Flavorwire: Real actors portraying actors rehearsing for a play is hard to pull off. In your film, these scenes felt like a voyeuristic look into a real rehearsal. Ditto for the scenes in You Wont Miss Me, which you cameo’ed in. What’s your secret for pulling this off?
Joe Swanberg: David Lowery and I wrote a real play and let the actors actually rehearse it. Jane was free to direct them, because she was playing the director of the play, and Josh was free to interject or contribute thoughts because he was the playwright. It moved very quickly and was a lot of fun. I had specific ideas that I wanted to get across, so I gave some general notes before each take, but then I let everyone go. Of course we had to move much faster than a true theater production, because we only had a few days, so we had to let each rehearsal scene in the film stand in for what would have been a week or two of actual rehearsal.
FW: We loved the scene where the director tells Alex that it’s OK to be falling for her hunky love interest in the play. Have you witnessed actors falling in love on set? You and your wife have collaborated on projects. How did you meet?
JS: I don’t know if I would recognize other people falling in love on set. I’m usually too wrapped up in my own thoughts. But I have certainly recognized my own emotions being very heightened while working. Personally I’m more susceptible to falling in love with footage. There’s something about the way it never changes and my ability to edit it that appeals to my own control freak personality.
Having said that, I met my wife at college and I fell in love with her before we worked on any projects together. She told me her favorite movie was Raising Arizona and I fell into a swoon. We generally tend to bicker and disagree when we work together, so our relationship works a lot better away from movie sets.
