In India Donaldson’s fantastic debut film Good One, 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) embarks on a three-day backpacking trip in the Catskills with her dad, Chris (James Le Gros) and his oldest friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy). As the two men quickly settle into a gently quarrelsome, brotherly dynamic, airing long-held grievances, Sam, wise beyond her years, tries to mediate. But when lines are crossed and Sam’s trust is betrayed, tensions reach a fever pitch, as Sam struggles with her dad’s emotional limitations and experiences the universal moment when the parental bond is tested. Selected for both Sundance and Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, Good One is an emotionally expansive work that probes the limits of familial trust, understanding, and ultimately, forgiveness.
We open Good One this Friday in Santa Monica and a week from Friday in North Hollywood.
The nation’s film critics are not holding back. A small sample:
“Collias captures something gossamer here, a quiet shift into adult womanhood that happens, literally, overnight. She’s the new moon, ready to emerge. But unlike the moon, she makes her own light.” ~ Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine
“In its lived-in quality and gathering churn, Good One is a dream of an indie, from the craft in every frame to the humor, epiphanies and mysteries that gird its portraiture.” ~ Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
“Its most distinctive quality is how much Donaldson and her trio of actors … trust the subterranean, and allow it to do its work far beneath the surface, between the words.” ~ Sheila O’Malley, RogerEbert.com
“So much of the grace and, ultimately, the emotional resonance of Good One lies in Collias’ performance, and how she turns a symphony of reaction shots into a portrait of a woman caught in a crossfire of middle-aged male malaise.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone
“Subtly dark, humorous, and wise, Good One leans into its wilderness backdrop in all of its liberating (and, sometimes, paradoxically claustrophobic) properties.” ~ Tomris Laffly, Harper’s Bazaar
Donaldson has sat for several recent interviews to talk about her film. Here’s an excerpt from one with Jordan Raup of The Film Stage:
The best directorial debut of the year, India Donaldson’s Good One, is a carefully-observed portrait of both womanhood and fatherhood, capturing the 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias, in a revelatory breakthrough performance) who embarks on a camping trip in the Catskills with her father (James Le Gros) and his best friend (Danny McCarthy). As the men are in the middle of a midlife crisis of sorts, Sam is witness to their mindless banter and subtle indecencies, culminating in a piercing point of no return.
Ahead of the film’s limited release beginning this Friday, I spoke with Donaldson about the character dynamics, the film’s subtle accumulation of details, the Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Kelly Reichardt films she watched as inspiration, and the journey from Sundance to New Directors/New Films to the Cannes Film Festival.
The Film Stage: Can you talk about how you initially formed the dynamic between these three characters? In some ways, it feels like an update on Old Joy but with an entirely new perspective.
India Donaldson: When I wrote the script, it was like deep COVID, and I was living back at home for the first time since high school, basically. And I have two half-siblings who at the time were in high school and I was kind of reflecting. I never thought about, before this moment, exploring that moment in film or writing. But through them this triangulation happened where I was reflecting on my own teen years and memories, of the ways that I dealt with conflict, the ways that I was avoidant of conflict, just my qualities of being in the world as a teenager. And how I felt like I had spent my 20s kind of trying to beat back certain instincts I had––to please or this kind of thing that had worked for me as a teenage girl, I feel like it wasn’t working for me in my professional life. I felt like I didn’t have the confidence to really pursue what I wanted to pursue, all these things. I just wanted to look at that moment of girlhood where you are shifting away from being ostensibly under the protection of your parents, but also realizing like, “Oh, I’m actually not protected by the world. I have to figure out my own, my own way forward.”
If you just look at the logline you could think it’s like a coming-of-age movie, but I feel like throughout the movie you learn she’s actually more mature in some ways, and level of maturity is not defined by age. She’s picking up on different social cues. What was it like writing her character and after you met Lily, did her character expand?
The character was on the page for sure, but the moment I met Lily and saw her audition, she just had added this edge to the character. I was always kind of nervous about the character that she would come across as too much of a doormat. That it would be sort of unsatisfying to watch somebody repeatedly act kind of in service of these men and their needs and struggle with that. Lily just had this quality where even when the character’s at her most obedient, I could always feel her pushing against it. Because I think Lily herself has a natural kind of rebellious [spirit]. She’s a real freethinker and has this incredible confidence that the character doesn’t have. But I think it bleeds into the performance and so it evolved in that sense. As soon as it was sort of in her hands, the character became more powerful to me. Which was a cool thing to discover.