Last Thursday, October 2,
Charlie McDowell
visited Dodge College to show off his feature film debut,
The One I Love
.

The film stars
Mark Duplass
and
Elisabeth Moss
as a couple whose marriage is on the brink of falling apart. Their therapist suggests they escape to an isolated house for the weekend in order to rekindle their love for each other, only to discover that the guest house is more than it seems. To say any more would spoil the fun of the film, and trust me, you don’t want it to be spoiled. But if you enjoy mind-bendy, science fiction-ish comedy, this film is definitely for you.

Associate Dean Michael Kowalski led a Q&A with McDowell after the film, to talk a bit more about the process of making it. Kowalski revealed that McDowell was actually in one of his classes when he attended Dodge, and remained friends with him since then.

The students were enthralled with McDowell’s stories about the making of the film, and he graciously answered questions for almost two hours.

Associate Dean Michael Kowalski interviews director Charlie McDowell about his film THE ONE I LOVE


The students were enthralled with McDowell’s stories



McDowell met Duplass a little over a year ago at a general meeting for another film that eventually fell apart. Duplass was so taken with McDowell that he told, “Call me when you want to make a movie. I’d love to work with you.” And that is exactly what he did. According to McDowell, Duplass helped “…set the creative gears and motion, and freed me from traditional thinking about stories.”

When asked about how the script was written, McDowell said, “We actually reverse engineered the script to the location. We built the story around the set. We had this beautiful house to shoot in, these two characters, and we said ‘what’s the weirdest situation we can put them in’ and went from there.”

The script, when completed, attracted Moss, who hadn’t played a role like that before. Her and Duplass worked together to ground their characters in reality, within the world of the movie, and really make it work.

They shot the entire movie in 15 days, using only two cameras. “When I say it like that, it sounds like it’s just that easy. But the truth is, it is and it isn’t,” McDowell said.

“I like to make movies that don’t fit in a neat little box. I like them to play in different genres. That’s the point of making movies to me, and I’m extremely lucky I got to do that with this film.”

The One I Love
is available now on
Blu-ray, DVD, and on Demand
.