I think that’s great because everyone is just so on top of their game. What was it like to work with Bill (Skarsgard) and Kyra (Sedgwick) and Jeffery (Donovan)? Because everyone is just so incredible!
Monroe: Thank you, I agree. I’ve been watching it lately and I’m just so impressed by everyone. I mean, it was a blast. It was so much fun. Not often do you get these really long scenes in movies and they’re challenging, but they’re really fun. Being able to work…Billy is obviously an incredibly talented actor and so is Jeff. We had so much fun just kind of playing around with these scenes and I do know that everything was rushed but I felt like when we had these big scenes, that we had time to get to the place we really needed to get.
Olsen: What’s funny with Jeff and Kyra too is the different styles that the two couples had just being generationally from two different places. Also, I think that while Jeff and Kyra have plenty of film experience, they’re at this point mostly known for their TV work. Both of them were number one on the call sheet for these super, super-duper popular shows for six, seven years. So we were worried when we were going in, like, are these two going to be total divas and it was the exact opposite of that. It was the best of both worlds because they weren’t pretentious in any way. They were so good to work with. They were hanging out on set for scenes they weren’t in, like really just being such a part of the creative process. But, then they still had that TV acting toolbox that they would just nail it. They were like machines, they were so good. Sometimes we would go up and give one of them a note in our director speak and be like “So that was really great, what you did earlier, but–” and they would be like “You don’t need to do that, just tell me the different things. Just tell me to do it and then I’ll do it.”
“…they still had that TV acting toolbox that they would just nail it.”
Dan Berk: Like technical stuff from like seasons and seasons of television. One of the first days we worked with Jeff–you know sometimes when you’re in a tight shooting situation, an actor can’t always work against the actual actor that would be there. So you set their eyeline with a little piece of tape on the wall or something like that. We were all up—the script supervisor, the AD, and Bobby and I were all up at the monitor discussing where his eyeline should be and Jeff was like “Just put the tape right there 3 inches below that C-stand”.
Olsen: We were like “Jeff, you’re not even at the monitor, buddy!”
Berk: But yeah, he knew his own eyelines without even knowing what the frame looks like and we were like “Holy S**t!”
Olsen: Like blocking, and a lot of these things, it’s tough. You’ll get a day to think about the blocking, you know it’s not a bigger movie where you’re going in there three weeks before and figuring all this s**t out. So, you know, being there and having them there, you know, they’ve been in every kind of scene and every kind of physical orientation. A person sitting, a person standing, a person laying down, someone standing over them. You can imagine from all these hundreds of episodes of tv and dozens of movies that they’ve been in. They both just had such a great recall of all of that where one of them would be like “Oh, another time I did this it worked when I turned my shoulder this way and then looked to the left because we’re still catching light but not blocking a doorway.” They would just have great ideas like that and it just helped everything move really fast.
