— Beautiful morning, Sisters.
— Hey! Don’t fucking talk to us! — Fucking creep!
— Now get the fuck out of here!
— In “The Little Hours,”
an indie comedy released this month,
foul-mouthed nymphomaniac nuns run wild in a modern take on medieval times:
The film is based on a story from “The Decameron,”
a 14th-century Italian classic about young people
who hole up in a villa to avoid the bubonic plague.
Director Jeff Baena and star Aubrey Plaza can explain.
— Well, I just found that you dog-eared that page.
— Probably from college.
— And it says, “Misato of l’Empereur Akio pretends to be dumb,”
“and becomes a gardener at a convent where all the nuns”
“vie with one another to take him off to bed with them.”
That’s pretty much it.
— A good friend of mine, Joe Swanberg, who’s also a director,
was crashing at my place.
And we were kinda just getting fucked up.
And we watch Dog TV, which ostensibly is for dogs,
but around 11 o’clock it just gets really trippy.
It’s definitely not for dogs at that point—
it’s just, like, weird bubbles…
it just gets, like, really, really psychedelic and trippy.
So we were just watching that,
and we were talking about this movie he was working on,
and somehow it came up that I had studied “The Decameron,”
and I guess sexual transgression in the Middle Ages,
and he got really, like, pumped up about that,
and was like, “Dude, you gotta make this movie.”
So the next day, I called my producer
and I told her, “Hey, like, I know this is coming out of nowhere,”
“but there’s this idea that I had, and it would just take place in the Middle Ages.”
And she freaked out,
because one of my investors, she’s from Tuscany,
she’d been asking this investor group for,
like, four years to shoot in these medieval villages she had access to in Italy,
and everyone thought she was a crazy person.
So when I brought up the idea of shooting this medieval movie,
it just, like, fit perfectly.
So within a month of having this basic idea,
I was out in Tuscany looking at all these locations and scouting.
And then, within six months, we were shooting the movie.
— I knew about the idea really, really, early on,
obviously, because we live together.
I grew up Catholic,
and I went to an all-girls private Catholic school.
When I was going back and kind of researching prayers and prayer services and stuff like that,
I was kinda blown away by how much I remembered.
— There were elements that I kinda incorporated that
were definitely inspired by who Aubrey is in real life.
— My attachments to donkeys.
— Yeah, she’s super attached to donkeys.
— So, what Jeff wrote and what the cast received
was very detailed, very descriptive.
But there was no dialogue written.
So, every scene was improvised.
— As you can see, there’s really not much dialogue,
It’s just sort-of...
this happens, this happens, this happens, this happens, this happens.
— So that’s what we all read.
— And so what we would generally do
is take two, three, or four takes and sort-of find the scene.
— When you’re shooting a movie,
like a studio comedy with, like, Judd Apatow or,
you know, one of the big studio comedies that happen nowadays,
that’s a really different kind of improv.
— It was less about finding humor sometimes.
It was just about sort-of finding a tone that
existed somewhere in between comedy and drama…
— Did you roll your eyes?
— …where there’s funny moments, but there’s also real moments.
— Did he just smile at you?
— I dunno.
— Why is he smiling? Who is that?
Wait—who the fuck are you?!
Who are you?!
— Who are you?! — Fernanda, stop!
— He’s an intruder, I dunno who the fuck he is!
— Let me get Mother Marea!
— Fine! Go!
— You know, a lot of times,
comedic improvisation is literally just people going on riffs.
And this was us trying to find something a little bit more cohesive.