Director Katie Aselton on Moving From Mumblecore to Mack and Rita
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post Director Katie Aselton on Moving From Mumblecore to Mack and Rita appeared first on Consequence.
In Los Angeles, it feels like everyone wants to be young — except for Mackenzie “Mack” Martin (Elizabeth Lail), a 30-year-old woman who’s ready to skip to her senior citizen days and live her best life. Cue some magical realism (via an ad hoc past lives regression machine/tanning bed), and Mack finds her consciousness now inside a 70-something woman who starts going by Rita (Diane Keaton). It’s a fun, 2022-esque spin on high-concept body-swap classics like Big and Freaky Friday, which did mark a big change from director Katie Aselton’s past experiences as a filmmaker.
While Katie Aselton’s not a first-time director, she tells Consequence that she was eager to take on this project because “I hadn’t done a full-fledged comedy as a director, so I was really excited to lean into that.” Plus, she says, “I was excited about the message that this movie has. I loved the heart of the movie, what it says, what it says to young girls, what it says to middle age women, and what it says to older women.”
Aselton has directed two other films, 2010’s The Freebie and 2012’s Black Rock prior to now — but in those cases, “My first film was fully improvised with an outline by me. My second film was written by my husband [Mark Duplass] and co-written with me, story by me and then we improvised a lot, but there was a full script,” she says.
Both of Aselton’s films belong to a subgenre of indie film that became known in the mid-2000s as “mumblecore” — pioneered by a number of filmmakers including the aforementioned Mark Duplass and his brother Jay, the genre came to define a certain type of storytelling: character-focused low-budget productions, with a naturalistic approach to dialogue often driven by improv.
Meanwhile, Mack & Rita “was a full script written by two people that I wasn’t married to [Madeline Walter and Paul Welsh], and that was great,” Aselton says. “That was really great, to get new fresh voices in there — I think a lot of times when you’re writing and directing something, the voice can get very singular.”
While working with the script, though, Aselton created space for improvising on set, especially since Diane Keaton herself is no stranger to improv after working on fully improvised films like Annie Hall. “It was like ‘Diane, loosen it up — this is the start point, this is the endpoint. However you want to get there, just go for it,'” Aselton says. “She’s got it in her bones. We absolutely did improvise in this and loosened things up and I think that’s what makes it special.”
Aselton, it probably should have been mentioned sooner, is also a well-established film and TV actress, thanks to her starring role in FX’s The League, along with supporting performances in shows and movies including Legion, The Morning Show, and Bombshell.
This may be a factor in why her Mack & Rita cast feels that as a director, Aselton is “the sun.” At least, that’s how Taylour Paige (Zola), who plays Mack’s best friend Carla, puts it. “She’s just so sweet, so excited. She approaches it with this really great energy and attitude and just like a joy. Which I think is the heart of this film: It’s sincere, it’s earnest, you know? So you hope that the director of an earnest film is also earnest.”
Adds Paige, “She’s the homie, you know? She’s like, ‘Okay, in this scene, here’s the truth of the scene and here’s what we’ve gotta do. I feel like she speaks to us like we’re on the same level. Like, ‘We all want this thing to work. We want it to go well — how do we do that?'”
It’s the kind of connection that isn’t exclusive to directors with acting experience, but certainly directors with acting experience tend to have that quality. As Lail observes, “They know all the insecurities that come with being an actor, so they can extend grace in a different way. And I think [Aselton] understands to make it about the story and make the direction simple. She’ll say, like, ‘You know when you’re hanging out with your best friend?’ and you have this deep knowing — you’re like, oh yeah, I know what it is to be hanging out with my best friend.”
Adds Dustin Milligan, a love interest for both Mack in both her 30-year-old and 70-year-old phases, “It’s rare to have that kind of collaboration sometimes even between your own castmates, but then especially with the director, depending on how the show or movie you’re on is structured. Katie, through experience and also just through who she is, what her spirit is, led with this ‘we’re all making this thing together, let’s have fun’ energy. And it was all as much about what she thought as what we thought. That’s a rare gift. I think that was really one of the highlights of doing this movie.”
Aselton consciously made the choice to not take a role herself in the film because, she says, “I really took the responsibility of steering a ship that Diane Keaton was on very seriously, and I didn’t want to be distracted or spread too thin — and there wasn’t a right role for me so it made it very easy to be like ‘yeah, this isn’t my turn.'”
It was a decision she ended up being grateful for because the film “was a huge undertaking. It was a bigger movie than I had ever made before, with a much larger cast than I had ever worked with before, so I just really wanted to make sure that I was fully focused and paying attention.”
A body-swap movie like Mack & Rita would not necessarily fall under the umbrella of “mumblecore,” but as someone who was intimately involved with the genre in its heyday, Aselton says that she feels like the movement as it one time existed is no longer active. Instead, she says, “With the marketing of movies and what movies are able to be bought, sold, and watched, I think that the concept of mumblecore has been absorbed into a larger, more palatable genre.”
That genre, she says, basically comes down to “what sells big out of Sundance or sells out of Sundance at all anymore, or any of the film festivals. I’m excited by movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once, I think it’s a totally unique take on storytelling — it is character-based, character-driven, with a really strong heart and a really unique filmmaker’s vision. Is it mumblecore? No. But is it really unique storytelling, and emotional and thought-provoking? Yeah.”
As she continues, “I think the heart of mumblecore and what that is — very strong grounded performances and really simple filmmaking, not glossy and gorgeous — is still there. Everything morphs and everything changes and evolves but I think if you really look, it’s there still. I hope that even moving into larger projects, I can still hold onto the basic foundation of what mumblecore is, which is real human connection and really thoughtful introspection.”
Those feel like ideas that a great movie can always make room for, perhaps most especially in a body-swap comedy.
Mack & Rita is in theaters now.
Director Katie Aselton on Moving From Mumblecore to Mack and Rita
Liz Shannon Miller
Popular Posts
