Mighty Fine – movie producer Kathryn Wallack interview

A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to make a set visit to the upcoming indie drama Mighty Fine, starring Chazz Palminteri and Andie MacDowell, filming on location here in New Orleans.  I was there to speak with young actress Jodelle Ferland about her role in Twilight: Eclipse, but of course we talked a little about her current project, too.  And I jumped on the chance to grab a scoop on that movie with producer Kathryn Wallack, who told me I was their first press visit.  I went in to our discussion with literally one question on my tablet:  “What can you tell me about the movie?”  Read below to hear what she had to say and where our discussion went from there!

Elena Nola:  So you’re down here [in New Orleans] working on a movie called Mighty Fine.  What can you tell me about it? 

Kathryn Wallack:  Well, it’s a small little dramedy—that is, a drama with comic elements.  It’s a family story that we hope will make people feel something…that while they’re laughing they will feel a little bit of their own lives.  It’s a period piece.  It takes place in the 70s, which makes me feel very old (laughs).  Jodelle [Ferland] plays the youngest daughter, who really is intellectualizing this movie from Brooklyn to New Orleans, which, again, in the 70s, is really much more fish out of water than it would be today.  And she’s this smart little fourteen-year-old that really is so in love with watching her family, and all she cares about is to make this family happy and healthy as they should be.  It’s through her voiceover that we establish the movie, in the beginning, and it’s through her efforts that the movie reaches what we hope will be a very satisfying ending.  It’s a small movie that, unlike a lot of small movies, has a beautiful arc.  A lot of character development.  And I will tell you that Chazz Palminteri and Andie MacDowell and Jodelle and Rainey [Qualley] really relate as a family, you really feel their connection.  So that it does not feel like a cast but a family.  It’s just through the eyes of a bright and sensitive 14-year-old dealing with a lot of family baggage.

Is it sort of a dysfunctional family?

Yes, like most families. And we have a father with anger issues, that has emotional issues, that back then in the 70s, even more so than today, were not dealt with on a medical level, and a mother who survived the Holocaust.  So a lot of her inner direction comes from her own traumatic childhood.  The 16-year-old daughter is very popular and active in Brooklyn, is ripped out of her environment, out of her friends’ and surrounding families’ bosoms, so to speak, and without being asked is almost overnight moved into a brand new situation.  And it’s the role of Natalie, the youngest, who observes all this and tries to give it meaning.  In the end she uses a lot of her 14-year-old sensitive nature to try and lead this family to a place where we really hope and believe that they can move on.

Any similarity to some of the other recent dysfunctional family movies?  I know The Squid and the Whale, for example, was also set in the 70s….

I was not a huge fan of The Squid and the Whale even though it was a very compellingly done movie, and it was very well received.  But I thought it was also a more linear movie.  It didn’t give you what I think movies really need to do today, which is give you an arc, and a vantage point from which you want to root for these characters to find their way home, because frankly we see ourselves in these characters, and we want ourselves to succeed.  Chazz is an amazing actor, because he really is playing a character with a lot of emotional baggage in a way that we really care for him.  You don’t say, “I don’t care.”  And Andie plays a wonderful mother who has her own emotional baggage.  So you understand where the characters are coming from.  I think it’s got a lot of humor and heart, which is different, because The Squid and the Whale was a little more of an absurd situation, and you had to go into the scene as a moviegoer and throw a little bit of reality to the wind.  I think that this touches a lot more of the real life [feelings? Things?], yet we have to end it in 90 minutes.  It is a movie, and we can appreciate that.  But I think people will find this one [Mighty Fine] to be a really satisfying movie, and I hope to really reach audiences with that.  Debbie [Goodstein] is doing an amazing job as the director.

And it was a script she had written herself, right?

Yes.  And so she really knows these characters, and we were very lucky in our casting.  We got four people who really get who they are in the characters of the script.  And they’re bringing that depth to every scene that we shoot.  And we’re halfway through.  It’s a small-budget movie; it’s an independent movie.  We don’t have the high publicity, so we welcome anybody that wants to ask us questions.

Netflix is a godsend for people who like indie movies!  Even if you live somewhere like here, where they don’t always come to theaters, you can still get to them later.

I think we’re finally at a place in the movie industry where independent movies have become…I don’t know, I don’t want to say successful, because we don’t have 200 million dollar benchmarks or 100 million dollar effects budgets, but….

Well, if you’re working with a 5 million dollar budget it’s a lot easier to recoup that.

(Nods)  And it’s a lot easier to get a distributor who’s willing to take a chance with you, because you’re all in it together, and the risks—I think the rewards in that instance will outweigh the risks.

And you’re not making movies—to me, movie-making is like…well, you’ve heard that a camel is a horse by committee?  Movie-making is like that, but let’s just say that there’s less of a committee on an independent movie, which is why I think it’s becoming a real art form and increasingly more commercial.  I will say that while this is a small indie movie, it’s not a vanity piece.  We really are trying to make this a production that people really want to go see and that people will talk about and…endorse.  And we love New Orleans.  Originally the location was not New Orleans.  Once we made the transition, it even added extra layers to this movie that we never even dreamed of in the inception of this idea that Debbie had for this small story.

Why did you move it here?

We started to realize that if we were going to have a fish out of water, if we’re leaving Brooklyn, we really had to leave Brooklyn.  And we wanted a backdrop, in the 70s, that was a juxtaposition to being a Jew in Brooklyn.  There are no safety nets when you come to this type of an environment.  And, of course, the state welcomes filmmaking, they make it very inviting from both a shooting standpoint and a financial incentives standpoint, which we wanted to embrace right away. 

Is there anything else you want to say about the movie in summary?

You know, I will tell you that when we were doing casting, as soon as we saw Jodelle, not even realizing that she was coming up in Twilight, we knew that she had all the characteristics of Natalie.  And we felt the same about Andie and her flawed character, that once you understood where it was coming from, you didn’t pity her, and you didn’t hate her, and you were rooting for her.  And Maddie is this beautiful 16-year-old girl—Rainey is playing the part of Maddie, and she is Andie’s real-life daughter.  She is an actress and a singer, and when she read for us, and we liked her, we told her she was going into this movie in spite of her mother and not because of her mother. (laughs)  But the fact that they do have that bond as mother and daughter has only added to those layers of rich emotion that you can only hope come, that’s not on the page. 

Any word yet on release or distribution, or film festivals you’re trying to get in?

Right now we are talking to some distributors that know the script, and like it, but we are really going to try to—not rush it in a bad way, but with our eye toward wanting to get this into Sundance.  That’s something we would like.

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Be sure to keep your ears tuned to the name Mighty Fine, and when it’s tearing through awards at Sundance and is the next It movie on the indie circuit, remember–you heard it first here at BSC!