“It’s summer in Sydney. I could get such a good tan,” Sasha (Madeline Sunshine) tells her father’s coworker Rai (John Hedrick) when he suggests that she’s lucky to get to spend some quality time with her father Ed (Benjamin Howes) in New York in “Daddy’s Little Meatball.” It certainly doesn’t feel that way as the teenager lumbers around the city like a piece of luggage that Ed is dragging behind despite his best efforts to make her feel like she’s a part of the group, yet she inevitably ends up being the one to take pictures of him and other attendees of an international conference for menstrual hygiene professionals and as a teenager is far less susceptible to the charms of ice skating or a pretzel from a street vendor as she might’ve been years earlier as it’s clear Ed still thinks of her. Ironically, if writer/director Yael Grunseit didn’t have such an easy time acclimating to the Big Apple once she made the trip herself from Australia to study film, she might not have had the inclination to make her latest short.
“I worked a little in filmmaking in the industry in Sydney, but then moving to New York and studying there, I found such an amazing community of filmmakers,” says Grunseit, on the eve of taking her film back down under to premiere at Flickerfest later this week. “It felt so DIY and you just make it with what you’ve got. Within the community, there’s so much respect for people’s stories and what they have to say and what they have to offer as artists.”
Grunseit shows wisdom that her lead doesn’t have quite yet in “Daddy’s Little Meatball” when Sasha may be embarrassed by her father, but is truly mortified to learn what she’s capable of when she can’t help but seize an opportunity to lay him low in front of his coworkers when she’s reached her breaking point with a trip to a gift shop where they urge him to buy her a T-shirt bearing the film’s title that they find adorable. At a time when independence beckons, the film suggests that Sasha isn’t entirely ready for adult responsibilities as she raids the mini fridge in her room and sulks around when she doesn’t get her way, but nor is she the little girl her father still sees her as and while New York is often viewed as being alive with possibilities, she can only feel like a stranger in a strange land. Grunseit throws her right in the middle of the action, impressively diving into midtown at night and a tender father-daughter tale emerges amidst all the lights. Ahead of the film’s debut, the filmmaker kindly took the time to talk about how she pulled it off, finding her people when she got to New York and the film’s unexpected first audience.
How did this come about?
I’d been living in New York for a few years and I was struggling to figure out how to relate to New York. I knew I wanted to shoot in these amazing locations and capture the energy of the city and I felt like I was ready to do that after a few years of living there, but I was trying to figure out what can I offer to the New York movie genre or what’s my perspective? I’m Australian obviously, so tapping into my perspective as a foreigner in the city and seeing the city through that lens was the basis of the idea. And then I’m living away from my family and I feel like when I have distance from something, I often end up writing about that, interrogating and exploring that world, so that was where the father-daughter relationship came from, having that distance from my own family.
You’ve got a great father-daughter duo here. How did you end up with these actors?
Yeah, it was such a highlight working with Maddie Sunshine, who I was connected to through a friend, but I knew her a little bit growing up and she was studying acting in New York. We became friends a few months before the movie and before I fully could see who was going to play Sasha, I knew Maddie already and we had an audition. She was perfect. It was a great experience being able to collaborate with somebody who I know really cares about me and the project so much. Then another friend in Sydney who’s an actor recommended Benjamin and he was amazing too. I was always looking for Ed’s character to have that gut-wrenching quality, [where] you feel bad for him in a way and when I got Maddie and Ed in the room together, I feel like Maddie was able to bring so much of that hardcore teenage energy and then Benjamin, because he’s so earnest and sweet, that dynamic of tough and then sweet in the context of the story just really came to light. But they got on straight away and we [all] have so much in common. When you’re an Australian in a different city, you always bond and reflect about all the things that you used to do in Australia, so we all became really good friends right away.
You’ve also got to create this group of tourists. What it was like to put together a group that would wander around New York for a day or two?
That was awesome. Manuela Romero, a good friend of mine, did the casting for this movie and we thought a lot about who would play those [roles]. We called them “the professionals,” and it was so important to me that we found people who complimented and balanced [each other] and could give really good performances, especially in the reactions. Putting together that group, we worked a lot online at different casting websites, but then also through friends, we found the right people. It was such a coincidence that Madeline and John, who plays Rai, know each other super well, so when they found out that we’d cast them together, they had a good friendship anyway and they enjoyed working together. But it was awesome working with those people and because we were working with people of a variety of ages and some of them hadn’t been on set before, there was a lot of effort that went into making sure they felt comfortable and looked after.
What was it like throwing them into public in New York?
People were amazing with this one. We shot in January, so it was freezing outside and the days were shorter. Our producers all just carried different weight on set and we had a really collaborative environment where if people saw a need, they would either tell somebody because we had good relationships with each other, or they might just help and do that thing themselves. But we tried to just make sure people felt as comfortable as possible. We had heated vans for holding, but it was cold and people pushed through. In these harsher conditions, when you have a team of people who you can feel that everybody’s dedicated to the project, the energy is still there to keep going and I felt super grateful that that was the vibe on set.
Were you able to use a lot of the ambient lighting to get the tone you wanted?
Dylan Rizzo, the [director of photography] and I had so many conversations leading up to the shoot, and I’m so grateful that we had that collaborative spirit going into it, so we didn’t have to figure it all out in real time on the set. We wanted to play a lot with how cold the city was and then how much she was missing the summer. You can see when she’s in the bar, there’s that tropical mosaic behind her, which was just awesome that was there already. We really leaned into [the hotel] being this warm space in contrast to how she was feeling in the city. Then we spoke a lot about how we wanted to light the hotel room. There was already some blue and yellow lights just outside the balcony, so we obviously just ran with it and did our best to get that mood that we wanted.
Did you actually rent out a hotel room for an evening?
We went to a heap of hotels throughout New York and New Jersey and the hotel we ended up using actually is like five minutes from where I live, which was so convenient. They were so generous to us and let us shoot in their banquet hall, which we converted into the bar and their lobby, which you can see a bit of at the end of the movie, their elevator. Then we had two hotel rooms that shared a balcony, so we could have like gear and holding in one and we shot in the other.
Was there anything that happened that you may not have been anticipating but made it into the film that you now really like about it?
So many things. We planned out a different way to reveal that the two men [Rai and Ed] had some kind of [preexisting] relationship and then on the day that changed, and I’m really glad with how it turned out. Where Maddie comes out of the elevator and then there’s a significant walk before she sees the two men at the bar, we had the time [to figure that out] and it works really well just to build the tension and highlight this moment that is subtly represented on screen. Then we added the scene where Sasha is running after she gets the wine spilled on her and the two women come out of the elevator and laugh at her a little — that was actually two of our crew members. I love them. They stepped in to be those two women and I feel that scene is so important the movie. It really highlights her feeling embarrassed and this downward trajectory of everything going wrong for her. That was something that came on the fly and because we had access to the lobby, I [thought] “okay, we’ve got to use it” and we got this emotional moment.
It seems like you’ve been working with a lot of the same crew since your short “The Big Hug.” Did that help with this?
I feel like we’re all giving so much to each movie and I’m grateful to find collaborators who I feel like I’m building a relationship with where we have a shorthand and we understand what our tastes are and the way we like to work. It’s just the respect for each other’s time and craft that comes with that. They’re my friends as well, and it’s awesome just making all these projects with your friends who are also filmmakers. I work on a bunch of their movies as well. I work on a bunch of their films as well and we’re forming a production company called Scratch Off, which I’m really excited about.
That’s exciting. And from what I could tell, it looked like there were enough “Daddy’s Little Meatball” T-shirts on the rack in the store to give out as a parting gift…
A hundred percent. Everybody got a “Daddy’s Little Meatball” T-shirt and the guys at the tourist shop were so accommodating. They gave us a good deal on the shirts and we were being generous back to them. We actually went back to the tourist shop because they were such great guys and I showed them the movie and they loved it.
Was that that first audience for the movie?
That was the first audience! The two guys at the tourist shop.
What’s the official premiere going to be like for you?
I grew up in Bondi and now I get to screen in Bondi at Flickerfest, which is a festival I grew up going to, so it’s such a full circle moment. It is also my first time playing at a big Australian festival, so I’m excited to be featured. Madeline Sunshine and also our composer Merrick Craven, a super talented guy in Melbourne, are coming down for the screening, so I’m excited to be able to attend and with a lot of my Australian filmmaking community as well.
“Daddy’s Little Meatball” will screen at Flickerfest as part of the Best of Australian Shorts 3 program at 9 pm on January 24th at the North Park Bondi Beachfront in Bondi Beach.