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Q&A with Fran Kranz, Reed Birney, Ann Dowd, and Jason Isaacs

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Mass.


Fran, why did you decide to tell this story for your debut feature?

Fran Kranz: I had always wanted to direct. About twenty years ago in college, I was studying the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It really disturbed me because I don’t think I would be capable of doing that. I would live with the hate; I would never be able to forgive or accept it or move forward. Despite being amazed by some of the behaviors, I was deeply troubled knowing the truth of how I’d react. Twenty years later, as a father, I had to confront those fears and thoughts differently, and anew. I started doing research on the subject, and I came across these meetings and I thought, that’s it, that’s what I want to dramatize and tell a story about because it’s exactly this thing that I am so afraid that I don’t know how to do and I want to know how to do it. I want to know how to move forward, I want to know how to heal and restore something, how to move through and feel progress for the people I blame and feel hatred for. That started about three years ago and since then I’ve dedicated my life to this idea.

There was the need to become intimate as quickly as possible

What was the rehearsal process like and how did it benefit the performances?

FK: I wanted to make sure the language could carry them there… these are four actors that are better than I am! I wasn’t about to sit there and have a conversation about “how” you get emotional. I just needed to make sure the ride was clear and effortless. Effortless is a funny word for what they do, but it had to flow. What I wanted to get out of that rehearsal process was that if they felt there were any sort of bumps in the road, or any missing steps, let’s bring it up and we’ll rewrite it. We only had about two days but they became kind of co-authors because I needed the fluidity, the naturalism, and to have them be such a tight unit. Once we got to Idaho, we were only going to have eight days to shoot that conversation from when the door closed on them. It was a crash course in doing the script work from the table work. There was also the need to become intimate as quickly as possible and to find friendship and ensemble in two and a half days. Those were the two objectives of the rehearsal, and the latter was unspoken. We knew it implicitly.

Reed Birney: All four of us are theater actors, so we understand what rehearsal can do and how to use rehearsal. I think we really knew we had a lot to accomplish in two and a half days and went after it.

Ann Dowd: I think the most important thing we had to accomplish, even though it may not have been from a conscious place, was that we had to lay the groundwork for trust and commitment and respect for one another, Fran included. I think that was the most important thing that happened in those rehearsal days, in addition to what Fran has described as making sure we all understood. Martha Plimpton was talking about how she understood the rhythm of it when she read it—she does not often get through a script in one sitting, but with this she did. She could sense the rhythm and I thought to myself, that is not a skill I possess at all. When we were in rehearsal going through the text, I knew enough not to panic, but I did not know how it would be done. I did not know how Linda would say what she was going to say, but I said to myself, you just need to trust that you know what you’re doing. One of the brilliant parts of the script is that we were put in a circumstance with the words we needed, and what we were required to do was let go, and trust, and not look back.

Jason Isaacs: What Ann won’t take credit for is that she made that thing happen, right when we got there. It’s trust, and what that means for me is you need to prepare to make a complete fool of yourself in front of each other and be emotionally vulnerable. Make yourself seem stupid or weak… just show all the sides of yourself as if you were with someone you’ve known for your whole life that would never walk out the room. That’s an extraordinary thing to achieve very quickly, because only then can you feel relaxed enough to do the things you do on camera. That thing about the rhythm though… I wasn’t initially sure that was going to work. I can say that now because it’s clearly a magnificent film and it’s had an extraordinary effect on audiences.

AD: Why didn’t you think it would work?

JI: Because it’s four people in a room having a conversation; it’s insane. It’s disturbed to think you can make a film out of that. It turned out unbelievably—he pulled it off. But it’s a ludicrous notion. And I thought at the time, I don’t care. I just want to have an extraordinary experience, and we did have one while making it.

AD: I’m so glad you didn’t express this (laughs)!

JI: I just wanted to go on that journey with you and with Reed and with Martha and let go of the results.

RB: There’s a big lesson there about letting go of the results. Just be in the room. I think if we had all thought “this is going to be a big one and we’re going to get lots of reactions,” I think it would have been a catastrophe.

Each character has very specific needs and wants. How did you each navigate those?

JI: Mine was easy, in that it was only about Martha [Plimpton]. I just need to manage my wife, consciously. The brilliance of the writing is that I say one thing, I mean another, and the audience can tell perfectly well that I don’t know myself and someone else is driving it through.

RB: But then Jason, that notion of yours fall apart very quickly when suddenly you’re coming after me and asking me about my regrets. So you can tell yourself it’s all about your wife, but you had other emotional investments.  

JI: Yes, that’s what I’m saying. And the audience can see what I don’t know, that I’m sitting on this volcano of rage and regret and need that somehow needs to be evacuated if I’m going to move on with my life. But I don’t realize that.

RB: That’s right. I honestly found it easy because it was all in the script. I needed to manage Linda [Ann Dowd] and this couple across the table. If we got out of the way, the script did everything for us.

AD: The more we talk about it, the more it goes to the writing. There were little hints that said so much about Linda’s relationship with Richard and why it didn’t survive. And it spoke to what our roles were in the family prior to this meeting… or at least I have my version and Reed has his, I’m sure! I imagined Linda as being the peacekeeper, wondering when to intercede, and keep Richard calm. And when the earthquake happened, all of that is shattered and there is no need or desire to hold onto anything from the past.

RB: I think Richard really loved Linda and if this hadn’t happened, they would have had a perfectly fine life together. I say in the movie, “I regret everything.” I think he lives his life in full-on regret. Everything has fallen apart.

AD: But I think it wouldn’t have been wonderful for Linda, because she would always be appeasing and putting someone else first… you.

RB: But I think we would have stayed together.

AD: I do too, but you said perfectly fine!

RB: Maybe we need to talk about this off camera!

Q&A with Jessica Kingdon

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Ascension.


You did almost all of the work on this film— what was that experience like?

Jessica Kingdon: I did have a close cinematographer, Nathan Truesdell, and we shot it together. But, yeah, it was very much a film that was coming out of my own mind, and my own instincts. Even though this is not a personal film (about me, or about my family per se), there is something very personal about the sensibility of the film, I think? At a certain point, we did think that we were going to bring on another editor to go through all of this footage and help us find a story. But as I was kind of sifting through all of the footage and making early edits, it just made sense that it was going to be me. Because — like I said — this is such a personal vision, and a lot of it was based off of intuition, and following my own gut. And I also love shooting, too.

it was this kind of strange echo from the past

You open the film with a quote from your grandfather. Can you talk to us about that choice, and what that quote means to you?

JK: It actually came to us at the end of shooting. While I was shooting this film, I didn’t know that I still had living relatives in China, because my family — when they left China in 1949 — they cut off communication with that side of the family. When I told my Mom that I was going to this city called Changsha in Hunan province, to shoot at an air conditioning factory, she was like, “oh, you know your grandfather is from there.” And I had no idea! So one of my producers, Kira Simon-Kennedy, she works with a lot of artist residencies in China, and she happened to know a historian in that city who she put me in touch with. And because my great-grandfather was a famous poet at the time (apparently, according to my Mom), the historian did some research and my Mom was right: the historian turned up my relatives, and he also found some of his poetry at a nearby museum that had been preserved there. And I had never seen these poems before! So it was pretty moving to meet the relatives, and to see this poetry that I had been hearing about — I never knew if it was real or not, it was kind of a family legend — and then, we didn’t think that it was going to be part of the film or anything like that. But then months later, when we were trying to think about the right title… we were like, “oh, maybe we should go back and look at these poems, and just see what the translations are.” And one of them was called “Ascension,” and then when I read through the translated version we realized there was was this parallel with the film about the paradox of progress, even though it was written over a hundred years ago, and of course was in an entirely different context. It still is, at its core, about this idea of rising and hoping for that to alleviate your worries… and then realizing instead that there’s only more trouble. So it was this kind of strange echo from the past, and that’s where we got the film’s title from, and that’s how we decided to kind of bookend the film, with that poem.

There are so many remarkable examples of humanity in the film, of people trying to find their way in this giant system. What were some memorable moments for you, as you were finding these places and people?

JK: I had a framework in my mind about the types of places that would work for this film, and we had a lot of options of places we could shoot in. And I sort of new — or I sort of guessed — about what would work, and what wouldn’t work. But I was looking for places that could present a kind of visual paradox. Places that could speak for themselves, that we didn’t need exposition to explain what was going on, but rather could communicate entirely through the available visuals, or otherwise could do that through some of the naturally occurring dialog or interaction that was happening. So that was important to me, not to explain things to the audience, but rather, to let them discover it… as I was discovering it, really. And a lot of times these spaces we would go in thinking that we were going to get one thing, and it’s something else completely different. Which in some ways is really fun, because that lead to a feeling of unpredictability, and constantly having to adapt; other times it was frustrating, because you would drive for hours to a location, thinking you were going to get something, and then someone changes their mind or it’s a completely different thing than what you were expecting. 

The locations you shot in are so visually captivating. Could you tell right when you arrived that you’d found a great spot? Or did that only become clear after spending time in these places.

JK: Well, for example, we thought we were going to the carpet factory to shoot a plastic bottle recycling factory. It actually is that, but what they do is turn plastic bottles — many of which happen to be shipped from Los Angeles — they turn those plastic water bottles into carpets. But they have this proprietary technology that they didn’t want us to shoot. So this is one example of us going in thinking we’re going to shoot one thing, and then seeing something completely different. Because I wanted to show in the film the cycle of plastic: bottles being made, and then waste, on the other end. So that was still a vestige of an earlier idea I had about the film being more ecologically driven. But then of course it turned out to be this totally different thing, that was so epic. Just being there was pretty breathtaking, actually. It actually got pretty tense on day number three there: the boss called us into his office for tea (which is never a good sign). He accused us of being corporate spies trying to steal their techniques, because we didn’t have a host with us. Meaning, there was no person talking in front of the camera, explaining what was going on; it was just our weirdo (“verité”) way of shooting things for long periods of time that seemed like… well, seemed like what a corporate spy would shoot! Our fixer Jack had to convince him that no, in fact these are just dumb Americans, do you really think they would steal your secrets? And I for proof, I showed him a video I had made in grad school six or seven years ago. That was just this very flat, dull, shot of a duck at a zoo swimming out of the frame… and then like thirty seconds later, the duck comes back into the frame. And the boss is studying my phone very seriously… and then he looks up and just says, “Ok, so how does this benefit me?” And… fair point! So we took some of the footage and made a promo video for them.

Q&A with Jake Gyllenhaal

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Guilty.


There are many constraints built into this film… you’re in a call center, on the phone, there’s limited space to move. What drew you to that?

Jake Gyllenhaal: I guess I’m a fan of creating a certain type of resistance, and then I think that gives me a sense of freedom. For me, when I think about the process, I always thought it could be done in forty-eight hours—the movie, I thought we could shoot it in forty-eight hours. When I presented it to Antoine as something to direct, I said we could shoot it in five days. And then we ended up shooting it in eleven days. It became an issue for us while we were shooting because Antoine had been near someone that tested positive for Covid on a Friday, and we were supposed to start shooting on Monday. He had to go into quarantine for twelve days, which would have shut down everything. I should mention that he directed the entire movie from a van a block away that we hardwired to the stage I was shooting on and I never saw him the entire time. I didn’t consider it constraints; I considered it new land, a new world, a new creative space… one that I had not been in before. I also loved Antoine saying, “you cannot move from this space,” and I wanted to know what feelings would come from that. I’m a very physical actor.  He tends to move his camera a lot, but he forced himself to keep it still particularly for the first quarter of the film. As we faced all these technical difficulties in the process, and as these emotions started to come through the actors, and as I started to realize that all the research I had done was leading me down a very difficult emotional road, I didn’t like standing still or sitting still. I hated it after a while and I was forced to. All of these very primal, very childish—infantile—feelings came out of having to sit still. Which was a really interesting part of the process.

All of these very primal, very childish feelings came out of having to sit still

Because of Antoine’s situation, it almost sounds like he was method directing this film.

JG: After a while, it became so odd. He was in a van with like three or four monitors. Communicating through a walkie-talkie and through the phone. And I was in a room, with three or four monitors around me, communicating through a walkie-talkie with him. So we were complete mirrors of each other.

It seems like you were almost living a similar situation to an actual 911 control center worker. Covid is happening all around the world, your director is in a van, you can’t  move… it sounds pretty intense.

JG: Part of the advantage of the role is that he’s not a 911 dispatcher. It allowed for this brash and initial toxicity in him. And then all that crap comes out during the course of the film and there’s a sort of theatricality as the acts progress. We split the movie into five acts, twenty pages each. We shot twenty pages a day, one continuous take for each one of the twenty pages. Each one was staged with the actors on Zoom. I didn’t see them, but I heard them. The AD would cue them based on the script and whether I called them or they called me. And that was pressurized. One of the reasons I love Antoine is that he gave me so much ground and room to express.  And then he started to move his cameras in closer and closer to me as we got into that room. He started choosing lens where, no joke, the cameras were six inches away from my face. Focus was so sensitive and my movement was so important. You have six people operating three cameras and they’re this close to your face and they have masks on and you don’t. You’re in a period of time where any one of you could have contracted something. And you’re in a pretend world. And that was the odd thing for me. As soon as I took my mask off to act, which is always my space to sort of pretend, using my imagination, the actual risk to me sort of contradicted all the reasons I got into the whole thing and I thought, I’m actually unsafe. And I thought that added to all of it. I think we were all pent up. There were all these political things going on, and I think all those feelings started to come through. That’s what’s so great about my job—there’s an allowance for feelings that you might otherwise shun or be ashamed of, and you are praised for when you express them in that space. You’re encouraged. 

I was fascinated by the world you guys created for this character. It’s almost reality, but that lever is dialed to 11 and his inner anxieties have permeated his entire space. There’s a blurring of subjective reality and actual reality. What sort of conversations did you have about that?

JG: First, it was really important that as soon as Emily calls, it sets off this sort of fantasy. And the movie is a fantasy. Because essentially, I think the movie is about how we judge people and how we project on people that we can’t see, but only hear. And the choices that we make that we think are right and may not end up being right because of those assumptions. So often we’re wrong about what we think of other people. So often we don’t look within ourselves to realize, oh shit, that’s actually coming from me. I think we realize that if it was a psychological journey that was internal, that it became Greek, you know? As you progress from act to act in this five-act structure that we had created, in the end, I think the admittance of forcing out that feeling is almost an exorcism for him. It has to come out and it’s a horror film in a lot of ways. I always thought about that. When he admits to what he’s done and as things start to get worse, it becomes what Antoine refers to as Dante’s Inferno. That’s why he starts it in the fire. The feelings that come out of him become huge and that’s all part of that fantasy. We don’t live in a world where someone in his position says, “I did it, I’m sorry. I will not be redeemed on this earth but I will be redeemed spiritually because I have admitted and expressed this truth.” That’s a necessary thing. Both Antoine and I believe that big feelings needed to be there, because truthfully, there are big feelings in those ideas. There is a world—maybe more so in the Danish version—where those feelings are sort of held back and you see a man making a decision. But for us, it was so important that those feelings come out like snakes. You see Medusa’s head and it has to come out that way. For us, it did. That’s more metaphor than reality.

Q&A with Stephen Chbosky, Ben Platt, Julianne Moore, Amy Adams, and Amandla Stenberg

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Dear Evan Hansen.


Stephen, you’re no stranger to bringing musicals to the big screen, and you’re no stranger to stories about teenage longing and discontent. How did you get involved in the project?

Stephen Chbosky: I saw the show about three years ago, on Broadway. And I loved it. I didn’t know anything about it when I saw it. And I loved the show. And so the next day I called my team and I just said, “look, I don’t know if they’re going to make a movie of this, but if they do, I’d love to meet about it.” And a couple months later, I had some conversations with the producers, and I kept asking, and I kept pestering. And your question is sort of how I pitched myself— I remember going to Universal, and meeting with the executives and I saying, “I’ve basically done two things for the last fifteen years of my career: Musicals, and thoughtful films about young people.” So, I’m you’re guy. And luckily they agreed! That’s how I got involved. The vision was, really… I was obsessed with all the different ways that I felt like you could capture the emotions of the show, but in a very literal medium like film. And that included live singing. There several very specific moments in the show that I was very moved by, and I talked about how I would show them on film. For example, something like the song Requiem. It was beautifully depicted on the stage with three people, and I thought, well, with the family, what do each of those three spotlights mean? And I started to talk about how the abstraction of the stage would translate to the real world.

I really knew that the key to the lie is her need.

Ben, you’ve lived with this character for years. How did you adapt Evan’s character for film, and what was it like coming back to him after having several years off?

Ben Platt: It was certainly terrifying, a little bit scary, to re-enter that space that had been such a formative experience for me, both in personal terms (it obviously really changed my life in many ways), and then in a mental sense, to enter that anxious and somewhat self-hating mind space that Evan lives in for a lot of the movie was a scary thing to go back to. But I think just the prospect of how many people would be seeing the film, and could be positively affected by the story — after seeing firsthand how lives change and conversations start with this piece — it was more than enough motivation to get back in the shoes, literally! I think the translation was mostly about internalizing things, and demodulating things, and keeping all of the essences of his fraught emotional state, and his hunched posture, and his ticks (pulling on his clothes, biting his nails, taking up as little space as possible)… all of those instincts from the stage had to be kept in tack — they’re things that I feel really specify who Evan is, and that make him a specific person — but just trusting the intimacy of the camera and of the medium to not need to broadcast things in such a heightened way. And Stephen was a fantastic, consistent reminder of how to kind of bring things closer to the ground, and to keep it “inside the bottle,” as he would say. And in terms of singing, we had the great opportunity to sing a lot of the music live. And so there was a nice sort of raw communicative quality to it that the musical already has, but kind of to the nth degree for the film. So I think, for me, vocally the priority became even less the beauty of the music (which is there already), and the sort of quality of the singing, and more so just the communication of the emotions and the forwarding of the narrative. And that was really fun. Especially as a musical movie nerd for my whole life, and musicals in general, to see one that’s so sincere and so fully realized in terms of the humans singing and communicating in real spaces and in real rooms… it was really exciting to be part of a movie like that. 

Amy, how did you find the character, and how did your musical training influence your approach? 

Amy Adams: I was introduced to the play a little late in the game— I saw it in 2019 in person. And I just fell in love with the piece. I was so profoundly moved by the experience of all the characters. I immediately said to my agent, “if they ever do a film of this, I just want to be involved in whatever way I can.” So when I had the opportunity to develop this with this amazing group of people — to work with Ben, Amandla, Julie and Kaitlyn, Stephen… everybody! I could keep going on. It was humbling. I was just so grateful. I think that coming to this character… I really knew that the key to the lie is her need. Her need to know her son, her need to believe that her son could have been more than she saw. She wanted to think that she had missed something, that there was something there that she could hold onto. So that need sort of drives the first lie. It was one of those characters that, as I played her, was really… you had to just go with where you were on the day. And working with Ben, and the entire cast, that became very… I don’t want to use the word “easy,” but it became a very immersive experience. It was so moving. Working with Danny in developing the marriage, working with Kaitlyn in developing the mother/daughter relationship (which I thought was so key to Cynthia as well)… it was a really wonderful experience, and I’m really honored, and proud to have been a part of it.

How did you develop your bond with Evan, given the abbreviated shooting schedule?

Julianne Moore: I was so incredibly moved by the show. It was a show that was important to my family, because when I saw it on Broadway, my kids were adolescents. And this speaks so much to the adolescent experience, about feeling like you need to grow up, and kind of announce to the world who you are, and present that at a time when you don’t even know that fully yourself. It was so beautiful… my kids listened to these songs constantly in the car! What really struck me about it was, as much as it’s about an adolescent experience, it’s also about a parental experience, about what you go through as your child starts to differentiate themselves. You know that they need that distance, but you’re trying to be present, and be available to them whenever possible. And in her situation — I was really really moved by Heidi, because she’s a single parent and this is a tiny tiny family, there’s just the two of them — and so, as much as she’s trying to do everything (provide for him by herself), she’s also not physically there that she needs to be. And in the moment when she sings that song, that’s what’s so beautiful about it: That’s the time where she says, “I want to communicate to you how much I love you, how important you are to me, and how aware I was that I was going to make these terrible mistakes. And I have. That doesn’t mean that I love you any less.” And even though we didn’t have a lot of rehearsal, but I think Ben and I were both excited by the relationship, and wanted to connect as much as possible. And because our scenes are just the two of us — there’s like, nobody else there — I think we had that time to kind of establish their rhythm and their relationship, and just sort of go for it. You have to; you have no alternative. You have the time that you’re given. With that being said, I think it’s profoundly written. I love the book, I love the music. It’s very… as an actor, you have a lot to lean in to, as well as all these other cast members and our great director. So it was the infrastructure of everything that was the most helpful to me.

“So Big / So Small” was such an incredibly moving number.

JM: Yeah. That song is… I mean, it’s the ultimate parental song. It really is. It’s kind of… it floors you, I think, when you realize that this person hasn’t revealed themselves at all to you, you don’t know anything about her, you really don’t know anything about their history… and there’s this one moment, when she decides her son is able to hear it, she reveals herself in this way. And it’s just kind of intimate, and crazy, and emotional… and it’s a gift of a song for an actor, it really is.

Amandla, your character (Alana) was a bit different than the one we met on the stage. How did you grapple with the character as she was written, and can you discuss the song you composed for the film, “The Anonymous Ones.”

Amandla Stenberg: The Alana that I saw on the page was already very different from the stage version. She has this moment of vulnerability where she’s really struggling with her mental health, and that’s a reason why she connects so deeply to Evan, and also why she has such an impetus to start the Carter project. So I think going into portraying her, it was about really trying to tap into who that kid is, who is overachieving, and performing at such a high level… but is also struggling at the same time. And for me, it kind of really became about tapping into her self-worth, and the way that she valued herself. For me, that meant that she really needed a lot of external validation in order to compensate for the ways in which she maybe felt like she wasn’t fully whole. So I feel like, in terms of her physicality, and the way that she spoke… it felt important to me to portray a kid who wasn’t fully comfortable in her skin yet. And so I think she’s kind of different in that way. But also, I think Stephen Levenson kind of supplemented some of the main themes of the musical with kind of a new angle: there are a lot of people who you wouldn’t anticipate are going through mental struggles. It’s such a universal experience to have those kinds of challenges. So it was, for me, kind of about leaning into that feeling, and that’s what we decided to focus on most with the song, because we wanted to provide another opportunity for the kids who loved Dear Evan Hansen so much, and who connect to it, and who need it as a place to feel seen and heard, to also feel represented by this character. So that’s why she’s kind of different, why she feels different… and why she’s also this really high-energy overachiever! I think we just had a lot more time and space to hopefully add more color to her. And so the song is about what it’s like to be someone who presents themselves with a particular facade, but who is actually struggling. And how that’s actually something that most of us are going through, to one extent or another.

Q&A with Natalie Morales and Mark Duplass

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Language Lessons.

You both had so many roles in making this film. How did you two connect to make this film during Covid?

Mark Duplass: Natalie and I were acquaintances; friends of friends who had met a few times and I think we had the sense that we respected each other’s work and we had hit it off and liked each other. I knew I wanted to work with her and ideally share the screen with her at some point, and we hadn’t really had that opportunity. A couple of years ago I asked Natalie if she wanted to direct a few episodes of my anthology show Room 104, that I was doing for HBO. She knocked those out of the park so that just made me want to work with her even more. Then at about two months into the pandemic, I was feeling a little creatively frustrated and doing a bunch of writing and thought I’ll just squirrel away a bunch of scripts for when the world opens back up to make them in a normal way. But I didn’t want to wait to make something. I was taking Spanish lessons online with an institute in Guatemala, and it was a weird time. We were all dealing with fragility… one of my close friends Lynn Shelton had just passed away. Neither of us were in the mood for small talk so the conversation went deep pretty quickly. And I was surprised at how a connection could form over this sort of video chat format. I thought there was something there in that relationship so I called Natalie immediately and asked her if she spoke good Spanish. And she responded “oui,” which I thought was really awesome.

Natalie Morales: I can’t remember if I did say that or if you just made that up and now I believe it.

MD: I think you did, or maybe it was in a text.

NM: I have been known to be somewhat witty at some points.

MD: And a little sarcastic.

NM: I had directed those episodes of Room 104 but Mark was busy doing one of his thousand other projects so he wasn’t actually on set when I directed. So we had never worked together in a capacity where we were together all the time. It was exciting to get to do that with him, and I always wanted to work with Mark and Jay and their company, but to do so in an ultra-intimidate way, with something coming out of both of our hearts and brains together was very exciting.

what you see in this film is the consummation of the early stages of our platonic relationship deepening

Can you describe the early writing process?

NM: Mark, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that once Mark called me and asked if I spoke Spanish, we were both like okay, now we need to write something! And we paused, and then I suggested we both go our separate ways and write bios for our characters, just to see what happens. And that is how we started. I had never done any writing that way and I really believe it paid off in this, because we were both so sure of our characters, which came in very handy not only in writing and developing the story, but also later in the improvisations we did. So we wrote the biographies for these two characters without consulting the other person, and perhaps trying to surprise the other person! Then we figured out how to merge these two people and their lives and make it interesting.

MD: The only thing I would add is that I’ve been using this term alacrity a lot in terms of how I make my art. I’ve discovered it in these kinds of discussions as I’ve gotten feedback from people and what they respond to in it. This movie is the ultimate exercise in alacrity and speed—from the minute I called Natalie to the moment we wrapped the film was about four weeks. We knew we were going shoot off of an outline, mostly, and we knew we were going to want to script some of the more intricate Spanish stuff because my character Adam speaks a little better Spanish that I do personally. We needed to make sure we had all that right for Natalie and her character Cariño. But otherwise, we felt very confident in our ability to improvise the scenes together, us being the writers and the performers. Getting the story in place, like in regards to the platonic love story… I’d like to say that was something we pinpointed early on as something unique to the romantic comedy form and we were ready to raise the flag for and say we’re doing something new. We knew we wanted it to be a platonic relationship; in fact, that was one of the major motivations as to why we wanted Adam to be gay in the first place, to remove all sense of “will they or won’t they” from the table and so the audience could just focus on the intricacies of platonic love. We knew that was interesting, because Natalie and I both have deep, and in some cases deeply complicated platonic relationships. We shared that and thought that could be really cool, but we weren’t thinking “wow, this could be really trailblazing and new.” We didn’t realize that until people saw the film and reflected that back to us.

I thought it showed such restraint to have that big blowout argument at the end of the film because it’s simmering along the whole way. Both of your characters voice big and accusatory ideas. For the both of you, which of those big themes—or small themes even—did you find as the most fascinating as actors and writers?

NM: Off the top of my head, there were a lot of things we explored in this movie that were so interesting. Part of what was so freeing about making this is that we didn’t know what it would be and we didn’t know if it would be good, so it kind of left us room to explore anything that we were itching to explore. There are themes of class differences and what we assume of people. When I saw myself in the Cariño outfit with the school teacher background in this Costa Rica setting, I could see myself through the eyes of a gringo, as Cariño would say, and I could see what the assumptions you would make about her might be if you didn’t know anything about her. And I thought about the assumptions we make about all people, well-intentioned or not. As Americans, we have assumptions about people from other countries and what their lives are like, but also as people we make assumptions about everyone we meet. It’s so interesting and I’m sure they’ll continue to study this to learn about its effects, but I’ve noticed that when you meet someone in person, you do make a judgment about them the same way as you would via Zoom. But in Zoom, you get this square of like part of my house, or part of my office, this peek at people’s homes and lives and you also get this slightly exaggerated way of talking and expressing yourself that we’ve adjusted to really in just the last year and a half in order to be better understood. So we make our sentences a little clearer, like I’m doing right now, and I’m a little more smiley than I’d normally be… and then those things start to fall off because you have this familiarity of talking to someone every day, or weekly, and then the front comes down and you start to pick up on things about people. That idea was really fascinating to me. Things we assume about people and everything we project and hide, and intentionally or unintentionally show, these were all things I was interested in exploring. We also talked about movies or people with a White Savior Complex and I’ve never seen it been said or called out in a movie. It was important to me to do that and get it out there and talk about these things that are difficult to talk about.

MD: That wasn’t a central part of our plot but it was a fun side street. That was something that was interesting and exciting for me… it’s like a vulnerability thing that I have, where I talk a lot about how Duplass Brothers as a company tries to lift up struggling filmmakers and for me, that comes out of survivor’s guilt as a struggling filmmaker. I see someone struggling and I have so much PTSD and pain when I look at them that I can’t allow them to suffer. But there is an element of pity in there, and an element of judgment that is off and a little strange. And I’m trying to figure out what the right place is in that, so I was able to explore some of that stuff through Adam and his relationship with Cariño as a side angle to what that could be in my life. That was really exciting to me. I also got to explore something else that I know about myself, which is that I can come on a little strong with people when I like them and I can either intimidate them or make them back up a little bit. It’s a little bit of a blind spot I have; I can miss a social cue or two at times. I wanted to play that out with Adam to see when that could go wrong or when that could be perceived as just a puppy dog love. And there was a third thing that was important for me to explore. I’m kind of a private person; I’m married with two kids and I don’t have a lot of room in my life for a lot of big deep relationships because I work all the time. And work is a way for me to connect with people. Being able to make this movie with Natalie—who is someone I really like as a friend—was a way for me to experience that wonderful, platonic-falling-in-love energy that one gets. Normally people get that out of dating, but I’m married, I don’t have dating. So that was a fun thing that I was able to do, and what you see in this film in a lot of ways is the consummation of the early stages of our platonic relationship deepening.