Normally UCLA film students are eager to go their separate ways, but three recent UCLA graduate film program alumni have stuck together long enough to produce a feature film that won the Audience Award at the Austin Film Festival and has been accepted as an official selection of the AFI FEST .
Writer-director Mo Perkins and co-producers Angela Sostre and Tamara May Maloney, have all collaborated on the independent film “A Quiet Little Marriage,” which will screen at the festival on Nov. 7-8. It is a stark yet tender relationship drama about Dax (Cy Carter) and Olive (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), a young married couple struggling with the question of whether to have a child, not to mention Dax’s addict brother and Olive’s Alzheimer’s disease-battling father.
Perkins, Sostre and Maloney all met each other through the film program, which is a fairly easy thing to do, considering the number of people in the program. “Everyone knew each other because there were so few people,” Perkins said. “So we were all friends before we collaborated.”
The script for “A Quiet Little Marriage” was actually written collaboratively by Perkins and the two leads, Carter and Ellis. “I was working on my senior thesis at UCLA, and I was trying to cast the male and female leads, and I had already cast Cy … and I asked him if he knew any actresses … I had gone through about 50 auditions,” Perkins said. “I told her that I knew Mary Elizabeth Ellis,” Carter said.
The chemistry among the three was so great that they later reconnected and began to collaborate on a new project that eventually became “A Quiet Little Marriage.” The very intimate subject matter of the film came naturally, as it was partially inspired by changes in the lives of the three co-writers. “We all had recently gotten married, and the focus of the film was inspired by our shared experiences in living with someone else,” Perkins said.
After the script was finished, Perkins brought her old friends Sostre and Maloney on to produce the film, as she knew that they would be sympathetic to her aims. “The cool thing was that one of us could step in if necessary,” Sostre said, “like if I needed to (be assistant director), I could because we had all been trained to do that at UCLA.”
The team then began filming in Angelino Heights, one of Los Angeles’ oldest neighborhoods, with the interiors shot in Perkins’ own apartment.
The domestic setting of the film combined with the inventive photography help reinforce the ideas central to the script. There are several time-lapse sequences in the film, most of them of Carter and Ellis sleeping in the same bed, tossing and turning in fast motion. “Those sequences were meant to show how much time you spend with someone you’re married to,” Perkins said. Perkins and Carter even started assembling a time-lapse sequence of Carter’s beard growing, which was ultimately cut from the film. “Every day before filming I would come into Mo’s bathroom where she had a camera set up … and we would do the beard shot,” Carter said. “The idea that you can see someone’s beard growing day by day is a degree of intimacy you don’t have with anyone else,” Perkins said.
Another distinctive element that sets this film apart is the quirky score, which, in another act of close collaboration, was provided by Perkins’ brother, a Northern California musician. The gently plucked strings of banjos, guitars and other instruments flow throughout the scenes.
The core cast members themselves also share the common bond of being featured on the FX television show “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.” Ellis’ husband is in fact Charlie Day, one of the four protagonists of the television show, who makes brief but candidly funny appearances during two scenes in the film. “I think the experience of being on “˜Sunny’ made us already comfortable enough with each other that really helped us make this movie,” Ellis said.
While the cast and crew anticipate the AFI debut, in the meantime they’re reveling in touring with their finished product. “It’s like being in a touring band,” Perkins said.