At the end of a long film shoot, the cast and crew around you might just feel a bit like your family, despite the expected hiccups and bumpy road it took to get to that promising announcement, “That’s a wrap!” The close-knit feel is all the more heightened when everyone lives together in a tucked-away location like, say, rural New England to shoot ahorror comedy film. Featuring a stellar cast,The Parentingis now streaming on Max, and MovieWeb recently caught up with its director and some of its stars to learn more about the unique production experience.
“We shot it in Concord, Massachusetts. We were all staying in basically, like, a haunted house. It was this old manor, and we all had our separate rooms,“directorCraig Johnson(The Skeleton Twins). “Parker Posey was living down below me, and she’d knock on the ceiling when she wanted me to come down and see her.So we’d be hanging out and kind of bonding in that way.Filming can be like summer camp.Sometimes you’re all in it together. And for something like this, where everyone’s trapped in a house, it was just the perfect dynamic.”
“It’s the most bonding cast I think I’ve ever been with, in such a short time,” said co-starDean Norris(Breaking Bad). “[Scene partners] Lisa [Kudrow] and I and Parker Posey all shared a house together, and [Edie] Falco was right next to us. And oh, man, I mean, I had so much fun off-set.We had films we would watch, you know, movie nights. We had game nights. We would all go out to eat together. The boys would come over and play games. And sometimes we’d cook. Parker would cook sometimes, and we just had so much fun.” Norris continued:
“And we had these off-camera improvised things — like, things that we kept doing. Like,Parker and I pretended like we had this affair, and now we were feuding. So we’d just make people laugh because, you know, she was so good at this improv that wasn’t even in the movie, had nothing to do with the movie. But it was off camera, and we kind of brought that. And Lisa Kudrow and I would just sit around and, you know, people would say something, we would improvise and just go off and make each other laugh. So it was great. It was a great cast. It was a great friendship, and we are still all in touch together to this day.”
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Surrounded by “Legends”
Also part of the on-screen ensemble isrising star Vivian Bang(Always Be My Maybe), who told MovieWeb about the fun they had with the cast. “Parker Posey, who I adore, and Edie Falco — I mean, all these legends that I grew up watching,” explained Bang. “I remember shooting at the table, and we’re all at this family meal. And even though there’s demons and stuff going on, it’s still like, ‘Wow, I’m at this table. I want to belong to this family, even with the demons.'”
And leading the charge inThe Parentingis another young gun, Nik Dodani(Atypical), who plays one of two lovebirds trying in vain to peacefully introduce his parents to those of his significant other. “We all kind of, like, gathered andwatched reality TV. We cooked meals together,” Dodani told us about the production experience. “We really got to know Concord, Massachusetts. We went to Salem. Like,we did a seance. [My co-star] Brandon [Flynn] and I went stargazing one night. It was just really fun,it was like we were shooting during the day and at summer camp at night. And it was really just such a wild, fun time.”
The Parentingis now streaming on Max. Watch it through the link below:
