As LGBTQ representation evolves onscreen, films like I Don’t Understand You understand the universal truth that it’s impossible to support gay rights without supporting gay wrongs.
David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, the husbands and writing/directing duo behind the dark comedy horror now in theaters, spoke to Deadline about the importance of writing “queer characters not just being labeled as queer” in their semi-autobiographical about a gay couple on a nightmare vacation in Italy while preparing to adopt a baby.
“There are a lot of different steps in emotions in a queer person, and I think we should see more of them,” said Craig. “We’re just excited to put a movie out there that shows queer characters, and also birth mothers, as real and great people.”
I Don’t Understand You stars Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells as Dom and Cole, two prospective dads who find out they’ve been matched with a birth mother (Amanda Seyfried) just as they set off on an Italian getaway. But when a series of escalating miscommunications results in multiple accidental deaths, the couple has to think on their feet to get back home.
Although the couple emphasizes that the real trip resulted in zero casualties, Crano said the experience of frantically preparing for fatherhood while in a foreign country “put us in the mindset of being like the characters in a horror movie on some level, of just being freaked out and panicked, like everything could go disastrously wrong. So that’s sort of the onset of the movie.”
Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig
Courtesy Mathieu Young
Read on about David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano’s journey from adoption to the big screen with I Don’t Understand You, how Joel Edgerton “bullied” them into making the movie, and their real son’s reaction to seeing his cameo.
DEADLINE: Tell me about your adoption experience and how that inspired this movie.
BRIAN CRANO: So, we had been in the adoption process for a couple of years before we matched with a birth mother that ended up being a scam. And that’s common, and sort of hopefully avoidable now, going through it once. And right as we were kind of reckoning with that, we were about to go on our 10th anniversary trip to Italy, and two days before we got on the plane, we matched with the birth mother of now our son. And so it kind of broke our brains open because we had less than six weeks before he was due. And there’s a reason a pregnancy is nine months. Six weeks is not a lot of time to prepare emotionally.
DAVID JOSEPH CRAIG: And we also had a 10-day romantic vacation planned to Italy at the same time. So what do you do?
CRANO: Yeah, and it put us in the mindset of being like the characters in a horror movie on some level, of just being freaked out and panicked, like everything could go disastrously wrong. So that’s sort of the onset of the movie.
DEADLINE: And I saw something about how Joel Edgerton pushed you to turn it into a movie as well. Can you tell me about that?
CRAIG: I sort of had my film school with Joel. I started working with him about 12 years ago, and worked with him for over a decade, so I worked with him on The Gift and on Boy Erased. And so, he’s been both my boss and a real ally in our growing career as well, and has been my mentor forever. And so, the first act of the movie is semi-autobiographical, up until a certain point. And we left that experience, and we were talking to Joel on the phone, and he said to us, “Oh, you’re right, this is a horror movie. You should write this. And if you don’t, I will.” And so, that was sort of how it got championed in that way.
CRANO: Bullying works.
CRAIG: Yeah, bullying works.
Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells in ‘I Don’t Understand You’
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DEADLINE: I loved Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells. The characters that they’re playing, is one supposed to be one of you specifically, or was it more just representative of your relationship?
CRANO: No comment. [laughs] No, I think one of us is perhaps more fastidious and nervous, and the other one is a little more loose, and maybe by the, end you’ll be able to [figure it out].
CRAIG: We definitely wrote them with our situation in mind, and sort of the pastiche version of what we are comedically as humans. We’re very funny people just in our own personal lives. So we definitely took elements of our own life into it. And then when Nick and Andrew came on, we definitely nurtured the script to be much more in their lane and their voices. And what was great is they’ve known each other for years and like truly are in love with each other as human beings. And so it was really easy for us to write a true relationship that didn’t have to be ours, onto the boys. And we think they were the perfect match for it, so we’re really happy with them.
DEADLINE: Well, I also love them on Big Mouth.
CRAIG: And the one thing we didn’t take into account when we cast them and that we realized before we started shooting was, they’re both part of comedy duos, Nick with John Mulaney and Andrew with Josh Gad. And so it was really nice to have, because they both shared space with each other and they knew how to do that, that they gifted each other the way that you do in a relationship. And they were in 98% of the movie together, and they never got tired of working with each other. It was fantastic.
DEADLINE: The funny part of the movie is how the miscommunication just keeps escalating. Tell me about mining the real experience that you had with that, and then also playing that with the actors and trying to emphasize the miscommunication.
CRANO: I mean, that’s kind of the fun of the movie was being able to set a bunch of traps for the characters and have to figure them out. And sometimes, we’re putting the audience ahead of their experience, and sometimes we’re holding the audience back. And so, figuring out how that would work was really a joy in the edit. I love being in the cut, and that was a really fun part of that, including like, “What do we subtitle? What do we hold back on the subtitles, so you’re actually listening?” Some jokes start subtitled and end up in spoken English, and that has a whole different vibe. Dialing all that stuff in was really super fun. And then, Italian humor in Italy is different.They don’t do sound-alike jokes in the same way that we do. And so, so many of the beats in the show are those sort of like, you know, Italian words that sound like English words that have a different meaning, and they’re like, “How does this work? What is the scene?”
CRAIG: Yeah, their idiomatic humor isn’t the same as ours, and we learned that very fast. But also, I think the miscommunication is a lot of times in their head too, right? All of the Italian characters are just wonderful human beings, and a lot of the miscommunication is the two guys, Andrew and Nick, who played Dom and Cole are misunderstanding what is being presented in front of them.
Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells in ‘I Don’t Understand You’
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DEADLINE: But communication aside, what else was it like shooting in Italy? Obviously you’ve been there before. Or did you shoot in Italy or was it somewhere else?
CRAIG: Yeah, we shot in Rome. We were just outside of Rome, yeah.
CRANO: We were there for six months. It was a dream. I highly recommend. The crew was amazing. We had this great realization coming in that there were like seven American crew: us, Nick and Andrew, and the producers. And then everybody else was Italian, so we’re like, “We’re making an Italian movie in English. We better figure out how these guys want to do it.” And we got so far with that, because I guess a lot of people come in with a very sort of “we’re gonna do it in our way” kind of approach, and the Italian film culture is so proud and so impressive. They’re like, “Hey, bro, we know what we’re doing.” So, it was great to be able to just kind of use the whole crew and, and everybody from department heads to loaders and PAs had read the whole script, which I’ve never experienced shooting here. So, it was this really collaborative process where everybody knew the story we were all telling.
CRAIG: They all had their favorite scenes. It was amazing.
CRANO: Yeah, and they loved how the movie plays on tropes of this sort of entitled American who needs to be comfortable, and they were familiar with that concept. [laughs]
CRAIG: We did shoot a lot of nights. Most of the movie takes place at night, and we shot for sure, 7pm till 5am. But doing that in the Italian countryside, and then waking up to a sunrise coming over an olive field, you’re like, “Not bad.”
CRANO: It’s not bad.
DEADLINE: And I loved, which was apparent in the last scene with them interviewing for their second kid, just this underlying theme that gay parents, just like any other parents, would do anything for their kids. Which seems like such an important message right now. Can you tell me about getting that message across and if there was any catharsis in that?
CRANO: For sure, I think the two things that were thematically important to us was that; we all want the same shit and would do anything for your kid. And I remember them handing us our son, and he’s like seven pounds soaking wet or whatever and you’re like, “I’d do anything for this little potato.” So, it was such a clear lightning bolt. And then the other part is, we were really interested as we were going through the adoption process in talking about adoption in a way that is never represented, in our opinion, where usually a birth mother is portrayed as like throwing a baby out of a car window. And nothing could be further from the truth in our life experience. It’s very important for us to make the birth mother in our story the hero of the movie, and not the two essentially protagonists. They’re very much not that [laughs], but she is. And so, those kind of thematics were important for us to just kind of kick back, as well as just having a movie in which gay people can experience joy. That just doesn’t happen very much.
CRAIG: I think it is really important to see queer characters not just being labeled as queer. There are a lot of different steps in emotions in a queer person, and I think we should see more of them. We’re just excited to put a movie out there that shows queer characters, and also birth mothers, as real and great people.
CRANO: The thing that was so surprising when we took the script out originally, before we shot the movie, was so many people, agents, readers, etc. would come back and be like, “Oh, it could just be a man or a woman.” What they’re trying to say is, it’s relatable, right? But the reason that you’re having this response is because you’re used to seeing only an AIDS drama or only a coming-out horror story or whatever. So, that was a real eye opener.
CRAIG: Which we need and I’m appreciative of that, but we get to do other things too.
Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig on the set of ‘I Don’t Understand You’
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DEADLINE: And I also loved Amanda Seyfried in the role of the birth mother. Tell me a little bit about casting her.
CRAIG: We’ve known Amanda for a very long time, she’s one of our dearest friends. For lack of a better word, or to be just relatable, she’s essentially a godmother of our son. And so it only felt fitting to put her in that role, and she’s also legitimately one of the best actors I know and have seen. She’s just a machine. It was just a wonderful experience to have her in that part. And for us too, it was just emotional because she was essentially playing the godmother of our kid, and that was wonderful. Those were real tears, by the way.
DEADLINE: Good to know. And I’m not sure how old your son is now, but has he seen the movie?
CRAIG: He’s in the movie, Glenn! He’s the little boy at the end.
DEADLINE: OK, so he seems younger than the audience for this film, but are you saving it for a future birthday?
CRAIG: He’s 5 now. He got to see—we brought him to the last screening at SXSW, and when we knew that his scene was coming up, we walked him into the room in the back, and he saw his face on a big giant screen, and he just screams out loud, “That’s me!”
CRANO: He really enjoyed it. I don’t know what sort of therapeutic processes we’ve set into motion with this, but he loved it. And he and Nick Kroll’s son are really good friends, and so he loves seeing Nick be funny on TV.
CRAIG: He calls him Nick Kroll. He doesn’t call him anything else. He says his full name whenever he sees him.
CRANO: And also, Andrew does a lot of cartoon voices, and so he’ll kind of perk up when he’s watching a cartoon and Andrew’s voice comes on, so it’s cute.
