It was very purposeful for me. It could have been a lot of exposition for Ray and Julie, a lot of scenes where it’s like, “We’re going to tell you exactly what happened over the last 27 years.” But it was a conscious decision to not feel like I needed to over explain who Julie and Ray are. And let their performances and the subtext and the nuance of the work kind of give you the context clues that you need to understand how they feel about each other, where they are.
One of my favorite little Easter eggs is that picture of them on the docks you see in Julie’s house. If you notice, Ray’s head was cut out of it. That’s lived-in, that’s fun, that’s texture. I’m like, “Yeah, she cut his head out of the picture. That’s how she feels about him. That’s what happened.”
You also have a real knack for casting young, up-and-coming talent. How did casting for the newer characters happen?
The audition process is brutal because—and this is no fault of any actor that auditions—but if you’re not right for something, you can tell. Then the thing that happens, at least for me as a writer-director, is I’m like, “Can we not find someone because the writing is bad?” And that’s not the case. It’s just like Cinderella’s glass slipper—it’s going to fit one lady.
Everybody auditioned except Jonah. There was another movie that was going to get him and I was like, “Just give it to him.” I just knew that Jonah had to be Milo.
Chase and I talked on the phone before we read together. I remember getting off the phone with Chase and being like, “Huh, not only am I pretty sure that that’s going to be Ava, but I also really just want to be her friend.” But that’s what you want in your final girl—you want it to be the downest bitch.
Madelyn Cline was going to audition for Ava at first. I called her agent, who I’ve known for many years, and was like, “Will she read Danica?” I feel like no one is really going to Maddie for that specific thing. And they should be, because I do think that she is the reincarnation of Madeline Kahn. She’s so fucking funny. There are so many things in this movie that are her ad libs. There’s a line in the bridal shower after she opens the note [from the Fisherman] where she’s like, “Sorry, I think I just took too much Adderall this morning.” She improvised that in her audition and I wrote it into the script.
Tyriq—movie star, literally. Maddie and Tyriq actually read together and the chemistry was so crazy. I was like, “Should I leave? I feel like I shouldn’t be here.”
Sarah Pidgeon, absolute star, did her audition with a butcher knife that she was holding to her neck on Zoom. And I just was sitting there like, “Am I going to have to call a New York hospital” All five of them were so immediately the characters that it was kind of a no-brainer. The minute they opened their mouth and said the first word, I was like, “For sure.”
