Heartbreaking and hilarious all at the same time, D(e)ad is a delightful film from Dropout veteran Izzy Roland. A deeply personal story that recontexualizes her feelings over losing her father into a plot about a ghost who can’t move on from his family (and can’t be seen by one of his children), D(e)ad works in large part thanks to a delightful script and authentic performances at the core of the story.
Roland plays Tillie in the movie, but this isn’t the only double-dipping the film takes in the production. Playing Tillie’s mother, Frankie, is Claudia Lonow, who isn’t just the director of the film but also Roland’s real-life mother. During an interview with TVBrittanyF, Director/Star Claudia Lonow and star Craig Bierko sat down to discuss the power of a story like D(e)ad, bringing real-life experience into their project, and how their real-life friendship informed their on-screen dynamic.
TVBrittanyF: Congrats on D(e)ad! It does such a great job balancing the natural grief and deadpan comedy you get from a story like this. How did you approach trying to make death funny in your performances?
Claudia Lonow: It’s supposed to feel heartfelt. There was crying while we were shooting from the crew.
Craig Bierko: There was a lot of laughter, too! There was fun. You’d be surprised, there was more laughter than crying. But there was one scene, I remember we were shooting it, and I really wanted to nail it. I was just being as honest as I could, and there was this dead quiet afterwards, and I heard our DP say, ‘You all right?’ Then the sound guy went, “Yeah, it’s just hard.”
What was it about this script that really hooked you into the story?
Claudia: Well, the story is based on me and my daughter, Izzy. My parents are in the movie, too. It’s based on… my ex-husband died. I hadn’t spoken to him in a while. I was worried that, when he’d be awake, his joke was going to be ‘if you’re here, I must be dying.’ It was all about that feeling, of [figuring out] how we move on from this experience. Will this person and the ramifications of all their dysfunction live with us forever?
Craig: It can be a very healing thing to step into somebody’s shoes. Somebody who you’ve never understood, someone who’s actually shaped you — and not necessarily in a positive way. I have some painful memories of certain figures in my life, and I don’t look at acting as anything other than a “meat and potatoes job.” It’s a craft, but I don’t get all [sucked] into it. But this was a very emotional experience for me, a private experience… and the script is really superbly written. It’s very clean, very funny, very sad, appropriately so in all the right places. It’s uplifting! I think most good movies should ultimatley be uplifting.
It’s beyond the words, though. It all has to do with the connection to their real life experience; whatever I could do to contribute to that, I wanted to. I didn’t do what I usually do, which is get an inside joke going with every single person on the crew. In between shots, I’m usually making jokes with everybody. But from the moment I read the script and we started working, I had this kind of respect for the story and the process. The emotion of it was really hitting people.
Claudia: It was really affecting people. What’s happening inside of it is so real and identifiable that, at times, it shook me up. We shot scenes, and they were very close to the bone. That’s just superb writing. We had shot some things before Craig arrived. We had done some work and and then when Craig came, all of us went, ‘Oh, my God, he’s really bringing it!’ he’s a real actor. It just raised our level, because we’ve been very insular in our own little group. It was my daughter, me, and my parents. I mean, Vic Michaelis is not in our family, but I see them quite a bit. Then Craig showed up, and it was like, wow, you know, this is serious. You know, there are serious things about the movie that he just beautifully brought to life.
It really is so well done — the film does such a good job of threading the needle between those tragic moments and those bits of natural levity. I still love your scene, where Frankie sees Daniel in the hospital mid-joke, and just breaks down.
Claudia: That did literally happen in real life! We’re a naturally funny family. We have a comedy background. Before we went into the room, there were lots of jokes. There were even jokes after we went into the room. But I literally hadn’t seen my late ex-husband for years. I was shocked by how much I was affected by it. It’s a shocking experience. Craig was terrific, and gave a beautiful, understated performance.
That dynamic that the two of you find in the film is great. It really does have the dynamic of a relationship that could have been romantic but has fallen apart.
Claudia: [Craig] and I have been friends in real life. We’ve known each other for a long time. Our friendship began online. We were in a show business group on Facebook, and then we were fucking with each other over texts. I think it was just natural. It was fortunate that we had this. I did want it to have a hopeless romantic sort of feel to it, like a His Gal Friday vibe, but they never got back together. They’re really combative. At the end of the day, it’s just too much work.
Craig: All characters are ultimately tropes, and the art comes from someone like Izzy and the work they’ve done on this screenplay. The thing that draws [Daniel and Frankie] together is the most attractive quality, that terrific sense of humor and irony, but they can’t make it work. Well, he can’t… if you look at it in terms of the kids, their work is done. Everything gets cleaned up in the end. Not to get too cosmic about it, but that’s what it feels like. Things are perfectly constructed so that if you want to move forward, you can move forward. There’s a positive message in this.
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What would you both say was the biggest surprise of this experience?
Claudia: I started out my career as an actress, and now I’ve been a writer for the last 25 years. I haven’t acted liked this in a while. For me, the biggest surprise was — well, the first thing was remembering how to walk and talk at the same time [Laughter]. The other big surprise was that it was just really fun. Acting is so much more fun than being a showrunner! All I gotta do is just show up, and I’m just playing.
I found myself in the acting, which I haven’t done in a long time. Being a writer and a showrunner and a director [are all great], but I was having a great time doing this. Coming back to acting was in my sense memory. It’s so much more fun to be doing it at this stage of my life than when I was a kid.
Craig: I’ve always felt lucky. I’ve never looked a gift horse in the mouth. I don’t expect anybody to give me a free ride. As I get older and accumulate experience, I realize that I need to appreciate working on something that is truly unique or rare. This is something that’s been crafted by a family. It’s deeply personal. When I read this script, I didn’t know it was by Claudia’s daughter or connected to her; I thought it was just a great script worth chasing. I’ve never seen a part quite like this.
It’s sort of a The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, but it’s not that kind of love story. It’s a beautiful script, written by the daughter of someone I know and whose career I’ve been following, who I’m lucky to have been friends with. This was a kind of character that was familiar to both of us… this is a guy who really loves his daughter in his own way. He loves his ex-wife. But he’s just so screwed up and got lost and then ended up paying the ultimate price for it, and gets one more chance to make it right. I’m making it sound like a Christian witnessing film, which it is not. It’s a Jewish witnessing. I think it’s going to leave people with a really positive feeling.
D(e)ad is now playing in select theaters
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