When Landline played at the Seattle International Film Festival a couple of months ago, it was one of SIFF’s most popular movies. The Centerpiece Gala selection is a great family dramedy that reunites Obvious Child (SIFF 2014) star Jenny Slate and director Gillian Robespierre. It’s a very funny, but moving, film about a New York, Jewish-Italian family that has each family member facing challenges to the fidelity of their relationships. The casting is superb, with Slate as Dana, and John Turturro and Edie Falco as the parents, Jay Duplass as Dana’s fiancé, and newcomer Abby Quinn as the youngest daughter/sister Ali.
Slate is the star, and she’s a magnetic movie star with perfect comedic timing, but Abby Quinn is quite a find as the self-imploding teenage Ali. Ali is seen acting out with drugs, sex, and turning late nights into later mornings, but Quinn plays her with a vulnerable sense that makes one think Ali is more scarred by her parents’ and sister’s infidelity than her carefree persona would let on.
Set in 1995, Landline chronicles a family that doesn’t communicate, in a time period before cellphones became ubiquitous and made it difficult for people to disappear for any extended period of time. I much appreciated that the film, while set during the nineties, resisted the urge to wink at their audience with pop culture references every moment. The genius of setting Landline in the nineties is that it simply takes Facebook out of the equation for how people interact with one another.
My favorite moment in the film might be where I’ll describe as the most logical continuation of the lineage where Alvy Singer and Annie Hall saw The Sorrow and the Pity on a date and the “Seinfeld” episode where Jerry and were Rachel making out during Schindler’s List. I’m also glad I was well into my late thirties when I saw Landline because “Want to get high and watch Zelig?” is the pick-up line my teenage self didn’t know he needed (and still doesn’t/wouldn’t, but it’s a great line nonetheless).
While in town for SIFF, I got a few minutes to chat with Gillian Robespierre and Abby Quinn in a downtown hotel suite on their press junket.
So I guess I should ask how did the idea for Landline come about?
Gillian: Well, it started this Elisabeth Holm and I, the creator and producer, we were just hanging out on tour with Obvious Child in hotel rooms and just talking about our lives and kind of figuring out what our next project might be and then deflecting and always going back to just telling stories about what it was like growing up in New York. We’re both born and raised New Yorkers so we have that sort of unspoken sisterhood even though we are not sisters and we did not grow up together because I’m a lot older than Liz.
So we had something in common, which was that both of our parents divorced when we were teenagers, I was 16 and she was around 17, 18 and we had this similarity where our families grew closer together. Where before we were just sort of chugging along, not necessary connecting with our siblings. We both have older brothers, not sisters. Not really totally connecting with our parents. And when both sets of parents declared that they are no longer going to be married to each other, but we’re still going to be a family, we both grew closer with our parents, our mothers in particular. And then our siblings became friends for the very first time.
And we thought, fuck, that would be a cool story to make into a movie. And that we hadn’t really seen that before on screen. Usually divorces end with somebody throwing clothes out the window, lots of anger and not that there wasn’t anger or sadness that occurred right after the divorce, but our parents brought us into the world and continued to be friends and co-parents, especially my parents. They moved across the street from each other. They didn’t go very far. They were always in constant contact and they were so civilized about it. I mean I’m sure my mom threw clothes out the window, but in her head. You know, she didn’t actually … We lived on the 12th floor, it wouldn’t have been dramatic. It would have been a slow sock and it wouldn’t have been very cool. So yeah, that’s where it stemmed from our lives and then it just grew into another family and no longer really reflected us, especially since we don’t have sisters. It became this really nice love story I think between two siblings, two sisters in particular. And then looking back we kind of think it was maybe a little bit about our friendship and how we grew as collaborators and became sort of sisters in the film industry.
And I want to ask Abby, how did you become involved with them? How did Gillian find you to-
Abby: I was sent an audition and then I flew to New York because I live in LA now, but I really loved the project and wanted to give it my best shot, so I flew to New York. I think I was there for a day and auditioned. And then maybe a month later, it felt like a long time. Maybe it was a couple of weeks later, I flew back to New York for a call back and met Gillian and Liz for the first time.
Gillian: She blew us away. Her tape was amazing. We looked at a lot of talented young actors and actresses and within two minutes of watching Abby, we realized that she was an old soul. Somebody who was tough but also could be vulnerable. And then we googled her and we also saw that she was a really talented. But her stage presence doing “Toxic,” Britney Spears’ “Toxic” acoustic version of it, she seemed cool. We knew she wasn’t a New Yorker, but she embodied this sort of wise beyond her years kind of style that we wrote for the character, so we immediately had to meet her. And she had the second audition, which was more like just hanging out and talking. And she’s amazing. And she also had to act against, next to John Turturro, Edie Falco, and then Jenny, who’s just hard to keep up with comedically. And Abby had all of that.
It doesn’t hurt that you could really picture Abby being Jenny Slate’s younger sister.
Abby: No one had compared me to Jenny before, and then, after we shot the movie, two people in like two weeks came up to me and said that I looked like Jenny.
Gillian: Well, they both have beautiful curls. I straighten my hair, I have super curly hair, and I saw that in the audition tape that this one-
Abby: My hair was straight.
Gillian: Was not a true straight hair. I could sniff them out. I could tell she had beautiful curls and Jenny has beautiful curls and that was the start of making these two sisters look beautiful. Let them have their natural curls shine. And John Turturro’s head is amazing and special. And I hate movies where families don’t look alike. It really irks me.
I think when I first started getting into watching movies, Do the Right Thing and Quiz Show were so formative for me, so seeing John Turturro always makes me happy in a movie. He’s such a great actor, and someone who I think is really a unique talent…
Gillian: Yeah. And we wanted to sort of take his comedic sensibility and sort of keep it there, but tone it down a little bit. Make it a little less like a caricature and sort of normalize, reign in his comic sensibility, which is abundant. He has so much. He’s really I think a genius comedic actor, but also has a vulnerable side. We didn’t want to make Alan, who he plays, the dad just a one sided villain who cheats on his wife and has no sort of depth to him. He’s a dark character who’s going through some real scary issues, I think, of feeling inadequate. We want to make him likable, and I think John Turturro can do that.
Did the movie change a lot when us started getting people on board versus what you had in your-
Gillian: It didn’t change that much. I think we do reference that it’s a Jewish Italian family in the movie. And collaborating with John and Edie, they have wonderful ideas about what they want to bring to the character and sort of … And I’m the type of collaborator and director who I like to step away and let actors live in their characters and bring their own intentions. And usually they’re very right on. And John and Edie, I think Edie can really look at a script and pull out the bullshit immediately. And either that’s by changing a word, but mostly it’s by just her tone. She’s a good bullshit detector. A wonderful, like I learned a lot from watching these two.
I wanted to ask you about calling it Landline because I think it really brings back this era before cellphones, before everyone was really accessible and before you could find out where someone is just instantly.
Gillian: Yeah, for sure. We definitely wanted to tell a story about a family who doesn’t communicate and who are holding in secrets and come together at the end when they finally let it all out. But we didn’t want to have to rely on cell phones as a plot device in a clever or not so clever way, the only way we could actually figure out how to do that is to make it a period piece. And then it sort of the title, we just wanted people to know that it was set in 1995 and then just sort of turn that off. And not feel like, when is the slap bracelet going to make its appearance? Or you know, when are certain nostalgic beats going to happen? Let’s just know there’s not going to be a cell phone and then let the story unravel and the characters connect in a more natural organic way.
And if it was set in 2017, I think the movie would be short film.
Abby: Yeah. And I think the script could easily like take place now. I don’t think it could, I mean you’d have different props and clothing, but the dialog doesn’t sound like it’s from the 90’s. A few references are pretty clear, but I think that’s why it’s a relatable story still, and why it’s not distracting. It’s in a different … It is a period piece.
Gillian: Yeah, if you took that element out, the movie hopefully still exists on its own.
Yeah. I think so. There also wasn’t anything like “I’m listening to this great new band called Nirvana,” those obvious nods to the audience for recollection.
Gillian: No, but it was fun, I think especially on an indie budget, how do you create 1995 when New York city looks like a goddamn shopping mall with Starbucks and Duane Reed every corner. One way to establish that was through a great soundtrack and we worked with a wonderful music supervisor named Linda Cohen. It was just fun to go back, for me to 1995 and pull all the b-sides that I listened to, but also we had other characters so we got to go to dead rock and then we got to do club rave music, which was terrible.
Dana, the more uptight sister, and what she would listen to. So we got to go from Steve Winwood, to Sebadoh, and Pavement, to Crystal Waters, and it was really fun to go back.
Jenny Slate, Gillian Robespierre, Abby Quinn, photo by Elizabeth Crook
It was a really fun movie to watch, but also I think it really spoke to me, as I, my parents, I was a child of divorce also, so I think it kind of felt universal.
Gillian: It wasn’t like day one, we were besties. It took a couple of years. But now, it’s great. And they have grandkids so they had better cut the shit out.
What’s going to happen with the film after this weekend? After it’s done with the screenings at SIFF?
Gillian: We’re going to do a little word of mouth tour on the east coast, and then it premieres July 21st in New York and LA, and then we’ll have a roll out release in other cities the following weekend.
Well I’m just going to ask if there’s anything you want people to take away from this film or anything? Or anything you want to say that we didn’t talk about while my tape recorder is running?
Abby: Yeah, I hope people in the end are focused on the relationship that forms between the sisters and again that divorce doesn’t have to be this terrible thing that brings everyone apart. But I don’t know, I think you can apply that to anything bad that happens in life when your immediate reaction is that this one event is going to define the rest of my life or it’s going to set a tone but it doesn’t have to be that way.
{Landline is playing at SIFF Cinema Uptown now; showtimes and tickets here.
