Re-teaming with her OBVIOUS CHILD writing partner Elisabeth Holm and star Jenny Slate, director Gillian Robespierre has created LANDLINE, a film set in 1995 Manhattan, about a family that knows each other so well that they can’t stand to be around one another. Slate’s Dana has actually moved in with her husband-to-be, Ben (Jay Duplass), who is the perfect blend of sweet and alarmingly predictable—husband material but maybe not sex-fantasy worthy. Dana’s high school-aged sister Ali (newcomer Abby Quinn) is the family’s wild child, who has no qualms about lying directly to her mother Pat’s (Edie Falco) face. She doesn’t even have to lie to her far-too-forgiving father Alan (John Turturro), who often will appear to take Ali’s side when mother and daughter are fighting.
LANDLINE is a difficult film at times because it’s not always clear who we should be rooting for (everyone comes across as abrasive at one point or another), so we end up hoping everybody exits the movie better than when we met them. Not everyone does. Recently, I sat down in Chicago with several of the creative forces behind the movie, including director Robespierre, her co-writer Holm, and actors Jenny Slate and Abby Quinn, to discuss the intricacies of the work, the importance of smoking in bringing the family together, and just how much of this mid-1990s tale was borne of real life. Please enjoy…
Capone: I've always heard that if you make a period film—even if it’s only set in the ’80s or ’90s—that it doubles the pains in the ass that you experience making a movie. Was that the case in this film?
Gillian Robespierre: Sure. I think it added work for every department, but I think it’s also enjoyable, especially with the production design and creating this lived-in look and doing some research. It was a combination of research, Liz and I giving our production designer photographs, yearbook photos from the high schools that we actually went to, finding yearbook photos online. So it was a lot of personal research and then always at the last minute wondering “Did this exist?” and then Googling. Luckily it’s not 1995, and we’re able to Google “When did this item come out?”
For music, we weren’t so particular. I think we had so many genres from so many different decades—from disco, to dad rock in the ’80s, to a current Angel Olsen song. We were looser there. But everything on screen, we wanted it to be as authentic and real as possible, down to the Apple IIGS and the graphic design on it. That computer does not know how to start on its own. That was all manufactured on our end.
Capone: I’m sure this is the question you get asked more than any, but why did you want this specifically set in 1995?
GR: Liz Holm, would you like to answer that? [laughs]
Elisabeth Holm: Yes. Gillian and I, as she mentioned, both grew up in New York City in the ’90s, both of our parents divorced when we were teenagers; it is more than a little bit personal story for both of us, so it started there. But I think we also really wanted to tell a story about humans being humans, and talking or not talking and connecting, and wanted to see these things happen without having to necessarily cut to an insert shot of a text or a tweet or discovering something on Facebook or Dana meeting someone on Tinder. These things are so ingrained in our lives now, for better or worse, and there are definitely filmmakers who show that stuff successfully. But we wanted to go back to that last moment before these things took over our lives, and maybe look a little bit at the root cause of those things that then took over our lives. So I think it felt like a good way for us to tell a story about family without all that shit.
Capone: I miss old-fashioned stories about stalking someone. Now it’s all online.
Jenny Slate: That’s two out of two movies they’ve had me stalking people.
GR: It’s true. I did stalking post-internet. You can definitely stalk in person [laughs]. I think also we were trying to make it timeless. If you took the 1990s out of the story and set it in present day, it would still feel real and relatable with or without the landlien being the subject of the title.
Capone: I lived in New York for a brief period that ended right around when this story starts, and it was a real transitional period in New York.Times Square was still a little shady, but it was certainly getting to the place where tourists could visit safely. Were there things about the city in general that you liked in that period that was also a reason you wanted to set it then?
GR: Yeah, for sure. We were both teenagers in the ’90s. I’m a little bit older than Liz, and I definitely dipped my toes in the rave scene, which doesn’t exist anymore. And 42nd Street was where my brother got his fake ID, and I tried, but it had already been closed down and Giuliani-fied and Disney was creepy in, but below 14th Street was like the Wild West. Kids were running around. CBGBs was over, but there were other art scenes popping up. I would go see a lot of shows downtown, and I was allowed to do that. I had a curfew, but I definitely was thriving and feeling free and I didn’t have a computer in my pocket at all times being tracked by my parents. There was a leash, but it was a lot looser. And also it was changing, and it was the last era that families like ours could exist in Manhattan. We were middle class.
Capone: Yeah, there’s no middle class in New York anymore.
GR: No. The rents were affordable, and it afforded my parents a lot of luxuries to raise us there and send us to private school, and you can’t do that now. I’m trying to raise my daughter in a good zone so she can go to a good public school, because private school costs as much as 20 colleges, and that’s first grade.
Capone: You mentioning your brother’s fake ID made me remember: my best friend lived in New York. He went to school at NYU in the late ’80s, and visiting him there is what made me fall in love with the city, and I got my first fake ID on one of those visits. I thought it looked so shitty that I was afraid to use it.
JS: They did look so shitty. Mine was almost a cartoon. I got mine on MacDougal street, though.
Capone: That’s where I ended up getting it, down in the Village. I want to talk about the role of smoking in this movie. It is still, even today, to have it in movies is daring these days, because it’s really frowned upon. But here, it’s both the ultimate act of defiance but also a bonding thing with the sisters and the parents.
Abby Quinn: I think for my character, Ali, she’s using it as an act of rebelling. She knows her mom doesn’t approve of it. I’m not very good at looking like I can smoke, so watching the movie, I think it kind of makes sense. I’m a teenager who doesn't really have a handle on looking cool while she’s smoking, but she’s still trying to do it, because her friends are and that’s the scene that she’s in in her junior year of high school. When the three girls are sitting in the bathroom, it is a bonding thing, but I think it’s also the lowest point in their family dynamic, and they’ve reached that together, and they’re all using this thing that they know is bad for them, and Dana ends up throwing it in the toilet. But if you’re looking at smoking the way that it’s regarded now, I think they’ve reached their worst point, and now they’re all going to share a cigarette together.
JS: Dana’s really not a smoker, and I’m sure that before this film takes place she has maybe tried a cigarette, but I think she’s a scaredy cat, and I think the things she thinks are cool are not the things that are typically cool, or she just really doesn’t connect to them. I think she’s a square, and the things that satisfy her are satisfying to her, but her idea is she’s going to go to Serendipity and she’s going to have dessert for dinner. I don’t think she wants to go and see, I don’t know, what was out then? She probably wants to see the Baz Luhrmann ROMEO AND JULIET [which actually came out in 1996].
GR: I don’t think that was…
JS: That wasn’t out yet. But she’ll see that because it’s ROMEO AND JULIET, but does she want to see CLUELESS? Probably not. She’s not that cool. Does she like Hole? No, she likes Bonnie Raitt and 10,000 Maniacs and Annie Lennox and other classic shit, like the Moody Blues. Dana, for this whole thing, is so shocked that she needs something else and something that she didn’t expect. The last thing she would ever do is cheat on a test, let alone a person. There’s no way. And suddenly it’s so easy to cross the line, and that makes her reassess so much about herself.
I like that in the bathroom scene, it’s almost like you can see that she’s like, “I do want to be free. I do want to give myself a chance to enter into a new zone that’s not for me, but I reserve the right to immediately back out.” And she does. I love that she lights that cigarette. She’s like, “I don’t know, fuck it.” And then she’s like, “No, I’m not. This isn’t… I can’t… I can’t… just because I want to change a little doesn’t mean that I’m trying to change completely.” And that is something that a lot of women don’t feel that they have the right to do. “I just want to change a little bit. I don’t wanna give up my whole identity. I don’t wanna say that I’m either good or bad because I need something new.”
Capone: In that bathroom scene, they’re all more or less in the same place for the first time in the movie. They’re all thinking “something has to change,” and for Edie’s character, it’s going to be huge, but for you two it’s going to be a little smaller.
AQ: They’re brought to the hard, cold, tiles in the bathroom, and they’re finally on equal plain.
GR: I was just going to go back to the smoking about how it’s an indication of different times in their lives. What the cigarette symbolizes for Ali is independence and freedom—and it’s going to kill her—and what it symbolizes for Pat is the past. But then it brings them together on that floor, and they’re finally, in a way, equals for the first time and they’re friends. They’re not going to close doors on each other any longer and they’re not going to lie. They’re coming clean. “Yes, I was a smoker. I know you’re a smoker and I’m not going to stop you. I don’t condone it. As a parent, it’s scary, but I’m going to be here for you.”
And that was her peace offering for all the moments they bickered over college applications or holding in secrets or Post-It notes that are clear lies and resentments. So it’s a bonding moment. It wasn’t meant to be glamorizing cigarettes. I think Jenny’s gross cough really makes me queasy in a good way every time. But that’s why it was meaningful to have so much smoking. And in the 90s, everyone smoked inside.
Capone: Jenny, I don’t tend to ask personal questions, but while you were making this film about someone who is doubting whether she wants to be married or not and changing her attitude about the person she is, and you were going through a lot personally at the same time. Did one fuel the other? Did your personal life fuel the person you were in the film?
JS: Sure. There’s no way, at least for me, that my life doesn’t affect my work and that my work doesn’t affect my life, and that’s a personal choice I make, to have those thoroughfares pretty open. By the time I got to set, I was getting divorced and I was really unprepared for what it feels like to get divorced, and I was in an amicable split, but it still is the disillusion of a belief system. When you get divorced, I had never been through anything like that, so I felt very untethered, meanwhile I’m playing a woman…and I’m not really like Dana. I’m just a lot more…I don’t know. Dana’s a really structured person, and I’m much more like a plant or an animal, and Dana’s much more like a building or something like that. That’s how I tend to see things, I guess.
It felt good to me that the situation that Dana was in, even though it was so different than mine, was one that I had to see her though to the end of it, and make sure that what remained intact was not necessarily her partnership or her life as she knew it, but her self respect and her outlook for the future, that it involved making decisions that are interesting and satisfying. So at once it made me feel really hopeful knowing that Dana’s story ends with her partnership coming back together, and that there was a chapter of my life that was closing. That was some real dissonance, that was hard for me at the time. But I also have a great respect for that push and pull, and I know that it’s there for me to use in whatever way I can.
Capone: Abby, how did you get this gig? What was the audition process like for you? And to the filmmakers, what did you see in her that made her right for Ali?
EH: Abby’s my uncle. JS: I met her on a dating app.
[Everybody laughs]
AQ: And then they sent me the script [laughs]. Yeah, I just got the audition from my agents. I got an email with the audition sides and the script, and immediately I read it, because, there’s like a tag line of who’s in it and who’s involved already, and I was ecstatic. I was freaking out even before reading the script, and then I read it. I live in L.A. now, but I just really wanted the part and I wanted to give it my best shot, so to me that’s being in person and being in a room with the casting director and not sending in a tape. So I flew to New York and I auditioned, and I feel like six weeks went by. It was a long time, and I didn’t hear anything. I just got a call from my agent, and they’re like, “They really like you, and you’re going to go for the callback.” I hadn’t forgotten about it, because I thought that I was going to see the movie eventually when it came out because I liked it so much.
JS: I didn’t know it was so long. That’s such a long time.
EH: I think maybe internally it was that long. I don’t think it was really six weeks.
[Everybody laughs]
JS: But I feel like I remember them being like, “We found this young actress; she’s amazing.”
EH: We didn’t have six weeks to do anything.
[Everybody laughs]
JS: I feel like it was immediate. They sent me some video of Abby on YouTube singing, and they were like “And she played Anne Frank,” so you know she could be your sister.
EH: “Sold, sold, sold, sold.”
JS: That’s what I texted back. I was like, “Who is she? Get her. Sold!”
AQ: I feel like it was a while. Maybe two weeks.
GR: It could have been two weeks. Either way, we watched a lot of tapes and we saw a great young actress.
AQ: I flew back to New York for the callback, which was the day before my birthday, then I went to Boulder and I was with my brother and couldn’t stop talking about it, and within like three days I think I heard. Yeah, it felt like forever, but I guess it wasn’t.
Capone: The three of you who have worked together before, now that you have this working relationship, will you continue to try to make things with each other? I know you’ve done something for television…
EH: The three of us did something already for FX, and it’s just living there for a little bit, and we have to reconfigure it.
Capone: A pilot?
EH: Yeah. They liked it so much they wanted us to do it again.
Capone: Tell me about how it works, why you like it, who brings what to the table, what’s the environment you create as a creative partnership?
GR: Hearts and farts.
EH: Hearts and farts, yeah. We often get asked about stuff balancing comedy with heavier shit, and I think we like to say “hearts and farts.”
Capone: I know exactly what you’re talking about. You don’t even have to explain it.
EH: Cool. It’s better when you don’t. In terms of what we bring to the table, to me the coolest thing is, we all bring different things at different times to the table. I don’t feel that like this woman does this thing, and that woman does that thing, and I do this, and those three things together become this witches caldron brew. I think we’re all growing and changing at different times. And sometimes Gill has the joke, and I have the thing that makes you cry, and vice versa, and I think it’s a cool combination where everybody gets to wear a lot of hats and show different sides of themselves, and I think the best thing we bring to each other is that trust that we can be all those different women.
Capone: Is there dancing in this TV thing?
GR: [laughs] Yes, on the rug.
JS: Totally. And actually there’s some dancing in that bowling alley.
GR: That’s true. Slow-motion dancing. We like to dance. Except the dad in FOOTLOOSE. That’s probably the only non-dancer.
Capone: The last thing I wanna ask you is about Edie Falco. She’s like a gift. The actors especially, what do you learn from being around someone like that, as an actor, as a person. What do you learn from her?
JS: I think it’s really easy when you work with an actor who’s a real master, and they have just such a respectful body of work, such a good body of work, it’s really easy to lift them up as a god of acting. On the one hand, Edie’s talent does put her at a sort of god-like level, but I think what gets her there is the reality of her as a person. She has a beautiful rhythm, she’s very connected. She’s very good about boundaries. I felt like it took an appropriate amount of time to actually start to get to know each other.
I think sometimes actors come in, and they really lean on the idea of charisma and they do that to try to show other people that they’re a star, and Edie couldn’t be more the opposite of that. She’s very still, peaceful, smart and nice to be around. She just felt like a relaxing, relaxed person. Whatever her process is, it’s inside of herself. Before we did the scene where we’re all in the bathroom, we were all just hanging out, and I remember for a second being like, “Ugh. Are we going to do this?” And then she just got down on the bathroom floor, and suddenly it was just completely on, and I felt drawn to that she was a mothership.
