Amy Koppelman, director of A Mouthful of Air talks about her personal attachment to the story

21 February 2022

There have been many movies written about depression. Black eyeliner, moody lighting, Bradley Cooper, and you have yourself a hit. But A Mouthful of Air isn’t that kind of movie. Julie Davis, played by Amanda Seyfried, is a children’s book writer and illustrator who sees life’s heartbreaking beauty — cherishes it — yet believes that the only way for her children to be safe is to live in this world without her.

A Mouthful of Air

In A Mouthful of Air, I try to explore this dichotomy. How can you love life, love your family, and still want to slip away?

In 1995 — when I gave birth to my son — postpartum depression was rarely talked about and remained largely undiagnosed. Today we know that one out of every five new moms suffer from it — and more and more women are willing to talk about it. But most are still too ashamed to share their feelings, so they suffer in silence. I was one of those women.

“Nothing’s stronger than a mother’s love.” There’s a phrase we’ve all heard a thousand times. And it’s true. It’s certainly something Julie Davis believes, right up until the moment she realizes she might be up against something stronger. This force isn’t coming from the outside. It’s living inside her own head. And feels impossible to escape.

But she desperately wants to because for Julie, the world is a magical place. She appreciates the beauty of life and it’s precisely that beauty that crushes her. And that’s what always crushed me. The fleeting beauty of life. Those little yellow flowers that push through the ice every spring. The sound of my son’s feet pitter-pattering down the hall. The site of my daughter being carried through the world on top her daddy’s shoulders… One day I will have to say goodbye. And the pain in that, of the inevitable goodbye. I still have a hard time with that.

I’ve spent the twenty-six years since I gave birth to my first child writing about motherhood and women’s mental health. As a novelist, I think about how to bend a sentence in a way that allows it to breathe, to convey the magnitude of loss in the description of a glance, capture love in the white space between paragraphs. Driving me — always — is a desire to reach through the page and connect to the reader. To form a communion of understanding. An acknowledgment of shared truth. And to try — in some small way — to remove the stigma of mental illness from motherhood.

A Mouthful of Air is my first undertaking as a director. It’s told, like my books, in a simple, straightforward, naturalistic manner. Before each scene, I didn’t only ask myself what images I wanted to show but also what I was trying to say in each frame about being human—and about being a mom. I believed if I stayed true to that truth, I could bring the story I had written in my book to the screen in a way that would reveal Julie’s inner thoughts — through her eyes, through her smiles, through the pain behind them — in a way the written word never could.

The tools of film and fiction are different, but the human heart beats the same. I hope that what’s in my heart resonates in the film. That Julie’s story will bring to light the darkness of postpartum depression and women’s mental health, yes, but also the ineffable joy — the wonder — of motherhood that Amanda’s performance explores so fearlessly.

A Mouthful of Air is not autobiographical, but it is deeply personal. My son will turn twenty-six this December, my daughter is twenty-one. Not a day goes by —truly—that I don’t stop and appreciate how fortunate I am to be alive. How grateful I am that I got the help I needed, that I didn’t die. I was lucky.

I am excited and proud to finally be sharing A Mouthful of Air with you. It’s not an easy film, but I hope it will help women open up about how scary it is to be a new mom, so that they —we —no longer live in shame. Because it’s not the sadness Julie feels, but the happiness that she’s left behind, that is the tragedy of her story.