One of the most buzzed-about movies at the Seattle International Film Festival this year is unquestionably the world premiere of I’ll Show You Mine, the newest film from one of Seattle’s very best filmmakers, Megan Griffiths.
The movie has the intimacy of a two-person stage play and centers around two people, Priya (Poorna Jagannathan) and her step-nephew Nicky (Casey Thomas Brown). Priya is an author known for the personal depths of trauma she explores in her book. Her next book is a cultural analysis/biography of Nicky, a former pansexual model known for his outward displays of sexuality. It’s a very slow-burning film that becomes more absorbing as the characters become less guarded when they reveal more and more about themselves. It’s a fascinating character study of two people at different places in their lives but still have their own troubling traumas that bind them.
Ahead of its premiere screening, I spoke with Megan Griffiths by phone about her terrific new film.
Can you tell me how the movie came about?
Sure. It was during the pandemic, trying to direct my energy and find something that I felt doable in the new parameters that we had. And production typically is such a large endeavor with a lot of crew and then actors not being able to wear masks, which makes it all feel fraught in the age of COVID. And I was thinking that this would be a good time to do something that was a little bit more intimate.
And I reached out to some writers that I knew who I had collaborated with on something in the past, and they had this script for this movie, and it just felt so timely and interesting and complex and like something that was really appropriate for the moment. And so we sort of started working on it together. Lacey Leavitt came on as a producer, and then we sent it to Mel Eslyn at Duplass Brothers Productions and then they came on board and it just went from there. I had been doing a lot of TV and I just really wanted to do something a little bit more personal and intimate.
I really enjoyed it. I feel like you have to watch it, and once you get absorbed into it, you’re just hooked on it, and it was really an interesting experience. I was wondering if it was made during the pandemic with those constraints of having literally just two people on screen. One of the things I really liked about it is that I love good acting. And in a movie like that, you can’t hide. It’s all acting because it’s just two people.
I love these two actors so much, and it really was so important to this movie’s success to have people that you just completely can believe as these characters and who are interesting and watchable and authentic. I love both Poorna (Jagannathan) and Casey (Thomas Brown) for that reason. They both brought a lot of themselves into their characters, but they’re also just like… They’re great actors and I just love watching them interact. I felt like they had such interesting chemistry.
How did you find them?
Poorna I had had an awareness of because I watched her in The Night Of and Never Have I Ever, and I had known of her, that she could… She had done an episode of Room 104, which I had also worked on. She did an episode called “The Internet,” which I thought was one of my favorite episodes of the first season, and she was off camera the whole time but still such a presence in the episode. I just always was such a fan of hers. So her name came up early in the process and she just felt like such a good fit for this character.
And then Casey, we were introduced to through a mutual friend when we were looking for the person to play Nic. And we had a meeting and I just connected with him right away. He felt like such a good fit for this. And I kind of scoured his work and loved that. He was more of a discovery for me in this, but I’m so grateful that we were introduced to him because I just felt like he brought so much to Nicky.
I was really impressed with the chemistry they had, especially for actors that didn’t previously know each other. How do you cast for that? It can’t just be getting the two best actors and hoping for the best.
I think it’s probably a combination between instincts and luck, because they didn’t meet each other until after they were both cast. But we, the three of us, had several Zoom meetings/rehearsals, I guess they could be called rehearsals leading into the shoot where we would just get on Zoom for a couple hours and dive into a section of the script and let it open up conversations about sort of our personal experiences with whatever topics were covered in that part of the script, and let it inform the writing process too and bring in some of what they had experienced in their own lives into these characters that way.
And also it just let us get to know each other and build a connection and trust, which was so important because a lot of this is really delicate subject matter. And just to have that level of trust, it created a really safe space on set where I think they felt supported by me and by each other and the whole production. Everybody who was on this set was just invested in creating a safe environment for those two actors, especially, to take risks and go places with their performance.
I also wondered, how much of it was scripted versus improv? A lot of it seemed really natural too.
Yeah. Credit to the actors for that, because a lot of things that feel very natural but some of the stuff that feels the most improvy I feel like is in the script, and then there are also quite a bit of improvised elements to it. Some of the improv got infused into the script because of those rehearsal sessions that we had. So it kind of grew… It was improv there, but then became scripted.
Also, we would do these 15 to 20 minute takes and sometimes we would find moments where we’d just say, “This feels like a place where you guys could go off and just talk about it, just on a tangent and see what happens, and then circle back into the scene and continue.” And they were really amazing at bringing things back around and then going forward and getting all the pieces that were required. So yeah, it was a combination of just a really well written script and actors who just brought their own thing. So it was definitely an even amount of both.
Since you made the film during the pandemic, how was this different from your other movies? Obviously you’ve had much bigger casts than two people, but what else did you do to make it a safe film environment for making everyone comfortable?
It was after the vaccine was released, so it wasn’t super early in the pandemic. Everybody on set had just been vaccinated when we shot. So there was that level of not having to be right in those early days where there were just so many questions. As you know, the story is incredibly contained within this one house with these two actors. And so we were also able to have a smaller crew, and everybody sort of worn multiple hats. But we wore the proper PPE and we had lunch outside. It was nice because it was good weather and we weren’t sitting out in the rain or anything. But we just kind of went through the protocols that every production was going through at the time. But it was nice because it also just translated into this more intimate environment for the actors to do their thing.
How long did filming take?
We shot for seven days.
And how did you find the location? That house felt like it was the third character in this movie because it was this gorgeous home, but they could use it to get away and kind of break up some of the tension from the conversation. I just loved how it was used.
It was a house in the Highland Park area in LA and it came to us through connections with the production. But yeah, that was such a find. Such a beautiful home. There were nice areas to be around the house. And then outside of the house to open it up a little bit to not be quite so claustrophobic, you know?
Your movie makes its world premiere at SIFF on Saturday, can you talk about what’s going on after this weekend?
I don’t know if there’s anything I can talk about, but I’m definitely still working on how to get it out into the wider world. I’m excited for a lot of people to see it and kind of be part of the conversation.
And what does it mean to have this movie premiere at SIFF?
You know, I love SIFF and I’ve had a lot of films premiere at the festival. It feels like sort of coming home with any film and the audiences at SIFF are always wonderful audiences. It’s just like it’s a city that’s known for its cinema-loving audience. And so I always feel that whenever I premiere anything at SIFF. And this film in particular, just there’s a lot of connections to Seattle. Even though we shot it in Los Angeles it was produced by Lacey and Mel, two of the writers are based in Seattle, and Tomo Nakayama did the score, and there’s a local animator named Neely Goniodsky who did the animation, and great cinematography by Jeremy Mackie and costume design by Rebecca Luke (both of whom no longer lives here, but who I met here and worked with on many Seattle projects), and edited by Celia Beasley, who has cut the last four of my films. And so it just has a lot of local connections. And it’s dedicated to Lynn Shelton who is obviously such a local hero and a wonderful human being who also had so many projects at SIFF. It just feels like it’s appropriate, feels like the right spot.
Let me ask you just one last question and then I’ll let you go because I know you’re very busy. But is there something that you want people to know about the movie that we didn’t talk about?
There’s plenty of elements to it that I feel are of interest. It has this beautiful animation and great music and illustrations. It breaks out of the boundaries of your typical two-hander, which I think is really fun and helpful to this particular story. I also feel like the film has something to say about personal acceptance and the freedom that can come from that. And I feel like these two characters, they have a journey that hopefully will spark the audience to think about ways where they might not be being kind enough to themselves or treating themselves with enough care. I think there’s a lot of negativity and chaos in the world right now. And it’s a good time to think about how we can be nicer to ourselves.
I’ll Show You Mine makes its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival with screenings on Saturday, April 16 at 5PM at SIFF Cinema Uptown and on Wednesday, April 20 at 4:15PM at Pacific Place.
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