My parents marriage was anything but conventional.  I was raised on a Tennessee commune in a multi family household.   I wound up with lots of siblings.  Through it all, my parents seemed to have a strong and loving relationship to each other.  The seniors in my family were much more traditional. They came from a time when marriage was expected and divorce was stigmatized. My grandmother suffered through a difficult marriage and her last advice to me was to “never get married.” My grandfather, who was afflicted with Alzheimer’s in the final part of his life would sometimes break into long monologues about his various lovers and wives confusing their identities into one guilt ridden relationship that he never quite resolved.  

 

A few years ago, I fell in love and married in the conventional way. Fumbling through my own experiences with partnership, I found myself thinking about what happens to two people when they commit to intimacy on that level. How do people with their distinctive histories and complicated families set out to create new families?  I was not alone, amongst my friends I found many of us were discovering marriage in a way that was unique to our time and age. Cy Carter, Mary Elizabeth Ellis and I began talking about this as a backbone for an interesting film idea.  We started to grow a story about a married couple that were in love but also still discovering what their commitment was to each other.  

 

Finally we decided just to make it in a very stone soup kind of way, pulling together all our talented friends and shooting the film in our own apartments.  Most important for all of us in this film was that the relationships feel authentic, even if the characters behaviors become outrageous. To help with this, we experimented with a writing process that included rehearsal. I wrote scenes and then once a week met with Cy and Mary Elizabeth, rehearsed, improvised and then sat back down and revised the scenes based on that experience. Every week we discovered something unexpected about the characters and the story. This was a new way of writing for me, and a new way of working for us all. A Quiet Little Marriage is my first feature film and I'm so grateful to have gotten to make it with such a super team of talented people.