Early in India Donaldson’s Good One, a balanced hiking trip of four is quickly cut down to three, shifting the dynamics for teenager Sam (Lily Collias), who must now navigate the three-day trip with two old dudes: her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and his longtime best friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy). Both are divorced, the latter newly so. Sam quietly observes the banter between the two, sometimes offering sage advice, sometimes catching little moments where they might speak of a female colleague with a dismissive turn of phrase — something of which they’re unaware. Le Gros and McCarthy are longtime acting fixtures, and newcomer Collias holds her own opposite them, a revelation in her first leading role. Close-ups of her face, often in reaction to others speaking, allows Good One to avoid underlining its themes too directly. Everything builds to a key moment in the third act, and the subtlety of the performances match with Donaldson’s confident direction and patience to allow the moment’s aftermath to ring out in a devastating manner.
Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Good One has made a big impression in cinephilic circles, making its next stop at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, which is where I caught it, and then Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight. It also won a Grand Jury Prize at Champs-Elysées Film Festival.
I spoke with Donaldson over Zoom as the film gears up for a theatrical opening in L.A. and New York City this Friday.
Caleb Hammond: As a banter-filled film, there are so many great little moments — like when Danny’s character names every day in Spanish, or when he talks about being a philosopher in another life. I’m sure you could write an endless amount of little quips or small conversations. How do you decide what makes the final cut?
India Donaldson: It’s funny. You pulled out two examples that were totally improvised. For the Spanish days moment, I was just like: “Sit at the bar.” And Lily was throwing out prompts to them: “Talk about this. Talk about this.” There was an exchange about Steely Dan. It was hard to choose between the two. But most of the banter, including Matt’s musings, was scripted. I thought about it — especially once they hit the trail — more like sound design than actual dialogue. Danny’s character Matt is someone who doesn’t want to listen to his own thoughts because that’s too dark right now. So he has to fill the space with his inane stream of consciousness. It’s a gentle aspect of the sound design that gets increasingly annoying as the conversation between these two guys starts to get more tense and takes shape around their actual failing friendship dynamic.
CH: If the dialogue is sound design, how do you direct that? Are you working on the cadence while you’re writing, or are you doing that in the moment, in the woods? In the edit? How do you work those beats?
ID: I definitely refined it to something that felt natural in the script, but then encouraged the actors to stray from the script when it didn’t feel natural, when they couldn’t find a way in that felt real. Danny is an amazing theater actor, and he was more loyal to the words I’d written, to a point where I had to encourage him to mess it up sometimes. But then in the edit as well, in pulling stuff out that was excessive, or just getting the cadence to feel authentic — it was at every step in the process.
CH: You met Lily through your sister; the two went to Santa Monica High together. And when you first met up, she said you guys didn’t talk about the movie that much. I’m always interested in those meetings with director and potential actor. What are you looking for? You said you had her do a tape regardless. But that first meeting, how does that work: that conversation of sussing out whether someone is right to play a role.
ID: I think at the time, I was just going off of pure instinct. It was hard to put my finger on it. But in retrospect, Lily was 17 when we met. She really felt like a teenager. And she had an amazing, confident sense of humor, and she was curious and open, and asked interesting questions about the script. So I think in retrospect, that’s what I was responding to: these authentic aspects of her personality that make her a gifted actor. Her audition was the proof of my instinct that other people then saw. But it’s still mysterious to me, to be honest.
CH: If you’ve seen movies, you might think early on with this type of narrative: “Oh, a smart teenager with a strong point of view with her dad on this trip. They’re going to be constantly at odds.” I appreciated that in this film, the two get along to a certain extent. The tension comes elsewhere.
ID: I was aware of all the tropes. There’s this long history of expectation we have when we watch a certain type of movie. I wanted the audience to care about all three of these people. And I think showing the closeness between Sam and her dad was important to that. There is a relationship there that will withstand whatever happens over these few days. That’s more true to reality. Our parents behave badly or disappoint us, but you still love them and you still have relationships with them.
CH: I was also struck watching it on a big screen. Sometimes the prevailing wisdom is that a subtle movie works just as well at home. But I actually think the opposite: when an intimate movie is projected really big with other people, it actually has a lot more power. You see the nuances of the performances.
ID: I totally agree. I think subtle movies that are character- and performance-driven are the most worthy of the theater experience, at least for me personally. And I also love watching movies like that with an audience. Sharing in this intimate experience with strangers is very compelling to me.
CH: With a short shoot of 12 days, I can only assume a lot’s happening on set. So how did you make space for this subtlety in the performances?
ID: I had this idea going into it that we carried through the whole process of shooting and editing and so forth, that we were anchoring the movie to Sam’s experience, and that even when she’s not saying anything, we’re prioritizing how she’s processing what’s going on around her. That was the unexpected saving grace of a short shoot — I knew that if we had her performance, we had the scene. James [Le Gros] was so locked into that from the beginning. He would be like, “Just put the camera on Lily and let’s go.” He totally got it. That’s what it was about. Designing it to be doable and to be able to move through it quickly, part of that, honestly, was shooting outside. We weren’t spending hours tweaking lights. We could find it, block it, and go. We had a B-cam for some of the long scenes, so that helped us move through them quickly — it was practical things like that. It was a combination of that, and the preparation that all the actors did on their own time, that wasn’t formal rehearsal. They showed up prepared, and it helped us move quickly.
CH: Was the B-cam primarily trained on Lily the whole time, so you know you’re getting her reaction shots?
ID: Yeah, pretty much. There’s one scene where the three other characters come in, the hiker boy sequence. The B-cam saved us for that, because there’s overlapping dialogue. It helped us cover the whole scene in the edit. I didn’t think about having a B-cam until the very last minute, and I’m so glad we did.
CH: I like the bizarre energy those three guys bring. They’re not nefarious, just a little strange.
ID: I thought of them as being this other species of guy. They are strange to the two men that we’ve been with. These three guys — where are they coming from? They don’t recognize it, and the three don’t respond to the competitive, male ego stuff, which to these two older men is their baseline way of interacting with each other and with these young guys. And these young guys refuse to take the bait.
CH: At the Los Angeles Festival of Movies screening, you spoke about being a child of divorce and these memories of hanging around with your dad and his friends, and some of the interactions there. How did that inspiration become part of this script?
ID: There’s something specific to having divorced parents, where you spend one-on-one time with one parent. I have the same thing with my mom and her friends. You have this window into their friendships in a way that you don’t if your parents are always together, in a relationship, but also socially. There’s something unique about getting to observe throughout my life the specificities of my dad’s or my mom’s friendships. These are friends of my dad’s growing up, many of them men who I adore and were a big part of my life. The humor that I wanted to bring to the writing process came from those memories, laughing along with these friendships.
CH: It reminded me of those scenes in Boyhood when he and his sister go stay with his dad and there’s the musician friend who’s always hanging around.
ID: Totally. I also thought about the scenes in Somewhere where’s she’s playing video games with her dad’s friend. It’s a very specific, interesting world to be in.
CH: I’ll call it the inciting incident. (I don’t love that term—it’s a little screenwriterly.) When I was first saw the film, after it happens, I thought there are two ways this can go the next day: Matt can act like nothing has happened, and he’s just as boisterous as usual — maybe even overdoing it a bit because he’s thinking about what happened (or maybe he’s not thinking about it at all). The second time I watched it, I didn’t think about this option at all, because your version is the correct one, in which Matt’s more quiet because he knows he messed up. But he’s still there. How did you decide he’s going to react the way he did?
ID: In the original script, he’s more present in that final act. But after being in the shoot for some time and seeing these real dynamics form, I felt that his character would feel the shame of that moment, and then he has all night to sit with it. And he can’t escape, he still has to get out of the woods. But I thought that he would eject himself a little bit. He’s doing it for himself, but he’s also doing it for Sam. The distance is the sad acknowledgement of what he’s done and how he’s forever probably changed his relationship with this girl that he’s known, maybe her whole life, and with this man that he has this long friendship with — a friendship that’s probably expired anyway, but this certainly is going to cement that.
CH: You went with Metrograph for your distribution, which is a new outfit. What was the thinking there? What excites you about going with somebody who doesn’t have a decades-long history of releasing films?
ID: A big part of it was David Laub, who runs Metrograph Pictures. He was making this change in his career, and I was already such a fan of his work and the films and filmmakers that he had supported in his career. I felt a real connection there — this is exactly the person that I want to like my work. So, a big part of it was the people. And there’s something exciting about being involved with something at the beginning, and being a part of this optimistic approach to the theatrical experience. I like that they’re in the movie theater business in addition to this new distribution arm.
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