"Like Crazy," which won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Picture at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, explores the poignant, honest realities of a whirlwind first love. After a pre-screening at the Kendall Square Cinema, director Drake Doremus and actress Felicity Jones held a candid Q&A with the audience that touched upon everything from the impressive improvisation of the two lead actors (Jones and co-star Anton Yelchin) to Doremus' personal ties to the film's characters.
Question: How much of the film was scripted versus improvisation from the actors?
Drake Doremus: We worked from a very specific 50-page outline, and all of the dialogue was improvised by the actors from that outline. We worked from delving into the characters — understanding their back-story, the emotional beats of the scene and the subtext injected into the characters. We knew all of the parameters in which the scene was going to function, and then the dialogue and the blocking came out of the process of experimenting and finding the scenes.
Q: Was it scarier going into filming without the dialogue written out?
Felicity Jones: The most frightening thing was that I didn't meet Drake [Doremus] or Anton [Yelchin] before I got to Los Angeles. It is quite daunting, but [not] after that first week of spending every minute of the day together and making that decision to throw yourself in. With this style of filming, you forget that the camera is there. It's actually a lot more exciting and interesting than a more conventionally shot film.
Q: What made you want to be a part of this film?
FJ: Apart from slight madness, when I read the outline it was just so truthful. There's no tricks to it, no gimmicks. It's just about people, and those are the kinds of films that I like to see.
Q: Working in this improvised fashion, how does that affect the way you shot the film and maintained the continuity of the scenes?
DD: I'm not as concerned with continuity, to be honest. It doesn't bother me. The camera's constantly moving in the middle of a take, too, so it's not like we're shooting one piece of coverage and then moving to another piece of coverage. It'll just move around when I want it to. Since it's a jump-cut style, not everything had to be the same every time we did the scene. And that was what was magical about it. It would never be exactly the same. We didn't want it to be. We wanted it to function how it needed to every single time in a fresh, new way.
Q: How did you come up with the setting of the United Kingdom?
DD: I'd spent a lot of time in the U.K., in a relationship actually. I was really familiar with London, and I wanted to show my experiences with the city. I was in a relationship with someone from a different country, but then going to London. So, to make it simple, we just made it British.
Q: Regarding the characters' problems with visas, how did that part of the story come about?
DD: Unfortunately, I went through that, so it's a very personal thing. It was no question about telling this story — we had to have that come in the way of the romance.
Q: Are you still bitter?
DD: No, no, no. What's really special about making the film — making the film was hard, but now, sharing it with audiences is really exciting, because I find that so many people have been through similar circumstances, oddly enough. And that's what really touched me. Not bitter, just grateful to have lived life to the fullest.
Q: How difficult was it to get funding for this film?
DD: It's really difficult to get funding. It's hard to convince people when they don't see it on the page that it's going to end up on the screen somehow. It was almost written like a short story. There would be little quotations, and you'd learn a lot about the characters' thoughts, but you wouldn't really understand how that comes to life on the screen. I did, but some financiers didn't, and now they're sorry. The movie was made for only $250,000. We only shot for 22 days and kept it really small, contained and intimate, so it wasn't that big of a risk, but it was still a risk.
Q: How was it working with the challenge of having to portray the development of a relationship when you didn't shoot the scenes chronologically?
FJ: Originally there were year cards over seven years where they go from 19 to 27 years old. Having the separation-of-year cards really helped and enabled us to chart their progression through costumes and changes in development that we wanted to show. But eventually, Drake took them all out.
Q: Watching the film you see that it really is up to the audience to figure out what the time period is. Why did you decide to take out the year cards?
DD: When we watched the film with the cards in, it was distracting. I found myself asking more questions than I wanted to be asking about what I had missed. When it jumped that much time, I was like, "Well, what happened in the last six months?" Whereas without them, you feel like, "OK, this is where they are emotionally" and you don't have to think too much about what you've missed. They just felt lame, to be honest, so we took them out.
Q: Felicity, how were you able to create an intimacy with Anton [Yelchin] so immediately?
FJ: It was partly that we naturally got on as friends and had very similar ideas about our characters. But it was also just the way it was filmed. Drake [Doremus] gave us the space to do what we wanted to do, and to have complete freedom. The combination of that style and the willingness to throw ourselves into it added to our chemistry.
Q: What were some challenges you faced?
DD: We moved a lot of things around. Streamlining and getting the exposition correctly in the first 15 minutes, I find, are always the most difficult to construct in the editing room, because you're constantly trying to figure out the best way to expose what you're going to be watching.
Q: Can you share some of your festival experiences showing this movie?
DD: It's been really fun. Our first screening was at Sundance earlier this year. We hadn't shown it to anyone before that, and we thought this movie was drama-only. Then we started getting some laughs, and we were like, ‘Uh-oh, is this good?' And then we realized it happened at every screening, so that was a good surprise. But festivals are fun. It's like Disneyland for filmmakers.
