during mass and permitting Catholics to pray with parishioners of other faiths.
In Novitiate, the convent’s Reverend Mother (Melissa Leo) tries to push back against the sweeping changes that are threatening to undermine her lifelong dedication as a nun and shaking the foundation of her faith.
“I ended up buying all these ex-nun memoirs, and they were such page-turners. I was consumed with the idea that the relationship these nuns had with God was like a literal love relationship leading to an eventual marriage,” Betts says. “And then simultaneously, the whole issue of Vatican II–I was like, wow, I have such a sustained fascination with this.”
However, it’s one thing to have an idea–it’s an entirely different struggle to execute it. As a novice director, let alone a female one of color, Betts was operating in a space in which her authority could be routinely challenged. To get ahead of what could’ve been a problem, she decided to surround herself with female department heads.
Still, Betts was aware of the limits to her knowledge and had no problem asking “stupid questions,” which, as it turns out, helped her develop her authority as the director.
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