RATED

When I was 11, while my Dad was on deployment in the Navy for a year at a time, my mother, who was an artist, brought home a VHS player and a stack of movies. And that was that. I loved movies. Because suddenly my mother, sister and I found a way to laugh, cry, and be moved together. To talk to each other about things we thought, lived, and felt through watching movies. They connected us.

Once I became an actor, I felt what it was like to stand on stage telling a story with an audience just a feet away. It was electric. It was connection. It was community.

This is what I felt writing and performing my two one-person shows, the power of story and connection. Not just being a part of a story, but creating an entire evening of theater sculpted around an intimate story I wrote. Thus I gained the sight of directing. And connecting back to my 11 year old dreamer, it was movies that were calling.

Spielberg, Coen Brothers, Hayao Miyazaki, Nicole Holofcener, Soderbergh, Hirokazu Koreeda, Truffaut, Alfonso Cauron, Mike Leigh, Chris and Paul Weitz, George Lucas, Mark Pellington, Mark Romanek, PTA and many more brought my imagination to life through intimate, fantastic, larger than life, and seemingly ordinary stories that sent a lightning bolt through my body and inspired me to set out to do the same.

I want to make movies about us. Intimate, big, and small that inspire and challenge us about our humanity. We all see the same sky, the same trees, the same ocean. Why can’t we see each other? As human. Hearts beating, vulnerable, beautiful. Why are there so many divisions? I was struck with this idea that I can’t let go of, our internal search for value, for acceptance, for our true self, inherent in all of us but that maybe is only attainable through our interaction and service to others.

And so I was struck with the idea of RATED in 2014 after a conversation about Uber drivers and how you can rate the driver, but they can rate you. I instantly thought, what if a husband and wife woke up and they were RATED? I pitched my wife and she instantly said, “you have to make this movie, but the WIFE must have the lower stars, because she’d be devastated and the husband would think, “Who Cares?!” I love her for saying yes and for her advice, because she was absolutely right.

I wrote and we improved, and we wrote. I wanted the story to be as much about relationship, family, our desire to be liked, our inability to control life, about being the best of us, as it was about the stars. It helps to have a house full of professional actors to work with and flush out the story. In April of 2015 we shot RATED the short film. We shot in our house, at our school, in a nearby cafe, with my wife, Christie, starring, my daughter, Abby, who was shooting HBO’s Togetherness as Melanie Lynskey’s daughter at the time, and my son Joshua.  And the result was tremendous. RATED debuted in April 2016, won the first festival it played, and went on to garner 23 awards at more than 60 festivals worldwide. 

And it was while editing the short, that I got hit again, with the idea for the feature. So around 2017 I started writing. The script changed many times, the ending completely. Really getting to dive into a family and their relationships to each other, based somewhat on my own life was at the center of it all. And of course, I cast my family and myself again; I love acting and want to continue in front and behind the camera. And who better to work with than my wife, who I’ve coached and worked with on more than 90 TV shows and movies. I had coached my daughter Abby on a show for Spielberg, the Duplass Brothers, Ant-Man and more. I love working with actors. And what chemistry we could bring to the screen. It seemed very John Cassavetes. It seemed to all be adding up to me making the feature the way we did the short film. 

And so we did. The best was the improving, the writing, and the re-writing which led to discoveries of the themes of the feature RATED. Embracing the love around you. Learning to let go. What is an American family today? Finding your voice in your family and in the world, which almost everyone in RATED does. About not giving up and not giving up on those we love. About our inherent nature as humans to be giving and kind. To walk a path from selfishness to selflessness as Maggie finds in the film. Onward.