Pop-Culturalist.com

Award-winning director Josephine Decker is at the helm of the must-see film The Sky Is Everywhere.

Tucked among the magical redwood trees of Northern California and surrounded by her grandmother’s gargantuan roses, seventeen-year-old Lennie Walker (Grace Kaufman), a radiant musical prodigy, struggles with overwhelming grief following the sudden loss of her older sister, Bailey.

When Joe Fontaine (Jacques Colimon), the charismatic new guy at school, enters Lennie’s life, she’s drawn to him. But Lennie’s complicated relationship with her sister’s devastated boyfriend, Toby (Pico Alexander), starts to affect Lennie and Joe’s budding love.

Through her vivid imagination and honest, conflicted heart, Lennie navigates first love and first loss to create a song of her own.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Josephine about The Sky Is Everywhere, bringing the beloved book from the page to the screen, and creating a collaborative environment on set.

PC: How did you initially discover The Sky Is Everywhere? What was it about this particular story that made you want to adapt it from the page to screen?
Josephine: I read the script. My agent sent me the script four years ago. Usually, that’s not how you find something—I usually find a book I like or an article or develop something on my own—but I fell in love with this script. I loved it so much. I think I was really drawn to the location and the opportunity to shoot in the redwood forest. I’m really a nature girl. Every movie is a chance to have an adventure. I was like, “I get to make a movie in the redwood forest?”

But then on a deeper level, I was super drawn to the fact that this is a coming-of-age film that deals with life and death. It deals with grief and the question of how you handle loss. Especially for someone of that tender age, it felt like such an important story to tell. Jandy [Nelson] had written it so beautifully, with so much subjectivity and so many magical sequences, that I felt the script felt very me. I was ready to plunge in. I was so excited to make that world the world I lived in for the years it took to make this movie.

PC: The Sky is Everywhere takes audiences on an emotional roller coaster. How did you create the space for the actors to explore those varying emotions?
Josephine: Oh, wow. I really care about actors. I love actors. Performance is always the most important thing. I think the number one thing that helps an actor feel safe is when the set feels positive for everyone—not just for them but for the whole crew. We really tried to include everybody, especially since we shot during the pandemic and the California wildfires. It was a pretty crazy, intense time. Many of us hadn’t really left our house in months. To come out and work again was such a gift. So there’s that—creating a good vibe on set, a vibe where everyone feels important and feels heard.

Then we got together with the actors and tried to live in these moments with them. We’re all storytellers. They’re such gifted storytellers. That’s why I wanted to work with them. They read so much into the script, so a lot of our collaboration was about going deeper into the personal circumstances, deeper into the moment, and finding the nuance or the arc to a scene. It was about holding the darkness and lightness side by side.

There’s a moment when Lennie has just quit clarinet. She’s basically given up her title. She jumps out through the window of the room where she was trying out for this clarinet solo. She runs into the forest, and during the first few takes of the scene, I was like, “Why isn’t this working?” Joe runs after her and catches up to her and tries to walk with her. I realized that they were staying a little bit too much in the darkness that she needed—that reality of her grief—but we also needed to have the joy of being chased by this guy and feeling like, “Oh my God. He’s right here with me. I want to be so in love, and I’m hurting deep inside.” It’s always a matter of trying to keep the two layers going at once—the possibility of total joy and abandon that you feel when you’re falling in love for the first time and the real challenge of how to navigate this whirlwind that eats your heart up when you’re grieving.

To keep up with Josephine, follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Watch The Sky Is Everywhere on AppleTV on February 11th.