How are you doing?
I'm great, thanks for doing this.
Thank you for taking the time.
I just spoke to your lovely cast and caught them unawares with some questions.
Some fun. Great. Great, good.
I might ask you as well in a moment, but congrats on the movie.
I really enjoyed it. I watched it this morning.
Tell me about the challenges of not just bringing a book to life,
but this book because there's a lot that goes on
and there's a lot of kind of visual style, but also lots of messages
and there makes narratives of what kind of stuff.
So what was the lure for you in an initial instance?
And did you think that you could take it on immediately?
Or did it take a little bit of time to get your head around it?
Well, for sure.
I think the challenge was we had the biggest challenge of the film.
Besides that, we actually shot during the California wildfires
and the pandemic, which are two competing crises.
one is like one wants you to wear a mask and only be inside.
Look at the fires and then one, you have to wear a mask and be outside,
so it was hard to breathe.
Let's just put it that way for a lot of the prep for this film.
So it was a little scary.
But then the emotional challenge the film is really that it totally.
I mean, this is a film about Lenny's grieving her dead sister Bailey
and falling in love with Joe and maybe falling in love with Toby, her dead
sister's boyfriend, who she feels like is the only person who gets her grief.
That's a lot in the movie
to have a profound loss and really know that the audience has to believe her
loss has to feel her grief, and they have to laugh.
The movies are written as a comedy, and so you have to hold both of those things.
And so I think we just really tried hard to kind of
it took a lot.
The edit took a long time to find the right balance and to make that happen.
But that's also why I wanted to make the movies.
When to put something that profound at the center of a young
adult coming of age story just felt really real.
I mean, what could be more profound than dealing with this?
All of the hormones and issues of coming of age
while also dealing with the loss of your sister?
Yeah.
And there's some great sequences
as a as a musical kind of sequence, and that has kind of one take.
There's one in there and in the square, it's kind of one take.
How long did it take you to prepare those
because it looks like they're all in one take?
I don't know if you cheated, but it looks like you didn't.
We had we had terrific choreographer Faye Driscoll, who helped us
with all of the dance sequence sequences, and she is amazing.
I've worked with her actually a bunch on the last three films
I've done because I like to sneak dance into a movie no matter what .
And it did
that that particular sequence went really well
because she actually rehearsed for a really long time with the actors.
We had planned everything.
She had rehearsed with the actors before I got there
and then just took some refining and honestly doing one take.
Sometimes I think that's easier because you're not trying
to get 20 different angles and you're off the light different ways.
And it was outside. So we weren't dealing with lighting.
So it was just nailing the choreography and the plan,
and we had so much fun shooting it.
And I think in a weird way,
also when there's one take, everyone knows they have to be on the whole time.
So it was just like a fun.
You have to rise to that level.
Was there a little injury to moment? I guess you could say.
Yeah,
as a final question before I have to go, this is something I asked your cast
and you can't it as well, because the music's about about life
and death and music and all the other things.
If you could pick a song or a piece of music to take,
to have a movie, to listen all the time, or at least while you're up there,
what would what would it be?
I think it would be either the two pieces
that I'm currently playing on the piano that I'm into, that I basically take.
I'm going to cut my own personal heaven.
I have two babies right now and they're really cute.
So I feel and I always play them the Claire de Lune by Debussy
and that the first Gymnopédies by Erik Satie
So those are fun.
Those are some ones that we've been enjoying in my house,
but I'm really a sucker for Beethoven.
So ideally, I would take three that was maybe like Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata.
That's not of the whole one. Yeah.
OK, thanks.
Thanks, Scott.
Thank you, Scott, thank you.