Usually, hikes are all about silence and changes in sound – insects buzzing instead of phones, streams murmuring instead of people on the street. But one of the secretly great cinematic choices in The Good One is that it doesn’t shy away from dialogue during its long meditative walks through the woods; it just shows us how easy it is to tune people out when they’re not saying anything substantial.
This is one aspect of relationship management that teenager Sam (Lily Collias) deals with on a three-day backpacking trip with her father Chris (James Le Gros) and his long-time friend Matt (Danny McCarthy): Both talk a lot to her and to each other. But director India Donaldson knows the difference between portraying boring conversations and conversations that are actually boring to the viewer. The way she portrayed the trio throughout the film keeps “Good One” firmly in the former camp and the audience firmly anchored in Sam’s perspective.
Donaldson told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast that while scenes often contained enough dialogue to pad them out to seven pages or more, she knew her framing and coverage would make them seem almost like background noise. “We’re coming from Sam’s experience of that conversation. We’re not covering the conversation of these two guys in a traditional way. The camera is pointed at the listener,” Donaldson said. “When we were shooting, (cinematographer) Wilson Cameron and I always talked about prioritizing Lily’s coverage. Even if she literally only has one line of dialogue in a seven-page scene.”
Donaldson and her team knew they had to get a lot of pages done in just 12 days, but their approach had to reflect the characters. “(Sam) says the least, but I hope she comes across as someone who has the most to say and maybe the most meaningful insights. These two guys, I think, especially Matt, are uncomfortable with silence and don’t know how to listen,” Donaldson said. “I always thought that dialogue would be something that would be de-emphasized.”
Both the camera angle and the timing of the cut stay focused on Sam, allowing us to see the changes in emotion or attention flash across her face in real time. It creates an organic wave of emotion rather than the potentially didactic punch of a reaction shot.
“I tried to capture that feeling that I felt particularly strongly as a young person, watching and listening to the adults around me who weren’t particularly interested in my point of view,” Donaldson said. “Then you process the meaning and try to make sense of it, which I don’t think happens overnight. It takes time and I wanted to capture that rhythm.”
Donaldson gives Le Gros and McCarthy a lot of credit for taking the time to work through the pages of the script, especially in the first half of “The Good One,” and putting their acting into words that are ultimately a lot of hot air. But the film finds other ways to get to the true essence of the two. For example, Donaldson said their camping gear gives away a lot of character details.
“I loved writing that into the script. Both men, Matt and Chris, have their own very intimate relationships with the equipment they bring in. Chris has the new, lighter, more efficient stuff; he always has to have the new stuff. Matt’s equipment is all 30 years old,” Donaldson said. “(Production designer) Becca Morrin and I had a funny text exchange while she was getting all this stuff… ‘How about this for Matt? Is this thing funny? This little bottle of hot sauce?'”
Morrin and Donaldson also wanted to find and subtly design certain outdoor environments that certain characters feel more comfortable in than others. The filmmakers designed the pivotal campfire scene between Sam and Matt to make the two feel truly enveloped in darkness—a scenario that makes Matt feel a little safer—while a subsequent scene on the riverbank features a “curtain” of flowing water that makes Sam feel a little safer in speaking her mind to her father.
In those two moments, as well as the last of the film, Donaldson and her team emphasize Sam’s reactions more than the conversations between the characters. “I really feel like (the ending) and the turning point in the campfire scene were the moments where both (editor) Graham Mason and I felt like some really small changes had an outsized impact on the emotional moment,” Donaldson said. “We really fine-tuned that down to the frame.”
Whether a frame goes on too long or cuts too early makes a huge difference in what Sam realizes over the course of “The Good One.” Even if the adults in her life don’t see it, we do.
