Filmmaker Statement

The Last Time You Had Fun is my second feature and like my first it deals with marriage. I wouldn’t call marriage an obsession, but it is definitely a fascination of mine. I think as a culture there is a lot of discussion about what marriage is or isn’t or should be, and part of me is responding to that. Here is this commitment made by two people, ideally grown-ups, and with it comes all of these nebulous expectations, happiness, fidelity, morality, social acceptability, children, no children, fulfilled sexuality. When those expectations fall short in reality they can be painful, but they can also be cathartically very funny. Because of those stakes and that potential for humor, marriage for me is the perfect lens with which to examine human relationships in general.

I’m not a director who likes to sit behind a monitor or really sit much at all while on set. I love the collaborative engine of filmmaking, all the pieces coming together in a single moment with a collective push towards one story. It is the ultimate barn raising. Nowhere is this more fun than with the actors. One of this film’s challenges and thrills for me was that it is an ensemble, so I got to work with group performances as well as one on one. It’s different when you have four or five actors in almost every scene then when you have two – it’s harder in some ways, but it brings a heightened energy. I love rehearsing; I love problem solving and discovering with the actors. I think it comes from what I like as a viewer: I can forgive a less than beautiful esthetic, I can overlook a focus slip, I can handle clicks and pops in the soundtrack, but if the performances don’t ring true, I’m out. Because of this, working with the cast to build grounded performances is the most important thing I do as a filmmaker. Stylistically with this film, I wanted to stay very true to the script, but have the performances feel almost improvisational. I got lucky with an amazing talented cast and I’m very proud of what they were able to accomplish.

When my husband Hal and I decided to collaborate, with him writing and me directing, the first thing we talked about was what kind of film we wanted to make. Hal has written for other people and is a director in his own right, with several award-winning films. The one he’s most known for, Special, with Michael Rapaport, really rode the line between darkness and a giddy transcendent humor.    We both like a lot of different kinds of stories and watch a lot of films together. But in talking it became quickly apparent that what we really wanted to make together was something we weren’t seeing as much of in recent independent American films. A grounded, scripted, comedy for grown-ups, which dealt honestly with character. I think there is a move in smaller budget indie films to explore character through these very pensive cinematic styles and it’s beautiful, but for me I felt that I had done that several times already and therefore it was less interesting. I wanted to make a film in which you come to meet the characters as you do in real life, by listening to what they have to say.

With The Last Time You Had Fun I was searching for grounded humor, the kind that makes you wince, tear up and laugh despite yourself. For me this is a movie about how unsuccessful most of us are at being grown ups, and what happens one night to these four people when they stop trying so hard.    I try consciously to set up challenges for myself with every new project. A Quiet Little Marriage, my first feature, was a marriage in a pressure cooker; for the most part everything took place in the same four rooms. The two main characters were in love with each other - looking right at each other and not really seeing each other at the same time. That special interiority was part of the last film’s constraints, it was the shape of the film and I enjoyed experimenting with it. With this one, I wanted to be on the move, literally, and to have that be part of what makes this night special and gives the characters permission to reexamine themselves.    The movie is about marriage, but none of the main characters are married to each other. They are exploring what’s missing with strangers. Instead of a spatial constraint, The Last Time You Had Fun has a time constraint; the characters have wandered out of their situations for the night, but they all know when the sun comes up, they will have to go back and face their lives.

Making a film is the most fun I know how to have, no contest. It’s a chance to think about what it is that makes us human: our flaws, our terrible decisions, our great leaps of hope, and our capacity for tenderness with each other. Filmmaking is where I go to laugh, cry, create and collaborate. And when it's over, hopefully to tell a story that inspires people to share some of the joy I get from making it.

How to survive night shoots and the unwanted advances of stingrays

The night shoots were hard.  I personally drank my weight in coffee. Everybody had his or her own way of staying up.  There were jokers, singers, dancers, cursers, but everyone put their shoulder to it and it was generally not just bearable, but pretty fun.  Then we hit the beach.

We had hoped to schedule our beach nights for the very last days of our shoot, that way everybody could sleep indefinitely afterwards.  We knew just looking at them in the script that they would be a challenge for the crew, not to mention our poor cast who would be jumping into the pacific and then performing wet in their underwear in the middle of the night. It's Southern California, sure, but that ocean is never really warm and at night, well, it's really cold.  It has always been my filmmaking philosophy that you make things as comfortable as possible for the people who show up to help you create your vision.

Well it didn't work to out to shoot at the end. Because of the beach location availability, it was right smack in the middle of the shoot.  I was worried about our team becoming exhausted.  We tried our best to prep.  We had warming tents, we had soup, and we had coffee.  We had people with bathrobes standing at the edge of frame that could run in and engulf our poor actors as soon as we yelled cut.  We had a state lifeguard and state park rangers on hand.  But there was no denying once the camera started rolling that the shoot looked unbalanced.   There was everyone, including me, in wooly coats and our cast in skivvies. 

But the worst came right before all four of our main cast were supposed to jump into the ocean.  We had a huddle with the lifeguard to talk about safety and he started talking about STINGRAYS.  Apparently there was an unusually abundant population happening, a once in a lifetime super population and they had been known to gather around the beach we were shooting at.  Our lifeguard suggested splashing and making a lot of noise when entering the water to scare these guys away.  He didn't see any real danger, but wanted our cast to know this.  The five of us just stared at him.  

When the time came, I could see everybody was a little nervous.  But there was also this charge mentality, like lets get this done!  I double-checked with the lifeguard to make sure it was just irksome and not dangerous and he reassured me.

We shot the initial run in a wide with two cameras rolling.  It was kind of crazy and exhilarating seeing the four, Kyle, Demetri, Eliza and Mary Elizabeth, charge into that water. They ran in, they splashed about, they ran out.  We shot the whole scene, with them in the water and then their dialogue at the edge of the water with the beach ranger.  They were amazing.  When we cut, Mary Elizabeth turned to me and said "Um, I rolled around under the water with a stingray".  Apparently she had encountered one, tripped and then continued with the scene because she knew we could only do it so many times.  It was amazing and also emblematic of the type of commitment I got from everybody on this film.  It became a joke, the rest of the cast teasing Mary Elizabeth about her tumble with ‘Ray’ and then her doing the most hilarious stingray impression I have ever seen.  The shot where she meets the stingray is actually in the film.  It's a wide, but you can kind of see where she stumbles and then comes back shouting with ‘joy’.

That’s the kind of shoot this was, hard, crazy and at the end of the day, a really good time!