Jeff Lipsky talks about GOLDILOCKS AND THE TWO BEARS

When he was in college, Jeff Lipsky was hired by John Cassavetes to help distribute A Woman Under the Influence. It was a collaboration that led not just to a career in distribution for Lipsky, as cofounder of October Films, Lot 47 Films, and Adopt Films, but later as a writer-director whose style clearly found early inspiration in Cassavetes’ conversational, gritty portraits of people living life on the edges.

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His latest, Goldilocks and the Two Bears, involves broken people connecting, or attempting to, in unexpected ways. Ingrid and Ian are drifters and druggies who sneak into empty homes for some respite from the Nevada desert heat.

Ivy is new to town, about to move into the condo that she doesn’t realize contains some unexpected guests. But rather than call the police, she finds herself drawn to the strangers, in potentially dangerous ways.

Films Gone Wild had several questions

Films Gone Wild had several questions about this particular movie, but in the answers we got from Lipsky, we learned more about his entire filmography, and where Goldilocks and The Two Bears fits into it. He also had the most unexpected  answer to our standard final question that we’ve ever received.

FILMS GONE WILD: Getting any actors, male or female, to do this level of nudity nowadays onscreen is a rare thing. Did it take much persuading, and was it difficult finding actors who were both okay with it and at the level of performance you needed?

JEFF LIPSKY: First, I must disagree with your underlying premise. My favorite film of 2023, four-time Oscar® winner Poor Things, contains significantly more nudity than in any of my films. (Filmed in the UK, granted, but starring three American actors.)

And from what I’ve been reading about this year’s Cannes offerings, upcoming, high-end American films have everyone from Demi Moore to Mikey Madison good-to-go with nudity. 

But getting back to my film(s), little of the male and/or female nudity is sexually motivated, rather it is naturalistic, organic to their characters, and essential to the story. A homeless couple gain access to an empty condo, find a washer and a dryer, and shed their clothes with wild abandon.

Then they shower…in separate bathrooms. I strive for a sense of naturalism, not eroticism, in all of my films. In each case the sensitive material is spelled out vividly and in detail in my scripts from the get-go. No surprises. The scripts usually detail how the scenes will be (and are) filmed. Discussions with my actors about how these scenes are character and story motivated abound, prior to casting and then later on-set. For all graphic scenes my sets are closed to the nth degree.

We’re talking about only me, my DP/camera operator (four of my seven DPs have been female), my female boom operator, and, sometimes my female wardrobe person if a robe is not near enough at hand while the camera is rolling. C’est tout!  (On my first film Childhood’s End, my female DP chastised me for throwing my male script supervisor off the set during filming of nude scenes.) 

So! The answer to your question “was it difficult” and “did it take much persuading…” Nearly five hundred actors were submitted for the three lead roles. Ten wound up dropping out given to nudity considerations.

The three actors we cast delivered off-the-charts performances in every scene in the film, including those to which you refer.  That’s also been true in the case of higher profile actors who’ve graced my films. Actors like Justin Kirk, Julianne Nicholson, Jonathan Groff (who’s about to finally win his first Tony Award – yay!), and Reed Birney.

Ian and Ingrid’s stories

FGW: Did you invent Ian and Ingrid’s stories from whole cloth, or was there research or other stories of homeless drifters you’d seen that inspired you?

JL: Whole cloth. These are people I know, but have never met. Ingrid and Ivy leave the east coast with potentially great futures in their back pockets. But they were also escaping demons, just as Ivy is, and those demons only grow stronger as our story progresses. It’s their particular demons that sets them apart from the general population.

I needed connective tissue that would somehow attract if not fully bond Ivy to Ian and Ingrid, even though their demons are self-confessed. So my “homeless” characters had to be very specific, unlike the sometimes amorphous, sad lives of many if not most so-called drifters we all-too-often see and all-too-often ignore.

Could it be a stage play

FGW: So much of the story feels like it could be a stage play, though the very end changes the pace quite a bit. Was that always planned that way, or did certain locations and additional shots become available to open the story up like that?

JL: Ah, another question that often comes up in discussions about my films. The structure of GATTB was always planned as it appears in the final cut of the film.

Two recent examples of why my films, and why most of the best-acted dialog-driven, character-driven films, wouldn’t be as effective as plays:

In my previous film The Last brilliant 89-year-old actor Rebecca Schull, playing 92 (and now, in real life, a robust 95!), delivers a twenty-minute monologue that begins in close-up and concludes in extreme close-up, in which this matriarch of a Jewish family in New York details her mother’s life and her own, leading to the stunning confession to her beloved great-grandchildren that she was never Jewish, and how she became a willing member of the Nazi party collaborating with a monstrous doctor at Auschwitz, the father of her child. 

Audiences (and critics) were transfixed, couldn’t blink or take their eyes off of her, for a moment. Most viewers who loved the film singled this monologue out as one of the best scenes they’d ever seen in a movie. Now, imagine the same actress delivering those same words on a stage.

Unless you are seated in the first ten rows, preferably in a chair angled so you can look directly at the actor without developing a crick in your neck, how would you see all of the emotion, the pain, the fear, the love, the determination, the unrepentant, non-regret in her eyes? Or even hear the subtleties in this aging woman’s voice?

The longest “monologue” in GATTB (interrupted only by a few short questions from Ivy) is delivered by Serra Naiman, playing Ingrid. It’s her life story, which climaxes as she describes the circumstances by which she made the acquaintance of the man who turned her on to heroin and, yet, about whom she says, “I trust that man with my life.”

Her performance is riveting. In the finished film the scene lasts eight minutes and forty-six seconds. The unedited scene ran thirteen minutes and twenty-five seconds. We shot it in one take (three times).

After the first take something happened that never happened before during production of my seven previous films. The entire crew, none of whom were standing more than eight feet from Serra, burst into spontaneous applause.

In a theatre, seated fifty or one hundred feet from my actor, that’s never gonna happen. Well, almost never.

shot guerilla-style

FGW: Was any of this shot guerilla-style? I’m wondering if the Stratosphere or In N Out folks realize what kind of movie they’re appearing in.

JL: C’mon, they’re appearing in a wonderful movie! The only “scene” that was truly filmed guerilla-style was the opening shot on Fremont Street. We’d been warned that if you’re not Sean Connery (a car chase in Diamonds Are Forever was shot there) your equipment might well be busted-up by someone resembling Joe Pesci in Casino.

Funnily enough, getting permission from billion-dollar casino resorts to film in, even as a low-budget independent film, is not difficult or expensive. We had full permission to shoot at the STRAT, outside its entrance, inside the casino, and atop the 108th floor observation deck.

I shot two days of my first film (in 1995; co-produced by Joana Vicente and Jason Kliot) in the casino and showroom of the long-gone Stardust. And during production of the eighth film I directed (but the only one I didn’t write) I shot for four days at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. 

In N Out (whose food I love)? We didn’t actually shoot at their drive-through but in an adjacent mall parking lot. You can barely see its logo in the background. And, hey, in the scene a young girl feeds some of their yummy French fries to the homeless.

We had formal permission to shoot at almost every other location (eleven locations in all).

Did the story come first

FGW: It’s the dream of every writer-director to come up with a compelling script that can basically be shot entirely inside an apartment, or in this case, condo. Did you start with the location and work a story around it, or did the story come first, and the location fit it as best as possible?

JL: Of the seven features I’ve both written and directed a good part of three of them were filmed in the home where I lived at the time I wrote the film, and the home, in each case, becomes an important character in each.

In Flannel Pajamas Justin Kirk’s character rents a one-bedroom apartment in a luxurious high-rise, in part to impress the young woman from Montana with whom he’s fallen in love. Later in the story the beauty of the apartment itself contrasts with a scene of ugly coercion and selfishness on Justin’s character’s part. The scene wouldn’t have been effective anywhere else. 

The wife (played by Sophia Takal) in Molly’s Theory of Relativity is the bread winner of the family and has recently (unjustly) lost her job so the couple is forced to move out of the only home they’ve shared. The story unfolds in one eighteen-hour period, on Halloween; again, the home becomes a linchpin in the story. 

In the case of GATTB, one year after moving into a condo community sporting 250 units, COVID hit. I became a hermit at a time I’d only ever met two of the five hundred or so people who were my neighbors. Who were these neighbors?

In addition, the population of Las Vegas is two million but I live in an upscale suburb where you can hear a pin drop at any hour, twenty-four-seven.  That’s when I first came up with the characters of Ian, Ingrid, and Ivy. 

That said, only a third of Flannel takes place in that high-rise, and only half of GATTB takes place in my condo. My main goal in writing was to avoid the Las Vegas most tourists only know. That’s why only one sequence (and the one opening shot in the film) takes place on The Strip.

futures of both distribution and film criticism

FGW: In a 2010 interview with IndieWire, you were optimistic about the futures of both distribution and film criticism. Are you still? Based on your breadth of experience, where do you see things going for theatrical?

JL: For all of us, fourteen years was a lifetime ago. But there’s a reason I dubbed my unincorporated company Glass Half Full Media. I am nothing if not optimistic. Late during the pandemic every single movie studio publicly admitted that, for their own films, theatrical distribution was essential in order to maximize downstream revenues.

That was a good thing.

Cord Jefferson’s Oscar® acceptance speech this year, encouraging studios to make ten $20 million dollar budgeted films rather than one with a $200 million budget…that was a good thing. Then just as things began looking up again (way up) the double-work stoppages mortally wounded theatrical distribution…and the new SAG-AFTRA contract expires in two fucking years!

Please, no one strike for the remainder of this decade, at least until theatrical revenues exceed the level of 2019. 

Am I still optimistic about the future of film criticism? More difficult for that glass to remain half full. The problem is not the caliber of film reviewing itself; it’s the aggregation of film criticism, the reductive nature of selling film criticism to the masses.

It began, I believe, in San Francisco, decades ago, when despite writing by some really good critics, reviews in the Chronicle were ranked by a little idiotic caricature of a moviegoer (always a man) sleeping, attentive, or leaping from his chair, his ubiquitous bucket of popcorn strewn every which way. 

No one had to read the review. What does the little comic strip moron think? That’s all the reader needed to know. And, as we know, it’s often editors, not the critics, who assign stars or other abbreviated encomiums to the reviews.

Often I question whether those editors (or more likely, interns) even read the entire review as there are many occasions when the viewpoint of the critic does not correspond to whether a Critics Pick is assigned to that review or not.

Why read star-assessed reviews either? Why read anything…at all! 

One of the best film critics in history was also complicit in the dumbing down of (his own) reviews. I refer to the late, great Mr. Ebert who, along with Mr. Siskel abetting, gave films thumbs-up or thumbs-down designations. 

Scorpions in Las Vegas

FGW: Have you had a lot of problems with scorpions in Las Vegas (as the characters in the movie describe)?

JL: Define problem. I’ve encountered about a dozen (baby-sized) scorpions in my kitchen during my first two years here and dispatched all of them to the afterlife. Then, no scorpions (that I could detect, anyway).

Only one of those first dozen was several inches long, the rest, as I said, minis. There’s presently a major remodel going on upstairs in another unit. Last week I awoke to find one in my bathtub. I nabbed it before it had time to scamper down the drain. My next door neighbor said she was bitten by one once (she’s lived here for a decade) that was hiding in the toe of one of her shoes.

Balancing all the characters in this story

FGW: It’s a tough balance keeping all the characters in this story moment-to-moment sympathetic, especially when most of us would probably avoid similar people in real life.

When you were writing and/or editing, were there any moments (aside from the obvious) that pushed the balance too far out of whack and needed to be reined in or trimmed?

JL: Actually, I think it’s easy to perceive of Ivy and Ingrid as sympathetic, even early on. They’re both victims simply trying to survive. Ian’s character is more complex.

He is his own victim. Even the people in his life whom he admires, or admired, were predators on one level or another. Only his grandfather, who is deceased, remains his role model, his father-figure, a man who came from very little, and died with very little, but who once himself saved a fragile woman…a fact that makes Ian determined to protect Ingrid for as long as possible. 

There was one three-minute driving scene between Ian and Ivy that was cut, that I miss, wherein Ian describes a woman in his life he admired who was not a predator but a teacher, a woman he describes to Ivy but, who knows, he may never have ever discussed the woman with Ingrid. Bryan Mittelstadt (who portrays Ian) played it impeccably well but structurally it would have made Ian more unsympathetic, not less. It was my fault as a writer, and it couldn’t be solved in the editing process so it had to go. I miss it.

FGW: The natural assumption of the title is that Ivy is Goldilocks, since she’s blonde, and Ian and Ingrid are the two bears. But that’s a role-reversal from the fairy-tale, in which Goldilocks is the squatter, and the bears own the home. By the end it’s clear this is Ingrid’s story — could it be that the bears are her sister and Ivy, one of whom wants to make things too easy, the other too hard, with Ian’s way being “just right”?

JL: Great question…and great answer. I love that interpretation, just as I think there will be many others opined, just as valid and provocative as yours, as the film gets out there in the world. I thank you for this!

FGW: Popcorn or candy?

JL: First, I would never, nor have I ever eaten anything during a feature film. I’ve too much respect for filmmakers for such sacrilege. (Exception: In 1979 I devoured a huge carton of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies watching Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s near seven-and-a-half hour Our Hitler in Alice Tully Hall during the New York Film Festival.) 

Popcorn? Never. I lost my desire for popcorn having had access to limitless handfuls as a theatre usher between the ages of 16-19. Candy?

I would secret a pound bag of Duane Reade-bought strawberry Twizzlers into a cinema (only after ascertaining its freshness by feeling up the sealed package in the store aisle) and scarf its entire contents down during the endless trailers.

In recent years, however, as my dental bills have dramatically risen, along with the cost of all confections, I am now laser-focused even on the trailers.

GOLDILOCKS AND THE TWO BEARS will opens in Los Angeles theaters on July 19.