If you’re doing a big studio movie, you can have anybody you jolly well want. The test is, are you gonna survive it or is your head gonna explode? Casting is tough. MACY: Yeah, but that’s what directing is, one panic after another. When you have a friendship that’s so important at the core of this movie, how did you decide on the casting for Kate and Meg? And when your original actress playing Kate dropped out prior to filming, did you have a panic attack? I just want to have a joke, every once in awhile, to lighten things up. There’s a lot of depressing stuff out there, which is so well done, but it’s just unrelenting bad news. I want the characters to be different at the ending than they were at the beginning, and I want them to be better. We have to be forced to change because human beings hate change, and I feel like they really changed at the end of this thing and they survived it. They need something to get them out of their rut, but can they save their relationship? I’ve always thought, once you reach adulthood, to make a major change in your life, it takes dynamite. The fact that these two women are stuck in their lives and have become enables to each other, so that they don’t move forward, the obvious is that they’ve gotta split up. I love being in their presence and I love everything about them. I’m not pretending that I understand them, but I just love women. That’s not what they were fighting about. The big change that I brought to it was that it would be about the two women, and that trying to nail this guy was just the battlefield. David Hornsby and Lance Krall were the writers, and it was simpler before I came on board. Did this end up being a lot more complicated than you expected? There are so many aspects to this film, with the friendship between these two women, the road trip and the physical comedy. I thought maybe that could have good results and be really fun. I have a tendency to be dry and to be more dramatic. What was interesting to me was to bring my perspective to it. But I’ve gotta say, this is close to my humor.
I either see it in my mind’s eye or I don’t. MACY: I’m pretty intuitive about choosing stuff. How do you choose what you want to direct? I thought maybe a sex comedy would be an easy sell, as opposed to a drama about a guy who shoots people in school with music, and in fact, it was an easier sell.Ĭlearly, the kinds of movies you’re attracted to don’t fall into one category.
Interestingly, even if you’ve been working on something for two years, the phone rings and you’re two months behind, instantly.
MACY: Once you decide you want to be a director, scripts come along and you go, “I wanna do that!” You start the process of raising money, either by finding an actor or a producer, or something like that, and then the phone rings and everything has changed. Collider: Last time we spoke was for Rudderless, and back then, the next thing you were going to do was Krystal, but now The Layover is coming out.