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Offscreen Dialogue: India Donaldson on Good One
Lily Collias in Good One In writer-director India Donaldson’s feature debut, Good One, 17-year-old Sam (outstanding newcomer Lily Collias) embarks on a weekend camping trip with her father Chris (James LeGros) and his lifelong pal Matt (Danny McCarthy). For Sam, a meek college-bound lesbian, the interactions with the two adult men with whom she treks through the forest fall back on conventional gender dynamics ranging from idly domestic to outright degrading: She cooks dinner, washes utilitarian dishware and fields insensitive comments about her sexuality without protest, demonstrating the extent of her excellent manners, so defining of her character that they’re referenced in the film’s title.
Sam’s polite nature is undoubtedly a product of her upbringing (though the influence of her mother is never overtly explored), but there’s only so much she can stand before losing her dignity. Much of the dialogue in Good One is blurted offscreen by Chris and Matt, who exchange wistful memories of bygone youth and targeted jabs at the other’s expense with equal gusto. Locking the camera on Sam’s transfixing gaze, Donaldson effortlessly conveys the mounting toll these conversations take on her as this “vacation” drags on, especially as spotty cell service occasionally resurfaces the summertime antics that her girlfriend and buddies back home are getting up to.
On the rare instances that the men ask for her opinion—regarding Matt’s rocky relationship with his son or Chris’s ridiculous midlife crisis–tinged desire to hike across China—she readily embodies the clichéd role of “wise-beyond-their-years” teenager, if only for the fleeting luxury of being heard. Her father is absorbed by Matt’s presence to the point of outright ignoring Sam, particularly when an uncomfortable situation arises that should require his immediate attention. While Sam’s deferential attitude initially appears wholly ingrained, mother nature offers her the chance to finally redistribute the burden of Chris and Matt’s patriarchal egos onto their own backs.
I spoke to the L.A.-based Donaldson via Zoom shortly before she embarked for Cannes, where Good One screened as part of the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section. This international leg concludes the film’s festival tour—it premiered at Sundance before making its New York debut at MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center’s annual New Directors/New Films showcase. Besides being Donaldson’s feature directing debut, Good One also carries the distinction of being the inaugural film distributed by Metrograph Pictures, the New York City theater’s new distribution arm overseen by former A24 distribution executive David Laub. The film will have its theatrical release on August 9.
Filmmaker: I know that you wrote the script for Good One during the pandemic while living at home with your family. Can you discuss the process of developing the film and how this environment shaped the then-budding narrative?
Donaldson: The script came out of a convergence of a lot of themes in my life at that moment. I grew up hiking and camping, and the environment is always seductive to me when I see it on screen. But there was also something about being trapped largely indoors. In Los Angeles at the time, reports about COVID were constantly changing. I remember walking on an empty street in an empty neighborhood and people were keeping their distance. All the beaches were closed, all the hiking trails were closed. You couldn’t even be outdoors unless you left town and went somewhere remote. I was fantasizing about being able to do that. I was also working in a writer’s room at the time and spending many hours a day on Zoom, so the fantasy element of that was not only story-wise, but production-wise. It seemed like it was just that much harder to make an independent film at that time because of all of the COVID restrictions. I dreamed up this project with the “pod” vision of a small group of people coming together in a safe environment because we’d be largely outdoors to make a film. By the time we shot, COVID restrictions had totally lifted. So, it didn’t end up being necessary, but it informed my approach in ways that are very specific to that time.
Filmmaker: When you found then 17-year-old Lily Collias to play Sam, you also chose to delay production for a year until she turned 18 for practical production reasons. How did you use this time to your and the cast’s benefit?
Donaldson: The producers and I really felt ready to go the year before, but time is the ultimate luxury in independent filmmaking. It was a hard decision to push [production back], but that whole year was bonus prep time. I’m ultimately grateful for the hiccup. We couldn’t really afford a lot of formal prep, so when there were windows when we were all available, we would take a trip upstate and go scouting. The production team Zoomed regularly, which helped hone our plan so that we could effectively shoot a movie in 12 days when the time came. I shot-listed more extensively. Spending more time also enabled us to raise more money, which was crucial. We [originally] had one plan that was even more microbudget, but then we were able to slowly raise some more money so that we could afford the location we ended up wanting. As for Lily, we got to know each other slowly over the course of that year. Lily was finishing high school, and I would just periodically check in with her. By the time we cast James Le Gros—who lives in Wyoming and plays her dad—the three of us would periodically Zoom to just hang out and talk, not even really about the movie. We achieved the comfort level that comes when you spend time with somebody. Lily was also doing her own prep during that time. My God, she knew that script so well! I don’t think I ever saw her looking at her sides; it seemed very ingrained in her by the time we were shooting. She had so much time to let it soak in and also to make the character her own.
Filmmaker: Another casting-related question, but when exactly did James Le Gros and Danny McCarthy come on board? How did you guide their relationship on- and offscreen with Lily?
Donaldson: I just really wanted everyone to be comfortable. I had this intuitive sense—I had no proof that this would be the case, other than actors I’d worked with on short films—that if I connected with these people, that would lead to a level of comfort among them. I could maybe help facilitate that by being the connective tissue, but that, I think, is probably giving myself too much credit [laughs]. When I first saw Lily and James meet over Zoom, I was coming back to New York City from upstate after a scout. [My phone] kept cutting in and out of service, so I was just listening to them talk, and it was insane—it was such an easy conversation. They were talking about movies, art, life. And this is a 17-year-old girl and a seasoned actor who’s about to play her dad. It’s a credit to their openness as people and actors that they welcomed each other in. They had incredible chemistry on camera. Even off camera, they spent so much time together on that shoot. I’d see them argue, I’d see them laughing about something. They just seemed like buddies. After we wrapped, I drove them to the airport because they were both getting flights out of Newark. I took a photo of them on the curb, and it’s my favorite photo from all of production because they look like a family.
Danny had the difficult role of playing the outsider. There’s this father-daughter unit, and I think his character feels some jealousy toward them. It was this tricky tightrope of playing somebody who’s very familiar to them—he’s kind of part of the family, they go way back—but is an outsider, too. He was able to move from that sense of alienation to close-knit-ness and camaraderie with Chris. James and Danny are so experienced; I just witnessed them clicking into this rhythm and finding out what [their characters’] relationship was.
Filmmaker: Your films largely focus on feminine interiority and relationships. Yet with Good One, the majority of the dialogue is spoken by men. You’ve previously said that you were open to the actors improvising, but I’m also curious if shifting your focus to these almost aggressively male conversations proved at all challenging.
Donaldson: I always had this idea that their dialogue would play heavily offscreen and be de-emphasized in a really significant way. So, the script reads like, “Oh my God, these two guys are saying so much, and this girl is saying nothing.” I did have to kind of communicate to all my collaborators that it might read this way, but this is the movie that we were going to see. I mean, a lot of information about them and their dynamic is revealed through their dialogue. Through the pace of walking and talking in the woods, a lot also shifts in their dynamic. A lot is happening there, but it was always kind of my goal that [their dialogue] was more a part of the sound design than the driving narrative force.
Filmmaker: Sam has a girlfriend with whom she’s clearly smitten, but her queerness also doesn’t prevent her from patriarchal subjugation, whether by being tasked with the so-called domestic chores of camping or receiving inappropriate comments from men. What made you want to explore this facet of identity as you were developing Sam’s character?
Donaldson: Thank you for bringing it up. It’s a small piece of the film that some people miss, which is OK. I think there should be more queer characters in stories everywhere, and their queerness can be part of the story in an overt way or not. I wanted it to be this baseline thing that affected her life in the way that every aspect of the circumstances of her upbringing have affected her life. But it isn’t a source of tension between her and her dad. I think it’s totally welcomed by him, and I don’t think he particularly cares, but he’s still who he is, and he doesn’t quite have the language that she has to talk about every aspect of her being. What father does? There’s a scene in a diner early on in the film, the only time Sam’s queerness is explicitly brought up, and the men talk about it as if it’s a protection against other men. Like, she doesn’t have to deal with these “gross” boys. I don’t know how to talk about this without spoiling the movie, but a lot is projected onto her by these men and none of it is accurate, as we learn over the course of the film. They take pieces of who she is and slowly start to use them against her. I felt like her queerness was an integral piece of that, just as much as her obedience is.
Filmmaker: Something shared by all of your films is a New York setting. Your shorts—If Found, Medusa and Hannahs—have taken place in the broader metropolitan area, and Good One starts in the city before moving upstate. You’re now based in L.A., but what makes you come back to New York as a filmmaker?
Donaldson: I was living in New York when I made all of my short films. There’s also a piece to all of them which is specific to New York, in the sense that they involve unexpected encounters that I don’t think happen quite as much in Los Angeles. New York throws you into these spaces, public and private, where you’re encountering people that you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. Those films would not have come out of living in Los Angeles, for sure.
With Good One, it was a very practical reason. I lived in New York for 12 years, but I was living in L.A. when I wrote the script. I originally wrote it for California. That was the environment that I grew up camping in because I grew up here. Then, when I started bringing people on board to help me, many of them lived in New York. I realized, “Oh my God, all of my collaborators live in New York. If I’m going to make a microbudget film and rely on the generosity of my film community, it’s going to be really hard to do that in L.A.” I didn’t have the community there yet. So, I pivoted and re-wrote it for upstate New York, and I’m glad I did. Leaving the city for the country feels more deeply felt here than it did in the California version.
I’m so grateful that I got to do it with many of the people who’d helped me make my shorts. Wilson Cameron, who shot Good One and also produced it, lives in New York and previously shot two of my shorts. We got to build on the work that we’d been doing together and the shared visual language we’ve been developing.
Filmmaker: A quick follow-up, but I went to school right next to the Mohonk Preserve, where you shot this. You mentioned that the bolstered budget helped you secure this shooting location, but did you scout any other trails for the film? Or was there something specific about this location that called to you?
Donaldson: Did you go to New Paltz?
Filmmaker: Yeah, I did.
Donaldson: Oh, cool. I love it up there. I also went to school in upstate New York. We scouted one day at Minnewaska State Park Preserve, and a ranger there tipped us off to this wonderful woman, Karen, who had 300 acres surrounded by the Mohonk Preserve. We visited her, and she was very generous and showed us around her property. We talked with her about how it might be possible to film there because the land surrounding her property is very untouched. It was just so obvious once we saw this place. There’s a sequence in the last third of the movie that happens near water, and I always knew that we needed to find some important water feature. I wanted there to be running water or a waterfall so that the sound would compete with the conversation that happens. And oh my gosh, her land had this incredible waterfall that led into a creek and these pools.
It also felt like we could have a home base so we didn’t have to be moving around a lot. I knew that we would have so much more shooting time if we weren’t going to a new state park every day. There just seemed to be so many practical benefits to being rooted in one place. Our crew was able to stay partly on her property and partly five minutes down the road. It was gorgeous but also very friendly to production.
Filmmaker: Speaking of the way that the sounds of nature influence the film, I want to talk about Celia Hollander’s excellent score. You’ve collaborated with her extensively on your films, yet on this project she is providing original music that must be in communion with the natural soundscape that also adds so much musicality to the film. Can you speak to how you approached collaborating on this, specifically?
Donaldson: Like [with] Wilson, our previous collaborations were a foundation for doing a larger project together. We had already had a language for how we talk about music and narrative together. This was a coincidence, but one thing is that Celia lives in L.A. but was spending a lot of time in upstate
New York right before we shot the film and while we were in post-production. I think she actually composed a lot of the music while she was living in High Falls, which is in that area. She herself is a very avid backpacker and camper and was immersed in that landscape while composing the music. I don’t want to speak for her, but I think she was thinking about that connection as she wrote the music. Her music really comes into the film when they’re in the motel, but largely in the woods.
Filmmaker: You’ve said that you hope teenagers see this film. Again, most of your work has dealt with characters navigating their adult lives. What made you want to craft a coming-of-age film for your debut feature?
Donaldson: Like we talked about, I was living at home when I wrote it. I have two siblings who were in high school at the time, so I was living with them as well. Octavia, my sister, is actually how I met Lily. But it was the first time I lived at home since I was in high school. Through witnessing [my siblings’] experiences—their relationships at home and dealing with challenges that I never had, like being stuck at home for more than a year—I was reflecting on my own youth in a way that I hadn’t really done in my adult life. I was also reflecting on ways in which I felt connected to them, but also quite different from them. This theme kept coming up around how much of a people pleaser I was at that age and how much I almost regret not having a rebellious period or learning to be comfortable with pissing people off. Not that I want to go through my life pissing people off, but especially in my early 20s, I was so uncomfortable with conflict. I now think that conflict can be healthy, and that was how I got into this character. What is the price you pay by being so easygoing and going with the flow?
As far as what I hope teenagers get from it, I want this to be the type of movie, or I hope it’s the type of movie, that you could potentially see at different stages in your life and feel differently about. I had a child myself by the time I made this movie, and through that I definitely developed a newfound empathy for these father characters. I don’t generally feel prescriptive about how I want people to feel or what I want them to take away from it, but I hope that it offers some specificity of experience whether or not you relate to it, or whether or not later in life you’ll relate to it. The things that I watched about teenagers growing up, there were two extremes: Either girls were victims or girls were empowered. That was the media that I consumed, so I hope to offer some middle ground.
Filmmaker: That’s funny because occupying the middle ground and keeping the peace is a major theme of the film as well. But I’m curious, have your younger siblings seen it yet?
Donaldson: My little brother has not seen it yet, but my little sister has, and she also worked on the movie. She was with us during the whole production. We shared a bedroom full time. It was a real family affair [laughs]. She’s in college now, but she spent a month last summer working with us on the movie. It was really meaningful for me to have her there, working on the film.
Filmmaker: Finally, what can we expect to see next from you?
Donaldson: I really don’t know. This movie has taken up so much of my time and energy. I’ve wanted to give it everything I have in terms of care, and I’m learning all of the ways in which the movie still needs my attention even though I finished making it. That’s not something I thought about beforehand. The next step for me is figuring out how to make this sustainable for myself, how to keep making films while supporting myself and my family. That’s a vague answer, but I feel like it’s important to the world of independent filmmaking because you do a lot. Everyone who worked on this movie did so much, and we deserve to get paid a lot more in the future.
