X/Y played last weekend at the Seattle International Film Festival. It’s an unusual film in that it’s a character study of four New Yorkers who behave imperfectly in their romantic entanglements, but still seem worthy of empathy. There’s also a great cast that includes Amber Tamblyn, Common, Melonie Diaz, plus wife/husband producer/director team Ryan Piers Williams and America Ferrera.
This is the second film from Williams, whose debut The Dry Land was a fantastic, and timely, movie about Iraq veterans returning home and facing real-life complications from their military service oversees. With X/Y, the film is more subtle, and works on a more ambiguous level, but both ask their audiences to view their characters with empathy.
While they were in town for SIFF, I had a few minutes to chat with America Ferrera and Ryan Piers Williams about X/Y, how it differs from The Dry Land, and how they didn’t expect the response from audiences that they’ve gotten.
With X/Y, it’s a big departure from your first film, The Dry Land, can you talk about what made you interested in going in this direction for your second film?
Ryan Piers Williams: When I started writing it in 2012, I was really curious about modern relationships and how technology was affecting relationships and how millennials were dealing with relationships. I was in a period of self reflection and trying to understand my own relationships in my life, and trying to understand my friends’ relationships. I just realized that there were a lot of people struggling to make authentic, true connections and lasting relationships. I wanted to tackle trying to paint a portrait of what I saw, which was this struggle of people trying to connect against the backdrop of our hyper-connected culture.
One thing I enjoyed about the film is that everyone’s imperfections are explored in detail, and each character is conflicted with their own moral ambiguities.
RPW: I wanted to paint is as realistic as possible. Every character has good aspects as well as bad aspects. I wanted to paint all of the characters in a gray texture where they do good things in their life and they do bad things in their life. Some of them are in love; some are struggling, just having been out of a relationship. I think that I wanted to paint a more realistic portrait rather than a glamorized portrait you might see in traditional cinema.
America, can I ask you what you liked about this film?
America Ferrera: When I first read the script, I noticed that it was hard to like these characters based on their behavior. I saw there was a challenge in that as an actor, to take a character whose actions written down on paper seem unrelatable and make her seem like a real person and full person who you might be able to relate to despite the fact that you might not like what she’s doing. I think that’s an interesting challenge as an actor. I think I recognized in it a more subtle truth about relationships that they are all hard and that it’s very small moments of us recognizing certain things about ourselves that are keeping us from what we actually want. I think we’re pretty conditioned in our media and society to see things as the right thing or the wrong thing, especially when it comes to relationships. Is it the right person or the wrong person? Is this my ever-after or not, instead of taking on more of a responsibility of what I have to make something successful rather than just expect it to be successful or not.
I think it’s a much more nuanced version of our generation being in love. There are no black and white answers. That’s what I responded to when I was preparing the role and helping Ryan develop the script.
Besides the two of you, there are some other really wonderful actors in the film, like Common, Amber Tamblyn, and Melonie Diaz. How did you get them to appear in your film?
RPW: Melonie Diaz we had known for a while. We worked with her on Lords of Dogtown several years ago, so we’ve always been a fan of her work. When we met with her about playing Jen, she really connected with the character and brought such a great life to her. In the way that she talked about her, I could see that she really knew who this character was. I got excited about her ideas and she wanted to do it.
Amber Tamblyn is a good friend of ours. A lot of the cast were friends, from working with them in the past or having been friends with them. In terms of Common, my producer, Jason Berman, worked with Common on a movie called LUV and sent him the script and he really liked it. It all came out of prior relationships. A lot of the people knew each other as well, so there was a built in chemistry. When I was trying to put the movie together, I knew that we would be shooting it very quickly and I would be asking all of the actors to invest in the characters and bring a lot to their relationships with the other actors. What was cool was that we found a lot of actors who already knew each other and already had relationships with each other. That helped me as a director get over that first big hurdle of creating that bond off-screen.
To answer your question in a short way, a lot of them were friends who we have known for a while and were fortunate enough to have them be a part of the movie. Some of them came out of working with our casting director, Jeanne McCarthy, who is an incredible casting director. She turned me on to Dree Hemingway and I had never seen any of her work. She plays Claudia in the movie. I saw a movie that she did a movie called Starlet that was at SXSW two years ago and she was incredible in it. I got really excited about her and she loved the idea of the character. It came together really organically. It came together really organically. We’re also really fortunate to know a lot of really talented actors to be a part of it.
Common, in particular, I love watch acting, so I was really anticipating him showing up on screen when I found out he was going to be in your movie.
RPW: He’s a very talented actor and is really committed to his art. It was a real pleasure to work with him.
How did the movie evolve from when you first set out to make the film, to the final version being shown now?
RPW: It started out a lot longer. There were a lot more scenes. With The Dry Land, I was very efficient with the script. It was very lean and what you saw was pretty much what we shot. There were a few scenes that were cut, but it was very lean. With this movie, each scene was a lot longer than what you saw on the screen. That didn’t come out of any intelligent design, I just wrote a lot and when we got into the editing room, I realized we didn’t need as much dialogue and trimmed it down. That heart of what I was trying to say and the structure was already on the page. We hardly did any improvisation, it was all scripted. It was more about cutting down what we shot and really shaping it in the edit room. That was the main thing that changed from script to completion.
It was a very compact 82 or 83 minutes, which I thought was the perfect length.
RPW: I wanted it to flow very, not quickly, but I wanted it to have energy while it was moving. Even though there were long dialogue scenes, I never wanted information to repeat. I wanted it to feel like you were passing through these people’s lives. What I wanted to achieve was that each character builds on the next and the next, so that you get a taste of each of these peoples’ lives but also building on a bigger arc that the movie operates on and takes you on a journey.
What is coming up next for the film?
RPW: The next festival we’re going to be at is the Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland. Then it’ll go to a bunch of festivals this year. We’re starting to get distribution offers, so hopefully it’ll have a release sometime this year or early next year.
Is there anything you want people to take away from this film after watching it?
AF: I think it’s hard to say. What was really interesting was that we spent so much time, no one more than Ryan, living in this world, watching cuts and giving notes. You get so inside of it, you think it’s one thing but once you give it to the audience you realize it’s no longer yours to say what it is. It’s sort of the audience’s role to tell you what you made. That’s what’s so exciting about having an audience. You get to sit an experience them telling you how your work affects them.
At the world premiere at Tribeca, the first scene, which we always thought of as an intense and dramatic scene, got tons of laughs. It was so unexpected.
RPW: It was awesome.
AF: We looked at each other…
RPW: …like if we made a comedy.
AF: It was not what we expected. I know every audience is different but that was really surprising. You realize that you can make anything with your intentions but it’s really up to the audience to decide what you made. It’s hard to say what they should take away from it. It’s fun to be surprised by what they say.
There was one line in the film that I thought was very funny, and that’s in a scene you’re in, Ryan, and your agent asks you if you want to make a movie seen by only “five hipsters in Williamsburg.”
RPW: Thanks. I hope that’s not what happens to the movie!
What I really loved about The Dry Land, which we talked about in 2010 when you were both here, was that it was such a timely movie. You wanted to raise awareness for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among Iraq veterans at the time that combat troops were starting to wind down. Obviously there isn’t such an overt message here, but was there an idea that you wanted to advance with this film, somewhat more subtly?
RPW: That was a very special movie and I had a very specific idea of how I wanted people to experience that film. I wanted to bring awareness. It was very social realism and social realism. This one is completely different. There’s no agenda with this movie. If anything, I would hope that people would, when they watch it, find a way to have compassion for the characters. They all do questionable things and I think it can be a difficult movie to watch, depending on what you believe. It can challenge an audience that way. I hope that they can connect with the characters and have compassion for them and that can carry into their own lives and have more compassion for people going through difficult situations. I know it’s a lot to ask, but if there’s anything I can hope for is that it opens up people’s minds in a different way and think about their own relationships in their life and their relationship to themselves. It’s a different kind of movie.