The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Good One.
It’s such a beautiful film. Did you always want to set it in the Hudson Valley?
India Donaldson: I actually wrote it for California. Growing up, I spent most of my time camping and hiking in the Sierras. I live in LA now, but I had been living in New York for 12 years. And before that, I was at college in upstate New York, and I realized that all of my collaborators—everyone that I could lean on to help me make a low budget film—lived in New York. I spent a lot of time in this area and kind of reimagined it for the Hudson Valley, mostly because of the people.
Their closeness adds a layer of betrayal
That area is really welcoming.
ID: Oh yeah. A park ranger at a state park is how we found this woman that let us use her 300-acre property for the majority of our shoot. Everyone was so generous. As we scouted, we tried to share the story of how we were making the film. Various larger productions had been through before us, like Severance. Those productions have more resources than us, so we had to explain, hey, our crew is fifteen people, we are not going to touch anything. The film commission there was also very helpful.
Lily, how did you prepare to shoot in the elements?
Lily Collias: I knew I would be dealing with an environment that was entirely foreign to me. I never thought about camping growing up. I had tried to mentally prepare myself for the unawareness that I was about to experience. I was going embark on this journey not knowing but pretending to know!
How did you cast Lily? The role of Sam is so important, and her performance is tremendous.
ID: We’d been trying to cast Sam for months. And we were having a really hard time. My younger sister was, at the time, an eighteen-year-old senior in high school. Almost as a joke, I asked her, do you know any actors? Like, help me out here! And that was how I found Lily. I still can’t believe that’s our story.
LC: We grabbed a coffee, and then afterwards, you asked me to do two sides. One of them was the confrontation with my dad towards the end, and the other one was the vegetarian scene, which was really fun.
ID: I’d been sourcing auditions in different ways. You know, through friends of friends, and occasionally sending tapes to Taylor [Williams], our casting director, to ask, what do you think of this person? And I sent her Lily’s tape with zero context, not telling her the story, and she called me immediately. No joke, she was like, we can stop looking. It really blew us both away. She had seen many, many audition tapes. It was so exciting to finally have that feeling, to follow that instinct.
What do you think she saw in those tapes?
ID: Oh, a lot of things. Taylor’s husband is a wonderful actor, and I remember Taylor told me that she showed the tape to Danny, her husband, and he’s in his fifties, and he was like, damn, I’ll never be that good. But I think Lily has an incredible confidence for someone so young. She was so grounded, so present, so subtle. She was the character. It’s almost mysterious when you see a performance that doesn’t feel like a performance. It seemed effortless. And Lily has an incredibly expressive face where you can just hear what she’s thinking.
Yeah, there are so many shots of your face, Lily, holding the frame for like ten seconds. Did you ever overthink it?
LC: No, I had a lot of trust in India throughout the whole process. She’s very intuitive and knew exactly what to say and what needed to be said. It was very much understood. Even reading the script, I was like, okay, there’s not much dialogue for Sam. What do these moments of silence mean to her? And India said, this is about you, and even though you’re not talking, there are still things going on in your mind. That was fun to play around with because I got to mess with the dialogue that’s happening between the men. Sometimes when you’re with someone for an extended period, you tune out. And then there are moments, between a dad and a daughter, where you can tune out for so long and still be listening, like a snap. You hear one thing and you’re like, yeah, I’m back. I’m going to say something.
Sam’s a fairly internal character. How did you prepare to get inside her head?
LC: I had fun doing little activities like writing diary entries. That wasn’t on set. I wasn’t reading or listening to anything. Once I memorized my lines, I was able to have fun with these moments of creating more of her life… before the now. It was a helpful tool for me to get to know her because she’s so internal. I felt like her diary would be so interesting, and it was fun to play around with what that would look like. I didn’t try to take it too seriously. It was just a tool to get to know Sam better.
Sam’s queerness is an interesting element, because it’s not really highlighted but it’s an important part of this story. Can you talk about the choice to leave that in the background?
ID: For me, I love it when I see queerness on screen, and it’s not a huge part of the story, it’s just an aspect of the character’s experience. I think there’s a line in the movie where Danny McCartney’s character references her queerness, telling her father, you’re lucky she likes girls. As if her queerness will protect her from bad experiences with men. I was also interested in how her queerness is yet another area where she and her father’s shared experience don’t overlap. He can be as accepting and warm as he wants to be, because I think he is those things, but to really listen to her and connect with her is a whole other thing. It’s another layer of disconnect. I actually don’t think Lily and I talked about that aspect of the character much at all. I provided these clues in the script for Lily to then take and do what she wanted to do. I wanted to give her the space to find her way into the character, and in her collaboration with James [Le Gros], who plays her father. Lily would ask really good questions throughout the process, mining for information and ideas.
LC: Yeah, I don’t think we did talk about her queerness. It’s just a part of her life. Her parents are accepting, but they do find weird pockets to kind of make conversations that don’t need to be had about their child’s sexual preferences. And we see that in a couple of scenes that demonstrate how Sam is not being seen and heard. I think the aspect of disconnect is important, but her queerness is very subtle and it’s not a big part of the story. It’s just, Sam likes girls. Women are beautiful, no question.
You shot for only twelve days, is that right?
ID: Yes, although James always corrects me and says eleven because we lost a day to thunderstorms. But I did make use of all the time. Whenever we were losing time to weather, I would try to come up with something else to shoot. On the thunderstorm day, we set up the tents on the porch of our Airbnb and shot some stuff in the interior of those tents, things that weren’t in the script, but that did make it into the movie. I don’t think that anyone can ever do everything according to plan in a film production, regardless of the script or how much time and money you have. So I tried to approach it like, let’s embrace this thing we didn’t plan and shoot some things we didn’t plan—let’s see what this exact time and place in this environment gives us along with all the specificity of that.
When did you shoot that campfire scene? It’s such a quiet but significant scene.
ID: The campfire was the last thing we shot. I learned this recently. One of the producers on the film, Diana Irvine, her father is a career first AD. And when Diana and I were first trying to figure out how much time we needed to make this movie, we asked her dad. He’s retired, but he was so sweet, he made us a schedule, and he put that scene last. I was talking to Eliza Hittman about it, and said she always schedules the hard emotional scenes late. So I asked Diana, did your dad do that on purpose? She was like, of course, he did everything on purpose. I didn’t understand the value of that before, but now I really do. Was that helpful to you, Lily?
LC: It was so helpful, because at that point, Danny and I had known each other, and we felt very comfortable rehearsing. It was so important for me to shoot that later in the process. I think it was really helpful.
ID: And the characters do know each other so well. He’s known her since she was a child, so it was important, as actors, to give them time to get to know each other.
LC: Their closeness adds a layer of betrayal.
What was at like working with Danny and James?
LC: I feel like Danny kept to himself a lot on set and was just reading and rehearsing a lot. James would kind of talk smack with me all day long and we would just get into it! Which worked really well for our triangle dynamic in the movie too. In a funny way. Danny’s much more, I’d say, theatrically trained.
ID: Danny is an incredible theater actor and that’s the reason he was very loyal to the script. To the point where I need to be like, Danny, it’s okay!
LC: It was nice. It wasn’t every man for themselves.
It’s funny that James often takes these intense roles, because I’ve met him and he’s a super funny guy.
ID: I feel like we got so lucky that James agreed to do the movie, not just with his performance, but he helped us make the movie in every way. He knew exactly what he was signing up for, he knew the challenges that were ahead. He was always aware of what everyone was doing, and he always the first person in front of the camera saying, okay, let’s go! He was always helping us get there. And with Lily, I observed a natural chemistry with James that I wanted to foster.
LC: He such a mentor to me. It was incredible. He would talk to me about things I needed to understand about film and and how to go about things in a way that I needed to know, things you don’t get taught in acting school. It’s like how you go to high school and they don’t tell you how to do your taxes. I was like, wow, this is a whole other world, thank you! I needed to know this. The entire time he was such an wonderful role model.
ID: One thing that Lily told me that I loved and, correct me if I’m telling this wrong. In the scene where you confront your dad, you asked James before shooting, what HE would do, right? And he said, well, we’ll talk about this after the shoot.
LC: Yeah.
ID: Then we wrapped the movie.
LC: And then I was sitting down with James after the shoot, and I asked him again, so what would you do in that situation? And he said, I’m never going to judge any of my characters, and I don’t even want to think about that judgment. When he said that, it was so understandable. I have so much respect for that perspective.
