SXSW Film Interview: Katie Aselton Calls the Shots

We already love you.

I love you.

We're so amused by those types of conversations.

Do your research gals, do your research.

So anyway, loved the film. We suppose we should actually interview you as opposed to just spending the next 20 minutes telling me how great you and your movie are.

You can do that. And that will be one of the better interviews ever, actually. I love you.

You are funny. This is going to be the girliest interview ever.

You are pretty.

Ha! So, we feel like people talk about this all the time, as far as the plot of the film goes, couples and who their celebrity "freebie" get-out-of-jail-free card would be.

Which is very dangerous when you live in Los Angeles, you shouldn’t do that. We have the opportunity all the time. I run into George Clooney all the time.

All the time?

No, I don’t. I always say when Mark leaves me, that is who I am going to marry, just so that he knows.

But, we feel like people are familiar with the idea of The Freebie.

Yes

But, where did the idea for the film come from and why did you think it was needed to be made?

It needed to be made because I needed a job. But the idea came from me and a really good friend of mine sort of complaining about our relationships where nothing was really that wrong. We realized that we were just sort of nostalgic for the good ole days of being single and having that hook up and then giving a fake phone number afterward because you never have to see them again. You don’t have to follow through him. You can have that fun of a first kiss. You get so many beautiful things out of marriage, but you do lose that feeling. That is the one thing I feel like you give up, that feeling of a first kiss.

And we would never ever compromise what we have now to get that back but we miss it and wouldn’t it be so awesome if you could have both and you could be with someone where that was fine where you could explore the possibilities? But that would never really work. And I was like, ding! Here’s my movie. The ding happened after months of me wanting to work. I need to...I want to work on something that I love. I want to do something the way I love to do it. And I wasn’t getting those opportunities, so I just made it happen for myself.

But now you are in The League!

I know. And it also happened to me at the same time. Do you watch the show?

Of course we do.

We met Jackie (Marcus Schaffer) and Jeff (Schaffer), the show runners, in November and totally fell in love with each other all mutually. The show was set up somewhere else than FX—it was set up at HBO at the time. And then it fell out of HBO and went into purgatory somewhere and we sort of thought it was just, you know, gone, so I went off and I made The Freebie. And then the next thing I know, they call us up. They are like, it's at FX, the network needs to see you. And so we we did like this sort of pseudo studio test—I have tested for pilots before where it is this massively stressful thing, but this was more of like a chemistry test between the whole cast. And the next thing we know we have pilot! Oh my god! This show got picked up! Oh my god! We got renewed for another season! Now I get to do what I love to do, the way I like to do it.

When we first saw a commercial for The League, we did a double take and were like, wait....is that Mark Duplass? What the hell is going on?!

It is bizarre and it is bizarre for us on both sides. The people that know us like from the indie world, they are like, what they are doing? And then there’s people that only know us from The League and then they see us together and it totally blows their minds, blows their mind that Pete would be with Jenny. They can’t handle it.

There was awhile where we would go to film festivals and people would ask Mark, "Why wasn’t Katie in Baghead?" And Mark would say, "Because they are other actors out there in the world. She doesn’t have to be in everything." So in the indie world, we have to do everything together all the time. But now our movies are playing at the same festivals! I am going to the Boston International Film Festival and I think that is going to be my first film festival without Mark. I don't know what to do. [Laughs] It's terrifying! But yes, in one world we're connected and are inseparable and in another world we don't belong together.

Ok. So back on track, back to film.

Sorry!

No, we did that to ourselves and we're happy to hear about what's going on with The League, frankly.

This is what I do; I have hard time staying on task.

Back to the idea of The Freebie and it not actually being possible. Have you experienced anyone coming up to you and saying, "I did this. That story is my story?"

Well, kind of. The story that I will tell is that there is someone else who is connected with the movie who has had this experience of being in an open relationship, which is really interesting, so we had that experience to draw from. It wasn't me. I will say that, but someone who is very influential in the making of the movie had an open relationship for ages and that was really interesting and is little different than having a freebie.

We premiered at Sundance. After the premier it's crazy, everyone sort of raids the front to talk to you, but there was one girl who was sort of like lurking and she was sort of just in my eye line—I was hugging people and saying thank you thank you, thank you— and she was still there. She was young like 24, or 25, and she stayed in until the very end and she said, "I just had to introduce myself because I just have the most bizarre experience, in that you just told my story. My husband and I got married and six months in we decided to do this and we set it up just like you did. The only thing we did different is that we gave him a three day period because he had the same issue of not thinking he would be able to close the deal; it's so much easier for girls."

Well, the film feels so real, and it's so affecting we feel like we could see that happening; we could see people coming up to you and saying, you just told my story. They might have had a different experience or whatever but still....

It was really wild because for me, my biggest fear making it was that it was too surreal, too out there, what couple would really do this? But I think if you're keeping it human as it goes along...people make stupid decisions all the time. I do it all the time. They are constantly messing up, with the best intentions and Annie and Darren have the best intentions when they go into this, they are doing it because they love each other and they convince themselves and it’s a weird head game and they get so far that they don't want to disappoint the other one, because the other one is into it and so they don't want to pull out because they want to be supportive of their spouse's needs you know, which is so sad really.

I watch it now and there are so many points where I think that's the moment where they should have said NO… that is it. You know, but it changes, there are so many moments where I want them to just slam on the brakes and stop.

That's actually a really good point because we were thinking about it yesterday and when the credits rolled and we were so tense from watching it...

That’s what my sister-in-law said because she has seen a number of the cuts but she hasn't seen the final one, and she was like, "I'm so tense. I’m sweating. I’m so stressed out right now!"

The only other movie I can think that made me feel that way was The Hurt Locker .

Oh god, that movie broke my heart.

Every single muscle in my body was tensed up, and I feel like, this film, strangely enough...

[Laughing] You are definitely the first person that is comparing The Freebie to The Hurt Locker, aside from having a female director.

[Laughing] I’m going to be the first one, but because, in a way they are going through their lives and it is like the relationship Hurt Locker, they are coming upon these emotional bombs....

[Laughing] Can I put that on my poster?!

[Laughing] You can if you want.

"The Relationship Hurt Locker."

But, you know, they are coming to these emotional bombs and they are trying to defuse them without hurting each other's feelings.

Dax (Shepard) has a really good point about this: he is always saying that when you are addressing sexual issues in a relationship, that's like the hardest possible mountain to climb because there is so much ego involved and no one ever wants to admit that they are not connected sexually. You can say you aren't connecting emotionally because those are things that are less tactile, but sexually, you are really like killing someone when you are saying there is something missing.

I heard something about the script and I know you worked off the six page synopsis. Did you rehearse at all?

No. Dax—and we're not saying this just because it sounds cool to say—literally came on to the project 12 hours before shooting, including a night of sleep. He came on at 10:30 pm and at 10:45 am the next day he came over for wardrobe, and then we started shooting that afternoon. And I'm pretty sure he signed on without even reading the outline; he had no idea what he was getting into. So no, we didn't rehearse. We just have good chemistry together, we just get along, we really like each other and it's easy to work with people like that. The guy who was before him was not as easy to work with. It was harder.

Well we're really glad that you found someone that you have that chemistry with because it was totally believable.

But it's interesting when you talk about rehearsals, because we could've done two months of rehearsals and created a whole back-story for our couple, like where we met, what we've done and where things started to go wrong, but it was the second that we started shooting it was like, boom, Annie and Darren have mad love for each other, with flaws. I fell madly in love with Dax for eleven days, and then we broke up.

[Laughing] Did you have to mourn the death of your fake relationship?

Yeah, it was so weird the last couple of days when we got into the sad stuff. It was so hard. Dax and I were so sad, because we had the happy montage in the beginning of the film and that was our favorite day of shooting because it was just all this fun, couple-y stuff to do, and then at the end we had to shoot the sad montage stuff and it just sucked. Nat Sanders, the editor, was going through the footage and said, "Katie, you have no sad montage stuff," and I said, "What? No.. we didn't like to shoot it." We weren't enjoying shooting it, so we just shot some more fun montage stuff. He asked why there was fun montage stuff and I said because we were just getting too sad. We couldn't do it, it was so hard. The last day in particular, with the big fight—because we shot it all chronologically—was so sad. It was the fastest, most intense relationship, and then it was over.

Was there ever any variation on the big blow-up kitchen scene, where you discussed what had happened the night that you took your freebie?

Yes, there is a cut that exists on someone's computer that has what actually happened inter-cut into the conversation. It was when everything was much less linear than it is now and it was a lot of flopping back and forth in the story and in the kitchen scene we cut to what actually happens that night, to what each of them did. Talk about defusing, we found that that sort of took all the air out of that scene because you need to stay with them, and when you take them out of it you just get angry at them.

Well you say linear, but the movie is very non-linear...

It was much less linear than it is now, there was a whole lot of flopping back and forth.

Since everything was improvised, what was the editing process like?

Well, we shot everything chronologically, so while the outline, and my intention for the movie was to be non-linear, we shot it all in time order. The editing process was a flippin' miracle. I have no idea how Nat made heads or tails of anything we did, he's a genius. I think what really helped is that Nat, and Ben Kasulke, my DP, and my producer all knew the story that we wanted to tell, and we all wanted to tell the same story. It wasn't as if we came to this with conflicting ideas—which would have been hard because we didn't have a script. But we had an outline, and we knew it backwards and forwards, and we knew what the life of this movie was. We were all, somehow, on the same page.

Nat wanted to tell the same story I wanted to tell, so he could see through this mass of footage to where the story was. We ran these crazy long takes, so that we could get these natural moments. So you have a 40 minute long take, and the first five or ten minutes you're dealing with people who know that the cameras are right there, but at minute eight or twelve the actors forget the cameras are there and they get into the scene. And then, you're into the scene and you're working out the kinks. And then, you know, at minute 25, that's where it's like, you get a totally natural performance and they found their zone, they're in there, no one's yelling cut because I'm the director and I'm in the scene. I'll stop the scene when I damn well please. You get to get into it and find that really natural space where it's easy and comfortable and that's whats really cool. But Nat can see that in the footage, you know, and this is what Nat does, like Nat did Hump Day and he did Medicine for Melancholy, so he's very comfortable in this world. He also did a lot of reality TV. So he's comfortable with tens of hours of footage, and working with that and finding the magic moments in there and scanning through all of the hours that are bullshit.

Yeah, it all seems so natural and we know that you had said during the Q&A that there were 30 minute takes. And we just wondered to ourselves if you guys would forget that the cameras were there.

Yeah, but you need the right actors in the scene to do that, you know what I mean? You can only forget if you truly engage with the person across from you, because if the person across from you isn't engaging you're like, "What the fuck am I doing? Why am I saying all these words?" Dax is so good, he's so good. You can be in a scene with him and he's got these eyes, and their like this big and you just fall right into them. And you're like, "Uh huh, we're married. I love you."

Katie Aselton and Dax Shepard plot out a very bad idea in The Freebie

But, and it's not just cause he's cute; he gives you, and he's so open and vulnerable and lovely and cute.

He has very soulful eyes.

He does have very soulful eyes. So that was really awesome to work with because, you know, you work with actors who aren't like that sometimes. And even Steve Rannazzisi, my husband on The League, is like that, it's so easy to believe that he's my husband because you just can get in that place and you're like "I love you, I'll marry you." I've worked too many times with people where you're just like, "I'm just gonna say the words and smile," you know. But we we're lucky, I don't know what the question was so I don't know if I should wrap up this answer. Yes. I'm horrible at ending answers.

No, it's fine, we actually can't remember what we asked either, but... Regarding some of what we talked about, as far as getting the right actors, had you always intended to be the lead?

Yeah, I did, I sculpted this project for me to act in something. Acting is what I love and what I really, really love to do and directing was something that I just sort of ended up having to do so I could get a job because I was the only person who would hire me. Now I'm excited because I think I can do two things, which is awesome. And I'm excited to direct something else, and I'm excited to act in a whole lot more other things.

So what is next?

Well, season 2 of The League is coming up. Are you gonna be here on Tuesday night? Come to Emos Tuesday night. I think it's at 9 o' clock on Tuesday night, they're doing a big stand-up thing with the whole cast, except for Mark, who has to go back and work. So you should totally come. So I've got that.

I was really hoping to get an acting job this spring, but I don't think it's gonna work out. And then, maybe find a project to either act in or direct in the fall, after we finish shooting. I don't know, the world is my oyster! What's it gonna be?

It's totally opened up to you.

I know, and to think there was a time where I had to make movies for myself to act in.

Well, we think that's a good lesson, you know, if you can't get hired then...

Well, that's the Jay and Mark Duplass mentality: there's no reason you can't make these movies yourself. If you have an original idea, go out there and make it, it's too easy, and it's too cheap and if you're at film festivals you know everyone that can do things well, so use what you have at your fingertips and flippin' make something and stop bitching and moaning, and expecting the world to come to you, which is what I was doing for quite some time. And then you're here, at South by Southwest sitting at the Radisson and drinking an iced chai.

And having people tell you that your movie is lovely and wonderful. And It really is.