India Donaldson on 'Good One' and Playing with Perspective
Marshall Shaffer
India Donaldson discusses her choice to let her main character, and by extension the audience, sit in silence for so long.
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Slant Magazine
India Donaldson’s Good One marks multiple firsts. In addition to serving as the writer-director’s freshman feature, it’s also the inaugural first-run title released by Metrograph Pictures. Whether Donaldson’s film is a warning shot or a calling card from the repertory beacon of Manhattan’s Lower East Side as it makes its initial foray into releasing new theatrical titles remains unknown. “I’m just really grateful they responded to our film at a time when it’s hard to make movies and get them seen,” Donaldson says.

Good One marks the rarest breed of directorial debuts because it derives strength from listening more than declaring. The film mirrors the experience of its 18-year-old protagonist, Sam (Lily Collias), as she actively takes in her surroundings, both within the natural world and among unnatural human arrangements. After a family friend in her peer group bombastically bows out of a father-child camping trip in the Catskills, she’s left to contend with the egos of her divorced dad, Chris (James Le Gros), and his old chum, Matt (Danny McCarthy), on her own. Donaldson’s patient, perceptive direction lets the awkwardness simmer on low for so long that the moment their unspoken tensions reach a boiling point feels like a seismic event.

I spoke with Donaldson ahead of Good One’s theatrical release. Our talk covered how her collaborations with her cinematographer and editor informed the story’s perspective and the final film’s rhythm, the prioritization of Sam’s experience throughout, and the choice to let the character, and by extension the audience, sit in silence for so long.

There are two popular theories about first features that I love. One is that it’s a burst of expression from the story that a filmmaker has been waiting to tell for years, and the other is that it’s a film you’ll end up making variations on your entire career. Do either of these ring true about Good One?

I think the latter is true. It’s my first feature, but I’ve made shorts before. And with everything I’ve made, I always have this idea that I’m doing something different and trying something new. And then you go revisit the work and you’re like, “Oh, I was just circling around the same ideas.” But to me, there’s something interesting in filmmakers and writers grappling with the same things from different angles. If I’m fortunate enough to be able to make more than one film, I can see myself returning to certain themes! I didn’t think this would be my first movie. I’ve been trying to make a different one for a long time. This script, in many ways, came out of the frustrations around trying to get a film off the ground. I was trying to design something that was makeable in a really instant way. It wasn’t the decades-long percolating story I felt like I needed to tell. But, in many ways, it makes sense that I made a movie about a teenager first.

Do you feel any connection between filmmaking and textiles, the other art form in which you have worked?

Oh my god, yes, totally! At my desk above my computer, I have this little postcard with a photo of Anni Albers weaving at a loom. I actually didn’t specialize in woven textiles, but I know a little bit about weaving. When you’re setting up the loom, it takes an incredible amount of preparation. There’s all this precise design work and preparation that takes an incredible amount of patience before you get to the point where you actually do the thing. It’s just a reminder to welcome the pace at which things happen in life. I’m a real “slow and steady” kind of person. I’m interested in process and drawing attention to the textures of living and how those inform our relationships. That feels very connected to textile-making.

You’ve mentioned “overwriting,” which isn’t something that shows in the final film. Where were you paring it back, pre-production or even down in the edit?

Graham Mason did an interview about editing the film where he talked about how sometimes in editing you feel like you need to totally break something up and reassemble it. But with this movie, it was more like whittling something down into its form. I think that came through in the shooting process and definitely in the edit. Graham spoke to it beautifully: constantly working to distill it down to only the necessary elements. I think with a movie that’s quiet, it’s so easy to go too far either with the dialogue or the information you’re giving. I really wanted to let the audience have their own experience with the movie and not overly telegraph the emotions of it.

I read that you shot this film in 11 days. Were you able to get all the coverage you needed, or did that affect the visual language of the film at all?

It was 12 days—a crucial 12th day! We lost most of [one day] to a thunderstorm, so that’s probably the 11th? I think the only way that we were able to do that was, again, with so many layers of preparation. Wilson Cameron, who shot the film, and I had made shorts together and talked about making movies for probably a decade. All the preparation we were putting into developing our shared visual language allowed us to just go in and be really precise about what we were capturing. And, for me, that was leaning into my central visual idea focusing on Sam’s experience of everything. Even though she says the least amount of dialogue, [I was] really prioritizing her point of view while also showing how much listening and reacting is an act of participation in conversation. I knew that if we had Lily’s coverage of a scene, we had the scene if we had to rush through things. It’s so easy when you’re enjoying watching someone work to want to keep going. It’s almost harder to call it when you’re loving what you’re seeing than when it’s a struggle. My attitude was always if we were short on time, focus on getting Sam’s experience of the scene. If we had that, we have the whole scene, basically.

How were you and Wilson Cameron approaching camera blocking and distance from the actors? Especially when you’re shooting in close-ups, the characters all feel so compartmentalized—until Matt crosses into Sam’s shot at a moment of thematic as well as visual violation. I assume that was planned?

It was a shot that I think he found when we were there, and it wasn’t something we storyboarded. That shot is my favorite in the movie, and I think it’s the most important. That’s Wilson’s eye. And then Graham, as an editor, was finely calibrating when we cut to that shot away from Matt. I remember we were so short for time in shooting that scene, and it was hard to shoot for many reasons. Lilly’s performance was so great, and I remember looking at Wilson and being like, “Oh, he’s so happy with what we’re capturing.” And I was too! But it’s so nice when you see that he felt it in the moment from his camera’s perspective.

The other thing we were thinking about outside of close-ups and being close with the characters was showing them in space—how they’re physically relating to each other in the landscape. Who’s leading the pack on the trail? Who’s behind? I wanted to show those spatial dynamics. As much as we wanted to be close with the characters, I also wanted to step back when necessary.

Maybe it’s a good time to talk about the split-diopter shot…

You’re bringing up all my favorite topics!

Well, it works thematically, but there’s such a thin line between doing it well and “watches a Brian De Palma film once.”

[laughs] Well, that was also something Wilson brought up. We were talking about how it allows you to see everything in focus on the same plane. We were talking so much about point of view and how hard it is to get privacy and own space on a trip like this, you know. For Sam, this space was her own head with these guys who won’t shut up, but also it was physical space in the woods. We knew we wanted to try it, but we didn’t know where it would make sense.

We talked about having the tampon-changing moments evolve in how we understand how they relate to her struggle for privacy. In the beginning, she’s with her friend changing her tampon, totally comfortable. She doesn’t need privacy. It’s actually this beautiful, intimate involvement between these two girls, in my mind. Then she’s alone in a motel bathroom, and then it gets increasingly disrupted by the sound of these boys. And with the split-diopter shot, it’s like these men are present with her and she can’t get away from them. That was another Wilson getting-excited moment. He was like, “Now’s the moment for the split diopter!” At that point, we’d already been shooting for probably a week and a half, and it felt like we really earned it as a tool.

Digging in a little more on the relationship with nature, how do you approach grabbing the establishing shots? It felt to me like there was a running theme of the natural world uneasily coexisting with man-made structures, like the opening shot of the running water and those flimsy rock towers.

That was something that came out of the shooting and editing. I didn’t think that the natural setting would have such a point of view. But as we encountered the bugs like and all the flora and fauna, these flowers that were only in bloom for two weeks during the shoot, elements of the space brought a specificity to the movie. It felt so important to incorporate them.

When we were prepping the film, I had been showing my son his first Miyazaki movies, like My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. I was watching those movies through the eyes of a two-and-a-half-year-old, and I was like, “Wow, these movies really invite you to meditate on what you’re seeing by providing these little empty, quiet moments with nature that point to the larger natural world outside of the emotional lives of these characters.” I think of those shots as gentle punctuations to the story that point to what’s beyond the story.

There’s obviously the extended dialogue scene by the campfire in the third act, but the film seems to be more comfortable dwelling in silence as it progresses. Was that always the intention, or did you find that rhythm in the edit?

I think it became much more pronounced in the edit. When I think about the script versus the film, there are probably 10 pages after the campfire scene in the script, but it’s a third of the movie in the runtime. All the silence became so much more interesting to me once we started editing, and I realized how it would contrast with all of the dialogue that we’ve been subjected to for the first hour. The silence would feel that much more extreme by contrast, and sitting in it longer would elevate it. This gives the audience the opportunity to realize, “Oh, wait, this movie has been really quiet for a long time?” I don’t think that that would work if we hadn’t gone to such an extreme. I mean, extremes are shades of gray, but it was extreme in my mind!

There’s something almost elemental about Good One, but it’s very clearly set in some version of the present with smartphones. How were you calibrating the ways in which devices exert a pull on the characters?

Thinking about our constant connectivity, we’re so self-critical of the ways in which we, as human beings now, are so attached to our phones. But I wrote the movie when I was living at home with my family during early Covid, and my younger half-siblings were in high school at the time. To be 16 and 18 with no social outlet for months, that was such an extreme situation for them. I was like, “Great, I’m with my family, I’m fine with this for a time!” For them, I could see how hard it was, but their phones or computers were this [form of] connection. They could meet collectively with their friends or be in touch with multiple people at once. That was an extreme version of it, but I think it’s true for all of us that there’s this immediate intimacy we can have with people we communicate with regularly because of our phones.

I wanted to capture that with Sam because her social life exists in this device. It’s her one little connection back to her life beyond this experience with her dad and Matt. I was thinking about that and what it means to lose that connection to her friends and a side of herself. Teenagers are maybe more themselves with their friends than they are with their parents. They’re still struggling to reveal themselves to their parents, or it takes more time. That loss of connection with literal cell service for all of them forces them deeper into the dynamics of the present.

Do you consider Good One a coming-of-age movie? Some people consider that subgenre fraught.

To be honest, I never thought about the genre [while making the movie]. But I’m happy for it to exist in that world. It has certain connotations…I wonder if you think of coming-of-age films as being made stylistically for a young audience. But I feel like I made a movie for myself as the audience, the person who’s 20 years removed from that time in my life.

Is your perspective informed now by having a foot in both worlds? Having been the daughter and now being a parent, is there an understanding that there’s a certain amount in that dynamic that the other side will never comprehend?

Totally. After having a kid, it afforded me a newfound sense of empathy to my parents that definitely informed the script. I really wanted the two fathers in the film to be fully fleshed out, complex human beings that we hopefully have all types of feelings towards.

You programmed two films at Metrograph to accompany the film’s release. What are their connections to Good One?

Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum is just one of my favorite movies of all time, so I would probably find any reason to put that if given the opportunity to program a film. For me, it’s one of the richest depictions of a father-daughter dynamic that I’ve ever seen on film. It’s just so specific and delicate that I see something new in that relationship every time I watch that movie, and I’ll never get sick of it. It’s a really patient movie. I love cooking on film, and I love watching people eat together on film. That movie has one of my favorite meals in any movie.

And Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet is another movie about three people on a backpacking trip where one moment fundamentally changes the dynamic. So I think in that sense it’s an interesting companion to this movie. It has, above all, just three absolutely beautiful performances. It’s a movie that I thought about a lot because the success of the movie I wrote totally hinges on these performances. There’s an actor in that movie [Bidzina Gujabidze] who plays like a guide for the couple on this trip, and I think he actually was a real mountain guide. There’s beautiful authenticity in that. And visually, it’s absolutely stunning.

Did your views on their conversation topics change from making Good One? Did your perspective shift around ideas like how Sam says the worst doesn’t just “happen,” and we play some part in the universe’s decision-making?

I think the things that Sam says generally are probably things that I’m more or less aligned with. She’s struggling in that scene. She’s listening to these men, but she’s also wanting her dad at this point to be held accountable a little bit for himself and his actions. I think a part of her character is always trying to find the right words in the moment, but I think that there are a few moments in that scene where she actually does say exactly what she means…even if they don’t hear her.

Do you see the film as hopeful? I don’t think Sam and Chris aren’t simpatico at the end, but the fact that he can make his expectations clear that he’s asking her to drive the car feels like progress in their communication.

In my personal experience, relationship dynamics don’t change overnight. Especially with family, it’s a lifelong process of evolving a relationship. I hope that the ending points to the fact that this is a relationship that will withstand this encounter. It will hopefully help evolve their dynamic in a productive way, even if it takes a long time.