Love After Love a Film by Russell Harbaugh
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Presents Love After Love A Film by Russell Harbaugh Starring Chris O'Dowd, Andie MacDowell, James Adomian, Juliet Rylance, Dree Hemingway 91 min / Color / USA / English Publicity Contacts: BRIGADE / Rob Scheer [email protected] BRIGADE / Guillermo Restrepo [email protected] Sales Contact: ICM / Peter Van Steemburg [email protected] Logline: A glimpse into one family’s romantic, boisterous, messy, emotionally treacherous life over the course of several years, LOVE AFTER LOVE catalogues the reunions and departures of a mother and her two grown sons as they attempt to move forward in the wake of shared tragedy. Synopsis: Suzanne (Andie MacDowell) and Glenn (Gareth Williams) are college theatre professors, enjoying a playful, tempestuous marriage surrounded by students and family. Their two sons are Nicholas (Chris O'Dowd), a successful book editor in a relationship with Rebecca (Juliet Rylance), and Chris (James Adomian), perpetually attempting to find an outlet for his vague, impassioned creativity. When Glenn becomes ill with cancer, the family waits out his last Summer days together. Glenn's eventual death prompts curious, contradictory reactions: Nicholas jettisons his long-term relationship with Rebecca and becomes haphazardly engaged to his father’s student, Emilie (Dree Hemingway); Suzanne, now displaced as mother and wife, begins to see a series of men; Chris lurches forward, careening from failure to failure while pursuing an artistic career. Ill-equipped to attend to their mounting emotional needs, the family finds release in alternatively abhorrent and joyful ways. LOVE AFTER LOVE takes an unblinking look at a family navigating their way forward in the shadow of a shared loss. About The Production Writer/director Russ Harbaugh was fresh out of Columbia University’s film program when his MFA thesis short, ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING, premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. A knotty inquiry into the messy dynamics of family in the wake of a parental death, ROLLING ON THE FLOOR unfolds at a backyard birthday party for a widowed middle-aged theater professor who introduces her adult sons to her new boyfriend. As day turned into night, the woman’s sons grow increasingly hostile towards the man they see as competition. The characters in ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING were loosely based on Harbaugh’s family. Like the film’s heroine, his mother was on the faculty of the theater department of a small college and raised two sons with her husband, a stage director and professor at the same college. She was 54 when her husband died in 2006 and she mourned him deeply. A few years later, she made a decision to begin looking for a new partner. Harbaugh had a close relationship with his mother and was keenly interested to hear about her re- entry into the dating world, both as a son and as a storyteller. “All through film school I’d been trying to write about my father, but it was too soon and i didn’t know what to say and so i wrote a lot of bad scripts. When my mother started to date again, it felt connected to his death, but different — I felt too many things,” he comments. “My mom is an artist and she always pushed my brother and me to pay attention to our lives and feelings. So basically I called her bluff and asked if I could interview her about what she was up to. I think because she wasn’t in an urban center and was older, her dating experiences were unusual. I’d started writing a feature and it was really just scene after scene for hundreds of pages. There was a sequence where a boyfriend is brought home for a birthday party. That became ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING.” Sundance propelled ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING onto the domestic and international festival circuit, and it was selected to play at the prestigious New Directors/New Films series co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. Meanwhile, Harbaugh found himself dealing with major milestones and personal upheavals. “My relationship was falling apart literally at the same time my brother was getting married. I was staying in an office of theirs, sleeping on the floor, and I kind of lived with them that summer,” he recalls. “i was there alone, in his house, when he and his new wife were on their honeymoon and i had this flash of a feeling — I couldn’t catch up to my own life. That struck me as very cinematic. I could produce that feeling in a movie.” He’d recently revisited a favorite film, Maurice Pialat’s THE MOUTH AGAPE, a naturalistic drama about a dying woman and her family. The film’s unwavering, scrupulously realistic depiction of the woman’s death made a deep and lasting impression on Harbaugh, who counts Pialat as a key influence. “THE MOUTH AGAPE is the only movie that got to what it felt like for me to have my father die in our house,” he recalls. “It was a relief to see my experience reflected back to me. It was such a comfort.” The DVD’s special features section included an unused scene that showed the apparently healthy character an outdoor party. The sequence summoned a memory of particular backyard party at the Harbaugh house. “We threw my dad a party when he was ill but no one knew it yet. We just thought he had a cold,” recalls Harbaugh. “That gave me an idea for a cut. To slam an image of the father at a party where he has a cold against an image of him in bed, sucking air: that felt powerful to me. In a way, LOVE AFTER LOVE grew out of those two images next to each other. ” In the spring of 2012, he started showing pages of LOVE AFTER LOVE to filmmaker Eric Mendelsohn (JUDY BERLIN, THREE BACKYARDS), who had been his mentor at Columbia and his thesis advisor for ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING. Even in his first years of school, it was clear that Harbaugh was not a typical student. “There are lots of people who simply want to learn how to make movies,” Mendelsohn comments. “Russ wanted to reinvent them for himself, which is a different kind of person and filmmaker. He wasn’t happy just learning an established methodology. He wanted to figure out and take parts from all sorts of films and then use them to speak individually. It’s thrilling to find people like that and work with them.” The two filmmakers became friends outside the classroom. Mendelsohn hired Harbaugh to work on THREE BACKYARDS and their relationship continued after Harbaugh graduated. Mendelsohn was more than happy to provide feedback on Harbaugh’s project. “People use the term ‘new voice’ all the time – Russ has an actual new voice,” says Mendelsohn. “ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING was so gorgeous. I’ve said it’s one of the best American films I’ve seen in the past 10 years and I believe that. So I was excited to be helping Russ get his first feature into shape.” At the time, Mendelsohn was spending a lot of time on the Lower East Side, where his father had been hospitalized following a stroke. He and Harbaugh got in the habit of meeting for lunch at a Polish restaurant near the hospital. As they shared ideas about scenes, characters and themes, their lunch meetings grew longer and more frequent until they had established a full-fledged collaboration. They moved their base of operations to Mendelsohn’s apartment and got started. Says Harbaugh, “The organizing principle was to write a movie about what it was like after my father died and evoke that ‘I can’t catch up’ feeling. I saw the movie as a kind of quilt, an accumulation of events and situations that would produce a big mess of feeling. I wanted it to express the scary, loving, dangerous, self-righteous, anxiety-prone tangle of emotions that were part of my experience.” Those ambitions didn’t lend themselves to usual screenwriting norms of structure, character development and so on. Initially, it gave them pause but they realized they had to give themselves room to experiment. Recalls Mendelsohn, “Early on, Russ would say things like, ‘Well, I have this feeling but I know it’s not how you start a screenplay.’ I would then stop and say, ‘Why don’t we take all of those ideas that you have and I have and stop hesitating about whether they’re real or conventional or done, and instead see what they could be?’” Their challenge was to depict those emotions through behaviors, not dialogue. In LOVE AFTER LOVE, characters wouldn’t talk about sadness, or grief, or even missing someone. The emotions would be there, but they would be expressed through behaviors, some of them ugly. And the behaviors had to occur in a context that felt natural and true to life. Explains Harbaugh, “The scenes themselves would include dialogue, but they would be about something that the dialogue really wasn’t expressing. The circumstances of the scene would get the real point of why it was being included.” Adds Mendelsohn, “The idea that we worked from was chaos and events. Rather than the way that traditional stories are told, we would create whirlwinds of events where behavior will inform the audience where they are in the story, instead of dialogue.” That whirlwind begins almost immediately as LOVE AFTER LOVE introduces a constellation of characters who have gathered for a backyard party at the comfortable home of theater professors Glenn and Suzanne.