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Dec 06, 2013 By Chris Tinkham Laura Colella

Writer/director Laura Colella felt like she was hitting her head against the wall after her planned third feature film, Liquor Land, failed to get made. Just as it was nearing the production stage, Liquor Land‘s producers dissolved their company. Frustrated by the stagnation, Colella realized that she couldn’t wait around for things to fall into place, so she tried to think of a no-budget project that was hands-on and made the most of the resources that she had. She proposed an idea to her Rhode Island housemates and neighbors, they jumped on board, and her award-winning film, Breakfast With Curtis, was born.

The film begins with a 9-year-old bespectacled boy, Curtis, being physically threatened by his wine-drinking, grayed bohemian next-door neighbor, Syd (Theo Green), after tossing a miniature toy soldier at Syd’s cat. The story resumes five years later, with Syd, an online bookseller, attempting to make amends by luring the socially reserved Curtis (Jonah Parker) into a video blog project. Syd lives in a three-story house with a multigenerational group of well-read artist types who have circumvented the nine-to-five grind of an office job. Over the course of the summer, through gradual interactions with Syd and his free-spirited housemates (one played by Colella), 14-year-old Curtis begins to see the world through a wider lens.

Funny and lyrical, with a breezy eccentricity that charms, Breakfast With Curtis was one of the standout films of the 2012 LA Film Fest, where it premiered. For the 2013 Film Independent Spirit Awards, Breakfast With Curtis was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award for best feature made for under $500,000 and won the Jameson FIND Your Audience Award. The film also has been championed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who earlier this year hosted a screening and Q&A for it at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles.

Breakfast With Curtis is playing theatrically this week at New York’s IFC Center. There will be an after-party with cast and crew tonight. The film will open in Los Angeles at the Downtown Independent on December 20, with a Q&A and reception to follow the Friday night screening. It will also screen at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago starting January 3, 2014. Click here for screenings and cities.

Colella teaches directing and film production at the Rhode Island School of Design and is also an MFA student in Writing for Performance at Brown University. Under the Radar spoke with Colella by phone to discuss Breakfast With Curtis.

Chris Tinkham (Under the Radar): Once you decided on your cast and location, did it take long to come up with a plot and conflicts?

Laura Colella: Actually, really fast. I came up with the idea in June of 2010 and proposed it to them and said, “OK, if I can get the script together in a month, and I feel good about it, then I’ll make an investment and buy this camera”—a $3,200 Canon 5D Mark II camera—”and then we just can go ahead and shoot it.” And that’s basically what happened. I felt good about the script and everybody was committed, and I said, “All right, I’m gonna get the camera, and let’s start shooting.” We started shooting in the beginning of August, so it came together pretty quickly.

Was it a loose shoot? Did you do a lot of takes?

I did do a lot of takes, that’s for sure. It was loose in the respect that it wasn’t 12-hour days. We would shoot a scene a day or something like that. So it would be for a few, several at the most, hours in a day. I shot around meals. I think only one day we had to break for a meal, the only time I had to feed anybody. I didn’t even have craft services, because people would just go inside if they needed a drink. Everybody was, like, 10 feet from their house.

What was your LA Film Fest experience like?

We had a great time. Yvonne [Parker, who plays the eldest housemate, Sadie] couldn’t make the trip because she’s not that mobile, but everybody in the cast except her came. [It’s] a really great festival. They take all the directors up to Skywalker Ranch for a two-day retreat, which is really special. And they’re great hosts for the festival, fun parties. I met a lot of great filmmakers there that I’m still friends with, so yeah, I had a great time.

How did Paul Thomas Anderson come to champion the film?

I first met Paul at the Sundance lab in the year 2000. He was a creative advisor there when I was a fellow. I was there with my second feature, Stay Until Tomorrow. Every week, they bring in a new batch of creative advisors during the lab. The year I went, they picked eight filmmakers who had feature-length screenplays, and they give us the opportunity to shoot practice versions of five or six scenes in the course of a three-week period. So we would rehearse a day, shoot a day, edit it a day, and they set each of the eight of us up with either a West Coast or East Coast casting director. We were allowed to cast three people, and they would fly them to Utah. It takes place in Utah. And then they film it with other actors from the community if needed. Then, in that process, while you’re rehearsing, shooting and editing for three weeks, you also are followed around by these creative advisors who observe what you’re doing and give you feedback, and then they screen your projects all together, and you get feedback. And then they bring you back for a producers lab and composers lab for two more weeks. It’s five weeks total. So, Paul was there for that first week, and he responded to my project. When I had a rough cut, he looked at it and gave me some feedback. We just stayed in touch through email over the years, and he came to see Breakfast With Curtis at the LA Film Festival, and he liked it so much that he offered to host a screening of it as a way to help us get some attention. So he did, he hosted a screening in February at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica and did a Q&A with us, which was really fun. And then he was willing to let us use his quote for the trailer and poster.

Theo Green (left) as Syd and Jonah Parker as Curtis in a scene from Breakfast With Curtis.

What’s your journey with the film been like over the last year and a half, from its premiere to getting it in theaters in December? How much time have you had to dedicate to it after its completion?

A ton, really. I do a lot of other work too, but it’s like a solid part-time job. I also edited the film, so I’m doing all the replacement music—editing new tracks—and music licensing. That kind of post stuff has all fallen on me, because I’m the only person working on it. And then I worked on the trailer, I edited the trailer with another editor. I take all the pictures for the poster. All this stuff that’s a lot of work for me.

What sparked your interest in filmmaking?

I grew up with an interest in theater and acting. It’s not like now, when everybody has the option to be a filmmaker. When I was growing up, nobody talked about that. So, it’s something that I didn’t even consider until college. I was introduced to it through the RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] screenings. My boyfriend took me to that one year, and I was like, “Oh, wow! You can make movies, cool.” So then I discovered the film program at Harvard and totally dove into that.

What’s next for you? What are you working on now?

I’m in my third year of an MFA writing and performance program at Brown. I’m writing and directing a play that’s going up in February. After that, I’m definitely going to turn back to moving forward with Liquor Land. But, between the release [of Breakfast With Curtis] and that project, which is kind of my thesis project, I’m really swamped until February. But after that point, I’m going to turn my attention back to Liquor Land. Then also this other project that I’m developing, adapting from a play that I wrote called Back East Out West, and I’m hoping to have a screenplay of that sometime soon too. And I also was a founding faculty chair for a new MFA program in film at Vermont College of Fine Arts. That’s like a low-residency program. It’s really cool. I hired all the faculty, and the faculty and students get together for a week in the fall and a week in the spring for these intensive week-long residencies, and then all of the other contact is one-on-one mentorship between faculty and students. So it’s very project-based. And they work from wherever in the world they live, but we just get together for two weeks a year. We just had the first residency, and it was amazing. It went really well. And actually, I hired a couple of other filmmakers who had films at the LA Film Festival, Terence Nance [An Oversimplification of Her Beauty] and Till Schauder [The Iran Job].

What can you tell me about the play in February? Does it have a title?

It doesn’t have a title yet. I’ve been working on it when I can. I’ve written about half of it so far, and I know where it’s going. It takes place on a film set [laughs], so I’m sticking with what I know.

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