Bleeding Cool's very own Hannah Shaw-Williams' loves Lynn Shelton. Hannah loves Lynn Shelton's film Humpday. And Hannah absolutely adores Mark Duplass, in a slightly scary Shrine to Julia Sawalha way.
So it seemed completely perfect for Hannah to call up Lynn and speak to her about Your Sister's Sister, her Mark Duplass-sytarring follow up to Humpday.
Alas, she's sodded off to Spain or something. Lucky that I think Shelton is aces too.
So, I spoke with Lynn earlier in the week and asked her about her film, its 'puzzle' title, dodging genre expectations and not falling into the infuriating shaky-cam, zoom-heavy jump-cut booby traps that a lot of her peers fall victim to.
Here's some of what Shelton had to tell me.
The Puzzle Title And Pigeonholes
The title is a little bit of a puzzle, I understand, and that's why I liked it. And I like that it's circular as well. It implies, for me, three people. The person saying it ' and I think that person is Jack. And then he's speaking to one of the sisters and it implies that there's two sisters. Strictly speaking he could be saying that to either of them.
It also doesn't pigeonhole the film in a genre. All we learn is that there are three people and somebody is somebody's sister.
I find the film undefinable. I don't think of it ultimately as a romantic comedy. There is love revealed, but really it's about relationships, and different kinds of relationships. It's about grieving, it's about a brother relationship even though the fourth character, the brother, is unseen, and it's about these very alive sisters. It's about sibling relationships, friendship and more. I know it makes the film difficult to market and I apologise to my distributors every time.
Plotting And Improv
Mark Duplass called me and said 'Here's the kernel of an idea for a film. I don't think my brother [Jay] and I are going to direct it so, with his blessing, I'm bringing it to you. I think it might be a great one for us to work on together.' The idea was this: two best friends, a guy and a girl, and there's something going on between them that is unseen at the outset. He's in a bad place because he's lost his brother recently so she sends him up to the family place to get his life together and he thinks he's going to be alone but there he encounters' her mother. And then there's some kind of twisted love triangle between the guy, the girl and the mother.
Making the mother into an older sister, making her a lesbian and the subplots all came later. It just sort of unfolded.
I start with an idea that seems like it will lead to interesting territory and then I get to know the characters at the same time as I'm letting the plot unfold. With both Humpday and Your Sister's Sister I bought in the actors very early, before I had the whole thing figured out. I worked with them to develop the characters. I bring them and I share with them my work in progress script, or scriptment, I call it. Then we go through it and talk about the backstories and how we might support things in the plot.
I wanted their input to invest them in the project, to make it seem like our film instead of just my film. We gain a lot of intimacy and trust when we're doing that. Inevitably we'll end up sharing stories from our lives, and observations we've made. That intimacy can be very helpful on set.
And this process helps the actors to create characters that they can slip into like a hand into a glove. It will feel like a second skin tot hem, which adds to the degree of naturalism I'm looking for.
The Writing Credit
A lot of the ideas that came up, 80% of them were blind alleys. We had all kinds of crazy ideas. I had to say 'Okay, we've got to get rid of these, they're not going to help the film.' I was the pruner. I'm given the writing credit because I'm the one' the final arbiter.
I had seventy pages of dialogue but I really wanted them to improvise, like real people having real conversations. I asked them if they could go off script as much as they could, as much as they wanted, and find their own way through the emotional beats. We all knew what had to be covered in the scenes, practically, but the way they found their way through was up to them.
And really, the final draft of the script was written in the edit room. My editor Nat Sanders and I really sharpened it and focused it and cut the fat from all the different takes. There were a hundred different movies we could have made from the footage.
A Last Minute Cast Switch
Rosemarie DeWitt was a last minute addition, Rachel Weisz was originally cast in the part of Hannah. Before I thought they characters would be half sisters I thought they'd be full sisters. But I wanted some sticking points in their past, lots of points of friction. What better way than if the origination of the relationship is your baby sister stealing away your father from your family. And if they only see each other in the summers, in this summer house, it adds some kind of romantic gloss to their relationship. You can see how they'd bond over time but they haven't had to live together day to day. It created a really interesting relationship.
Rachel and I developed the character in tandem but three days before we had to start shooting, she had to leave the project. Luckily, because they were half sisters I could recast. It was brutal. But I can't imagine somebody else in the role now that Rose did such a great job.
The Visual Language'
I was attempting to make a film that felt visually like any other film you might see, the average film you might see, the classic 'letting the story unfold without making the camera a character.' I did use hand held cameras, to give scenes a human feel. There's mayhem, strain and stress and angst and in those circumstances, the hand held choice helped to support the dramatic action. I wanted to balance that out with a lot of tripod shots, static shots. I wanted some scenes to unfold in long two shots, where we could see the physicality and chemistry between the characters. For every single shoot, the choices I made about the camera were all very specific to that moment, but I wanted to give a real sense of place as well, so I had to include vistas and sweeping wide shots.
'And The Soundtrack
The film was very specifically scored. I tend not to like a lot of music. I find that if there's a giant bed of music it separates me from what is going on, more often than not. There were two kinds of score. There was a little bit, when he was doing the peeping tom number for example, there was a percussive thing ' wind chimes actually, was where that all started. And then there was a much more lyrical type, under montages typical. I wanted something lyrical and 'Island-y'. There was a seven minute montage that depended entirely on the score, tracking two emotional trajectories that shifted a lot. I couldn't make it work until I was working with my composer.
Thanks to Lynn for taking the time to talk to me. I felt like we barely scratched the surface.
Your Sister's Sister is already playing across the US and it opens today across the UK. It's often fun, it's always engaging and, not to put too fine a point on it, I liked it a great deal.
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