Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Joseph Cross

Joseph Cross is no stranger to Hollywood. He’s been acting in films and televisions shows since childhood, including portraying Augusten Burroughs in Running with Scissors to his recent role as Tom in Big Little Lies.

Now, though, Joseph has made the transition from in front of the screen to behind the screen with his directorial debut of the new film about life after college, Summer Night. We chatted with him about the film and what he loves so much about directing.

PC: What attracted you to this project?
JC: So what initially attracted me to the project was Jordan Jolliff’s script. He and I met through mutual friends—my friend, Lucas Evans, and I were working on a movie called The Circle. Jordan was [the writer] James Ponsoldt’s writing assistant, and I’d been working on a screenplay of my own that wasn’t good and wasn’t working. So Lucas suggested I give it to Jordan for a little advice, which he very graciously gave me, and then we just started exchanging material.

He had written this movie Summer Night up in Chico, California, when he was at Chico State. It was the first screenplay he’d ever written, and I read it and it really struck me for whatever reason—I was pulled into its orbit, and I think that I grew up in a small town with some musician ambitions and had a lot of friends who had ambitions of being artists in different ways. I identified with it personally, and then I just felt that he had done a very good job of crafting singular, unique characters. I thought he was really great with dialogue.

We just sort of got to work on it. I thought, this is special. So we started working on the script. After about six months of just throwing it back and forth, we were like, “Alright, well what are we gonna do with this?” And that’s when I said to Jordan, “I think I’d like to direct this, if you’re open to it.” And he was. So then we asked his boss James Ponsoldt to see if he’d become the Executive Producer, just to put a little bit of gas in our tank and give us a boost out of the gate. James was kind enough to say yes. From there, we just kind of got to work on the movie.

PC: This is your directorial debut. What was the biggest takeaway that you had from this experience?
JC: I was just surprised by how much I enjoyed being in the editing suite. I mean, I loved the entire process. Prep is like the most important thing, you know? Just taking the time to figure out what exactly it is that you’re trying to convey in each moment; what you want the feel of the overall piece to be; and then what you are going to do to get it there. So, you know, even though we’re a tiny budget, with a very limited schedule, because Michael FitzMaurice and Raymond Wood—our cinematographer and editor—had done so much planning, we were able to use every minute of time on set. So I think just preparing is hugely important. I had such a fantastic crew around me as well as a talented cast.

I had spent a little bit of time in edit suites, and I had friends cutting movies together, but I hadn’t, like, lived in one for two months, and that was—it’s really a joy. To be able to, first of all, hit pause and go grab something to eat or go to the bathroom or take a break or think about things, feels like a luxury after you’ve been on set 13, 14, 15, 16 hours a day for nearly a month straight. I think just the people—it’s all about the team that you put together, and fortunately I had a really fantastic team both in front of and behind the camera.

PC: Do you think your acting experience was beneficial to being a director?
JC: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been on movie sets my whole life, so I understand the pace of them and the language, and the politics of them, and the inner workings of a movie set. I also understand acting as an art form. So I was able to, I think, speak the language of the actors, and we all had a really great time in crafting these performances. So, yeah, I think it was definitely hugely beneficial. But then there was a lot to learn.

PC: What would you say was your biggest challenge directing this?
JC: My biggest challenge… I think the biggest challenge with the script right out the gate was, How are you going to establish this as an ensemble film early on, and then how are you going to interweave all these storylines? So that was really a big, big focus of mine in preparing to shoot this movie. My friend Justin Lerner, who directed me in a movie called The Automatic Hate—Justin’s a really talented filmmaker as well as a great film teacher—when he read the script early on, he was like, “You have something special here, but you need to help people understand what movie they’re about to watch in the first five minutes. So how are you going to do that?” So that’s when we came up with the way to use the geography of the town and the interconnectedness of the characters’ lives to introduce all these characters in what felt like a pretty organic way in the first five-and-change minutes of the movie.

And then from there, a lot of the work that we did on the script—you know, Jordan had written great characters and great dialogue, so my big challenge with the screenplay was, How are we going to sew all of this together so it feels cohesive and feels like everybody’s in the same movie and we can sustain the pace that we set at the top of the film. And so you think you have it so perfectly prepped out, and you shoot it, and then you get into the edits, and of course it all changes and you find new things, and better things, and what you thought was the most brilliant thing ever ends up on your cutting room floor. Some stuff that you captured before you even called “Action!” ends up in the movie. Ray Wood and I would watch every frame that had been shot and listened to every second of audio that we had recorded, so there was a lot of stuff—you know, there’s a shot that we stole from before action was called where Victoria just sits into this booth, and we’re like, “Okay, great, we need that, so let’s grab it.” You know, you think you know what you’re going to need, and a large percentage of it, you know, […] but there’s so many different surprises in the edit, so that was a challenge. It was also a really fun experience, the piecing of it together.

PC: Can you talk a little bit about the casting process? Was there a lot of collaboration with the actors? Did that influence their characters at all during the filming?
JC: Yeah, so, I didn’t have a casting director—I’m an actor, obviously, so I had no interest in auditioning 11 million people and sitting there. I knew the script really well. I knew the characters really well. I knew the kinds of actors that I needed, you know, people who had a lot of depth. People who were very deep souls themselves and could also act. So, I just watched a lot of movies and TV shows that featured people in the right age bracket and went through lists online. Like, I was watching The Stanford Prison Experiment and noticed Callan McAuliffe, and I had remembered his work from I Am Number Four. I remember seeing I Am Number Four and thinking, “Wow, that young guy is a very talented actor,” and so I started watching some interviews with Callan. It just felt like this guy is my Taylor—he just is! So I shot his manager an email, and he wrote me right back. We set a meeting, and Callan loved it and wanted to do it. So I cast him.

There were a couple of people that auditioned, but I was never auditioning more than one person at a time for that role. Usually it was, like, Okay, this person is super right for this role, but they don’t have any relevant tapes—their tapes were just a little bit old—so I want to see how they are right now. Or, a lot of their tape is drama and I just want to see and capture some of the comedic components of the scene and they’d send in the tape, and I’d be like, “Okay, great, they’re right for it, so let’s cast them.” It was really a pretty natural, organic process for me. And then every time we would bring somebody on, I would go back to the script and make little tweaks, based on what I thought they would bring to the character, and based on conversations I had had with the actors.

Most notably, in that vein, was Analeigh Tipton, who brought a lot more gravity to that role than was on the page. In her conversations with me, it was important to her that we treat this as seriously as it is. It’s not a joke, even though we also have to see it from Ian’s perspective—he’s not taking this as seriously as he should. So, when I was on the phone with Analeigh trying to get her to say yes to the movie, we talked for almost, like, two hours, and she agreed to come down and do it by the end of the conversation, I was just like, “I have so much work to do,” so I flipped my laptop open as soon as I got home, and got to work implementing what her strong points were and all the insights she had into the character. My wife Audrey Tommassini is a producer on the film as well and was super helpful during that process: “You know, what would you think if you were pregnant way too early? What would the feeling be?” And Audrey was like, “I would just be like this wasn’t the plan.” So that became Analeigh’s first line in the movie.

So, you know, we were each collaborating on the script all the way through to the end of when we were shooting each scene.

PC: What do you hope that audiences walk away with after seeing this film?
JC: I had grown up on movies similar to this, but I hadn’t seen this ensemble, coming-of-age [story] told from the perspective of post-college people in their early 20s. So that was an interesting component of it to me, and I think that the question that it addresses is for these young men, are they going to go the way of Justin Chatwin’s character Andy—the selfish, eternal bachelor, untethered but maybe also unfulfilled—or the way of Khris Davis’s character Luke—settled and satisfied, but starved for some of the fun and excitement of his youth? I think that’s sort of the question—how much of your hedonistic, indulgent, youthful lifestyle do you give up in exchange for being in a healthy, happy, loving relationship, where there’s a certain amount of sacrifice?

PC: So do you see yourself directing another feature in the future?
JC: Yes.

PC: Are there any particular stories that you’re drawn to, that you know that’s what you want to explore later?
JC: I don’t know—I really don’t know what it’ll be. I’m hoping it feels like this script that I really identified with fell into my lap with Jordan. I’m just sort of putting the feelers out there with similar pieces of material. I love the ensemble nature of the whole thing. I loved how personal the emotional stakes for the characters were, but maybe next time I’d want a more, like, singularly focused film with a driving story engine, for something different. But I really don’t know. It’s that funny thing when you feel like you don’t know what you’re going to make until it comes into your life for whatever reason, and you’re just totally focused on it. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I just know I loved the experience and I’m going to do it again. I just don’t know what the movie is going to be yet.

Pop Culturalist Speed Round

Last TV Show You Binge-Watched
Chernobyl

Favorite Film
Oh man… Children of Men

Favorite Book
I loved the Unbearable Lightness of Being when I first read it.

An Artist or Musician You Could Listen to on Repeat
I could listen to, and did listen to, the Whitney album Light upon a Lake hundreds of times while making this movie. That was our North Star basically.

Hidden Talent
Hmm. Do I have a hidden talent? I was good with a yo-yo when I was a kid. I haven’t come across one in a while, but I feel like I would still be able to pull off something.

Place You Most Want to Visit
I would love to visit Alaska. I would love to visit Nova Scotia. Other than a little bit around Europe, I’m not well traveled yet. My wife’s family comes from a town called Pesaro in Italy on the Adriatic, which we go to whenever we can, which I love. I would love to just drive all around Italy for a while.

A Person You’d Like to Meet Someday
Who would I like to meet? I’m reading the latest Frederick Douglass biography. I would like to meet Frederick Douglass. I’d also like to meet Kurt Cobain.

Summer Night is currently available on YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Google Play.