The French Italian and the Urbanite’s Plight

The fatal flaw of many indie films is the uninterrogated assumption that New York is a rarified place capable of instantly defining one’s self-worth. The dreams of those raised on Friends and Girls hinge on this delusion, which explains why millennial and Gen Z artistic output has gone out of its way to avoid grappling with it–barring a precious few exceptions. With her debut feature, The French Italian, writer/director Rachel Wolther proves herself unafraid to probe the contradictions and anxieties that have come to define the Age of Obama’s offspring. 

Starring comedian Cat Cohen and SNL alum Aristotle Athari, the film follows a thirtysometing couple stewing over their unrealized potential. In a moment of weakness, they decide to seek revenge on their noisy former neighbor (Euphoria star and newly anointed Nylon “It” Girl Chloe Cherry) through casting her as a fictionalized version of herself in a fake play and subjecting the seemingly oblivious iningénue to humiliating rehearsals.

The result is a droll depiction of nationalized East Coast ambition in post-pandemic America with a refreshing refusal to absolve its central characters of their bad behavior. In its portrait of not-quite young adults overcoming their arrested development and finding their calling, The French Italian separates itself from the navel-gazing slush pile by uncovering its own uncomfortable truths. 

Before the film’s Southeast premiere at the Nashville Film Festival on Friday and her stint as a panelist for the event’s “Navigating the Indie Film Journey” workshop, Wolther talked to The Pamphleteer about making a movie that screened at Tribeca, the reality of indie filmmaking. and the challenges of life in America’s urban centers.

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You started your career as a producer for Nathan Silver on Stinking Heaven and Josephine Decker on Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely–three of the most acclaimed indie movies of the last ten years. How did that experience influence you as a director?

They each had an idea that sounded really cool to me, and I just wanted that to exist. That's how I got into those projects. I was excited about working with Nathan and Josephine. I'm a very capable person, so I became a producer because, in a general sense and with a microbudget film, being a producer is like being a filmmaker. Those movies are very collaborative. Both of those filmmakers are extremely collaborative. Nathan takes a writing credit, but the actors make up all the words as we're going along. That was how I got into the film world; doing stuff like that. 

On Stinking Heaven, it was just me and Nathan. We made the whole movie, and then we had the camera people and the actors. There was no production team. And then, those movies got some acclaim. I was getting a little heat on the festival circuit, and I was like, “Oh, I think I'm going to try to make producing my job,” because I hadn't been working a day job while I was doing those movies. Then, as I started getting into that, I realized I'm not a producer. I'm not a producer who does this for money or who makes money for other people making movies. I needed to switch my focus to writing and directing my own work.

That experience was very informative in that it was the ideal situation. Making microbudget movies is like doing an art project with your friends and using all your skills and ingenuity and resources. It's so exciting and fun. And it's different from the movie business, completely different.

I just reviewed Silver’s new movie, Between the Temples. I was amazed that most of it was improv. But The French Italian seems like it would need to take a very meta, scripted approach for obvious reasons. Was that the case, or were you able to make room for improv? 

I definitely don't do improv in the style of Nathan or Josephine even. That's not me. I write jokes. I write plot. I'm a writer. But, when I'm working with incredibly talented performers, especially comedians like Cat Cohen and Aristotle Athari, it would be a mistake to hem them in. We read the script, we rehearsed the script, they memorized the script. But we would get on the set, and I'd be like, “You guys, feel free to say things in your own words.” Sometimes we would do a version that was my scripted version, and then I'd say, “Now, just do whatever you want.” And they're incredible, very funny performers. I'm really blessed. So yeah, improv comedy can't be beat.

So much of directing a movie is about getting the performance right, but you're working at two levels in this movie. You've got to make the main narrative believable, but then with Chloe Cherry's character, so much of it is about making bad acting believable. What's that process of trying to direct an imperfect performance like?

Man, I gotta say, I just love bad theatre. I hate bad movies, but I love that theatre. You're just live, you're watching it, and you just have to feel it one way or the other. 

This movie is all about the person you think you are. You have the person who you are and how you behave around your closest intimate friends and partners. And then you have your face to the world. And revealing each of those faces for the different characters and how that plays out on the stage, versus the stage of talking to a friend. You don't see that often. That’s what I was working on.

Chloe is so wonderful and incredible and creative. She's very funny. She does do comedy, but she doesn't have that hard comedy background that pretty much everybody else in the cast has. So, it was a real toss up. I wondered what was going to happen when I threw her in there, and she really held her own. 

My favorite scene is whenever they're calling her about the part. We always hear that it’s against the screenwriting rules to write a phone conversation in your movie. But the way she delivers so many variations of “OK” in that scene just cracked me up.

I love that scene and am so proud of it! It just goes to a different place than I thought. 

You're spending 92 minutes with these people. You understand why they're making the mistakes that they're making, but they're people that you would maybe not want to be around, because they remind us so much of ourselves in our worst moments. Can you talk a little bit about making these characters identifiable and maintaining that audience connection? 

Why make movies about people who are perfectly good, and, Leave It to Beaver, and likable? That's not who human beings are, and that's not what I'm interested in talking about. There are enough movies being made where everybody's ultimately a good person. Why would I, as a totally independent filmmaker, do that? I don't know. I think the characters are likable. They're certainly in a milieu, but they love each other so much. So I'm hoping that comes through.

It definitely does. How did you come up with the idea for this particular film? It's such a novel premise of these people that aren't involved in theatre at all just going forward and creating a play by accident as a form of revenge.

This movie really started because I live in a small apartment in New York, and I am home all the time. I’m watching my neighbors and inventing stories for what they're doing. I'm like, one of those little ladies who spends all day looking out the window. I'm a writer, and I keep a journal. And I was making up stories about my neighbors and thinking this could be my next movie.

But then I was like, “What?  I am such a fucking hack. Why don't I just come up with a story? And then I realized, “Oh, me being the hack is the story.”

So, that was the genesis of this. I feel like in a lot of my work I'm really interested in the act of performance, and a lot of my work is about the theatre. And so that was something I was excited to work in. Plus, it's just so funny.

Speaking of New York, this is a very localized, regionalist movie. I know it was made after COVID. In Nashville, one of the things you’ll find if you've not been here in a while is that we’ve gotten a lot of New York and L.A. defectors that are living here now. I really enjoy these New York comedies that are coming out now and dealing with the aftermath of COVID. How has the city changed, and how did that inform the writing and the direction of this movie?

I mean, the story of New York is all about real estate and the post-COVID system altogether. Everybody works from home, not everybody, but many people still telecommute, many more than did before. Where you live is much less essential than it was pre-COVID, right? So I think the movie is directly touching on that.

I have a friend who was like, “I would never live above 14th Street.” And, you know, now lives in the Catskills. Officially, things have changed. 

What’s going on in New York is just an extreme version of what is happening in the rest of the country. Being able to live where you work or near where your friends are. It's all more complicated than it seemed to have been in previous eras.

Do you think these characters would have made the same decisions if they weren't coming out of that Post-COVID correction?

Good question, right? Would they have been so out of touch with their own selves, with their friends, that they make all these choices? Would those actors have been so desperate to get a job that they would have done this very weird play?

You started your career at a time when articles were coming out about why major directors like John Waters, Jim Jarmusch, and Steven Soderbergh weren't making movies anymore. Then, Amazon and Netflix began throwing all of this money at indie filmmakers to make mid-budget projects. Now we're in a climate where things are pulling back. How has the world of independent filmmaking changed in the last 10 years? 

A lot has changed. When I first got into this, it was the Great Recession, and there was a real austerity period in lots of respects. The only job you could get in the industry in New York was reality TV or Law and Order. There were a lot of people making microbudget movies who made money in reality TV as their day job. And then said,” Oh, but I really want to make cinema. What can I do?”

Then, in the intervening years, there's been this expansion in both television and streaming where suddenly these internet companies wanted a lot of content. I hate the word content instead of film, but that was really beneficial to the independent film world for several years. 

Suddenly, small film festivals were getting big sponsors, and there was grant money. You could make movies and sell them to streaming–to all kinds of random streaming services that don't exist anymore.

Since interest rates have gone up in the last two years, and because of industry consolidation, that shit is over. There's no more. It seems like money's drier than before because money is expensive. They realize that all the random streaming ventures they thought would blow up lost money.

I think we're about to reemerge into new territory where it's much like the music industry. How you make money from movies that aren't Marvel is a big question mark going forward. But what the past ten years have shown is that there's a real difference between what people want to see on their phone on Tiktok. What is entertainment content versus what is a movie? Those are two different things that serve different purposes for people. So, I'm hoping that we figure out how to monetize movies again.  We should be making different things for theaters than we should be making for what you have on while you fold your laundry.

Is there anything else you would like Nashville audiences to know going in?

I feel like sometimes New York is maligned as a place that's very different from the rest of America, but I think it's exactly the same, having spent much time outside of New York. So that's my, you know, “we are all one message.”

The French Italian screens on Friday at 6:30 p.m. at Regal Green Hills as part of the Nashville Film Festival. A Q&A with Wolther and producer Miranda Kahn will follow the movie.

Wolther’s panel, “Navigating the Indie Film Journey: Festivals, Releases, and Visibility,” begins Friday at 4 p.m. at the Hilton Green Hills as part of the festival’s annual Creators Conference.