Jay Rohr
Carolina Caroline is steaming up theaters. This sexy crime thriller comes courtesy of director Adam Rehmeier. His penchant for crafting misfits who know who they are but have yet to find a place where they fit in makes him an interesting choice to helm such a feature. For those unfamiliar with the moviemaker, his filmography includes fantastic flicks like Snack Shack(2024) and Dinner in America (2020).
Recently, Rehmeier sat down with Film Obsessive to discuss Carolina Caroline. Following the video below is an abridged transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length.
Film Obsessive: Did you feel it was like time to bring sexy back to crime drama?
Adam Rehmeier: I saw this when I read the original draft. It did not play the same way as what we’ve executed here. It was more of a crime thriller. When I talked to Tim and Trevor White from Star Thrower, who had the option on it, that was my first instinct. The beginning of the first act of this movie is telling me that it wants to be a romance and not a crime movie. When they hired me for the job, Tom Dean, the writer and I, we started collaborating on it. Then as we cast [Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner], Tom went to shoot a movie called Charlie Harper, and I had basically his blessing to do any further tweaks that I wanted to as we rolled into production. So we did a lot of heavy lifting and changing things to make it what I wanted, which was like a Seventies, two-handed road movie that was set against kind of an early aughts backdrop.
It does have a fantastic timeless quality.
Yeah, it feels contemporary but also you know I thought that it’s exponentially harder to rob banks today in 2026 with like post 9-11 CCTV everywhere like you’re gonna get caught and I thought what would be the last possible window that this thing could be staged in where it wouldn’t be easy for people just to get on a cell phone and call. So it was like, what would be the last possible point in our history that this could be, in my mind, more achievable and believable than 2026.
Magnolia Pictures.
When you were casting this film, were you 100% certain from the get-go who you wanted for these parts or were you feeling this out?
No, I met with a few actors that — Samara was at the very top of my list. I loved her in Ready or Not, and she was interesting to me. But I had only seen her in kind of more genre offerings. When we met in LA, we had breakfast together. She came in like no makeup, super chill. I could tell she was like a total team player. Extremely funny and I was just like wow she really feels like an every girl and to me that really made her stand out even more. I called the producers, I said I think I found Caroline; she’s going to knock it out of the park.
I was wondering if was there ever an instance where once you had her and she’s so expressive throughout this film there’s so many moments where she says a lot without saying anything it’s just all in her face and her eyes — were there ever instances where you’re like we can cut 15 lines of dialogue out of this it’s just in the way she looks, you know?
Maybe not consciously. We did this movie in 25 days. There’s almost 100 locations. If you do the math on that it’s really nuts. It was very challenging. Out of the 25 years or so that I’ve been working in the business, this was the hardest movie I’ve ever been involved in, just from the standpoint of locations.
[Samara’s] also in the chair for tattoo removal and stuff that takes 2 hours at least. If you have an actor in a chair for two, two and a half hours every day, doing a 25-day shoot, doing five day weeks, that’s a workday that someone’s in a chair.
This is the first time I’ve ever worked with a writer outside of me being the only person on that. What was great about that was I wasn’t precious with anything. It could be kind of liberating to just knock a half page off of the scene, knowing that next week, this is going to be a brutal week, and I should really try to get the page count down here. As we went along, there were several bigger scenes that was like, yeah, we should squeeze out two pages of it. This scene here, we should try to get a page out of it just to lighten the load of what we actually had to execute.
And I think that with respect to Samara, there were, as we shot, I haven’t talked about this a whole lot, but as we shot, I think we all realized that the ending, the way that it was written didn’t quite fit the tone that we had been shooting and so we modified it even more the last weekend before we shot. We got together, me, Kyle and Sam, and we’re like these six pages here don’t feel quite correct. Let’s modify it to all the other stuff that we had sort of tailored and changed along the way. I think also giving them some agency in like what their characters would do.
This is one of two or three instances where I’ve seen this, where crime is treated like just another job. Sure, it’s got that thrill factor, but once that wears off, they have to keep robbing banks constantly in order to pay for things.
They’re not big jobs either. They’re maybe getting 10 or 15 grand if they’re lucky each time they fill up the bag. They’re not trying to get in the vault like Heat or something. It’s like they’re going for what’s in the drawer and what they can get out in under 60 seconds.
Smaller was better with it because I think in movies there’s this tendency to do this heist like we’re going to make $15 million, and we’re going to go live our dreams in Fiji. Okay, but keeping it super grounded in a way where the numbers aren’t that big. There’s something cool about that where you’re like, oh man, it’s 10, 15K they’re pulling.
When they’re swimming in the quarry lake, how did you pull that off? Because the camera’s right over shoulder on them, but they’re in the water.
I actually shot that. I shot everything in the quarry because Jean-Philippe, my DP, he’s like, “I prefer not to be in the water.” We are in an actual quarry. You see the shot where they’re driving and they get out and she sort of strips her clothes off in the headlights and then jumps off and you don’t see where she goes. She jumped into a quarry that’s 70 feet straight down. And then Kyle — it pops up to that wide shot. You see Kyle pull the Greg Louganis dive. I did not tell him to do that. So then what we did was we brought it in closer to the shore and we went out and we walked and it wasn’t very far because the water closer to the shore it had all of these like bluegill beds and stuff in it. There’s fish shooting between your legs and I mean, I’m literally operating the camera in a fish tank. We’ve got it down to the smallest it can be. We had a suction mount on the side so I could hold it better but the monitor was on the back end of it and it was just in a place where I could barely get minimum focus for myself with my eyes so it was in a really awkward spot so it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever shot.
The water and the buoyancy helps the thing kind of stay stable to a degree, but you have Sam and Kyle basically to the edge right before it drops off. There’s the illusion that they’re out farther.
Compared to Dinner in America and even Snack Shack to a degree, this is one of the kindest parents that I’ve seen in one of your features. Was that a conscious thing?
ADAM REHMEIER: There’s the father that was the single father that raised Caroline and you see where she comes from. And then, on the flip side, the absolute monster that mom really is. I wanted to offset that and know that she came from a good home. She came from a good, kind, patient father, but she has these yearnings to find out about mom and to find out who she was and why she left. Five minutes into that scene, you understand why she left.
And it’s a heartbreaking scene, but it’s also the catalyst for pushing her over the edge to say, okay, **** it. Let’s go all the way. Let’s rob the world. Everything’s sort of spiraling out of control at that point.
That’s one of the things I really like about this movie is that sense of things getting out of hand. All the characters don’t fully comprehend the reality of what they’re getting involved with.
Yeah, I mean, I think that you don’t know, I think it’s always a lot of people rub on the fact that when [Oliver/Kyle Gallner] sees the cop, we can’t quite read what he’s going to do. When he sees the cop that’s going to go into the bank, ultimately, he could just drive away at that point and leave her.
So now you’re currently sort of taking this around on tour as it were and I think the larger release is in a couple of days, correct?
Yes, on June 5th.
How is the audience reaction so far? Do you feel like people are getting it and they’re enjoying it?
It’s been fantastic. I think people are loving the romance, and they’re loving the fact that it’s sensual and kind of steamy and feels mature and yet respectful and tasteful. But I think that they’re enjoying just a different shade for me as a director.
And I think that that’s what I want to do. I feel like that obligation to the audience is always to try new things and new shades. For me, all of my movies are kind of mashups. I try to walk a tightrope and see if I can drop the floor out, you know, at some point and see what happens. In this, it’s clearly… can you still root for them? I want to challenge the audience that way, and I also want to build them memorable characters that they can root for and get behind.
I’ve got to ask the obligatory, what’s on the horizon for you?
I have a project I can’t talk about, but it’s already in the can. I’m almost done with it. I have projects in the true crime space that I’m gonna explore. Westerns, I have every genre, like bios, like that. I have 12 or 13 things that I’m attached to, that it’s just each year you’re trying to get in on a slate somewhere to get shot out. I just have massive amounts of projects that I’m passionate about, all of them. Anything I attach myself to, I’m super passionate to, like this one.
