Filmmaker Josephine Decker has been working as a director since her first short film, “Naked Princeton,” in 2005, but she’s become more recognizable and lauded in the last few years. With “Madeline’s Madeline” and “Shirley,” she has cemented herself as an individualistic and inventive filmmaker who can put her spin on each new genre she tackles, and in her latest, “The Sky is Everywhere,” she imbues a YA story with her distinct touch for the avant-garde.
Based on the novel by author Jandy Nelson, the film follows teenage music prodigy Lennie (Grace Kaufman), who is devastated by the loss of her older sister Bailey (Havana Rose Liu.) We follow her as she processes her grief, rediscovers her love of music, and begins a tentative relationship with new student Joe Fontaine (Jacques Colimon) while sharing a complicated dynamic with her sister’s boyfriend, Toby (Pico Alexander), who is similarly trying to deal with the loss of Bailey.
In our review of the film, we commended the cinematography and expression of the film, writing of Decker’s direction, “Decker also taps into these tumultuous emotions through the film’s verdant setting. Along with the ancient redwoods, nature is everywhere.”
Recently, we sat down with Decker about “The Sky is Everywhere,” the casting process for Lennie, visualizing her emotions, her connection to artists in her filmmaking, and more.
How did you become attached to the project? Had you read the book before being approached for the film?
Josephine Decker: My agent sent me the script, and I just fell in love with it, and I was banging on the door being like, “I have to make this movie, let me make this movie.” And after I got attached and Jandy Newson said, “sure, why not, let’s get married,” then I read the book and fell in love again with the whole world.
I know that Jandy Nelson also wrote the screenplay. Was it interesting working with someone with such a deep connection to the source material and then having that faith put in your hands for it?
Yes definitely. I didn’t realize, like, of course, you can tell it’s not anybody’s story, you can’t make this stuff up. Who has a family member calibrating their mental health through a house plant? But Jandy was like, “that’s what my family did to me.” I was grateful for all that detail, and Jandy was always a great partner and so open to changes and reshaping. Honestly, we didn’t change that much from her script because I liked it so much.
There’s such a distinct, visual style to this film and, really, to all of your work. I was curious about some of the more minor, practical touches, like the garden being played by actors. Is that something that when you’re reading the script, you can visualize from the start? Or is it as you begin collaborating and shooting that you see it that way?
I think when I read the script, the “Lennie-scapes,” all those magical, imaginative moments were so beautiful, but a lot of them were written to be more CGI; they were going to be more VFX heavy, and I’ve never done that. So I was thinking, “Is this actually going to look good?” Then, take, for instance, the scene that became the dance sequence with Bailey dancing through the town was written to be just that Bailey walks on the street and everyone is smiling at her, and the sky changes colors over her head, and she’s just this idealized person in Lennie’s mind. I thought, “we need to go further” then, just walking down the street, she’s Bailey; she doesn’t just walk; this is Lennie’s dream vision of Bailey, so she’s got to dance down the street. Jandy was open to that and re-wrote the voice-over to support it.
The roses garden, I was like, “how are you envisioning these roses?” She had just thought about visual effects, and at first, I think I kind of scared her because I was like, what if they’re people just wearing rose costumes, and she said that it wasn’t really how she’d imagined it, but then she was so excited and fell in love with it. As we got closer, it got more and more appropriate because there’s what Lennie is going through in reality, but there’s also what Lennie is going through in her mind, which is as real. I practice Zen Buddhism, and there’s something about what’s the difference between the imagination and reality? They’re both your experiences; you’re living both of them, so letting her imagination also have this physical embodied aspect so that the dancers around her are literally caressing her because they are physical beings too. Those roses are almost doing a love dance which felt very appropriate. Same with a scene where she’s running through a forest, and a house is falling around her. Originally it was going to be a house floating up off the ground, but I was like, “it’s so angry and violent in this section. Can the house fall around her?” It was a new approach to all of those sections, making it more physical and in the theater realm than just magical, cinema effects.
Could you talk about the casting process? You have an eye for this kind of emerging talent, and Grace Kaufman is no different. But also, then you’re working with actors like Cherry Jones and Jason Segel – so how was that experience working with this cast?
We saw so many young people audition to be Lennie, I think our casting director saw something like 800 tapes, and I saw maybe 200 or 300, so it was about a six-month process casting the film. Grace just really stood out because you have two to three different scenes, one is a comedy, and one is very intense grief. It’s really rare to have someone who can do both, who can be really funny and also really vulnerable and authentic, to hold Lennie’s journey. I thought Grace could do it. Comedy is hard, and she is very good at comedy. I was really nervous about the comedy because I know I can direct intense grief stuff, but I wasn’t sure how great I’d be at comedy, so I really needed to know that the actress I was hiring could do the comedy and she was just so good at it all. She was incredibly funny and great at both physical and verbal comedy. I just think she’s really gifted. What a find! I just felt so grateful every day on set. She was so prepared; she’d come to set with every line memorized and would never drop a line. She was also learning the clarinet, so she’d go and practice clarinet all the time for the scenes.
Cherry Jones, what a beautiful human; she’s so supportive and loving. It’s so funny because I think she’s known for these more severe roles, but she’s so sweet, and I think it’s fun to have her character be this calm, confident woman who is also just being herself. Jason Segel is so supportive too, and as a filmmaker and writer himself, he’s good at knowing what’s going on, basically, and supporting the whole vision and not just worrying about his part.
Was the comedy aspect, and it being this Young Adult story, a draw for you as well as a way to push yourself out of the types of stories you’re more used to telling?
I think I was really ready to make something that was a little lighter and had more lightness and less gritty, dark, violent, sexual [laughs.] Probably for my next movie, I’ll go back into it hard, but this was a nice little respite. It was nice to go into someone else’s mind and the universe and play and be lighter than normal.
I like that it was so visually vibrant too. In film, you see such an abundance of gray these days, so to see so much color in each sequence was such a relief. How deliberate is that? Especially with the themes of the film?
It was extremely deliberate. I was a little bit beating the color. I remember telling our production designer that it needed to look like we were in Palo Alto, and everything is super amazing bright colors, and there’s rainbow. I was sending images of a Super Mario Kart-level from the ’80s where you’re driving on a rainbow and falling off into the darkness, and I loved these colors. I wanted there to be a lot of colors because I wanted there to be an indicator too to the audience that, yes, this story is about grief but still, it’s also an extremely life-affirming movie about love and seeing the world again, anew, for the first time with these eyes that bring in all this color and that the world is colorful and we can choose to ignore or become a part of it.
There seems to be a link in your last three films of these complex, female creatives as the protagonists. Is that a thread you’ve purposefully been pulling on? Or do you think you’re just instinctively drawn to those stories?
It’s so funny; I’ve never thought about that, but you’re right, and someone else has pointed out that art is so important to these films and their protagonists as well. The reason I hook into a script is that since a movie typically takes about two years to start to finish, it’s a long process, and you want to live in that world for a long time. What makes me want to live in those worlds for so long is when I connect with the character. I think I really connected with Shirley and Rose in “Shirley,” and I really connected with Madeline (“Madeline’s Madeline“).
With Lennie, I played piano, accordion, and drums growing up. The piano was like my lifeline and my salvation. Music was so important to me I felt like I couldn’t live without going to the piano. I only wanted to play the sad songs, so when my teacher would suggest something else, I’d say nothing in a major key; it has to be minor because I just had these aches, I had my sadness, and I needed to get it out in my piano playing. That was such a relief, and it gave me so much space, so when Lennie is losing her ability to play, that can feel so life or death for a young person because that’s your mode, your expression. When you play that well, you’re practicing all the time, which means you’re playing all the time, so you really have to love it. So the connection to art and music, to expression, is important to me and is why I’m drawn to that character.
I just wish I could show this to everyone who is an orchestra student in the country because it feels very affirming.
Lennie is such a complicated and interesting character. She doesn’t grieve in a “nice way.” How important do you think it is to show these very human teenage girls?
It’s very important to me because I felt like I wanted to make a movie that I would’ve wanted to see when I was a teenager. I needed this kind of character to say, “it’s okay, be you.” I think that feels pretty central to this movie. And to let there be space for Lennie to be confused and to make the “wrong decisions” and mistakes and to let her have the space and forgiveness and love around her in the process of growing up and giving her permission to go through the motions of feeling like she’s failing and then reviving, falling in love and feeling so over-the-top with her emotions. It’s nice to see her be angry at times, she can be petulant, and she throws her sandwich on the ground. Life is hard, and it’s okay to be miserable sometimes. I never want there to be a message in my movies, but I hope there’s space for young women to relate and see this movie and see themselves in Lennie.
Do you know what drives me crazy also? That we give so much credit to movies where men kill a bunch of people, and everyone dies, and everyone is like, oh, that was a really big movie because many people died in it. I’m like; there are also big movies when somebody just has a lot of emotions. That can also be a really big movie. And I feel that we give so much weight to these, $200 million movies where a lot of people die, and you know, I’m in the Academy now, and things get blasted my way, aside from like, “The Lost Daughter” and “The Power of the Dog” -.I love those movies – so much that gets pushed my way is just another giant movie about guns. You can have an epic that is life or death – this movie is life or death – but it isn’t about people dying and going to war; it’s about the internal war.
“The Sky is Everywhere” is available now on Apple TV+.
This interview has been edited for clarity.