Your Sister's Sister
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Mongrel Media Presents YOUR SISTER’S SISTER A Film by Lynn Shelton (90 min., USA, 2011) Language: English 2011 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2012 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2012 TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL Distribution Publicity Bonne Smith 1028 Queen Street West Star PR Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M6J 1H6 Tel: 416-488-4436 Tel: 416-516-9775 Fax: 416-516-0651 Fax: 416-488-8438 E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] www.mongrelmedia.com High res stills may be downloaded from http://www.mongrelmedia.com/press.html Synopsis Following the success of her Sundance award winning film Humpday, Lynn Shelton weaves another compellingly human story in Your Sister’s Sister. Lost in an emotional funk one year after his brother’s death, Jack (Mark Duplass) takes his best friend Iris (Emily Blunt) up on her offer for a reflective week of solitude at her family’s remote island retreat. Upon arriving at the house, Jack discovers that Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) had the same idea, and the two spend an awkward evening together. Iris shows up the next morning unannounced, setting in motion an emotionally twisted tale of sisters, brothers, and best friends. Shelton once again honestly explores the complexities of interpersonal relationships while gently poking fun at her characters’ predicaments. Q&A: Lynn Shelton (writer, director) Q: What was the genesis of the film? What led you to embrace this story? SHELTON: My eternal interest as an artist is the self and how we perceive ourselves and what happens when we come face to face with the fact that our perception is not always in line with the reality of where we’re really at. Those kinds of situations when we rouse ourselves and become self‐aware, and then what we do at those moments, are fascinating to me. That often happens when we bump up against other human beings. It’s all about those dynamics, and the poignancy of how we’re all flawed. I heard Cornel West on the radio the other day say that we are all “cracked vessels.” And I thought, Yes, that’s what’s so beautiful—we’d be so boring if we weren’t! In this case, I particularly liked being able to explore sibling relationships. There are two strong ones in this movie—it just happens that one of the siblings is dead. Jack is really shaken to the core by the fact that he wasn’t that close to his brother when he died. He can’t get over his death because of that. Part of the healing process for him is that he ends up bringing the sisters back together again. And that enables him to forgive himself and move on. Those relationships were what interested me. Q: There’s a rich vein of humor in Your Sister’s Sister and all your feature films. Do you have any connection to the comedy scene or does your sense of humor spring from a more personal place? SHELTON: I love to laugh, and I’m not a quiet laugher. People usually think I’m a plant [in the crowd]! What’s funny is that in college theater, I was known as this serious, dramatic actor. In New York, I did a lot of off off Broadway downtown theater, and until I was given this one role, I didn’t know I could be funny. Madeleine Olnek (Codependent Lesbian Alien Seeks Same) directed a play I was in a zillion years ago—she was the one who made me self‐actualize as a comic actress. To answer your question, I don’t go out to see stand‐up comedy—that whole world is not part of my universe. Q: Comedy is something that arises naturally from the dramatic situations in Your Sister’s Sister. SHELTON: Right. I am not trying to make it funny. I’m trying to tell a story and the humor comes out of a very contextual place. It’s character and situation‐based, but there are no jokes in my movies. I find the biggest laughs come from the days on set that were the most serious. When things get the most awkward and intense for the characters, that’s when the laughs come from the audience because they recognize those situations. You know, “That’s the exact same look my wife gets on her face when she knows I’m bullshitting her!” Hopefully—and that’s what I’m going for—these characters feel real and authentic. That’s the big difference between me and anyone specifically trying to being funny. I still don’t know if Your Sister’s Sister is a comedy. It encompasses drama and humor alike. Q: How do you work with actors to reach a place where the performance feels true, where it feels like real life? SHELTON: I wrote a script for my first feature [We Go Way Back] and auditioned actors for the roles and then made the movie. In some instances, it was hard to find the overlap between the actor and the character I had written. Sometimes it was a struggle and other times it wasn’t. I love my first film—that tension was just something I noticed and it inspired me to try something else. I thought, What if I started with people I want to work with and designed a character for them? I was interested in making movies in Seattle, and most people who want to work in front of the camera, leave here! [Laughs] I wanted to create a process that would allow me a lot of flexibility, so I could work with inexperienced actors and theater actors and even nonactors if I wanted to, people who could be themselves in front of the camera. On My Effortless Brilliance I pitched an idea to my friend Sean Nelson and asked if he would play the role, and he was thrilled. And on Humpday, the starting point was Mark Duplass. Q: You have a very specific way of building characters in collaboration with your actors. SHELTON: With each iteration, I’ve been working with more and more veteran actors. Their skill set lies in not just being themselves but actually creating characters. And they just provide an extra layer of honesty if they can participate in the development process. We have a lot of conversations leading up to the shooting days. We’re building up whole histories and back story for each character—specific experiences and where they’ve met and what their relationships to each other are. We all end up telling stories from our own lives or stories we’ve heard from friends that inform it all. Q: What shape was the script for Your Sister’s Sister in when you first presented it to the cast? SHELTON: On this movie, the idea came from Mark: he called me and said, “I think I have your next movie.” And it turns out he did! It was such a great starting place for a story: a grieving guy, his gal best friend sends him up to her family’s remote get away, he encounters someone unexpected. That was what he brought me and then the film just spun out from there, in all kinds of fun directions. I like to gather my actors really early on, as soon as the kernel of the movie comes into being. I want them involved on the ground floor. What I was hoping is that veteran actors who are used to working in a really traditional way would see Humpday, find out how it was made, and get interested in working on an intimate, very collaborative level. Of course, most actors are used to working with scripts – they use the text as the spine of their performance and build on that. So there’s this leap of faith when you’re asking actors to improvise—you don’t know if they can do it or not! I remember talking to Emily about this way of working and being so relieved when she told me, “Of all the movies I’ve done, my favorite is this little drama called My Summer of Love where we improvised all the scenes, and I never thought I’d work that way again.” I had no idea that film was unscripted, but I thought, Perfect! She’s done it before! And she was so excited to have a chance to do something in that vein again. Q: Rosemarie DeWitt has had a number of roles in film and television. Was she also a natural at improvising dialogue or did she take some time to adjust? SHELTON: When I talked to Rosemarie, she said she’d never really done much improvising, a little in the theater and for Rachel Getting Married. I just had an instinct she’d be good at it. She was certainly game. On set, because I knew I would have actors who were less experienced as improvisers, I had more of a script. Humpday was a ten‐page outline with all the emotional milestones and arcs we had to hit in each scene—it was tightly structured but there was no dialogue. In this case, and it worked out well, I handed Rose a character bible telling her all about Hannah. There was a 70‐page script with some bits of dialogue and a few sketched‐out scenes. I didn’t think we’d use the dialogue I’d written—it was just there as scaffolding, to make the actors feel there was a safety net.