Director Lynn Shelton has proven herself a fascinating storyteller behind the camera on multiple occasions. With her films Humpday, Your Sister's Sister, and now Laggies (out this Friday), Shelton's become a pro at taking a magnifying glass to everyday relationships and twisting it on the big screen. And she's planning to do the same thing on the small screen.
"I have faith that I'll eventually develop a television series," says Shelton. "I love so much of the television that’s happening right now... [The idea] just hasn’t come to me yet."
Once she does pursue the small screen, she wouldn't necessarily be a rookie. Shelton's filmography includes episode of Mad Men, The Mindy Project, and New Girl. For now, however, Shelton's focused on promoting Laggies, a coming-of-age-in-your-30s film about a woman (Keira Knightley) who finds herself in an unexpected friendship with a teenage girl (Chloe Moretz).
Read on as she discusses what drew her to the project, what Lena Dunham's Girls signals for women in Hollywood, and why female filmmakers need to be more supportive of each other.
What made Laggies a story you wanted to tell?
First and foremost, getting to have a female protagonist. Exploring characters, I see men get to do that a lot, ever since The Graduate probably. It was the first time I remember seeing a film about a guy who’s in a quarter-life crisis and is bumbling along making all kinds of strange life choices along the way toward figuring out his place in the world. Women are so often relegated to be on the sideline. They’re supposed to have their shit together. They’re the patient girlfriend or the wife. It was so nice to see a woman who lies and makes mistakes and is genuinely flawed, as we all are in real life.
And the second was that I’m really drawn to relationships that aren’t supposed to work on paper, and people making soul connections with people who aren't in your category, people who you’re not supposed to be connecting with on this level. So, this platonic relationship, genuine friendship between a 28-year-old and a 16-year-old, I thought was really exciting.
Prior to Laggies, when Happy Christmas came out, people were praising the fact that Anna Kendrick’s character was imperfect and messy. Why do you think there’s a lack of those characters? What are people afraid of?
I think there’s a history, and it’s getting better. I do feel like more and more I’m starting to see on the landscape a film like Obvious Child, or even the series Girls, in the last few years.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I feel like there has always been this fear of putting women on the screen, who are main characters, who are not "likeable," and a lot of that has to with the box that society tries to put us all in. It actually refers to the box that Megan [Keira Knightley's character in Laggies] feels that she’s being forced into and she’s bucking up against that. It’s not so much that she actually is immature, it’s that she is living in a society that devalues her and makes her feel and seem immature. But it’s not really true, she’s just marching to the beat of a different drummer and doesn’t want to fall lock-step into the kind of life that all of her friends from high school seem so happy to do. Which is fine for them—it’s just not working for her.
Hollywood has been doing that to women for a while. They want to take off the rough edges and not let them be flawed and not let them be real because they think women should reach some sort of an ideal. What you end up with are these facsimiles of human beings, these cardboard cutouts on screen of a Hollywood version of what a woman is. They don’t actually feel real.
When you do see women who get to play "unlikable" characters, or even antiheroes, they’re marketed as the bossy type.
Yeah!
1.
Aside from flawed, imperfect female characters, what do you think TV and movies need more of?
The same thing: flawed and imperfect humans in general. The thing that excites me are storylines that are surprising but believable, which, again, was another thing that really appealed to me about Laggies. I’ve done this before with Your Sister’s Sister and Humpday—on paper there’s a sort of high concept, it doesn’t seem like it’ll feel real. It just doesn’t seem believable. But then when you actually watch the piece, it resonates. The characters feel identifiable, and I can see how they ended up in this crazy story. All kinds of crazy shit happens in the real world, but the trick is making it resonate with audiences on a deep level, making them seem like human beings instead of fake people.
This is one of the bigger-budgeted movies you've worked on, but you were adamant about working with the crew that you’ve always worked with. What does that add to a movie, and is that loyalty hard to come by?
I'm incredibly blessed. This movie was set originally in California, and we did get the California Tax Credit, but then it ran out. You have a limit on the amount of time you actually have to utilize it and it had just run out. In the meantime, we had applied for the Washington State Film Incentive program, which is also a wonderful program, and very competitive, especially if you hire locally, because you only get a rebate for local hires and local-based businesses. It made perfect sense.
I remember my producers saying, "Oh, it’ll cost so much money to fly people in and house them." I kept saying, "You don’t understand, the entire crew will be local, including all of my keys." So yeah, it was fantastic to be able to do that. [The local crew] are my best friends. I’ve been working with this same group of people in various iterations for six movies now, and it’s become a very close-knit community. There’s nothing better than working with your friends. Why would you want to do anything different? The crew has been working on such a small scale that it was so nice to give the department some more toys and more staff. They were able to actually hire bigger armies of helpers and see what they could do. And the results are just incredible. I can’t get over how beautiful the movie looks. I couldn’t be happier with it.
Even though you don’t see that many movies by female directors in the mainstream, do you feel like there's a really supportive female filmmaking community?
I think it’s getting more so. I was talking to a female AC recently and she was talking about how there’s a certain generation of women that came up and they were so few and far between that there was a sense that there’s only enough room for me. There’s only enough room for me and one or two other women, and so they were almost less generous with and very defensive their turf.
Now I feel that there’s enough of us, there’s more of us, and we’re starting to get a critical mass. It's nice to see women reaching out and realizing there’s room for all of us and we need to help each other. We need to create what men have had for forever, which is an old boy’s network. Even on a subconscious level, men are hiring the folks that are most like them and they end up hiring other men. So I think it’s really important for women to empower other women and to mentor other women and to be mutually supportive of their peers. That's just starting to gain traction here and there, and hopefully that will keep spreading and becoming more of a norm.
Tara Aquino is the Complex Pop Culture editor. She tweets here.
