Q & A with director Mo Perkins about A Quiet Little Marriage and IFC Distribution Success

Mo Perkins's A Quiet Little Marriage won Slamdance's Grand Jury Award Winner for Best Narrative Feature this year and has been picked up by IFC for both US and international distribution. The film stars Cy Carter, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Jimmi Simpson, Michael O'Neill, Rita Taggart, Lucy DeVito, Charlie Day and Melanie Lynskey. It will play first on demand and can be seen now on Comcast, BrightHouse, Time Warner, Cox, and Cablevision.

Here is our Q & A with Mo:  

Tell me about your film that won the Grand Jury Award at Slamdance.  

A Quiet Little Marriage is my first feature. The story unfolds around a married couple, who are in love, but find themselves struggling over whether or not to begin a family. They can't communicate about it and wind up sabotaging each other secretly rather than confronting one another.

You worked with your actors Cy Carter and Mary Elizabeth Ellis to write the script for this film. What was that process like?

The three of us had worked together before on short films and we are all good friends. We came together with the idea of making something where the actors would have a creative ownership of their characters. Hopefully, that collaboration from the beginning would lead to very grounded, realistic performances.  Mary Elizabeth and Cy didn't actually write, but we co-conceived for sure.  After nailing out collectively some of the themes and ideas for the story in brainstorming sessions, I went off and wrote on my own, and then brought scenes to the two of them every week.  We would rehearse those scenes and then I would go back and rewrite based on those rehearsals.  For me it was a wonderful way to write, a real luxury.  Every rehearsal was a discovery for all of us and the story just kept getting stronger.  Given the chance, I would work that way again in a heartbeat.

Can you talk a little about what inspired the subject matter for your story?  

When we were coming up with ideas for what kind of story we wanted to tell, Cy and Mary Elizabeth and I all felt like marriage was a somewhat untold story.  It felt like films usually ended with a marriage.  We were all newly married and wanted to talk about the work of recommitting to partnership daily, living and sharing with someone on that intimate level.  

I heard that the entire movie was shot in 15 days. Why such a short time and how did you and the crew overcome that challenge?

We pretty much did as many days as we could afford.  It was a dead run.  But we overcame that by being really prepared.  It really helped that Cy and Mary Elizabeth had such a strong connection to their characters, we could trust each other, move quickly and still get good performances.

How did IFC get involved with distributing your film?