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In 2018, Iliza Shlesinger wrote down, “what if high school came back to bite you in the ass?”
Over many, many rewrites, as well as several false starts and stops, that germ of an idea culminated in “Chasing Summer,” a comedy about a 30-something woman who returns to the Texas hometown she fled decades ago only to find herself embracing a summer of parties, menial jobs and carefree romance. That may sound like the premise of an Apatow-ian exercise in arrested development, but Shlesinger wasn’t interested in just landing punchlines.
“I knew what I wanted,” Shlesinger said during a Zoom interview a week before “Chasing Summer’s” Sundance premiere. “I wanted to make a film. I wanted to make art. I thought it’s time to make something beautiful, not just a straightforward comedy, because this very easily could have been that, and I wanted it elevated.”
To realize her vision, Shlesinger turned to Josephine Decker, an indie filmmaker best known for moody thrillers and dramas such as “Shirley” and “Butter on the Latch.” It was an unconventional match, but there was something about Decker’s style that Shlesinger thought would be perfect for “Chasing Summer.”
“This is the kind of movie that always speaks to me and that I want to be directing,” Decker said. “Instead, the things that get sent to me are like, serial killer movies. For some reason, the only things I ever get submitted are like this woman is murdered in the first three minutes.”
Shlesinger, who is a popular stand-up and sketch comic, wasn’t worried about delivering laughs. Working with Decker, she re-examined her script to make sure that the humor didn’t come at expense of exploring her character’s wounded heart. It helped that Decker, like Shlesinger, is also from Texas and had an innate understanding of the region, its idiom and its rhythm of life. When it came to casting the picture, they sought out people who could believably hail from the Lone Star state, such as Megan Mullally, an Oklahoma native who plays Shlesinger’s mom, and Garrett Wareing, the Texas-born “Ransom Canyon” star who plays her younger lover.
In “Chasing Summer,” Shlesinger’s character Jamie, is a humanitarian aid worker who is constantly jetting off to disaster areas around the world. But after she endures a messy breakup, she returns to her parent’s house to recover, spending her days working as a janitor at her sister’s skating rink. She also meets the 21-year-old Colby (Wareing) at a keg party, sparking a steamy affair.
“What I wrote in the script is, like, ‘Jamie and Colby kiss and they fall out of frame,’ and I show up to set and Josephine is like, ‘okay, he’s going down on you and then the camera is going to pan over you both from behind,” Shlesinger jokes.
There is indeed a lot of sex in “Chasing Summer,” but Shlesinger and Decker were intent on staging the hookups in a way that would be sexy to women, as well as men. That meant making sure that the cinematography was beautiful, as well as sensual, instead of replicating what Shlesinger dismisses as “full ’90s Michael Douglas, Skinemax.”
“Josephine, was putting this through a female gaze and thinking about, what do we want to see as women?” Shlesinger said. “What’s the kind of intimacy that we want? How do we want to feel? We wanted this to be beautiful for women to enjoy it. She could just stand there for six seconds and a guy’s gonna enjoy it.”
That meant having the scenes last longer than they might in a more conventional romance, something that divided audiences down gender lines during a recent test screening.
“I made them so long,” Decker says. “We did a screening for 30 or 40, people to just see how everything was landing in early December. And it was so funny, because some guy was like, ‘I don’t know, these sex scenes feel a little long.’ And literally, all of the women there rose up and were like, ‘sit down! They’re perfect!”
Decker and Shlesinger also relied on intimacy coordinators.
“The coordinator created an emotional safety net and worked so closely with the actors who are going to be having sex scenes to talk about consent and comfort,” Decker said. “It’s kind of like having a fight coordinator who makes your action scene cooler and more interesting. It just deepened the storytelling.”
“Chasing Summer” is one of many films at Sundance looking for distribution, and though the filmmakers insist they just want it to find a good home, you get the sense they’d prefer for it to be seen with as big a crowd as possible.
“I mean the best way to answer that is we want to make a lot of money, and we want a lot of people to see this,” Shlesinger said. “Hopefully people feel the same way when they watch it.”
English (US) ·