I’d been wanting to make a feature length film for years, but the thought of it terrified me. I knew I wanted to make a “mumblecore” movie, having fallen in love with that style of filmmaking the moment I stumbled on the works of Joe Swanberg, the Duplass Brothers, and Lyn Shelton. I loved the naturalistic acting and largely improvised dialogue. I loved the emphasis on dialogue over plot, and the low-budget aesthetic - perfect for a filmmaker who had no money to shoot with. Unfortunately, it was mostly a very American genre of cinema, and I was British. British filmmakers didn’t do films like that, I thought. 

 

I put the whole idea to bed for a long time, concentrating on making scripted short films and touring the festival circuit with them. But the desire to make an improv-based feature wouldn’t leave me and I eventually bit the bullet.

 

I knew there’d be no money for sets or extensive production design, so I’d have to film in real places. It seemed an obvious idea, then, to make the film a road trip movie - we could travel around the UK and find all kinds of interesting and beautiful locations, letting the country’s natural beauty do the visual work for us. I also thought, naively, that having our lead characters spend much of their time in a car would make shooting easier - we could almost control our filming environment while the ever-changing scenery whizzed by in the background. It didn’t make things easier at all. Note to self: shooting in a car is really problematic… as is taking an entire crew on the road! 

 

Roisin Rae and Brooks Livermore were the only actors I considered for the lead roles. I’d been working with them on-stage and on-screen for the better part of a decade, and I knew they had great chemistry. I was certain their improvisation skills were up to the task and that they’d bounce off each other brilliantly. I brought them in to the writing process immediately, and we spent the better part of the next 8 months bashing out the characters and story. By the time we came to shoot, we had a 16 page script outline, with in and out points and the emotional beats of each scene… but other than that, it was up to the actors live and in the moment. Pretty much every line in the film is the result of those spontaneous improvisations caught on multiple cameras in order to have enough usable coverage of each unique take. 

 

The shoot lasted only 12 days, but post-production consumed the next 4 years of my life. The first year alone was taken up with the initial edit - the final stage of writing, in a way, as we shaped the many variations of dialogue into a cohesive script. Some reshoots and pick-ups followed 18 months after our original filming, and an eleventh hour overhaul of the edit - along with a late change to the title - finally presented us with a completed movie almost 6 years to the day after I first said to Roisin and Brooks “So, I’ve got this idea for a film…”