Director India Donaldson’s first feature, Good One, is a fairly simple story at first glance: A family camping trip in upstate New York takes a turn for the worse when it ends up being just father-daughter duo Chris (James Le Gros) and Sam (Lily Collias) and Chris’s longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) spending three days in the woods. Sam is about to head off to college, while Chris and Matt can’t escape the emotional paths they’ve already blazed for themselves. What happens on the trip shapes Sam’s adult life in ways that feel both heartbreaking and necessary.

But just because something is simple doesn’t mean it simply. Donaldson had just 12 days to shoot the film, spending most of it outdoors in the Catskills — specifically, on 300 acres of private property near Mohonk Preserve and Minnewaska State Park — and using an Airbnb as a base camp for the cast and 15-person crew. They used the Airbnb to charge batteries and then drove UTVs into the woods to shoot each day. Weather and lighting, factors often shaped by cinematographers and colorists, were partially controlled by, well, the weather and lighting on “The Good One.”

But having to adapt to their surroundings allowed Donaldson and her cinematographer (and producer) Wilson Cameron to be all the more attuned to the textures and details that the camera—and through it, Sam—senses. The Good One is the kind of film where an inch can feel like a mile, where adjusting the framing to fit a new composition or the length of a cut betrays the characters’ insecurities and demands because those small adjustments shape our opinion of all three characters. Getting that alchemy just right in just 12 days of shooting in the woods is a complicated task.

So Donaldson’s trick is that while this is her first feature, it’s not her first rodeo. She and Cameron collaborated on three short films before “Good One” and developed a kind of shared language that allowed them to move quickly. “Our joke is that if you spend 10 years preparing with your DP, you can shoot a film in 12 days,” Donaldson told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the “Filmmaker Toolkit” podcast.

“During times when I was living in New York, during times when I was underemployed or freelance, we would take long walks together and just dream about making a film. We worked toward it for a long time and when we did it, we didn’t just have a shortcut – we just knew each other so well,” Donaldson said. “I developed my visual language in collaboration with him. He’s inextricably linked to it.”

Both a common language and a shared taste are something every film team must develop together. It’s never quite perfect, but the more projects filmmakers do together, the closer they can get. Donaldson could rely on Wilson to find the compositions that interested her “without me even having to say it,” Donaldson said. “You don’t get that overnight. It takes time.”

Donaldson didn’t have much time during filming itself, but she did have time to get to know Collias and bring her sensibility to the way “Good One” shows us Sam’s perspective; it was a secret advantage, Donaldson said, to cast Collias when she was 17 and they knew they would have to wait a year to shoot until she was 18 and their restrictions on filming minors were lifted. In the lead-up to filming, Donaldson sat in on Zoom calls between Collias and Le Gros designed to prepare them for their extended father-daughter trip into the woods — not by rehearsing the script, but by getting to a place where they would also know each other.

“James approaches his work from a filmmaker’s perspective and always had the attitude of, ‘How can I help the project?’ So he suggested we meet regularly,” Donaldson said. “They didn’t talk about the script, they just got to know each other and talked about books, art and life. I remember the first time I saw them on Zoom and listened to them and thought, ‘Oh, these people really feel like family.'”

And leaving Matt out of those calls makes him feel even more like a fifth wheel on the journey. “They all knew each other beforehand, but they didn’t meet until the first day of shooting. I’m very grateful to those three actors and their three performances,” Donaldson said. “I just got lucky with the casting – or maybe not so lucky, just following my instincts. But it’s luck when the right people say yes.”

So that’s the secret to filming a great story, no matter the pace: having the right people in the same place at the right time.

“Good One” is now playing in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. The Filmmaker Toolkit podcast is available on all podcatchers.