One of the best scenes you’ll ever see in one of the best feature debuts you’ll ever see occurs over a campfire in “Good One” where Sam (Lily Collias) can be seen preparing instant noodles for her father Chris (James Le Gros) and his longtime best friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) after a long hike in the woods. The ingredients might be humble, but you’d have no idea from the look in all their eyes that this wasn’t going to be the best thing they’ve ever eaten, particularly from how careful Sam is to prepare it, clearly hoping to impress the adults with what she’s capable of, but even surprising herself a bit in how well it’s coming out.
“I have a lot of affection for that moment in the movie,” says the film’s writer/director India Donaldson when I bring it up as a favorite. “I love food in movies and when people’s relationship to food is part of the story, whether or not it’s a movie that is about food. I love the sequence in the beginning of ’35 Shots of Rum’ where the father and daughter share a meal and how that movie lets us into that meal slowly. Specifically with this movie, I was thinking about how much food means when you’re camping or backpacking. If you’re walking all day, you’re burning a lot of calories and food is really at the forefront of your mind. Food tastes so good when you’ve worked, you’ve carried it on your back or you’ve waited for it or worked hard to get it, so [that scene was about] how the simplest thing, just some salty noodles with seasoning out of a packet, the ritual of it is so particularly meaningful in that setting, and I wanted to kind of expose how important food is to the relationships in this movie by giving it attention and screen time.”
You can imagine every scene in “Good One” being fussed over with the same level of scrutiny, but only after this true magic trick of a movie ends when the transfixing coming-of-age story is too sumptuous to get caught up in any of the small details that make it so rich for too long. The film couldn’t start out more simply when Sam agrees to go camping with her dad to get a little more time to bond towards the end of the summer before she’s about to start college, unaware that this will become a painful parallel for Matt, whose own son doesn’t want to join him as the family is at the start of a painful divorce. However, Sam can clearly see both his failings and her own father’s as what should be a weekend of rest and relaxation is filled with stress and she’s forced to take the lead, growing up right in front of them and wondering whether they’ll take notice.
Although the film was a magnificent discovery for many at Sundance where it premiered earlier this year, it is something that Donaldson has been working towards for some time with a tight-knit group of collaborators such as cinematographer Wilson Cameron and composer Celia Hollander on the shorts “Medusa,” “Hannahs” and “If Found” where the delicacies of meaningful yet mundane-looking moments in people’s lives have been revealed to have immense power. With the film now arriving in theaters, Donaldson was kind enough to let slip a few details about how she was able to pull it off, catching a few lucky breaks like being tipped off by her sister that she had a friend who could act in Collias, now a breakout star on the rise, while having less than two weeks to actually shoot with less than cooperative weather at times.
From what I understand, you had to wait a year for Lily Collias to be able to make the film, but you were able to use that time to your advantage in terms of developing the character. What was it like working on this together?
Really, we just got to know each other and Lily had all that time to sit with the character and get inside it. We never really talked about it, but my hope is that relationship we developed over that year it allowed us to really trust each other when the time came to shoot. I really tried to approach working with Lily in that way where the character was hers and I just had to create the environment where she felt comfortable and confident enough to deliver this performance. Lily brought a lot of depth and nuance and edge to it that is just a product of her and in my mind, it’s very different than what was on the page, but it’s really all in the specificity that comes from like a great actor delivering a performance.
Then when you cast James LeGros, it seems like you’re getting more than a great actor, but it puts you in this entire tradition of filmmaking he’s been a part of. Was that an exciting part of this for you?
Absolutely. First of all, James has worked with so many amazing directors, but specifically female directors whose work I admire and were really influential in my learning to trust myself as a filmmaker, so I think his collaboration with all of these women I was really interested in. Then there’s a small group of actors who just whenever they show up in a movie, it makes me look closer and lean in and he’s one of those people. Even if he’s just in one scene, I just love him and everything he does. Specifically, I was thinking about two different performances that in my mind are quite different. His work in “Certain Women” and then his work in “Support the Girls,” and I was thinking of this character as sitting somewhere in between those two guys that he played.
Is it true he and Lily go to know each other over Zoom?
Yeah, the first time Lily and James Zoomed, I was in a car and had bad cell service and they couldn’t really hear or see me, so I was just more listening to them. I remember Wilson [Cameron], one of our producers on the movie and also cinematographer, and I were driving back from a scout upstate and I just remember us looking at each other in the car, listening to this conversation between James and Lily and grinning because we could feel their chemistry in this first conversation. And we’d already cast both of them, but there was no like guarantee of that level of connection. It just felt so organic from literally moment one and observing their dynamic allowed me to just create an environment where we could lean into what was their natural chemistry.
On set, Wilson seemed really attuned to their energy as well in how the camera moves – how planned out is that versus adjusting to what may transpire on the day?
Wilson and I had made a bunch of shorts together and I think developed a shorthand and also learned really intimately through collaborating what the other person likes and responds to. He is so expert at framing for performance and looking for the emotional complexity of the scene. He has an enormous sensitivity to that and something that I think we have tried to build on across working together.
Their emotional journey seems really tied to this place, but was it actually in mind from the start?
It was definitely a process of finding the right place that spoke to some of the things that were in the script. For example, the water at the end of the movie was [always] a big part of the last act and I knew we needed to find some water source that could carry them along this path, but then also sound-wise be something that she was competing with in this conversation with her dad. So it really felt like a casting process, finding a location that had these elements that I had imagined. We scouted the places we ended up shooting multiple times and would discover something new every time and we built this journey as we scouted, like we would say “Maybe this conversation happens here” and it would add a kind of nuance and layer to the story, depending on the spot that we found that perfectly worked for that moment.
I hope I’m not bringing up traumatic memories with this, but I was impressed to hear this was shot in 12 days, but even more so when it sounds like it was really 11 with a storm that passed through. You obviously perservered, but when something like that happens on such a tight schedule, what goes through your head?
There wasn’t time to panic. We just all had to adapt and figure out a way to have a movie at the end of it. The other piece of it was SAG was going to go and strike the day after we wrapped, and we didn’t have money to extend the shoot, so we had no margin for error. I just felt very lucky that it was this really intimate group of people where we all just pivot and find a solution amd cut parts of scenes, whatever we had to do to distill the process and the script down to its like most important elements that would give us a story at the end of it. But I imagine that’s always the case, no matter how many days you have. That’s part of the process.
What this was like to actually put together in the edit room? The rhythm of this is so gently persistent.
Graham Mason, who edited the film, also produced it and [assistant directed] it, so [he was] a really deep collaborator throughout the process and Graham has said something that I will repeat because I love it so much and it feels so true to my experience of working with him, that sometimes in an edit, you have to break something open to put it back together. But with this film, it felt like more of a process of whittling something down into its form. It really did feel like a process of refining and we were prioritizing Sam’s experience of things over all else, staying closely tethered to these core ideas and then feeling our way through the movie with that as our guiding force.
You’ve also got a really great collaboration going with the composer Celia Hollander and how you accentuate what the characters are going through sonically has been a special part of your films. What’s it been like to work with her?
Just such a joy. What’s so great about collaborating with people, specifically Celia over multiple projects is you get to build off of the conversations you had the previous time you were collaborating, so this felt like a deepening of work we’d already been doing. Celia herself is a real avid like hiker and backpacker and camper and she was living in the area where we shot when she composed much of the music. So I felt that tonally and emotionally, she’s such a big part of how this movie feels and all the films that I’ve made that she scored, she’s inextricably linked to the identity of these projects.
The film starts out with such a striking image of these rock towers, which I understand campers often leave behind them on such hikes. What was it like for you to actually see them up and about out there?
The whole rock element was kind of the last thing I added to the script. I had been on a hike in the White Mountains in the year when I was developing the script and had seen those towers and remembered the feeling of this gesture of the people who pass through this space, and so I loved them symbolically. Then [our production designer] Becca Morrin and her team built these towers [for our shoot], and then after we wrapped Diana [Irvine], one of the producers, and James and I got to quietly disassemble them, which is maybe my favorite memory from the whole shoot.
“Good One” opens on August 9th in New York at Metrograph and in Los Angeles at the Landmark Sunset Five before expanding across the country on August 16th.