INTERVIEW: The making of Ashgrove

I met the creators of, and actors in, in Glasgow on the day of the world premiere of their new film. I asked how the film came about, and what their creative process was.

JEREMY LALONDE (Writer, Producer and Director)

The three of us wrote the film (Amanda Brugel, Jonas Chernick and Jeremy LaLonde). All the actors collaborated on creating their own characters. Jonas and I conceived this film in 2019 – pre pandemic. We were travelling around the country. We had made this film called James vs his Future Self, which was also on at the Glasgow Film Festival, and we were saying ‘what are we going to do next?’

Comedy is kind of our go-to and our comfort zone and we wanted to get out of our comfort zone and do something different than we’d done before. Particularly me, I’ve never done a straight drama. So I said to Jonas, as a writer, actor, producer what would be interesting to do?

JONAS CHERNICK (Writer, Actor and Producer)

And I wanted to do something raw and intimate and honest. Like about two people in a relationship, a character study, an acting showcase-

JEREMY

And I said that’s great as long as it doesn’t become like a really boring play, because that’s the danger. For every good movie like that, there’s like twenty that aren’t good.

I said, I want the stakes to be the end of the world. The outcome of this relationship also dictates the fate of the world.

We wanted to be a bit more experimental, and that comes with budget limitations, so we asked what is our version of that, that we can do in a contained way, but can use it as a metaphor in the background. And we used water is a metaphor for relationships.

JONAS

Water is the thing that we need to survive, and the very thing that has become toxic. So before we put pen to paper we cast the other half of the relationship. So that’s when we brought in Amanda, and we wrote it together, building the world and characters.

We wrote the film both before and during the pandemic.

AMANDA BRUGEL (Writer and lead actor)

When we first started we were meeting at Jeremy’s house but as more and more restrictions came in, we would do it over zoom. And I would discuss with Jeremy who I wanted the character to be, some of her secrets, how I’ve been in relationships. It became very very personal and incredibly therapeutic. We weren’t able to see each other but we were divulging all these details of our past relationships, and our current relationships. So we would take a lot of these stories and weave them into our backstories. We were quite detailed. We talked about the first day we met and things like that too. You don’t get the luxury to do that with your co-star a lot of the time. It’s usually imparted to you by a producer, a writer or director. You don’t often get an opportunity to come up with it yourself and then weave the personal part of yourself into that story. That was the most enticing thing.

JONAS

We spent a year, before we shot the movie, figuring out who they were, who they were when they met, before they met, where did they go, what are their likes and dislikes, what are the issues, what are the conflicts, and that infused them with history and with depth. You don’t see it on screen in a direct way. Hopefully you feel it in the inner action

AMANDA

After a year of our therapy sessions (laughs)

JEREMY

I had a lot of excitement about having all this material, to know where are their triggers, what are their buttons, what are her insecurities, what are his, because these are the things you can manipulate and turn into drama. It wasn’t fun exercises, we used those as a catalyst for the story. We have books and books of character backstory that isn’t in the film.

It also helps with the vulnerability that they have, there’s a fight scene. Both Jonas and Amanda were able to pull in some really personal stuff from their own lives and experiences they’ve had with romantic partners. And as a Director, watching on a monitor, I could feel that uncomfortableness, that rawness. What a gift to be able to experience that, and know the actors are willing to mine that for the good of the film.

AMANDA

Jeremy was the keeper of a lot of secrets. While I had an idea of how a scene was going to unfold, he would throw curveballs at us and we would film different versions of that scene. That forces the actors to be incredibly present. I had no idea what to expect, and even Jonas would come into the scene a completely different person. With every scene, it’s already heightened. With every take I had no idea which version of Jonas was going to walk though the door. You’ve really got to listen to your scene partner. That is incredibly exciting and unconventional.

JONAS

That was actually the genesis of the project. We thought – how will we do this in a different way. The idea was to keep it open, and Jeremy structured it so we were working chronologically and, while we knew we had to happen in each scene, there was a lot of freedom of how we actually got there. On top of that, Jeremy kept all these secrets from us as the actors.

JEREMY

Jonas and I usually work our scripts to the bone, right down to the last detail and moment. So what we did with this was not so much a script as a very detailed outline. I shared some of it with some actors and some with others. Some stuff was changed, or withheld from them, and they discovered on camera. A lot of the time when you see a character reacting to something on the screen, you’re watching the actor and the character learn that at the same time. Amanda, in particular, had the least information. We just hoped she wouldn’t run off.

JONAS

There’s a big secret in the movie. We withheld that secret from Amanda.

AMANDA

I found out when you (the audience) did.

JONAS

We conceived that from the get-go, that big twist. And we had to keep that from Amanda for a year.

AMANDA

I was signing into meetings thinking how well we were all doing, how honest we were all being with each other.

JEREMY

I also had secrets with Amanda that Jonas didn’t know.

AMANDA

So I thought I was a part of the secret keeping, not knowing-

JONAS

There’s no game plan for this. There’s no screenwriting book about how to write a film like this. We were really trying to do something new.

JEREMY

Just like how the actors were going to be thrown into scenes and not know what to do or what was going to come, I wanted to give myself the same kind of challenge. So I came up with things on the fly. I had amazing assistance from Spencer Giese who was my secret keeper, and every night he and I would go through everything that happened that day, and I would say – I want to use that, I want to come back to that later on, or I want to pivot this way now. I was constantly shifting. I had a game plan for the whole thing but I allowed it to go its own way.

JONAS

But lets be clear, there was a master plan. Amanda and I knew various degrees of it, and Jeremy knew everything so it still builds deliberately. Jeremy knew where we had to be and we felt we were in the hands of a storyteller who knew what he was doing, even though there was breathing room.

JEREMY

I had a safety net, but it allowed me to walk the tightrope sometimes. There was something dangerous and exciting about that.

JONAS

We were here two years ago with a film and we worked it to the bone with rewrites and rewrites-

JEREMY

That was a comedy but comedy is hard to do well in a longform improvised structure as everyone is trying to be the funniest person in the scene, and there’s a lot of pressure to be funny in the moment. I think comedy has to be more crafted. Improvised comedy can go to default clichés. I don’t think I’d want to do a whole film that way. That would terrify me, and I don’t think it would work.

With Ashgrove, with the tone and everything else, the film was going to tell us what it was going to be, and there was a tremendous freedom with that. When we approached every single person in the film – from the DP to the cast to our composer – we said to them you can only sign on if you are willing to fail, and try some stuff you’ve not tried before. This isn’t about achieving something, it’s about the process of discovery. We’re only going to do that well if we’re willing to be vulnerable and open to what happens.

JEREMY

When you set yourself up knowing you can fail, it allows you to do anything. That’s always people’s fear – what if this doesn’t work?

JONAS

We were so embracing of this idea of failure that we made a documentary about the making of the film. If it fails, we thought, let’s fail miserably. So we’re currently editing a feature length documentary about how we made a movie in this way.