'I find really sad things funny'
A conversation with actor and writer Laura Chinn about her directing debut, Suncoast
Nico Parker (left) is the breakout star of Laura Chinn’s Suncoast.
The Sundance dramatic competition title Suncoast is the debut feature of the actor and writer Laura Chinn.
It’s an autobiographically inflected first person memory piece. Chinn also wrote about it in her recently published memoir, Acne.
The story’s about fifteen-year-old Doris (Nico Parker), a Florida teenager who is caring for her terminally ill older brother.
The emotionally fraught circumstances are further complicated by her relationship with her emotionally volatile mother, Kristine (Laura Linney).
The wild card is a widower, Paul (Woody Harrelson), who’s joined in the cultural fight over the right to life battle for Terri Schiavo at the same hospice where her brother is living out his final days.
In the final twist, Suncoast yokes together parts of Cinderella with Risky Business, as the shy Doris transforms her modest home into a party house for the privileged kids of her private school.
The sensational Parker earned a special jury citation prize at Sundance as a breakthrough performer.
The film begins streaming February 9 on Hulu (subscription required).
In an interview, Laura Chinn talks about art and personal meaning, making the transition behind the camera, and finding the absurdity in the everyday.
Patrick Z. McGavin: Given how personal the material is, did you need time and distance to write the script, or was it cathartic?
Laura Chinn: It was incredibly cathartic to go back and look at that time, even just from the Terri Schiavo archival material, watching those videos and reading more about it.
I think at the time I was so young, I wasn't able to fully process the scope of what was going on. Just going back and looking at the story and inventing the details of the story, trying to convey all the emotions that I felt, it was very helpful to dig into those old feelings.
Patrick Z. McGavin: How did you negotiate the difficult emotional range of comedy and tragedy, framed against a classic coming of age story?
Laura Chinn: I think it helps that I just find things funny, such as I find really sad things funny. I'm really, really bad at the theater. If I'm watching a play where it's really serious and the actors are really serious and everything gets really melodramatic, I will just usually start laughing. I have to breathe and look down at the ground.
I find a lot of absurdity in the drama of life. I think in sitting down to write the script, even if I intended for a scene to be wholly serious, somehow the characters end up being sort of ridiculous in their behavior. A lot of it just came from the way that I see the world.
Patrick Z. McGavin: How have your experiences as an actor shaped your personality as a filmmaker?
Laura Chinn: Hopefully it helps me knowing what the actors are going through. I think that it gives me so much empathy, because being in front of a camera and everyone's staring at you, and hair and makeup and costume and all that is quite challenging. If you've never done it, then it's hard to see and to understand how challenging it is. Hopefully it also helps me with the way I communicate with them.
In terms of directing, I think with storytelling, you're either telling it visually or you're writing it down. I think at the end of the day, you’re a storyteller, so my acting background definitely helped with all of it—speaking with our production designer, our cinematographer. I wanted to come at everything with a storytelling background.
Patrick Z. McGavin: How did you conceive the film visually and stylistically?
Early on the cinematographer Bruce Francis Cole and I started swapping different photographs and still images we found very beautiful and dreamlike. There's a woman named Rineka Dijkstra, a Dutch photographer, who had these incredible images of these very insecure teen girls.
We just sort of pieced still images together with movies that we loved. We also tried to capture the idea of Florida. Bruce brought these vintage Florida postcards in, and they were so beautiful.
The colors were so saturated; it was the vintage quality of them that felt kind of dreamy, like a memory. We took all of these ideas with our colorist, and we were creating the look and the filter, and all of it.
Everybody saw the same movie, which I think really helped. The colors that our production designer used really complemented the colors that our costume designer used. It was very much a group effort.
Patrick Z. McGavin: You have these two great performances at the center of the film. Laura Linney needs no introductions. How did you find Nico Parker? Did you see her in something previously, or was it her audition that convinced you she would be perfect for Doris?
Laura Chinn: The audition was really the thing that clinched it. I had been aware of her because she was in Dumbo (2019), when she was very little, like 12 or something. When I was writing the script, I Googled mixed race teen actresses, because I’m biracial, and I wanted to picture somebody writing Doris.
I saw images of her from when she was like 14, or something online, with her incredible hair. I just thought, “This girl is so special.” I never saw that version of Dumbo. I met her, and she was so cool, so deep. Then I watched Dumbo, and she’s so good. Then she auditioned, and I was just completely blown away. She’s a phenomenal actress. She was 17, in London, and we did the audition over Zoom, and she just completely knocked me off chair with her audition.
Patrick Z. McGavin: How much of you is in the character of Doris?
Laura Chinn: I think Doris is a better person than me. Doris has taken care of her brother. She doesn't have friends. She's Cinderella. It was sort of creating this Cinderella story, in many ways. I was much more selfish. I had friends, I had a boyfriend, but I think I felt like Doris. I felt like everything bad was happening to me, so I wanted to capture that.
I think when you’re a teenager, you see yourself as amazing, and everybody else is crazy. I wanted to capture that feeling.
Patrick Z. McGavin: What’s interesting about Kristine, the mother, is that you never soften her, or try to humanize. She’s prickly and abrasive until the very end.
Laura Chinn: I think the grief counselor scenes help. I think you see her softer side and you're aware that it's there, You’re rooting for her to emerge. She drives a yellow truck, and you know that’s a certain kind of person who drives that car, or rents a pink houseShe wears fun colors, and you sense there’s a different person in there that’s just going through a really hard time. She has taken down all of these walls.
I think Laura just fundamentally understood this character, and brought so much to her. It’s Laura Linney, so even though she’s saying these prickly things, and she’s doing things where you think, “Don’t do that.” At the same time, it’s Laura Linney, and her soul is shining out through her eyes. You’re like, “I love her.”
Patrick Z. McGavin: You obviously bring in the political with the Terri Sciavo storyline. Is that part consistent with your own experience, or was that a coincidence you wanted to add to the creative dynamic?
Laura Chinn: It was just a coincidence that we happened to be there at the same time. I thought it would help add scope to the movie, and have different points of view on grief. It gives you this backdrop to showing all these different reactions to grief. Everybody’s just grieving and reacting, one way or another.
When I sat down to write the script, I was researching it, and looking at the story and everything I called my mother. I said, “Mom, this was such an intense thing, and there were so many people there, and a crazy amount of media. I can’t believe we didn’t move him.”
She said, “We were just doing our best, taking it one day at a time.” It was an intense experience.
Patrick Z. McGavin: There’s a lot that is ambiguous about the Woody Harrelson character, everything from his politics to his possible sexual interest in Doris. How deliberate was that?
Laura Chinn: I just didn't want to over explain anything. I think Woody has an idea of who Paul is, and I have an idea, and we always tried to leave things out in the edit to not over explain .
There’s a moment at the bar where he's with Doris and he's drinking a hot tea. It was funny. We got to the set, and in my mind she was drinking a soda, and in Woody’s mind, she was drinking a hot tea. We both saw him as somebody who was in recovery.
We both saw him as somebody who was sober. It was not in the script, it wasn’t something we talked about or discussed. It was how we saw this character. Woody was saying, I think he should be drinking hot tea because you notice this is a man sitting at a bar watching a football game drinking hot tea. There were little things we tried to plant about Paul without over explaining anything.
Patrick Z. McGavin: High school or films about teenagers are often the most accurate and realistic social portrait of class in American culture. Do you see it that way?
Laura Chinn: Absolutely. Class has always been a thing for me because I grew up in a town where there was such disparity. It’s also a town where the very wealthy people go on vacation, and there’s a town where not a lot of wealthy people live.
I grew up in a very small house, and the first time I went to someone's house that was massive and on the water, you just think, “We’re living on two different planets.” It wasn’t something I wanted to speak about a lot throughout the film, but I wanted to show all the ways that Doris feels like an outsider.
Another way she feels like another is that she is going to this private school, but without the same means as the other kids.
Patrick Z. McGavin: What’s been your family’s response to the film?
Laura Chinn: They were amazing. My father lives in a different country, but my mom is here, and she came to Sundance. She also saw it before Sundance.
She’s aware that Christina is not her and Doris is not me. She knew a lot of these things were invented. Doris’ father has passed away. Mine just lives in a different state. They both had a lot of catharsis from it, and they were both super complimentary and super proud.
Patrick Z. McGavin: Given how personal this story is, what do you feel like you learned about yourself in the making of it?
Laura Chinn: That I could direct a movie. I think that was the biggest surprise. I put directing on a pedestal even though I was running the show.
I suppose I always thought of directing as this other thing. I think this forced me to learn things that I had blocks on, it forced me to overcome fears, and really feel like I could do this job that I put on a pedestal. I thought it was reserved for only people who went to film school.
That was really that was really helpful to just see myself in that leadership position, and see that these things could all be learned and taught. You can learn about lenses, you can learn about cameras, you could learn from your cinematographer. You can learn it all, and that was really inspiring just to see that was all possible.
Patrick Z. McGavin: Was giving the character of the brother your brother’s name a personal form of acknowledgement?
Laura Chinn: I think that was to honor him. I think ultimately, this whole movie is to honor him, and talk about what that’s like for young people. They don’t say his name until the very end of the movie, and that’s the same way it was in the script.
The intention there was when someone is sick, they fall to the background, but your whole life revolves around them. Somehow you’re not even saying their name. That idea that people can get lost even though you’re obsessing about them. I think with Max, it was just to pay homage to him.
Patrick Z. McGavin: Do you think you’ll continue to toggle back and forth between acting and directing? Or now that you’ve directed a film, is that your destiny?
Laura Chinn: I don’t know. I loved directing so much. I feel very open. I also wrote a book, Acne, when I was finishing writing this movie. That was also a great experience. This is a different way of expressing myself.
I really love all of it. I think any opportunity to do any of it, I’d say yes to everything, and no to nothing.
