“Valentine’s Day, it’s kind of about bullshit,” Zoey (Josephine Langford) tells her roomie Elle (Mallori Johnson) as they walk across campus in “The Other Zoey,” just after the former has presented the case for something of a thesis project in Compatidate, a mobile app that matches prospective partners with the algorithm doing the heavy lifting that uncomfortable small talk typically does on a first date. If Zoey gave thought to how she’s made a good friend in Elle despite them being wildly at odds over how romance works — Elle is about to dip into a marathon of rom-coms where there might not be a plot if awkwardness didn’t give way to a beautiful love story — she might not pursue Compatidate much further, but the computer geek in her pushes on, convinced that computational analysis is far more capable of making a connection than people are on their own.
Zoey isn’t wrong to think this when her own love life suddenly becomes messy in the comedy, mistaken for the girlfriend of Zach McLaren (Drew Starkey), a big time soccer star at Queens University when she comes to his rescue after being hit by a car and she shares the same first name as his girlfriend (Maggie Thurmon). If she had watched “While You Were Sleeping” as Elle surely had, she might have a better idea on how to handle the situation when Zach suffers from short-term memory loss, but when she’s drawn to his cousin Miles (Archie Renaux), she leans into the mistaken identity and developing a dating app looks less like a way of helping others than to prevent herself from having to interact with others and engage as she ends up on a ski trip with Zach’s family where navigating the slopes looks easier than conversing with his parents (Andie MacDowell and Patrick Fabian).
While Zoey struggles to find her match, “The Other Zoey” proves to be a good fit for director Sara Zandieh, who last graced screens with the raucous “A Simple Wedding,” about an Iranian-American woman (Tara Grammy) whose decision to wed comes as a welcome one to her mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo), though her choice of a non-Persian groom does not, and although Zoey struggles to find an easy path forward, the director emphasizes the zigs and zags in Matthew Tabak’s script to put a real spin the dizzying nature of finding love. With the film opening in theaters this week, Zandieh spoke about how the project ended up as a real blast from the past for her, having to wrangle a shoot on a college campus and revisiting some of her favorite films from her teens for inspiration, as well as some less expected references for its inventive visual style.
How did this come about?
Well, my agents sent me the script, and I think they had seen my first film and saw a similarity in that it’s a coming-of-age [story] of a young girl and also a rom-com. I really liked the script. It was really amusing and quirky and heartwarming. It was also nostalgic and reminded me of rom-coms and coming-of-age movies from the ’80s and ‘90s, which was my favorite decade of comedies. I loved all the Molly Ringwald movies — “Pretty in Pink” and “Sixteen Candles” — and “Weird Science,” “Breakfast Club,” “Ferris Bueller,” and all of the John Hughes stuff. But I also loved rom-coms from the ’90s, like “Clueless” and, “Sleepless in Seattle,” “The Birdcage,” “Say Anything.” So I was interested in the script and when I met the producers, I told my vision for it [that] I would like it to kind of look and feel like those movies. It was also a bit more heightened than a rom-com that’s totally rooted in reality – it had a ski sequence and a concussion and memory loss, so that spin on it was really interesting to me. I also really liked Josephine Langford. I think she’s such an exciting young actress coming up.
You’re also able to build out this really big ensemble around her. Was that something you actually have to fight for, not only just getting the actors for it, but giving them time once they’re there to have fully fleshed out parts?
Yeah, there’s a lot of characters in this movie. There’s a lot of supporting roles and we got really great cast for all of them, especially the young adult cast, so we kind of built out those characters a bit more just because of how great the cast was. Elle and Diego’s storyline was expanded a bit because of how much we love those characters and the actors [Mallori Johnson and Jorge Lopez, respectively] playing them.
Was there anything that happened you might not have expected once you got this in the hands of the actors that you could get excited about?
There were a couple of improvised lines, especially in the game sequence [where] Drew [Starkey] and Josephine were improvising a bit, so I think some of that made it in, which was really fun. I love it when we riff on set and it ends up making it in the cut.
You have these two humongous locations in it of this college campus and the ski resort. What was it like to work with?
Yeah, we shot in Charlotte, North Carolina, and it was a really fun location. I had never made a movie there before, but it was a wonderful place to film. It was a very hospitable city and shooting on a college campus is really fun, it took me back to my early college years, and the ski resort was actually about an hour from the college campus, so everything was local and filmed near Charlotte. That whole sequence was we were on the ski slopes was also really fun. The actors had to take ski lessons and we were on the bunny slopes. They took snowboarding lessons. And I loved shooting action. You get to play around with a lot of toys.
It looks like you went pretty wild with the camerawork, which adds a real verve to the comedy. What was it like to figure out the look of this?
My cinematographer and I came up with an elevated naturalism, and [the producers] were on board with that. We have a one take [for the opening scene on the college campus] that’s really long and our cameraman was on the crane and then the crane comes down and he walks off and it turns into a steadicam shot. I’m very happy whenever I’m on a steadicam and I used a lot of steadicam in this movie. I’d love to do a whole movie on steadicam, and the action sequences were really fun to shoot. There’s a scene where Zach gets a concussion and I got to use tilt shift lenses and a descending rig. I was really inspired by “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and it’s not a movie I considered for the whole movie, but just for that sequence, I looked at that because it’s a moment where the main character loses his memory, so there were a lot of fun opportunities to get subjective with the camera and we got stylized in certain scenes.
Is it true you already have another movie on the way?
Yeah, it’s another comedy, which we filmed in Toronto and I’m in post-production. It should be fun.
“The Other Zoey” opens in select theaters on October 20th and will be available on demand on November 10th.