One of the best scenes you’ll ever see in one of the best film debuts takes place around the campfire in The Good One, where Sam (Lily Collias) is preparing instant noodles for her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and his longtime best friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy), after a long hike in the woods. The ingredients may be humble, but you wouldn’t know from the looks on people’s faces that this wouldn’t be the best meal they’ve ever eaten. Especially considering how carefully Sam prepares it. She’s obviously hoping to impress the adults with her skills, but surprises herself a little at how well it turns out.
“I have a lot of sympathy for that moment in the film,” says the film’s writer and director, India Donaldson, when I bring it up as one of my favorite moments. “I love food in films and when people’s relationship with food is part of the story, whether it’s a film about food or not. I love the sequence at the beginning of ’35 Shots of Rum’ where the father and daughter eat together and how the film slowly introduces us to that food. With that film in particular, I was thinking about how much food means when you’re camping or backpacking. When you’re out all day, you burn a lot of calories and food is really at the forefront. Food tastes so good when you’ve worked, carried it on your back, waited for it or worked hard to get it. (This scene was about) that the simplest thing, just some salty, seasoned noodles from a bag, has a very special meaning in that setting. And I wanted to somehow show how important food is to the relationships in this film by giving it attention and screen time.”
One can imagine that every scene in “The Good One” is examined with the same level of care, but only after this true magic trick of a film is over, when the compelling coming-of-age story is too lush to get lost for too long in the little details that make it so rich. The film couldn’t start off more simply, as Sam agrees to go camping with her dad in order to have a little more time to bond toward the end of the summer before she starts college. Little does she know, this will become a painful parallel to Matt, whose own son doesn’t want to come along as the family is in the early stages of a painful divorce. Sam can clearly see both his and her own father’s mistakes, however, as what should be a weekend of rest and relaxation is filled with stress and she’s forced to take the lead, growing up right before their eyes and wondering if they’ll notice.
While the film was a great discovery for many at Sundance, where it premiered earlier this year, it’s something Donaldson has been working toward for some time with a close-knit group of collaborators including cinematographer Wilson Cameron and composer Celia Hollander. The short films Medusa, Hannahs and If Found have shown that the intricacies of meaningful yet mundane moments in people’s lives hold tremendous power. With the film now in theaters, Donaldson was kind enough to share a few details about how she managed to make it happen. She had a few lucky coincidences, like a tip from her sister that she had a friend who could star in Collias, a rising star, while she had less than two weeks to shoot and the weather wasn’t exactly cooperating at times.
We just got to know each other and Lily had so much time to get into the character and get into it. We never really talked about it, but I hope that the relationship we built that year allowed us to really trust each other when it was time to shoot. I really tried to approach working with Lily as if the character was hers and I just had to create the environment where she felt comfortable and confident enough to deliver that performance. Lily brought a lot of depth and nuance and grit to it that is just her product and in my eyes it’s very different from what was on paper, but it really is all down to the specificity that comes when a great actor delivers a performance.
So when you cast James LeGros, it seemed like you got more than just a great actor, but you were placed in the whole tradition of filmmaking that he was a part of. Was that an exciting aspect for you?
Absolutely. First of all, James has worked with so many great directors, particularly female directors, whose work I admire and who have helped me a lot with trusting myself as a filmmaker. I think his work with all those women really interested me. Then there’s a small group of actors that I always look closely at and lean in when they appear in a film, and he’s one of those people. Even if he’s just in one scene, I love him and everything he does. In particular, I was thinking of two different performances that are quite different in my eyes. His work in Certain Women and then his work in Support the Girls, and I thought this character is somewhere in between the two guys that he played.
Yeah, the first time Lily and James Zoomed, I was in a car and had bad cell reception and they couldn’t really hear me or see me, so I was listening to them more. I remember Wilson (Cameron), one of our producers on the film and also cinematographer, and I were driving back from scouting upstate and I just remember looking at each other in the car, listening to this conversation between James and Lily and grinning because we could feel their chemistry in that first conversation. And we had already cast both of them, but there was no guarantee of that level of connection. It literally felt so organic from the first moment and watching their dynamic allowed me to just create an environment where we could lean into their natural chemistry.
On set, Wilson seemed really attuned to her energy, including the way the camera moves. How planned is that compared to being attuned to what might happen on the day?
Wilson and I have made a lot of short films together and I think we have developed a kind of shorthand and through working together we have also learned very precisely what the other likes and what they respond to. He is an expert at setting the framework for the performance and recognizing the emotional complexity of the scene. He has a tremendous sense of that and I think we have tried to build on that in our collaboration.
Their emotional journey seems to be closely connected to this place, but did they really have it in mind from the beginning?
It was definitely a process to find the right location that fit some of the things that were in the script. For example, the water at the end of the film was (always) a big part of the final act and I knew we needed to find a water source that could carry her along that path but also tonally was something that she was competing with in that conversation with her father. So it really felt like a casting process to find a location that had those elements that I had in mind. We explored the locations that we ended up shooting in multiple times and discovered something new each time and built that journey as we searched, like saying “maybe this conversation is happening here” and it would add a kind of nuance and layer to the story depending on what location we found that was a perfect fit for that moment.
There was no time to panic. We all just had to adapt and find a way to have a movie at the end. Another aspect was that SAG was going to go on strike the day after we started shooting and we had no money to extend shooting, so we had no room for error. I was just really lucky that it was this really trusted group of people where we could all just pivot and find a solution and cut out parts of scenes, whatever we needed to do to distill the process and the script down to the most important elements that would give us a story at the end. But I imagine that’s always the case, no matter how many days you have. That’s part of the process.
What was it like putting this together in the editing room? The rhythm is so gentle and insistent.
Graham Mason, who edited the film, also produced it and worked on it (as an assistant director), so he was a really intense collaborator throughout the whole process. Graham said something that I’m going to repeat because I love it so much and it feels so much like my experience working with him, which is that sometimes in editing you have to break something down to put it back together. But on this film, it felt more like a process of reducing something to its form. It really felt like a process of refinement, and we prioritized Sam’s experience of things over anything else, stayed closely tied to those core ideas, and then felt our way through the film with that as a guide.
It’s just so much fun. The great thing about collaborating with people, especially Celia, across multiple projects is that you can build on the conversations you had last time, so this felt like a deepening of the work we’d already done. Celia herself is an avid hiker, backpacker and camper, and she lived in the area we were shooting in when she composed a lot of the music, so I felt like she was such a big part, sonically and emotionally, of how this film feels, and all the films I’ve done that she’s written music for. She’s inextricably linked to the identity of these projects.
The film begins with a very striking image of these rock towers, which I understand campers often leave behind on hikes like this. What was it like for you to actually see them out there?
The whole rock element was pretty much the last thing I added to the script. I had been hiking in the White Mountains the year I was developing the script and had seen these towers and remembered the feeling of that gesture of people passing through that place, and so I loved them symbolically. Then (our production designer) Becca Morrin and her team built these towers (for our shoot) and after we were done, Diana (Irvine), one of the producers, and James and I got to take them apart in silence, which is maybe my favorite memory of the whole shoot.
“Good One” premieres in New York at the Metrograph on August 9 and in Los Angeles at the Landmark Sunset Five before opening nationwide on August 16.
