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Sara Colangelo directing actor Jacob Lofland on the set of 'Little Accidents'

Jan 15, 2015 By Zach Hollwedel Sara Colangelo

Newcomer Sara Colangelo’s first feature, Little Accidents, hits theaters this month, and if early reviews and industry support of the film are any indication, the writer-director is a star most definitely on the rise. Despite having only three short films on her resume, Colangelo proved a tour de force while making Little Accidents. She was invited to participate in both the Sundance Writers and Directors Labs, was blessed with an incredibly talented cast, and received the support of directors Jeff Nichols and Chris Columbus (who executive produced the film).

Little Accidents has been recognized with awards at the Napa Valley Film Festival and the Hamptons International Film Festival, as well as nominations at Milano International Film Festival Awards, Seattle International Film Festival, and others. Colangelo was recognized with a prestigious Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay.

Colangelo spoke with Under the Radar about making Little Accidents, which is set in a coalmining town in the months after a deadly collapse killed a number of miners. Boyd Holbrook (The Skeleton Twins) plays Amos, the sole surviving miner. As Amos struggles with the fallout from the accident, he develops a relationship with Diane (Elizabeth Banks), the wife of the supervisor on whose watch the cave-in occurred and whose teenage son has just gone missing.

Zach Hollwedel [Under The Radar]: First off, congratulations on Little Accidents. It’s very a moving and beautifully shot film. And kudos on your Independent Sprit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay. What was it like to receive that news?

Sara Colangelo: Thank you. It was definitely a surprise that morning, a really pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting it, and it was just a really nice affirmation that you don’t often get. So it was pretty cool.

This is your first feature. It’s loosely based on a short you made in 2010—also called Little Accidents—which has a different plot, but shares the character of Amos, played here by Boyd Holbrook. What was your motivation, or what were the themes you wanted to explore when expanding that idea into a feature?

You know, I think the short film dealt with a lot of similar themes. It was set sort of in an industrial space. It was set in a factory town, and it took place in a soda factory. So there was that, which was similar. But I think, more importantly, it was looking at this idea of an accident set in the past of one of the character’s lives, or all of the characters’ lives. And the audience is never really seeing it on screen, but hopefully experiencing its force through the aftermath of its effects on the characters. I think I was really interested in that idea and really pushing it forward in the feature, and keeping this notion of a one company town or a one-industry town. When I moved away from the short and started brainstorming for feature ideas, I had a few things that were kind of interesting to me. I had this vision of a boy in the woods with a secret; somehow that image was really potent to me at the time. I somehow also wanted to keep this character of Amos somehow. I was reading a lot about coal country in the news—there had been some pretty awful accidents: one in 2006 and another in 2010. And the stories of the survivors and the victims really touched me in a particular way, and I couldn’t get these stories out of my head. So I just started doing a whole bunch of research, and I thought coal country could really be a great backdrop to this new idea and could really give a lot of dramatic fodder to me as a writer. So that’s kind of how it started.

The film really draws viewers into the small, blue-collar coal-mining town in which it’s set. Beyond the research you did, was that a world you were familiar with prior to making the film? How did you manage such an honest exploration of life in that type of community?

I’m from the Northeast, so where the short film was shot is where I’m from. You know, like a factory town. As I started reading about it, I was like, wow, there’s so little I know about Appalachia and coal mining in general, and I thought it could be a great opportunity to introduce American audiences to the daily grinds of these men and also what it’s like to work in a coal mine. Certainly, the danger and anxiety of it, day to day. And also, because these communities that are really generating more than half our electricity. We know so little about them. Often times, they’re so misrepresented in the media and the film industry itself. It was something that I felt films hadn’t really looked at in a serious way. Clearly, there have been documentaries about some of these communities. But I felt there hadn’t been a fictional film set in a coal town in quite some time.

It sounds like perhaps even your views or your impressions of these towns changed over the course of production.

Yeah, for sure. Through my research, and then of course as production.… I always wanted a fair-minded exploration of the area, and something that wasn’t rooted in redneck stereotypes and the extremely unfortunate depictions that we’ve seen in the past. It was something that I was definitely keen on as I was doing the research. I was like, these people are really wonderful and industrious and much of—in the case of West Virginia—much of their infrastructure is devoted to coal. So when these accidents do happen, they really wreak havoc on these communities and are something that is really hard to bounce back from. So much of their lives are really geared toward this, and there’s not much other work, besides working at a Walmart or working for the government. One of the things I was really pondering was, what happens to a community where an accident like this happens, and feds threaten to shut down the company. What are the ethical conundrums involved in that situation? You know, where someone like Amos wants to keep his buddies in their jobs and wants to work himself, but knows a lot of information that could tear the company apart. And I found those stories to be really rooted in the reality down there, where there are the union issues down there, as well, and this red state mentality of not feeling like you have to support the union and be protected by the union. There were so many interesting issues that I’ve come to in doing the research and going down there and talking to normal folks.

You had a number of incredible and enviable experiences and encounters while developing this project. Can you talk a bit about the film’s trajectory, and especially your experience developing the film at the Sundance Institute’s Directors Lab?

Absolutely. Quickly after writing the first draft, the Sundance Labs contacted me, and they were really interested in having me at their Writing Lab. I did that, and then in June of 2011, I was invited to be in their Directing Lab, which was a really fantastic experience, one in which you get to workshop five scenes from the script with actors that you may or may not use for the final film. In my case, I had just met Boyd Holbrook and was just so impressed by him, and by the fact that he’s originally from coal country. His dad was a coal miner for 30 years. So I brought him to Utah with me, and that’s where we started working together. It was the beginning of a really great working relationship. He ended up being the first person that I officially attached. From there, Sundance was really supportive of the project and recommended that I meet with Anne Carey, who is such a renowned indie producer and has done so many amazing films that I was a huge fan of. We really just hit it off, and I was really lucky enough to work with her in development. She and I were working for quite some time—about a year or so—cutting some scenes, adding other scenes, and getting the script ready for production. In that time, we were giving the script out to various agencies. Liz Banks read it, and to my surprise, really loved it and wanted to set up a meeting. I was impressed with her sensitivity to the material and how smart she was and with how much she really wanted to return to her roots in drama. She had had this amazing comedic career, but she really wanted to sink her teeth into something new and sort of a character study. She was—in the meetings—asking all the right questions. What is this woman like? What kind of clothes does she wear? What’s her hairdo? What kind of curtains does she hang in her house? Who were her friends? What are her fears? What does she think of her husband? And it was just a really great first meeting. I ended up flying out to L.A. and meeting her in person and pretty quickly decided she was the right person for the part. And the cast, I was just really blessed to have a lot of people interested, like Josh Lucas and Chloë Sevigny and the great Jacob Lofland. It all happened pretty quickly. We got our financing in pretty quickly thereafter.

It is an incredible cast. I feel like Jacob Lofland is a name that, if people don’t know now, they will know him a lot more in the next couple of years.

Yeah, he was this kind of incredible find in that I had actually talked to Jeff Nichols briefly before starting the casting process—he was sort of part of the finance family and was helping me on some script things. I said, “You know, I really want Jacob.’ And he said, “I wholeheartedly encourage you to contact him.” I think Jacob was this perfect mix of not being a trained kid actor with all of the baggage that comes with that, but at the same time, he had been on set with Mud and kind of knew the discipline of shooting a movie and memorizing lines. He had worked within a sort of similar structure that kind of gave me the best of both worlds.

And you were able to elicit such wonderful performances from all of them. I’m curious, what was your process as a director, working with them? Are you very hands-on, or do you trust them to take it?

It was a funny situation, because normally I really like to rehearse. It’s actually a part of the process that gives me a lot of joy; I just enjoy it, and I end up tweaking the script slightly. It’s a process where I’m really flexible and like to see how they respond to the script, and make any modifications necessary. I wasn’t really able to do that, because it was the first time I was dealing with—in some cases—movie stars, and they had incredibly busy schedules. So I wasn’t really able to have the rehearsal time that I normally did have. In the case of Boyd, that was sort of the exception. He was attached pretty early on, so he and I would meet pretty consistently and watch videos of coalmine survivors, looking at how they would walk after being stuck in a mine. If they had oxygen deprivation, what were the physiological effects of that? How would it affect their speech? How would it affect the way they walked? How would it affect their emotional connection to other people? So we were looking at a bunch of different kind of case studies, and certain nights just working on it—having him walk across the room with a cane. We’d have to split up the script into three acts, because his character is getting better gradually. So we really worked on those physical things and just the before and after of the character. It’s sort of this Lazarus-like character, comes back from the dead. So, you know, what was this guy like before the accident? Was he a womanizer? Was he good in school? Versus, what he’s like after. I would say, he was the actor I worked the most with. Unfortunately, Jacob was working on a lot of other stuff, as well, so it was hard to get the rehearsal time with him and the other kids. But, normally, yes I like to think I am hands-on. It was just in this particular situation, there were just so many schedules to deal with; we’d have had to have flown everyone into West Virginia really early to do rehearsal and stuff, and it wasn’t possible logistically.

***

Little Accidents opens on January 16, 2015, in theaters and on demand. For more information about the film, check out its website.

To read our review, click here.