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. Their adult sons Nicholas and Chris, as well as Nicholas’s girlfriend Rebecca, have come in from New York City. It’s a big crowd: friends and colleagues, and their children. People come and go, eat and drink, talk and tease, roughhouse and laugh. And then that swirl of activity is gone, and Glenn is bedridden in a downstairs room, attended by Suzanne and a hospice nurse.

The sights and sounds of Glenn’s decline and death are subject to the camera’s steady gaze. The granularity of those scenes is unusual in films, but it was important to Harbaugh for specific reasons. “There aren’t that many movies that deal with death in a straightforward way that aren’t trying to soften the edge. It’s a cliché, but death is such a fact of life and we all deal with that. The fact that that experience isn’t reflected in popular art seems to me a mistake,” he remarks. “It was important that Glenn’s death hover over the rest of the movie. I wanted to build a movie where this tragic thing happens and no one talks about it; we just see a catalog of behavior in the wake of it. Each character responds in different ways and the audience is trusted to make the association between the tragedy and the behavior.”

Time lurches and glides forward after Glenn’s death, and the film drops us into the lives of Suzanne, Nicholas and Chris as they struggle with their new, permanent reality. Suzanne is suddenly alone, her natural vitality muffled by profound sadness. Nicholas cheats on his girlfriend Rebecca and continues on a jag of reckless actions that includes an impulsive engagement to a young actress named Emilie; Chris is a genial mess, prone to drinking too much and screwing things up for himself.

Harbaugh found himself imbuing each character with specific emotional aspects of his personal responses to loss. “The more that I decided, well, Nick will be this part of me; Chris will be this part of me; Suzanne will be this part of me,” Harbaugh explains. “Suzanne is locked in a kind of grief- stricken isolation, who’s just trying to get out of it. Nick’s behavior is a direct consequence of someone who cannot accept that his life will be what it was before his father died. He’s reaching for something; his behavior to me feels desperate and angry. He does bad things but I think it’s an honest depiction. And Chris is a big loveable goofball. So Suzanne is the sad part, Nick is the angry part and Chris is the emotional, honest part.”

Harbaugh and Mendelsohn talked through their ideas at length and in depth, the conversations becoming the core of their working method. “By the time that we were actually writing the scenes into the script, we had been talking about them for weeks. And the more we worked on it, the more refined the connections became between this event and this event. When we began to shoot, the structure just felt like oak to me.”

Their unconventional script attracted a gifted cast, led by Andie MacDowell as Suzanne. “I loved the script. I thought it was creative, and it was an amazing, complex, interesting role,” she says. “Suzanne is the most mature character I’ve ever played. She’s the head of the family, a very modern, strong, creative woman who really loves her husband. But when Glenn dies, she gets the rug pulled out from underneath her. It’s like losing her compass; she doesn’t know who she is for a little while. I understand that feeling from going through a divorce, which is similar to a death because you don’t know who you are for a while. You act kind of crazy.”

During the casting process, the director looked on the internet for interviews that offered a sense of performer’s off-camera personalities, and MacDowell’s leapt out at him. “Watching Andie in conversation, I was like, ‘That’s Suzanne.’ And I wanted her to bring herself in front of the camera, which she’s really good at,” he comments. “In thinking about Suzanne’s conversations with Nicholas about Emilie, the obvious choice would be an actress with a serious, brooding exterior. Andie is the opposite of that, which I loved. She has this kind of breezy Southern silkiness and ease that felt very compelling for Suzanne, who has a certain sharpness.”

The relationship between Suzanne and Nicholas is a key element of the drama, as their dynamic toggles between love and closeness on the one hand, and antagonism and disapproval on the other. “The relationship between Suzanne and Nicholas was very interesting. They love each other but at the same time, they can manipulate each other and get in each other’s way,” observes MacDowell. “It’s a subtle thing, but it’s definitely there.”

She was moved by Suzanne’s attempts to tunnel back from grief and seek out sex and love. “She’s human, she’s lonely, she’s sad,” MacDowell reflects. “She’s trying to make the transition, to leave her husband. She’s probably not ready yet, but she makes the effort. She tries to connect. She’s the most powerful character I’ve had since SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE. And, in a way, more so because of her maturity.”

Harbaugh was looking to strike a balance in casting Nicholas, whose moods and behavior grow ever more unpredictable over the course of the film. “I wanted someone who was physically big and could feel like a physical threat just by being himself, but would also be fundamentally warm,” he explains. “That would introduce a new of tension to the film, inviting an audience to care about a someone who is personable, gregarious and smart but who can also behave in ugly ways.”

Casting director Doug Aibel made the case for Irish actor Chris O’Dowd, having been impressed by O’Dowd’s performance in “Of Mice and Men” on Broadway. The actor watched ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING prior to reading LOVE AFTER LOVE. “I loved the tone of short, that it was this real, terribly awkward relationship between sons and their mother. And then I read the script and something that felt very different and an interesting world to get involved in. I talked to Russell and he articulated what he’s trying to do very clearly. He came across as such a smart, driven filmmaker that I wanted to be part of it”

Very early in the writing process, Harbaugh had the idea to open with film with Suzanne and Nicholas in a thoughtful, honest conversation about their personal lives. The pairing of MacDowell and O’Dowd matched what he had imagined in writing the scene. “I wanted it to feel intimate, like they were under the covers together. Andie and Chris felt right for that. He’s this big guy, she’s soft and beautiful. I thought that before they said a word, the audience might wonder, ‘are they a couple?’ That felt important to the movie and material, which is partially about their showdown.”

Nicholas is forever pursuing sex and love, only to blow things up with egregious cruelties. Says O’Dowd, “Nicholas has difficult relationships with women. He has a difficult relationship with his mother, a very warm relationship that at some stage has had difficulty defining its own boundaries. I think that has bled into his relationships with women outside the house. In some ways he’s like a child in a playground when it comes to relationships and matters of the heart and he plays with people too loosey-goosey.”

As an actor, O’Dowd welcomed the challenge his character represented. Likeability wasn’t an issue. “Nick is such an outrageous ass for so long in the piece,” he notes. “To make him feel human and understand where he’s coming from – that was part of my attraction to the piece.”

Harbaugh first talked to stand-up comedian James Adomian about playing Chris in 2013, when he was workshopping LOVE AFTER LOVE at the Sundance Labs. “James is an amazing stand up comedian and a real favorite of mine. The character Chris is kind of a mess but he’s also a warm spot in the movie. The person playing him had to be both funny and moving, and James felt right for it.”

The film’s supporting roles drew an outstand group of actors, including Juliet Rylance as Nicholas’s girlfriend Rebecca; Dree Hemingway as Emilie, Nicholas’s fling-turned-fiancée; and Francesca Faridany as Karen, Suzanne’s colleague and close friend; Gareth Williams as husband/father, and Matt Salinger as Michael, her new love interest. Harbaugh counted himself very fortunate. “Juliet’s remarkable; she and Chris were so dedicated to getting the relationship between their characters to feel full-blooded. Dree could come up with responses to the action on the spot, not just with dialogue but with her body and movements. Frankie was the same way. Gareth came on a week before we shot and threw himself into it. It was incredible to watch, the way in which he transformed himself, just by holding his jaw in a certain way.”

LOVE AFTER LOVE began production in November 2015 in Kingston, New York and shot for 26 days.

The film continued Harbaugh’s collaboration with ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING producer Michael Prall and director of photography Chris Teague. They were joined by producers Lauren Haber and Lucas Joaquin.

Harbaugh’s years of working on the screenplay enabled him to arrive on set with a clear idea of how he wanted the movie to look and how to execute it. “Eric and I had written the script in a way that would allow for drama to be pointed out to the audience by the camera but otherwise feel rough, raw and natural,” he explains. “I love the feeling when the camera can emotionally ground an audience in a scene that otherwise feels chaotic.”

The director chose to shoot LOVE AFTER LOVE on film to achieve the visual impact he wanted. Beginning with the writing of the film, Harbaugh referred to films and paintings by favorite artists for inspiration and insights into how to executive his visual ideas. Key influences included movies by Pialat, Jean Renoir, Woody Allen and John Cassavetes; Post-Impressionist painters like Vuillard, Bonnard and Gauguin helped him devise approaches to lighting and composition. “I wanted LOVE AFTER LOVE to feel like a memory,” he remarks. “The Post-Impressionist have a softness to them that lets the viewer project their thoughts onto them. I wanted that for the movie. With film, the image feels softer but at the same time there’s something strong and permanent about it.”

He worked with Teague to determine how best to use the camera to express what was happening in the film. Most of the film is shot in single, long, unbroken takes, usually without coverage. Together, Harbaugh, Teague, production designer Erin Magill and costume designer Sarah Mae Burton worked to develop a color palette that would not only inform the audience in terms of mood season and advancing time, but would also fuel the sense of “can’t catch up.” “Color was a way of helping land the sense of being ripped away from one scene and then slammed into the next, very different scene. Telling the audience ‘you’re not where you were before.’ So the beginning of the movie has a lot of muted primary colors and it’s warmer than what follows when Glenn is dying. The colors of the house change over the course of the movie. Both the clothes and the sets have a delicate, expressive quality that provides an extra layer to what’s happening. Chris, Erin and Sarah are real artists.”

LOVE AFTER LOVE was designed to give the audience the feeling of being dropped into a scene that’s already in progress and will continue to unfold after the camera has left. That objective guided the work of everyone involved in the film: the cast, Harbaugh and Teague, production designer Erin Magill, costume designer Sarah Mae Burton and their departments. The production team sought to create evocatively detailed environments that would feel truly inhabited and would enable the actors to slip into their roles like a second skin. Everything was thought out, down to the food that was eaten.

Harbaugh and the actors would work through scenes, the actors improvising their way to scripted dialogue. It made for a unique and lovely experience, says MacDowell, “Nothing ever felt pushed or rushed. When we set up a scene, we really took the time to get into it and understand it, get into and then do it. Everyone was committed. It was the oddest thing, working, because it felt so real. I remember a scene with Chris where we’re eating soup and I’m talking to him about his relationship. We were so in it, it wasn’t even like acting.”

There was a considerable about amount of footage shot, which made for an involved editing process. Harbaugh and Mendelsohn were reunited in the edit suite, where the process was led by John Magary, also a Columbia/Mendelsohn alumnus. “It was great -- Russ and I joked that we were back where we’d been, talking about the entanglements in the story and writing again through editing.”

Cast and Crew Biographies

RUSSELL HARBAUGH (Director / Co-Writer)’s directorial debut, LOVE AFTER LOVE, starring Andie MacDowell and Chris O’Dowd, will World Premiere at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival in the US Narrative Competition. The film was supported by the Sundance Institute and produced by PARTS & LABOR (THE WITCH, AMERICAN HONEY, BEGINNERS, LOVE IS STRANGE). Harbaugh's short film ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING played the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and dozens of other festivals around the world including the FSLC/MoMA co-curated New Directors/New Films, Maryland Film Festival, Sarasota International Film Festival, Milano, Warsaw, and many others. For his collaboration on John Magary’s 2015 film THE MEND, starring Josh Lucas and produced by Moxie Pictures, Harbaugh was nominated for a 2016 Independent Spirit Award for “Best First Screenplay.” In 2015, Harbaugh was the recipient of a Jerome Foundation grant for LOVE AFTER LOVE. Previously, he participated in the 2013 Sundance Screenwriter and Director Labs, the preeminent workshop for new American filmmakers, and received a Sundance Institute Cinereach Feature Film Fellowship. The project has also been supported by IFP’s 2013 No-Borders program and was one of four projects chosen for the 2012 Nantucket Screenwriter’s Colony. Harbaugh received his MFA from Columbia University in 2011 and is originally from Evansville, Indiana. He lives in New York.

CHRIS O’DOWD (“Nicholas”) has built an international reputation as a versatile film and television actor, winning awards, critical acclaim and huge audience popularity in equal measure.

Over the past few years Chris has carved out a hugely successful movie career. Chris most recently appeared in Tim Burton’s MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN. He also can be seen in Netflix’s MASCOTS, Christopher Guest’s most recent mockumentary, starring opposite Fred Willard, Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey and Jane Lynch. He will next be seen in LOVE AFTER LOVE opposite Andie MacDowell, premiering at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, and Jim Stouse’s THE INCREDIBLE JESSICA JAMES, which debuted at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

Previously Chris starred in THE PROGRAM, Stephen Frear's movie based on the book by Irish journalist David Walsh, "Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong," in which Chris played David Walsh. THE PROGRAM premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival. In Wayne Blair’s THE SAPPHIRES, Chris starred as Dave, the manager of Australian aboriginal singing group The Sapphires as they entertained US troops in Vietnam. The film broke Australian box office records, garnered Chris the AACTA Award for ‘Best Lead Actor’ and received several awards and nominations for ‘Best Feature’. He was nominated for BAFTAs Rising Star Award in 2012.

Chris was also nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and won the Irish Film & TV Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor – Film’ for his role as Rhodes in hit movie BRIDESMAIDS. Produced by Judd Apatow the film received two Oscar nominations and was recognized by AFI as ‘Movie of the Year’ as well as being a huge box office success, making almost 300 million dollars worldwide.

Chris’ other movie credits include Judd Apatow’s THIS IS 40 opposite Paul Rudd; Jennifer Westfelt’s FRIENDS WITH KIDS alongside John Hamm and Kristen Wiig; Jay Roache’s DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS opposite Paul Rudd and Steve Carrell; Rob Letterman’s GULLIVER’S TRAVELS with Jack Black and Emily Blunt; Richard Curtis’ FOX, THE BOAT THAT ROCKED opposite Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Gareth Carrivick’s FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT TIME TRAVEL opposite Anna Faris.

Chris also starred in FESTIVAL which was nominated for two BAFTAs including ‘Best British Film’ and won him a BAFTA Scotland Award for ‘Best Actor in a Scottish Film’; John Michael McDonagh’s CALVARY opposite Brendan Gleeson; ST. VINCENT, opposite Bill Murray and Melissa McCarthy; Marvel Production’s THOR: THE DARK WORLD and James Griffiths’ CUBAN FURY opposite Nick Frost and Rashida Jones. He also lent his voice to Chris Wedge’s animated blockbuster EPIC alongside Beyonce, Amanda Seyfried and Jason Sudeikis.

Chris is currently shooting GET SHORTY for EPIX opposite Ray Romano. The series, based on the feature film, is set to premiere later this year.

Chris first came to the British public’s attention starring as Roy in Channel 4’s cult comedy series The IT CROWD. He’s been a regular on the small screen ever since; from the critically acclaimed BBC series CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE in which he starred as William Wrackham, to writing, producing, directing and starring in Sky’s MOONE BOY his acclaimed semiautobiographical sitcom that finds him returning to his Irish childhood in 1990s Boyle. The show, in which he plays Sean Murphy, the imaginary friend of young boy Martin Moone won an Emmy for ‘Best Comedy’ in 2013, it was also nominated for ‘Best New Comedy Programme’ at The British Comedy Awards and won the IFTA for 'Best Entertainment Programme' in the same year. In 2014 MOONE BOY won the British Comedy Award for Best Sitcom, earned the IFTA for the second consecutive year and in 2015 followed up these with a nomination for 'Best Sitcom Comedy' at the BAFTA's. The series premiered on Sky One in the UK and Hulu in the U.S. In 2013 Chris played the leading role of 'Tom Chadwick' in Christopher Guest’s FAMILY TREE, which aired on HBO in the US and BBC2 in the UK. Chris also starred in Lena Dunham’s HBO series, GIRLS for two seasons and his voice can be heard narrating the animated PUFFIN ROCK. He is currently shooting the small-screen series adaptation of GET SHORTY for Epix, opposite Ray Romano.

In 2014 he added Broadway to his list of successes. His performance as Lennie in John Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN opposite James Franco earned him a Tony nomination for ‘Best Performance by an Actor’ in a Leading Role; a Drama Desk Nomination for ‘Outstanding Actor in a Play and Theatre’ and a World Award for ‘Outstanding Broadway Debut Performance’. His demand as a screen actor means his last stage appearance was back in 2008 in the West End starring opposite Catherine Tate and Francesa Anis in Anna Mackmin’s UNDER THE BLUE SKY at the Duke of York Theatre.

Chris is from Roscommon, Ireland. He studied politics at Dublin University before training at LAMDA. ANDIE MACDOWELL (“Suzanne”) has established herself as an accomplished actress and spokesperson with worldwide recognition. On the big screen, MacDowell earned the worldwide title of #1 female box-office draw with her performances in the smash hit romantic comedy FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination, and the western BAD GIRLS with Drew Barrymore. She also starred alongside Bill Murray in Harold Ramis’ holiday classic GROUNDHOG DAY, which was recently inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. In other comedies MacDowell continued to partner with top leading men including Gerard Depardieu in GREEN CARD, for which she again earned a Golden Globe nomination, Michael Keaton in MULTIPLICITY, and John Travolta in MICHAEL.

She first received critical acclaim and accolades for her performance as a repressed young wife in Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies and videotape.” The film won the Palme d'or at Cannes and garnered MacDowell the Independent Spirit Award and the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Actress as well as her first Golden Globe nomination. Additionally, she has been presented with the coveted Cesar D’Honneur for her body of work, the Golden Kamera Award from Germany’s Horzu Publications and the Taormina Arte Award for Cinematic Excellence.

MacDowell’s dramatic feature performances have included THE END OF VIOLENCE, directed by Wim Wenders, which was selected to screen at the opening of the 50th Anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival; Robert Altman’s THE PLAYER and SHORT CUTS, for which the cast earned a special Golden Globe Award for Best Ensemble and a Special Volpi Cup Award at the Venice Film Festival; UNSTRUNG HEROES, directed by Diane Keaton and the ever-popular ST. ELMO’S FIRE. Her more recent film credits have included Paramount’s FOOTLOOSE reboot, MONTE CARLO, the indie feature MIGHTY FINE which she co-starred with her daughter Rainey Qualley and MacDowell earned critical praise for her work in the sequel, MAGIC MIKE XXL which reunited her with producer Steven Soderbergh.

On the small screen, MacDowell starred on Hallmark’s #1 series, Cedar Cove, based on the bestselling book series by Debbie Macomber. Previously MacDowell was featured on the ABC Family series Jane By Design and starred in the Lifetime Original films, AT RISK and THE FRONT, both based on Patricia Cornwell crime novels. She earned praise for her performance in the Emmy-nominated, HBO original film, DINNER WITH FRIENDS and co-starred with Rosie O’Donnell in the CBS telefilm RIDING THE BUS WITH MY SISTER, directed by Anjelica Huston.

For her philanthropic work, MacDowell was presented with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Lander University and received an Honor of the Arts from Winthrop College. MacDowell has served as the national spokesperson for both The Ovarian Cancer Research Fund and the American Heart Association. Additionally, in her continued efforts to bring awareness to preserving nature, MacDowell has supported the Tree Farmers of America with a national awareness campaign and put two thousand acres of her Montana ranch in a conservation easement with the Montana Land Reliance in her effort to preserve Montana’s natural habitat. MacDowell currently sits on the board of the National Forest Foundation.

MacDowell began her career as a model and appeared in international ad campaigns for brands such as Yves Saint Laurent, Vassarette, Armani perfume, Sabeth-Row and Bliss Blass. Since 1986, MacDowell has been the global spokesperson for L’Oreal Paris cosmetics and hair products. MacDowell’s long-standing relationship with the brand has made history as the longest consecutive relationship between a beauty brand and spokesmodel.

JAMES ADOMIAN (“Chris”) is a comedian and actor who is well known for his standup, characters and impressions. He can be seen in David Cross’ feature directorial debut HITS, and in forthcoming feature films LOVE AFTER LOVE and ADVENTURES OF DRUNKY. He has guest starred on Comedy Central’s @Midnight, The Meltdown and Drunk History, on Adult Swim’s Children’s Hospital and on IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang! as a variety of guest characters. As Bernie Sanders, James is one-half of Trump Vs. Bernie, a comedy debate act that includes a memorable guest appearance on Comedy Central and two TV specials for Fusion, along with a live international tour in 2016, and a hit comedy album called “Trump Vs Bernie: Live From Brooklyn.” James performed standup on John Oliver’s New York Stand Up Show on Comedy Central, and on NBC’s Last Comic Standing where he was a Top 10 finalist. James has also performed to much acclaim over the years at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal (where in 2016, he was named one of Variety’s ‘Top 10 Comics to Watch’), and many other top comedy festivals. He works as a voiceover artist on numerous animated shows including Disney’s Future Worm and Nickelodeon’s Pig Goat Banana Cricket. He is also a beloved regular guest on the Earwolf podcast network, where his debut standup comedy album “Low Hangin Fruit” was released in 2012.

JULIET RYLANCE (“Rebecca”) BIOGRAPHY TO COME

DREE HEMINGWAY (“Emilie”) was most recently seen starring with writer/director Michelle Morgan in the feature L.A. TIMES, which premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. She recently completed production on writer/director Sam Boyd's IN A RELATIONSHIP, opposite Emma Roberts and Michael Angarano.

Hemingway received rave reviews for her starring role in the 2012 indie, STARLET, for which the New York Times listed her performance as one of the five “Breakthrough Performances of the Season” and Variety called her one of its “10 Actors to Watch.” The film was one of the most buzzed-about at the 2013 SXSW Film Festival and its cast and director received the Robert Altman Award at the 2013 Independent Spirit Awards. The film explores the unlikely friendship of Jane, played by Hemingway, and Sadie, an elderly woman, with whom she comes into contact at a yard sale.

Other film credits include roles in Alex Ross Perry’s LISTEN UP PHILIP, Logan Sandler’s LIVE CARGO, Noah Baumbach’s WHILE WE’RE YOUNG, a lead role in the 2012 English language sequel to the French hit TOUT CE QUI BRILLE called NOUS YORK, directed by Herve Mimran and Geraldine Nakache. In 2013, Hemingway starred in the short A DREAM OF FLYING, directed by Georgina Chapman as part of Ron Howard and Canon's Project Imagination, as well as a live-action music video written by Lena Dunham and directed by Spike Jones at the 2013 Youtube Music Awards.

Hemingway studied acting in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and later in New York at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She studied ballet with Suzanne Farrell in Washington D.C. and at The School of American Ballet.

ERIC MENDELSOHN (Co-Writer / Executive Producer)'s feature film debut, JUDY BERLIN, starring The Sopranos' Edie Falco, as well as Madeline Kahn, Barbara Barrie and Julie Kavner, was an Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard), won Best Director at Sundance, Best Independent Film at the Hamptons Film Festival, was the Opening Night Film for the Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors/New Films festival after which it was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards. His short film, THROUGH AN OPEN WINDOW, starring Anne Meara and Cynthia Nixon, premiered at The Sundance Film Festival, enjoyed festival screenings internationally, was an Official Selection of The Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard) and garnered him a guest spot on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. His feature film, 3 BACKYARDS, starring Edie Falco and Elias Koreas, premiered in competition at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival where it garnered the Best Director award making Eric the only person in the festival’s history to have received the award twice. His screenplays have been developed at the Sundance Institute's labs and he is a producer on the documentary films of Rebecca Dreyfus, and Juan Carlos Vallejo. In the field of film design, Eric worked for writer/director Woody Allen for over 8 years on such films as CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, HUSBANDS AND WIVES, BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, ALICE AND EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU. Mendelsohn is a mentor for the Sundance Institute's writer's lab and at Columbia University where he is a professor of film directing, he was the 2012 recipient of Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.

LUCAS JOAQUIN (Producer) is an independent creative producer in New York City and a founding member of the production company Secret Engine. His most recent features are COMPLETE UNKNOWN, directed by Joshua Marston, starring Rachel Weisz and Michael Shannon, and LITTLE MEN directed and co-written by Ira Sachs, starring Greg Kinnear and Paulina Garcia both of which premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

Joaquin also produced Sachs’s previous features, LOVE IS STRANGE and KEEP THE LIGHTS ON, and was the 2nd Unit Producer of BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, directed by Benh Zeitlin.

Joaquin was a participant in the 2012 Sundance Creative Producing Lab, the 2013 Berlinale Talent Campus, 2014 Venice Biennale College, and IFP No Borders Co-Production Market. He is a founding member of Secret Engine with fellow producers Alex Scharfman and Drew Houpt, and worked for many years with the prolific production company Parts & Labor.

LAUREN HABER (Producer) recently joined Pulse Films as a Producer. She produced Russell Harbaugh's LOVE AFTER LOVE and Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau's TROPHY, which will be released by The Orchard and CNN Films. Previously, as head of film and television at Parts & Labor, Lauren managed the production of numerous critically acclaimed films including Robert Eggers' THE WITCH, Matt Ross's FRANK & LOLA, David Lowery's AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS and Shaul Schwarz's NARCO CULTURA.

MICHAEL PRALL (Producer) is based in Brooklyn, NY. He produced the 2016 Independent Spirit Award nominated film THE MEND, and the upcoming LOVE AFTER LOVE, starring Chris O'Dowd and Andie MacDowell, and THE STRANGE ONES, starring Alex Pettyfer and James Freedson-Jackson, which earned a Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Actor at SXSW 2017. He received a BFA from the Syracuse University School of Visual and Performing Arts in 2005.

An Oscar and Grammy winner and multiple Tony and Emmy nominee, DAVID SHIRE (Composer) has composed prolifically for the theater, films, television and recordings. Broadway: Baby (Tony nominations, Best Score, Musical); Big (Tony nomination, Best Score). Off-Broadway: Starting Here, Starting Now (Grammy nomination); Closer Than Ever (Outer Critics Circle Award, Best Score, Musical), Take Flight (McCarter Theatre); Sousatzka, currently having a pre-Broadway tryout run in Toronto. Film scores include NORMA RAE (Academy Award), THE CONVERSATION, ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1-2-3, ZODIAC, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (two Grammys). Numerous television scores have garnered five Emmy nominations. Songs recorded by Barbra Streisand, Maureen McGovern, Melissa Manchester, Jennifer Warnes, John Pizzerelli, Kiri Te Kanawa, Liz Callaway, Nancy Lamont, many others. His “With You I’m Born Again” was an international hit single for Billy Preston and Syreeta. He and his wife Didi Conn are developing a children’s animated musical series for Amazon.