'Greener Grass' Interview: Filmmakers Jocelyn DeBoer & Dawn Luebbe
Right now the new film Greener Grass is out in select theaters and it’s one of our favorite films of the year. It’s a surreal and fantastic satire about life in modern suburbia, and without a doubt it is one of the best absurd comedies to come around in recent memory. Here’s the trailer for this film that we highly encourage you get to the theater to see.
Recently we were honored to speak with directors and stars Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe about their film. Jocelyn and Dawn talked with us about the making of Greener Grass as well as the process of writing it, and everything that went into realizing this unique cinematic vision. Check out our interview with them below and go see Greener Grass playing in theaters now.
Andrew Hawkins: Alright, well, to get started, I just wanted to let both of you know that we watched this film and found it to be fascinating, hilarious, unsettling, and overall just excellent.
Jocelyn DeBoer & Dawn Luebbe: Oh, my god. Thank you so much! Those are all such nice things to say!
Yeah, it was just so much fun. We were just jaw-dropped the entire time and had a blast. So the first thing I want to ask you is, how would you summarize the film? What would you say the film is about for someone who doesn't even know the official synopsis?
JD: That's a good question. I feel like Dawn-- what we normally say is it's a film that satirizing suburbia in a surreal way, that sort of thing.
DL: Yeah, a dark comedy satirizing suburbia.
I wanted to ask you, why the suburban setting? Why the setting that seems like a gated community on the side of a golf course where everyone always has something going on that's either on edge or uncomfortable, almost like-- I don't want to be cliché, but Lynchian?
DL: Yes, oh no, please. We always admit that we were watching Twin Peaks when we made the Greener Grass short film, so very truthfully David Lynch is a huge influence of ours.
JD: But I want to say, your description of that specific suburbia is not very different from where I grew up. [laughter]
DL: --and where I grew up.
JD: Exactly. I think we were interested in just satirizing the suburbia of our youths, and of course, we're very much heightening it, but that's where that came from.
DL: We wanted to have this timeless feel, and also be in the time of “Anywhere, America” type of place. From that respect, we didn't want to have it set in a specific city where everyone would be like, "this is a story about Philadelphia." This was just a suburban setting that lent itself to timelessness and an Anywhere, America feel as a platform for the things we wanted to get into.
JD: I love the description of it being a gated community because we definitely wanted it to feel isolated from the outside world.
It really does. It made me wonder if the rest of the world was like the small community that we see in Greener Grass, if that's kind of become the entire planet. So that was great worldbuilding, and it was such a fun idea, but also a shock. I want to ask you if you'd talk about your perspective on the type of comedy that's in the film, where it's subversive and dark and abstract and absurd at times.
JD: What was most important to us is that all of the comedy is rooted in reality in some way. So for example, it seems so absurd that Jill gives away her baby in the big ending of the movie, but what's behind that is sadly rooted in something real: how much people in their lives make huge decisions based on what they think will make other people happy, what they think other people's expectations are of them, etc. People make career decisions that way, decide who they're going to marry, whether or not they're going to have kids, and so that's something real that's an observation of ours that we were interested in exploring in a larger comment on misplaced values. That's one example of the comedy we approached in a way. We wanted to make sure that everything had meaning behind it, otherwise, who cares about crazy things happening in a vacuum, so to speak?
DL: Just to add on to what Jocelyn was saying, all of those seemingly absurd or unusual events are connected to one of our larger seams. Especially as we started working on the short back in the day, we really were interested in exploring this idea of politeness taken to the extreme, and how that can play out in different ways that continually heighten, keeping it playing with the element of surprise, which is so important in comedy. Just when you think a scene might be going in one direction, really pulling the rug out and something surprising happens.
Yeah, there are so many moments in the film that surprise and shock the audience. We were definitely not expecting things to play out the way that they did at all. Talking about politeness and how customs and courtesies play such a big part in the film, would you both explain the dynamic between Jill and Lisa, and how-- from what I saw, it seemed like Lisa wanted to have everything and Jill had a need to please everyone and never say no?
JD: Yeah, I think very much.
DL: Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head, in terms of Jill. Based on kind of this selflessness, and this idea of trying to please other people and her husband, her children, and especially in this story, her "best friend" Lisa. So many of her decisions come down to that need to please Lisa. I think Lisa is aware of how to manipulate this quality in order to get what she wants. The more Lisa does get what she wants, and the more she does take over Jill's life, it's almost like she can't stop herself, and it just balloons where she needs more and more and more, until she literally has her exact life as it is in the beginning of the movie.
JD: I think one thing that was important to us with Lisa, is that there was an element of vulnerability to her as a character, and that the things she's doing that are manipulative. There's also a real element of impulsivity to them. So she's not a mustache-twirling evil genius to us so much as she, in the moment, in the soccer game in the middle of the movie before she gets pregnant again, she's feeling strongly badly about herself that morning. We joke that you always see Lisa with her hair so intricately done, and that morning she has a thrown-together ponytail, that would signify a bad day.
Her outward appearance is so important. It's this brimming of feelings that lead her to an impulsive decision to put the soccer ball baby up her dress. But it's not like she woke up that morning and decided that she wasn't getting enough attention that day, we wanted to make her have that recognizable thing of when you say things you shouldn't have said. I love Dawn's performance in the moment when both of the women are in karate class, and she really wants Jill to do-- every time I recap the movie, it sounds so ridiculous, I'm so sorry-- but she wants Jill to paint your own pottery with her that evening. Jill says she can't do it, then you see Lisa in this impulsive way, say, "But I have to go tonight." I feel like we've all been Lisa like that; you just so impulsively say something that you know is your own issue you have to deal with. I don't know, does that make sense?
Yeah, it absolutely makes sense, and it's a theme in the film that we noticed touches on how people act towards each other and present themselves, and then the kinds of responsibilities that are self-imposed for either status or other people's recognition. It kind of leads into how Lisa is unkempt the morning before she grabs the soccer ball and gets pregnant again. I wanted to ask about the costume design of the film, the way that you develop the characters, and just the presentation of the film because it's vibrant and fantastic. The movie looks great. Do you want to talk at all about the development of that?
DL: Absolutely, thank you. We really have to shout out our costume designer Lauren Oppelt, and also our costume designer, Leigh Poindexter, who were so integral in executing the look of this movie in such a cohesive way, on a very small budget. It was so important for us that, the second the movie started, you were brought to a different world where the colors were all a little brighter and in coordination with each other. One thing Lauren Oppelt did with the coloring blocking of the women and their families is-- it just shows how much these people established personality based on things outside of them: their clothing, their houses. We also used this to show Lisa's taking over Jill's life through costumes. At the beginning, Jill is in pink but Lisa is in blue; as she starts to take over Jill's life more and more, there's more purples and lavender, and finally she's wearing pink in the end. It's just a subtle, easy way to represent that transition through visuals.
JD: With the production design, we wanted to have that element of artificiality. Of course, our story is comment on the climate it was written in. We're in this era of social media where everyone is almost putting on this facade between the carefully controlled images they project to their community through filters and stuff. We wanted our world to be a sort of facade that, throughout, the movie, you start to see the cracks in. We love one thing our production designer did with flowers. She had artificial plants and flowers everywhere, all over the movie. It gives this feeling of a fake world. In the script, we have this beat which is very early on, we have this artificial flower with a real live caterpillar trying to get nourishment from the plastic flower. That's so meant to be a symbol for what's going on in the larger world of these people living in this fake world.
Yeah, it makes absolute sense. The film, the themes that you touch on, the comedy, it's all very unique and very extreme to a degree too, because it's really a reflection on some of the ugly stuff that people have been doing. I wanted to ask, how has the reception been for Greener Grass? It seems like the film has been playing to bigger crowds at festivals, you've been winning awards. How is that feeling for-- I believe this is both of your feature film debuts?
DL: Yeah, I mean, we have just been so excited that our movie has been received. We don't read reviews at all; we try to stay away from that. But we can't deny that we are so grateful for the success in terms of such an incredible festival run. We are so excited to be distributing the movie with IFC Midnight. This weekend and next weekend we're expanding to more theaters, and it's so exciting to have that happen with our first feature. But truly, this sounds so cheesy, but some of the most meaningful things that have happened in the past several months that we've been touring around with this movie is a sixteen year old will come up to us and say, "I didn't know movies could be like this," or "I want to make a movie like that." Those are the moments that have stuck out the most and have been the most exciting.
JD: Yeah, it's been so special. We just love when people talk to us about when the movie has been meaningful to them in highlighting some behavior in their own lives that's a bit unsavory. We're kind of surprised with how much we're flooded with that, and it's also so meaningful to us to be able to communicate to people on a deeper level. It's been really cool.
Awesome. Well I'll tell you both, since watching this film for the first time last week, there have been countless times where I got stuck at intersections where other cars have come up at the same time, and I thought about your movie immediately. So it's definitely stuck with me, and I've loved it. To wrap up, I wanted to ask you both, do you have any final words about the film, or anything to say about it getting released on VOD?
DL: Definitely, we just truly thank people from the bottom of our hearts for going out and seeing it in the theaters. We feel really grateful that we're in cinemas and we think this kind of comedy can be really fun to see with other people, particularly because some of the laughs are so uncomfortable, you can go through that experience together. We know that it is available on VOD, and we're so happy that people are watching it like that, too.
JD: And yeah, greenergrassmovie.com is where you can check if it's playing near you, and if it's not playing near you and you want it to come to the theater, Dawn has some advice for you...
DL: Yeah, so I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, which is not necessarily known as a hotbed for indie film. My mom so badly wanted it to play at the local movie theater, so she wrote this email where she pretended to be my aunt, because she didn't want it to seem like the mother of the director was emailing. But she wrote this email from her own email address, requesting that they bring this movie to her theater. I was giving her such a hard time, but you know what? The next day, we get an updated theater list from IFC, and Lincoln, Nebraska is on the list! So, contact your mom and ask her to email your local theater.
