Sundance’s 2011 Grand Jury Prize Winner Like Crazy hits home with anyone who’s ever had a long distance relationship, and is now on a fast Oscar track. To bring you the inside scoop on a recent Oscar Series Screening hosted by The Wrap in Los Angeles, we captured the Q and A with Director Drake Doremus (Douchebag), Anton Yelchin (Star Trek) and Felicity Jones (The Tempest.) This love story was filmed in 22 days in Los Angeles and London, and Anton reflected, “Because it’s such an intimate experience, you really loose your life to their life…It felt like 6 years in this inter-continental relationship.”
In this heartfelt movie, Anton Yelchin (Jacob) and Felicity Jones (Anna) capture the intense heartache that often comes from a long distance love affair. This couple has extraordinary circumstances with a 6,000 mile distance between London and Los Angeles, and you can feel every emotion that they’re going through as they text each other, deal with time zone differences, and wonder what the other person is doing all the time. Jennifer Lawrence (Academy Award Nominee for Sundance hit, Winter’s Bone) works with Jacob, and plays his lust when the couple spends months separated.
During this Oscar Series Screening Q and A, Sharon Waxman, The Wrap, asked the panel about what it was like to work without a script. Drake shared his reasoning, “We have an outline that’s about 50 pages long....It’s a really exciting process to collaborate and to find things together and to really have these incredible actors live these characters from the inside out and watch something organically happen and to capture that, so the idea of writing a full script is not right for me……this process is something I’ve been working on for a couple years.”
And when asked to expand on the filming experience as an actor, Felicity Jones explained, “The outline reads a bit like a short story, in a way, that there is a certain back story about the characters, and there may be specific points in the scene that we have to hit, and suggestions to say to further the plot. When we come to filming, it’s up to us to find our way through it and to get to those points in a way that is naturally fit and organic.”
It was also fun to hear Anton Yelchin’s take on working without a script and learn about how a CD of music set the mood, “The outline is very emotional…when we got the outlines, they came with a CD of songs that matched certain scenes. Some of the songs are in the film, but not all of them. The outline was like an experience because it read like a short story, and then you felt everything. And by feeling everything, you then figured out who these people were and knew what they were going to say. But the CD was really great. I listened to that CD a lot when we were shooting, and I tend to be very cynical and cold hearted about love stories, but the CD actually broke me.”
Drake explained the filming process with an outline, “What’s magical is when they’re not thinking and they’re just being and they’re just living within Anna and Jacob…If you want to do something real, you have to make it as real as possible so every condition is made to feel like it’s documented, so we shot the movie like a documentary in that sense.” And filming a movie like a documentary actually has budget advantages.
With a goal to make a film a year, similar to Woody Allen, Drake’s budgets are on an upward track. His first film at Sundance, Douchebag cost $25,000, Like Crazy budgeted $250,000, and his next film will be a romantic thriller starring Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce and Amy Ryan for just under $10 million.
When you watch Like Crazy, you’ll see that this movie must have been made with a big heart. Drake expanded on the film’s inspiration, “Yes, it’s very personal. I have a lot of feelings and emotions of going through a seven year relationship with a woman overseas, getting married and going through that experience.” Whether you live an hour apart or have 10,000 miles between you, the raw emotions of a long distance love are the same and brilliantly captured in this Sundance hit. Watch for Drake, Anton and Felicity on the red carpet on February 26th at the 84th Academy Awards to see if this long distance love goes gold.
© Liz H Kelly @LizHKelly, National Digital Entertainment Columnist, Sunrise Road Media, http://sunriseroadmedia.com
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