By the way, why were you told it was impossible to make?
Well, it was a Black List script and for all the acclaim they get, sometimes those movies have trouble translating. It was one of those scripts that everyone like[d], but no one wanted to make because for some reason it was seen as the — the 17-year-old girl who talks crass, it became the blow-job movie or something like that. And that was never how we saw it; that was the least interesting part of it to us, because to me, she’s pretty asexual, intimacy is her greatest fear. When she kisses Adam Scott’s character in the car, I essentially imagine that it’s her first kiss ever and she freaks out. Any sense of intimacy is so far gone because she is still reeling from the abandonment of the one person who she has idolized, [which] is her father.
Zoey Deutch is just magnetic in this movie: a total firecracker kid you absolutely believe. Her friends are terrific, too.
Zoey’s energy propels the movie in a way that…she is the movie. The movie either works or doesn’t work because of her. It was in rehearsals when I realized we had something really special, and as the shooting started and she really locked in, we just became dazzled by her presence. There was this eccentric dude whose house we shot in — we had a low-budget film, so we can’t really stop people from walking around set — and he would actually come up to me during shooting and whisper in my ear “Tuesday Weld, Tuesday Weld.” And I kept thinking, what the fuck are you talking about? And then I looked her up and realized he was right.
But she’s amazing. She’s very serious and committed and the amount of work she does, the amount of notes she has…it’s incredible. The thing I get excited about the most is seeing her in the movie because I’m really proud of her work in it. It’s hard to carry a movie on your own, and she’s like spinning plates and doing so many things at once. The character is a feminist, but also a capitalist; she’s doing a lot of what many would call “unlikable” things, but she’s doing in the name of trying to distract herself from the things that are eating her up.
This movie gets a little crazy — in a good way of course, but it begins to get really serious and mashes together elements of thriller, road-trip and darker genres beyond teen comedies.
It’s fully crazy! I haven’t even showed it to my parents yet. It’s fully insane. The original script leaned more into the comedic elements, but…the movie is almost like a dream. When you’re young, everything is so important. What you’re feeling is the most important thing in the world, and no one’s ever felt this way.
It’s important that the freedom and spirit of the kids is alive and fun and you want to hang out with them at the beginning, because they’re doing these very adult, very dangerous things and they have no idea about the mess they’re going to get themselves into. They’re playing with fire and other people’s lives. So, as things start to get more serious and they flirt with real danger,…then the movie starts to subtly change and the second half of the movie is where real shit happens.
So it’s crazy because I wanted the movie to [show] the immediacy and the importance of how things feel when you’re young, and so it ends up taking a turn where the feeling is, “oh shit, we shouldn’t have gone down this road.” Same way “The Goonies” feels. They’re looking for gold and treasure and it feels so important, and if they were older, they’d probably look back and think, “Uhh, maybe we shouldn’t have done that.” And by the third act, I wanted to just go for it. It’s about her accepting love, really, and I didn’t want it to feel slight. I wanted it to feel big and romantic the way young love feels, and I didn’t want to shy away from any of that.
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Creatively, the movie feels like a 180 from your last movie, “Ceremony.” Was that intentional?
Yeah, “Ceremony” was like a screwball comedy with notes of depression in it and it had a very controlled style of filmmaking. Everything was super-rehearsed and had stiff marks, and the conceit and the tone of the movie was very different.
When you’re a 26-year-old director and you’re working with all these great people, there’s a lot of showing off with what you can do with the camera and what makes you laugh on set versus what’s actually serving the character. And I wanted to get rid of all that for “Flower.” My cinematographer Carolina Costa and I wanted to lose all magic tricks, or any flashiness, and just tell the story. There was no watching of “Boogie Nights” or “Magnolia,” which is something I would normally watch. We really wanted to just tell the story.
From a technical point of view, we just wanted as much natural light as possible, have no marks and let the actors be free. So you know, continuity…when you have Zoey and Kathryn Hahn doing their thing, the last thing you want to do is get in the middle of that and tell them to shift their heads or whatnot. And it was really liberating to give everyone…total freedom over their characters and the creation of them.
Especially because I’m not a 17-year-old girl. Neither was John Hughes — not that I’m comparing myself to him in any way — but it’s possible to make a good movie about being in high school while not being in high school. But these kids are young and I just wanted them to make it authentically themselves. They’re all brilliant and different versions of their own true, personal selves.
Well, speaking about that, we’re living in an age of empathetic inclusivity, right? Cultural awareness and sensitivity never hurt, especially in the age we’re living in. But it’s tricky what you pull off with this film because there’s an everyone’s-watching sensitive element to being, you know, woke. So, did you worry at all about being a male filmmaker who’s writing and directing such a sexual, female story?
I loved the script so much and had an instant connection to it right away, but I felt the most important way for me, a cis man, to tell this story authentically and honestly was to surround myself with a crew of amazing women who could hold me accountable for any misinterpretations of what it means to be a young woman today. I wanted a set where the crew felt totally comfortable and empowered to tell me their ideas and thoughts and the actresses felt deeply in control of their characters — what they said, how they said it, what they did. The film became a real collaborative effort. I also did a lot of research into feminist history and theory that I probably would never have done otherwise and that shifted my perspective quite a bit. My coffee table was covered with Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millett, “Go Ask Alice,” “Reviving Ophelia,” etc.
Also, and this may be weird to say, but, like, I grew up as, like, this short, kind-of-nerdy guy who was into poetry and movies and stuff, and I didn’t always relate to the weird ideas of masculinity portrayed in movies. Sometimes, honestly, I saw more of myself in female characters in the movies, so in that way I relate to Erica. In no way am I purporting to be the face of young women today, but the more we can place ourselves inside each other’s narratives and connect across of lines of difference, the better.
I always think there should be more stories of things we haven’t seen before on screen. What’s important is that this movie is asking questions, not giving answers. It’s all about embracing these harder questions and not forcing people to make generalizations. In the end, we told an honest story and everyone felt included in the process.
“Flower” makes its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this week.