Week in Streaming: Special Edition

In 2017, Steven Rogers earned a Writers Guild Award nomination for Margot Robbie’s breakout movie I, Tonya. But without a childhood steeped in community theatre, Rogers may have never discovered the love of drama that led to his 30+ year Hollywood career. After penning some of the 90s and 2000s most high-profile dramas and romcoms from Hope Floats and Stepmon to Kate & Leopold, Rogers decided to mine his own theatre kid past with his latest project, Everything’s Going to Be Great. 

Starring Bryan Cranston and I, Tonya Oscar winner Allison Janney, the film follows the Smarts, a vagabond family of community theatre entrepreneurs who spend the 80s traversing the Midwest for their big break with their sons. Told primarily through the lens of preteen drama junkie Lester Smart (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), the film oscillates between capturing the childlike wonder of discovering a place in the arts and the grim reality of making a living while pursuing one’s passion. 

Though Everything’s Going To Be Great could have come off as a more twee cousin to Little Miss Sunshine, Rogers’s clear understanding of the Midwest and the creative working class keep the film rooted in a humanism that serves as a rebuttal to Flyover County stereotypes. In the hands of Scottish director, Jon S. Baird (Stan & Ollie, Filth), the film infuses the road movie and family drama for a fresh take on the American Dream and the perseverance of family. 

On the eve of the film’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last month, Rogers and Baird sat down with The Pamphleteer to talk about Midwest settings, depictions of faith on film, and the process of bringing child actors into a cast featuring Hollywood’s most seasoned character actors. 

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What’s really impressive about this movie – among other things – is the sense of regionalism. I don’t feel like anything is stereotyped, and you both seem to get these pockets of the country very well. Will you take us through the process of developing that sense of regionalism and breaking away from a lot of those stereotypes that we often see in indie films?

Rogers: My dad produced regional theater for a living, and so that’s how we were raised…We were moving around wherever he had a season. It was sort of like being an army brat, but with theatre. 

In terms of the regionalism itself, there were different cities in the script, and then we filmed in Ontario, Canada. So, some of those didn’t match, and so, we just switched where it took place. I think that that was okay because we weren’t reliant on the specific places. It was more about the family that we were dealing with than the places. But certainly being on the road and being a new kid and being in different regional schools or theater was part of my background.

Baird: I grew up in a regional very remote part of Scotland. I grew up with people like this in terms of dreamers and people who were trying to fit in and find a place. The first time I came to the US was in 1988 when this film was set. I had a holiday in West Virginia as a 16 year old. So, I was at Derrick's [the elder Smart son played by Jack Champion]’s age at the time as well. I remember very vividly what it was like. And a couple years later, when I came back to the US, I actually bought a station wagon exactly like the one that we’ve got in the movie, an Oldsmobile, and traveled all around and actually ended up in your city–in Nashville–in the early 90s. I do remember what it was like in these places back then. Stereotyping was something we were keen to avoid.

A lot of films either pretend religion doesn’t exist, or they really lean into it and are in that kind of faith-adjacent category. Can you all talk about the process of navigating the very nuanced discussion of religion in the movie?

Rogers: For me, a lot of the movie is about fantasy versus reality. Allison's character is a woman who's sort of been betrayed by her dreams. I think you need some sort of faith. I wanted to present it the way that I grew up. I had one parent who was more religious than the other, and so I was just going with that.

Baird: I grew up in quite a religious household. Both parents were church goers. I do understand where Macy’s faith comes from and the subtleties of that and the complications and how you question your faith sometimes. We actually had a little bit more of it in the script as well. There were some more scenes with Macy at the beginning that we didn’t end up including in the film. But I think we’ve still managed to get the right balance through. I’ve got the Bible that she gets at the end in my office. 

In this film you’re working with two Oscar winners–Allison Janney and Chris Cooper. You’ve got record-breaking Emmy winner Bryan Cranston, and you've also got these three amazing young actors. What was the process of writing a film without knowing that these actors were going to be in it and then making these very experienced performers work with these younger actors who are figuring out the craft and honing their skills and talent?

Rogers: I didn’t write it with anyone in mind. I was just writing the story. The casting part: that’s my favorite part of movie making, just because there’s possibilities everywhere. I’d worked with Allison before, and I’ve known her since God was a small child. I thought it was going to be harder to find the kids, but actually, we had a great casting director with Mary Vernieu. Right off the bat, Jon sent us this email saying, “Look at this kid, Benjamin.” And we all did, and I was like, "It wasn't even very hard to find our lead.”

Baird: We looked through quite a few of them, but as soon as we saw Ben, we were unanimous.

Rogers: Bryan Cranston did chemistry reads with the young actors to make sure it would work. 

Baird: We all moved up to Northern Ontario to shoot the film. So we were all in the same boat. It’s not like people were going back to their usual residence. We became this family, not only the cast, but the crew as well. It was a very enjoyable experience. 

I think that helped the actors become really close with each other. I used to say to the kids, “Look at Chris Cooper, look at Allison, look at Bryan Cranston. That’s who you should be using as your yardstick and using as an example. This is why they’ve had such long careers, and that’s why they’ve won the Academy Awards. They do things the right way and they conduct themselves the right way, and people want to work with them, so use them as an example.” We were just blessed with who we ended up with.

The work that you’ve both done lately could be best described as indie films, but they never really fall into quirky, idiosyncratic cliches. That gives them a wider audience. This film is a perfect example of that. When you’re making movies that could be considered indies– I mean, you’re premiering at Tribeca tonight–are you conscious of trying to sidestep those indie cliches?

Rogers: When I was starting my career I was working in the studio space and I was doing studio movies. To be really honest, I just found that it was very difficult to be a creative person in that space, because it’s very hard to be an artist. They change stuff. They say the word “love” like I say the word “envelope.” It doesn’t mean anything. 

When I wrote I, Tonya, which is my first sort of indie movie, I knew that the tone of it was never going to survive the studio system. I had never done an indie movie, and I’d never produced a movie. I was one of the producers on that too, mainly because I wanted a seat at the table. I wanted a say. And that’s what indie filmmaking gave to me, in terms of not being a cliche or using cliche. I actually think that that’s more possible in the indie space because there aren’t all those cooks in the kitchen. I feel that it’s easier to be a creative person in the indie space.

Baird: Mine is more a subconscious thing. I’ll read a script and if it’s a great story and I respond to it, then I want to be involved. I’ve worked mainly in independent films, but, my movie before this one was with Apple called Tetris, so I suppose you could say it’s more of a studio thing. I’ll go with the script and when I read it, I’m like, “Would I go and see this movie?” 

I think my personal taste is probably just a fine balance between where the indie world lives and where successful commercial studio films that have a heart to them live as well. There’re not many of them that make it through, especially these days, when you’ve got about 100 people trying to tell you the decisions to make. When I saw I, Tonya, I thought, “Steven’s definitely somebody that I would like to work with, because that was a very successful commercial indie film, but it had a great story, and it was quirky and didn’t feel as though it had been washed through the studio system.” So that’s the sweet spot. If you can land somewhere like that, then I think just automatically, you will avoid the cliches.

Everything’s Going to Be Great is now available for digital rental on all platforms.