Interview: Lynn Shelton talks about her great, new film OUTSIDE IN
Outside In is an incredibly moving and beautifully-told character study, and the first new film from director/writer/Northwest-treasure Lynn Shelton. It’s one of Shelton’s very best films, even if the comic relief of her outstanding dramedies is much more subtle and distant.
The film stars Jay Duplass as a man, named Chris, forced to navigate a world much different from before he went away to prison for twenty years. It’s a crime that Duplass’ character isn’t fully culpable for, but still receives 100% of the punishment. His former high school teacher, Carol, played by Edie Falco in a brilliant, understated performance, worked tirelessly to hasten his release and to stay in contact with Chris, Duplass’ character, to the detriment of her career and family. She was the only one who made any effort to not forget him while he was away. So when they reconnect in the outside world, Chris develops romantic feelings for Carol, while also developing a (platonic) friendship with Carol’s teenage daughter, Hildy (Kaitlyn Dever).
Outside In is an especially timely film because the issue of mass incarceration is on a lot of people’s minds right now, and there’s something of a reckoning with the system that locks hundreds of thousands of people away each year, while only offering something minimal of a support system for people who get out at the end of their sentence. Employers are reluctant to hire anyone with a criminal record, and the ex-con wears a scarlet letter where they’re shunned and isolated from the community they were removed from. Outside In brings a lot of empathy to the Chris and Carol characters.
The film was shot in rural Washington, Granite Falls, to be specific. It’s a small town with pockets of true beauty, but is a community that had also gained notoriety for the prevalence of methamphetamine fifteen years ago. The recent history of the community and its natural beauty made for a perfect location for the film, which became its own central character.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Lynn Shelton, by phone earlier this week, about her great, new film. Outside In plays in Seattle, starting today, at SIFF Cinema Uptown.
We last talked when Humpday came out, in 2009, and I think this is my favorite movie of yours since then, so I’m excited to talk to you about Outside In. What can you tell me about how this movie came to be?
Well, the narrative and the characters had been percolating for a number of years, actually, and then, in my head, and then, really the backstory… I really had a very clear vision of the 20 years to develop what these characters were like back when Chris was a teenager and his teacher sort of saw a little intellectual spark in him and hoped maybe she could help him get out of this dead end town, sort of saw promise in him. And then boom, he gets out of high school and immediately goes to prison and she ends up befriending him and keeping him going that whole time. I had that whole clear idea in my head and the development of their relationship and falling in love over the course of 20 years without ever getting to touch each other and not even being on each other’s radars being a possibility and that just sort of happening organically. All of that was really clear in my head.
Then, it was really sparked by, to actually pull it all together and make it into a film, it was really sparked by me wanting to work with Jay. And when I was trying to figure out different ideas of characters he might be interested in playing, this wasn’t one that immediately leaped out at me, because it’s just a stretch for him. This is a character that doesn’t have a lot of overlap with the life experience of Jay Duplass the actor. But I realized that I really felt like Jay had so much potential as an actor that he could stretch himself and that there would be range there that he hadn’t yet really been given the opportunity to explore.
So my history with him is that I knew him as a filmmaking peer before he started acting and before I even knew he had any interest in acting at all. And I just loved him as human being. He’s always been very supportive. We’ve sort of had this mutually supportive and very friendly filmmaker level friendship and then I saw him on “Transparent” and I was so blown away and immediately became slightly obsessed with wanting to work with him. So I pitched him this idea, and he just loved it. I think he really was attracted to the challenge of playing a character like this and diving in and researching. Yeah, so that’s where it started.
He was so engaged from the very beginning. I would be developing this treatment and we’d be talking a lot about the character and I like to involve my actors in general in shaping their characters, but he also had a lost to say and a lot of thoughts about the narratives as well. We ended up just trading the draft back and forth and becoming official co-writers later in the process, but he was always engaged from the very beginning.
I thought he was great, and he wasn’t someone that would strike me as being the first choice for someone who’s been incarcerated for 20 years, but he was fantastic.
Oh, I’m so glad you think so. I think it’s incredible too. I think it’s incredible what he has done.
And Edie Falco gave, I think, one of the best performances I’ve seen from her. So how did you get someone with her stature in your film?
Well, she came on later in the process and it was, I’m so grateful again… It was because of Jay, really. I mean it was the combination of the script and Jay, but she had a connection to Jay because they had spent a couple days together, done a couple scenes together on the Gillian Robespierre movie Landline about a year before we approached her with this role, and she just really likes him and really felt like he was funny and fun to be around and a great actor. So, the opportunity to work with him, I think, was very attractive to her.
And then, this role is just not a role that you see a lot, where you get a lot of opportunities to play being an object of desire, having an emotionally complex life for a woman, really, over the age of 40 it’s really hard to find. We were really lucky. She was the last jewel in the crown of our cast. I mean, she owns this part so beautifully, it’s impossible to imagine anybody else playing the role. She’s such a joy to work with. I just can’t say enough about this woman. She’s just… God, what a beautiful performance.
One of the things I loved about it is how you don’t see much in popular culture that covers people trying to re-integrate into life after they’ve been incarcerated, and I think that people are kind of forgotten when they go away for 20 years, in this case. There’s no training class of how to get on with life once you get out.
Yeah, it’s really tough. We both did some research into it. Jay really did a deep dive, just starting with watching interviews of folks on YouTube and then looking at documentaries, and then he actually was able to sit down with some ex-cons and find out what that process was like. On so many different levels it’s challenging. People have preconceptions about you that are really difficult to undo, to overcome. It’s really hard to get a job. That’s one of the reasons. And, it’s also just emotionally just a huge transition and it’s so hard to wrap your skull around just having been not in the real world for so many years, especially this period. When you come out now, there’s been more technological advances and cultural shifts in terms of how people interact with each other and communicate.
And there’s another moment where they’re watching YouTube videos on the television. He’s just trying to like, “WiFi on the TV.” I don’t want to like dwell on it, but I definitely want to give you that sense of what his brain is trying to do, swirling around trying to take all of this in. Yeah, it’s a lot to overcome, so I’m glad you got a sense of that.
This is something I’ve wanted to ask you for several years now. Your films always have really well-written and really deep male characters and I really don’t see that a lot in films. I think you say a lot about masculinity in this movie and in Humpday and in Your Sister’s Sister and My Effortless Brilliance. So, I’m wondering if that’s something you’re interested, or how does it come out that way?
Well, no, I would answer that. And, first of all, thank you for saying that and thinking that and noticing that. I really appreciate it. I really, really do. And, especially coming from a man.
I would answer that the way that Mike Leigh answers… He gets asked a lot about the intelligence and layered female characters that are in his films, and he says, “It’s not that I’m interested in women, in particular, I’m interested in people. I wanna portray people in that way.” And that is exactly how I feel. I’m not super intelligent in every realm. There are these multiple intelligences. But one place that I feel pretty secure in my intelligence is in emotional intelligence. I feel like that’s my secret weapon.
And it’s certainly an area of interest for me. I’ve always been super, super interested in what is going on in people’s heads, especially emotionally. We all screw up and what makes us human is our flaws: the fact that we are flawed and that fact that we are not all black and white. There are so many things going on at the same, so many conflicting emotions and things we’re contending with all the time, all of us. There’s just so much drama inside each and every one of us. And then that and this continual desire, need, hunger to connect. These are the things that really interest me.
And I’m also interested in exploring who are we, what do I believe and how am I behaving? How do all those things contend with each other? Those people-oriented things are what fascinates me and what I like to explore in my films, that I just keep going back to again and again and again.
I think there’s a real focus today on having really well-written women characters, and for good reason, and I think a lot of male characters are stereotypes or hollow or superheroes, so seeing someone that’s important to me. I mean, I haven’t been to prison, but there was a lot in Chris that I really identified with, and not just because I’m a 39-year-old man named Chris that lives in Western Washington, but there were times where I thought, “Wow, there’s a lot inside my head that’s in this character’s head, too.”
I think the thing that drives me more crazy than anything else when I go to the cinema is seeing a two-dimensional human on screen who doesn’t really feel like a real human. Not believing in a human being who’s a character. It immediately pushes me away on some level. I just can’t care about them if I don’t believe in them. So, it is extremely important to me that the people that are on screen in my movies feel like real people.
And, even if at first, you feel like you can size them up and see who they are, hopefully at some point there will be a reveal that “well, no. Actually there’s more to this person than you originally thought.” I love that. For instance, the wife character in Humpday, you don’t get to spend nearly as much time with her as you do the men, but I really wanted her to be as three-dimensional as they were and not just be the sort of device for their narrative to play out. And so I’m probably as proud of her character as I am any other aspect of that movie, because I feel like she comes off as a three-dimensional human being.
It’s men, women, I want everyone to come off that way in my movies. To feel real.
Last week, I interviewed your producer, Lacey Leavitt, for something unrelated, though we did talk about Outside In, but she said, about her short, VR horror film that you’re going to be more scared for a character if you also care about them.
I’m just curious how, why is it like in your films and the things she works on… It feels kind of unique to the Northwest. I don’t see that coming from a lot of other films outside this area. From you and from Megan Griffiths and SJ Chiro. I don’t see that in a lot of other filmmakers other than the Northwest filmmakers.
Well, maybe there’s more consistency there. I think it’s definitely out there. I would say, though, that I do feel like there’s something about regional filmmaking. And maybe it has to do with the fact of this, of LA being a little bit of a machine, so even independent films that are based or shot in LA and crews and filmmakers… I mean, I don’t want to dis people who live in LA by any means or work out of LA. I’ve worked with so many talents down here, which is where I am right now actually.
There’s something special about regional filmmaking, and I feel like it is because it’s outside of those more commercial-oriented centers. There’s a little bit of a disagreement about whether film is a business, is it commerce or art? When people allow themselves to really treat it as art and really feel like it is, it has more soul. And, when you’re making movies in… When there’s a regional filmmaking scene, I feel like there’s more opportunity to be a little more out of the box and perhaps make a more humanist film, you know?
I mean, I’ve seen it in other regions as well. I think of Kat Candler’s movie Hellion, is a great example of just a beautiful character-based film that has very, very real feeling characters and it has an incredible sense of place and an incredible sense of relationships, complicated relationships, complicated people. That’s an example of another non-Northwest film that has these similar sort of approach.
Maybe it has to do…All those people you just mentioned are all women, as well, and I just mentioned another woman filmmaker. Maybe that has something to do with it. Again, I don’t want to paint a broad brushstroke through a lot of emotionally intelligent male filmmakers as well, but it is interesting to note, I think, that all the people you just mentioned are women.
I also wanted to ask you about filming in Granite Falls because it’s like it’s own central character to Outside In.
I always had it in my head that this film was going to take place in not Seattle and not in a bigger urban kind of environment. There are so many places outside of Seattle and Bellevue and Spokane that are like this in Washington state, that are smaller places where there’s a lot of struggle going on in people’s lives: economic struggle, struggle with addiction to opiates and meth. It’s notorious. There are a lot of economically depressed places that are surrounded by natural beauty… It’s interesting. There’s an integration of natural beauty everywhere you look. All this gray and green, which to me is just beautiful. But, it’s also kind of oppressive: that constant rain, the constant gray, the giant trees. It’s sort of a combination, you know?
The thing that was so beautiful about Granite Falls is that if you look out for it, it’s so subtle, but I don’t know if people would really notice this if they’re not looking for it. In many of the shots outside, you can see in the distance, foothills that are half clear cut. So you can see the indication of this battle between man and nature, between the civilized world and the natural world. It kind of is emblematic of that border line. And the house that Hildy is actually doing an art project, or her sanctuary, her little abandoned burnt-out house, is being taken back by nature. You can see the plants coming in and the decay happening and that sort of life cycle happening.
So that border between that battle line between the natural, chaotic state and civilized, this is the way things are supposed to be and society. It’s emblematic. It sort of echoes what’s going on emotionally for these people. I’m supposed to like and be in a relationship with this prescribed, pre-approved list of humans, and I’m not supposed to have a real soul connection to somebody who’s completely in a different place in their life, a different age range, a different cultural experience and life experience. I’m not supposed to be in love with this person. But, you know, things don’t always happen as planned, and emotions aren’t always convenient. So that’s really important to me on so many different levels.
The reason we ended up with Granite Falls was simply because I was looking for that kind of place. Again, there are a lot of places like that in Washington State. But when I sat down with my amazing location scout, Dave Drummond, he already had in his archives a bunch of different spots, because he knows all of the state like the back of his hand. He had scouted for Captain Fantastic actually, that Viggo Mortensen movie from a few years back, and Granite Falls was one of the places he’d kind of done an initial scout. They didn’t end up using it, but he had this folder of photographs and I looked at it and immediately said, “Let’s go there tomorrow. I want to go there physically and look around.”
It was like every single spot, it was exactly what I had envisioned in my head. It was exactly the right size town. It had all of the kinds of houses that I was looking for for the different locations. It was amazing. We embedded ourselves there. It was so small we couldn’t sleep there. There were no hotels anywhere, so I think the crews slept in a hotel in Marysville a little ways away, a half an hour away. There was bed and breakfast in Lake Stevens that the lead actors and the producers stayed in. And then we would all commute. Our base camp was in the American Legion Hall. It was right in the center of town. And every location, I mean 90 percent of the locations were between one and three blocks away, so you’d see us tromping off with our little carts of equipment to the location. We barely used the trucks. We shot in just about every inch of that town. The whole town knew us by the end of our shoot and it was really wonderful.
I really like being geographically specific in my work and giving a strong sense of place. I remember seeing Hell or High Water right before I started shooting this film and saying “That is what I want. I want you to feel like you’ve been to Granite Falls, like you’ve been to upstate Washington in the foothills of the Cascades.” You feel like you’ve actually physically gone there.
It’s gorgeous and I love that, like I said, that Granite Falls is its own crucial character in this film. Like you talked about Hildy’s little space, the house that was burned down. What I loved about that is that here in Seattle that wouldn’t exist. A house like that, it burns down, someone’s going to be ready to put something new on top of it immediately.
Yup. Yup. Exactly. And that’s just been sitting there derelict for awhile. That place. And originally, her sanctuary was, my original vision in the script was it would be under a bridge because there are all these rivers and all these great bridges. The one that we scouted and found, we looked under all these great bridges. And then there was an enormous rain and the rivers all rose six feet over the weekend and they all flooded out and we realized this was a little precarious. Never mind. And so we shifted kind of last minute and found this location. It was just perfect. And it was so perfect in so many other ways, too, because it echos other stuff she does in the movie. And, anyway, I just couldn’t be happier with it. I love it.
I’m so glad you made this movie because it’s been a few years between your last film, and I know you’ve been really busy. I see your name in the credits of just about every TV show that I watch.
Yeah, and I love directing television. I didn’t think I was going to be a serious TV director, I thought I would do an episode or two a year and keep the mortgage paid, help fill in those lakes while I continued making movies. Then I just started getting really heavy into TV because all these wonderful shows that I adore were asking me to direct, and meanwhile the movies I was trying to put together of all various sizes, scales, just for one reason or another, they were just taking a longer time to develop. Some of them just feel apart. It took four years it took between being on the set of Laggies and being on the set of this film. It was really fascinating to see what a difference it made to be on set so much in those years because I’ve learned so much doing television. I think television really shaped me, gave me so many more tools in my tool kit as a director. I felt like I had so much more confidence in the sense of ease on set this time around. It was really fascinating from the last time I made a film.
I love that you have a lot of people that I see in stuff in Seattle all the time, like Charles Leggett and Alycia Delmore that have important parts in Outside In.
Yeah. Louis Hobson. It’s the second time I’ve used Louis, big theater guy. Charles Leggett was great to work with, kind of a bit of an honor actually. He’s such an institution on the Seattle stage. Edie loved working with him. She was very impressed with him, and that made me super happy to see.
There’s even a cameo of, very brief, but she’s definitely critical, Pamela Reed. I don’t know if you noticed her, but she has an incredible resume. I was just watching The Right Stuff recently. She was one of the astronaut wives. And she lives, I think in Tacoma, I want to say. So it was really great we could get her as well, a local. I saw her a few years ago on The Seattle Rep stage doing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It was absolutely astonishing. She’s such an incredible talent.
So, yeah, it’s really fun to be able to dip into the local talent of acting pools.
I wish I could talk to you all morning, but I’ll wrap it up. What’s going on with this film? I know that it’s, you’re playing at SIFF Cinema this weekend and what about beyond that? Are you releasing it out to several cities slowly?
Yeah. It opened last weekend in a bunch of, a nice little list of cities, including New York and LA, but also few others. This week it showed up at, on Friday it will be kind of a lot of different spots in the Northwest and beyond, including Chicago, but it’s going to be in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Port Orchard, Winthrop, WA; Hartford, CT; Pleasantville, NY; Halifax, Nova Scotia, of all places, and Chicago, Illinois as well. And then, it’ll be the Ashland Film Festival in Oregon the week after that. It’s playing, I believe in Eugene this week. So, lots of different spots in the Northwest, which is great. Makes me really happy. And then it’ll roll out to a few others. Maybe more will be added, I don’t know.
And then it’s available on VOD platforms like iTunes, for instance. You could rent it on iTunes for those who don’t feel like it’s going to be able to come to their city. And I can’t guarantee that it will make it to many more markets, we’ll see. So, iTunes and then eventually it’ll be on Netflix, but not for awhile. Not for a couple of months. Which is great, because it gives us an opportunity to have it in the theaters and play a couple more festivals. It will be at the Louisiana Film Festival. People can see it in New Orleans, places like that.
So, yeah, it’s really pretty satisfying because it’s the best of all worlds. It’ll be a bunch of different theaters… If we can get word out, we can get there. And then, you know, it’ll be available for everybody basically, the rest of the world, on Netflix after June.
I love that it’s playing places like Winthrop because I, when I go through these small town like that, I think “Oh, this place is gorgeous, but I don’t think I could live here because I don’t know what movies, like yours, would ever come through.”
Yeah, exactly. I guess the story with Winthrop is they have a brand new cinema that everybody is super excited about over there called Barnyard Cinema. It’s supposed to be just spectacular. I can’t wait to go see it myself. I did a WTF interview with Marc Maron last week and the booker heard the interview and immediately called the distributor and said she wanted to book the film. It was such a great story. I was really happy to hear that. It is the kind of film that I hope plays in a lot of smaller, independent cinemas. I think it’s also gonna open in Bellingham, which is great. Probably the closest to Granite Falls. It’ll be at the Pickford Center.
It’s really great when a smaller community is has an art house cinema. It’s a pretty special combination.
100% agree. I think I’ll wrap up. Is there anything else you want me to know that we didn’t talk about?
The thing I would say, the other thing that I think that makes this film special and probably makes it my favorite film to date… That’s a terrible thing to say. It’s almost like saying, “This is my favorite of my children.” So, I feel a little guilty saying that. But, one thing that really makes it special for me is the score, because I’ve been wanting to work with Andrew Bird for a long time. I’m just super fan of his, and the fact that he came in and so beautifully created this just, in my mind, perfect, perfect soundtrack for this film… it just puts the icing on the cake. So, any Andrew Bird fans out there should definitely make an effort to see the movie.
