Tina Kakadelis
Couples Weekend writer/director Nora Kirkpatrick has concocted a holiday trip from hell in her new movie. Two couples (Josh Gad, Ashley Park, Daveed Diggs, and Alexandra Daddario) arrive at a snowy cabin to celebrate the New Year. Mitch (Gad) and Debs (Daddario) have been friends for decades and their spouses, Melanie (Park) and Josh (Diggs), respectively, often play second fiddle to this friendship. The equilibrium of the foursome is thrown for a loop when Mitch and Debs, while on a hike, see Melanie and Josh having sex. The friends are torn on whether they want to confront their partners or not, but when a snowstorm traps them in the house together, emotions run high.
You mentioned your band, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes. I’m curious whether you feel that comedy has a sort of rhythm, a give and take, that could relate to music. Have you ever thought about that sort of rhythmic approach to comedy, given the years you’ve spent in a band playing accordion?
Nora Kirkpatrick: Absolutely. I feel like the rhythm of the scene becomes apparent as I’m moving through it. Where you put the jokes, where you put the spaces, and all of that. I was lucky enough to work with actors on Couples Weekend who had such a great sense of inherent rhythm.
A lot of them had come from the theater, so they were so capable at handling the ten pages of dialogue we would shoot in a day. I was just really, really impressed by their ability to put in the natural ebbs and flows almost identical to the way they were in my mind.
When you write, do you have to hear the dialogue out loud to get that sense of rhythm, or do you feel like you have enough internally?
Sometimes I speak it out loud, but a lot of times it’s in my head. I can hear it very clearly and see it very clearly. If I’m trying to figure out how it might feel, I’ll say it out loud, but I’m usually just mouthing along to people screaming in my head.
This is a nightmare of a movie. It’s any couple’s worst-case scenario. You’ve written a ton of comedy, but did you ever think about taking the horror route for this movie?
You could have done anything you feel like with once you have this concept. It could have gone horror, could have gone sci-fi…you could do anything. The idea came from my interest in doing something for actors where they could stand and deliver and do scenes. I was missing a bit of the feeling of the theater. That’s how I wanted this film to feel. I’m a big fan of chamber pieces where people can’t get out and you have to work through the emotions in real time. I love that.
I thought of the premise of two friends who have a very different viewpoint on the same event. Could their alliance to each other be stronger than their alliance to their partners? I thought that set up an interesting dynamic. Would you not tell if your best friend said please don’t blow up my marriage along with yours? How long would you be able to hold off?
It started as a short film. After I wrote it as a short film, I thought, I have ideas for what might happen next. I’m just going to keep going. So that’s how it worked.
I think that’s such an interesting dynamic because, going back to When Harry Met Sally, there’s the famous line about how men and women can’t be friends with each other, but that is your film’s inherent dynamic. I’m curious if the genders were ever flipped in this scenario. Maybe two women who had been the longtime friends? Or was it always that male-female friendship at the core of it?
I tried a lot of different things in the movies, and a lot of the points of view had been flipped. Originally, instead of Josh Gad’s character wanting to not tell the secret, he really wanted to tell it, and Alex Daddario wanted to keep it secret. That ended up changing to align with their arcs at the end of the movie about who wanted to stay and who wanted to go.
It’s fun, because this movie feels like a chess piece where you could have just moved anything around and it would have been interesting, could have also been interesting. It could be like True West, where they have different people play it every time. Make two women married, make two men married, and try the same thing. It might be really interesting.
Speaking of these four, it’s primarily them for the majority of the film. How did you come to these four? The chemistry in these chamber pieces is such a difficult thing to manage. Was there any chemistry reads between these four?
I met with everyone one-on-one, and I had a feeling right off the bat for all of them. I’d been a fan of a lot of their work leading up to this. I felt very honored that they wanted to do it. They brought so much of themselves and their own ideas to the roles as well. We truly had so much fun making the movie that it was a real joy. I mean, we were all in this abandoned ski lodge together in Utah for a month, and it was a really, really beautiful, fun experience.
Like you said, it’s a chamber piece. It’s a single location. What were you picturing the house to look like? What were some things you needed out of the location? How difficult was it to find something that could fit all your needs for the film?
We really needed snow. Our shoots kept getting pushed back for whatever reason. By the time we shot, it was almost June. Thankfully, there happened to be snow in Utah in June, but it was melting every day, so we had to shoot all the exterior stuff on the first couple days.
We were driving up the mountain, getting more snow, and driving it back down the mountain. I think day one was us shooting them seeing the sex through the window. There’s about a ten-page monologue that’s not in the movie that was Josh Gad and Alex still outside the house running through the scenario of what they would have said. Probably my favorite scene in the movie, but it’s not in the movie of course. It was such an interesting thing to do day one because usually you kind of build into that kind of drama. You build into that kind of relationship, but we just had to jump into it. They’re going to have to figure out how to seem like they’ve been best friends for 20 years on day one. To their testament, they really did.
As the writer/director, this film is very close to you. How difficult is it to cut your favorite scene? I feel like that’s something a lot of younger or newer filmmakers struggle with. How to cut something you love in service of a larger picture.
It’s so hard, and it’s not something that happens right away. You fight it for as long as you can. Then there comes a time where you’ve got two days of the edit left and you’re like, it’s got to go, doesn’t it?
We screened it several times with that in and the audience doesn’t even know what the problem is. Maybe a few people will say this area dragged a little bit or something, and then I know what has to happen, but it is my favorite scene in the movie. I waited as long as I could.
I read that you described it as The Breakfast Club for adults, which I think is really interesting because in The Breakfast Club, they’re all strangers to each other. These people in Couples Weekend have such longevity between them. I’m curious why you feel that was the comparison that sums up the film for you?
That’s a description Josh Gad gave to the movie after we made it. The Breakfast Club has five lead characters who are all so different and they’re all stuck in one place. By the end of that day, they have a greater understanding of themselves and the people they had developed these real preconceived notions about. I think from that element I felt like it was a really apt description in that these people are starting with a presentation of who they are, similar to The Breakfast Club.
By the end of it, you’re realizing that’s a facade. Here’s who I really am. Once you strip away all the fears and anxieties and everything, and acknowledge I’m putting on this character, to what? Feel better? To make people like me more? In that regard, I felt like it was a good comparison.
You just wrapped your second feature. What experiences did you take from Couples Weekend to your new film that you feel made things go smoother?
Oh, my gosh. So many things. I have this one journal that’s just called “things I learned.” After each job, I write down what I learned and I think I’ve lost it, which makes me very sad.
I literally write down, to the micro level of things, what I learned. To the extent of showing the client the perspiration on the beer can first before you shoot the wide shot in case they want to tilt the can.
On Couples Weekend, we were really strapped for time. There was no way around it, but that was helpful to me in terms of prepping shot listing. I had to be so ready to go. All of that I brought to the second feature, which I think I had for more days than the other feature, but we had a lot more pages and a lot more set pieces. I would say we were equally strapped for time, which is just kind of the nature of things at this point.
One thing someone told me before I made my first project that really solidified for me on Couples Weekend is that if you think you need a shot, you have to get it. Even if everyone’s trying to talk you out of it, and everyone will try to talk to you about it, you have to get it. Your AD will be like, we don’t have time. Your producers will be like, it’s too expensive. Everyone will try to talk you out of it if it’s some extra-special something, but if it was really part of your original creative process with the scene, you have to find a way to make it.
There was one shot in Couples Weekend that we almost didn’t get because there was a lot of we don’t have time and we don’t need it, all this stuff. If I hadn’t gotten it, I do not think the sequence would’ve worked. It became so integral to the dancing sequence. It was a really good lesson for me.
If something’s part of your creative process, you have to trust yourself in the moment to carry that on.
