EXCLUSIVE: When Canadian director Leah Nelson and producer Lauren Miller Rogen first read Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, it was a subject matter that hit home in a very real way. 

The story, which is the basis for Nelson’s animated feature debut Tangles that is world premiering as a Special Screening on Thursday (May 14) in Cannes, follows Sarah, who has to leave her exciting life as an activist and artist in 1990s San Francisco to return to her eccentric family in the conservative small town she recently fled when she learns that Alzheimer’s is beginning to erase her mother Midge’s vibrant personality. 

The bittersweet and poignant film, which is also playing In Competition at Annecy next month, features a stellar voice cast including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Seth Rogen, Samira Wiley and Beanie Feldstein with Abbi Jacobson voicing the lead role of Sarah. Charades is shopping international rights to the project in Cannes with CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group handling domestic.

Nelson and producers Miller Rogen and Vicky Patel had all been personally affected by the disease at some point in their lives. Nelson’s grandmother was afflicted with dementia at the time of first reading the novel while Miller Rogen’s mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at just 55 years old. She also lost her grandmother and grandfather to the disease. Meanwhile, Patel’s father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2003.  

“There’s one scene in the book when Sarah and her dad are told by the doctor that Midge has Alzheimer’s and Sarah had drawn this little crumbling ground underneath the characters,” Nelson tells Deadline. “It was just little lines and little rocks that showed that they felt the Earth was crumbling beneath their feet.”  

The imagery resonated with them in such a strong way that Nelson says that when she optioned the rights to the novel to make through her Vancouver-based studio Giant Ant, she used this image to anchor the entirety of the film. Miller Rogen, meanwhile, admits this visual representation was a feeling that “spoke to me in such a sincere and deep way.” 

“That’s exactly what it feels like when your loved one is diagnosed with a disease like this, especially at a young age,” says Miller Rogen. “The ground feels like it is literally crumbling beneath you. What I loved about the visual style of this graphic novel is that it brought that fear to life in a way that wasn’t heavy handed. I felt like this wasn’t making a meal of it and that’s what is so powerful. This delicate nature just hit home in a way that felt so real to my experience, and I knew would speak to, unfortunately, millions of other people’s experiences as well.” 

Both Miller Rogen and Patel have been incredibly active in the Alzheimer’s space. Miller Rogen and her husband Seth Rogen founded Hilarity for Charity in 2012, a nonprofit that cares for families impacted by Alzheimer’s while Patel, who heads up Monarch Media with Steve Barnett and Alan Powell, became one of the nation’s leading fundraisers for brain science research after her late father was diagnosed with the disease. 

When Patel first read Nelson’s script, which the writer-director adapted with Leavitt and Trev Renney, it took her back to the time when she first learned that her father had Alzheimer’s.

“It’s a time of great sadness and confusion and you look for any sort of guidance of what to do next,” says Patel. “Fortunately for me, I connected with the Alzheimer’s Association’s local office in Northern California and Northern Nevada to see if I could find some resources there.”

The process of adapting the script was a “tough one” admits Nelson. “This is a book made up of memories and vignettes and, in many cases, we would write a scene based on one drawing. Sarah and I took our first swing and realized quickly that we needed someone else to come aboard who had better knowledge of screenplay structure, so we brought Trev aboard and then we drew as much as we could from the book and from pieces that weren’t from that book that happened in Sarah’s experience and in her life.” 

They workshopped using Sarah’s artwork for the film, which Nelson admits “looked really cool, but for a full 90-minute feature, we felt we really needed to build out the visual style and make it more cinematic.” The team eventually hired French illustrator and animation director Manddy Wyckens to handle the animation on the project. 

“Sarah’s art is very sparse and delicate in its line work, and we needed to give it more structure so the look of the film to the book is quite different,” says Nelson. “But we tried to really retain the spirit of it and the weirdness of it and Sarah was totally on board with that.” 

Nelson said it was also crucial, while telling the story, that they didn’t “go inside the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s.” While the film has an incredibly moving scene of depicting Midge’s slight unravelling as Alzheimer’s begins to take hold of her, the audience is left looking at it from afar, rather than being inside her mind. 

“I felt really strongly that we don’t know what is going on inside of Midge’s brain,” says Nelson. “We wish we did and that would help us with the research and care for people with this disease, but we don’t get to go inside her brain. So, we drew the line there.” 

She continues: “But Sarah is a young woman whose mom is suffering and she’s this imaginative artist who is neurotic, so we can go inside her brain, and she was sitting right beside me during this process so I could ask her what it was like. I was hellbent on making this film with the North Star that this is still a collection of memories and this is how Sarah remembered these moments.” 

The cast, which also includes Pamela Aldon, Wanda Sykes and Sarah Silverman, all recorded their voices at the same time in one room, something that was important for Nelson and the team. “It was a family we were building, and I really wanted the dialogue to be naturalistic and feel like a family arguing or talking over each other.” 

Miller Rogen is hopeful that the film resonates with all caregivers – not just those caring for loved ones with Alzheimer’s. “When I started Hilarity for Charity in 2012, my mom had already been battling Alzheimer’s for almost 10 years and I felt alone,” she says. “I felt like no one understood my story. I felt like no one could comprehend what I was dealing with back at home while I was trying to start my life. 

“I’m excited to share this story because I know I’m not alone and there are millions of young people who are caring for their families while they are building their lives – not just in the Alzheimer’s space – and these caregivers and the sacrifices they make often go completely unnoticed and are taken for granted when they shouldn’t be.”