The ‘Chasing Summer’ Team Made a Love Letter to Texas Suburbia — in St. Louis

They say that the best way to get the roles that you want is to write them yourself, and Iliza Shlesinger wrote herself a great one in “Chasing Summer,” which sees the comedian playing a disaster relief worker navigating the end of one relationship and the beginning of a new one.

Ahead of the film‘s Sundance premiere, screenwriter/star Shlesinger, director Josephine Decker, and co-stars Garrett Wareing and Tom Welling visited the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox, to unpack the semi-autobiographical coming-of-middle-age story.

“I am not so creative that I can write a character that isn’t similar to me,” Shlesinger said of her character’s origins. “I wanted to play someone who felt like me, but it wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about standup. I wanted to create someone that was grounded, who was tethered to something emotionally. I wanted the freedom to explore heartbreak and nostalgia and the pull of home. And being able to put drama first, even though it’s a comedy. And so by creating Jamie, I got to still be a little bit of me, but she’s a little bit more serious.”

Shlesinger emphasized the importance of the film’s setting, explaining that recreating specific details about her childhood in suburban Texas was key to the project.

“This is a love letter to a Texas suburban upbringing,” she said. “Josephine and I happen to both be from Dallas. This movie is not rural; we don’t live on farms. Not everyone in Texas drives a tractor and has a truck and a horse. It’s the suburbs. This is a small suburb, and if you’re from the suburbs, you get this. And if you grew up in Texas, I just wanted this to be a nostalgic bath. I had this desire to see my own summers reflected back on film.”

The only problem? Tax credits required them to shoot in Missouri rather than Texas, prompting Decker and Shlesinger to meticulously search St. Louis for pockets of suburbia that resembled the Lone Star State.

“We did a lot of work to find places that look like where we grew up in the suburbs of Dallas,” Decker said. “We were scouring all of St. Louis to find the right kinds of lawns. I do think that the suburb texture comes through. We were both trying to invoke our childhoods and bring that to the screen.”

Watch the complete conversation with the “Chasing Summer” team above.

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