Variety compared Russ Harbaugh’s Love After Love to the work of John Cassavetes, calling it “an alternately ugly and lovely, and altogether authentic, snapshot of the tumultuous process of grieving a lost loved one—an assured debut for a formidable new American indie director.”
Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney hailed “the real breadth of the emotional canvas” and sees in Harbaugh ’06 and co-writer Eric Mendelsohn moments of Manchester by the Sea writer/director Kenneth Lonergan’s “knack for locating weight in seemingly inconsequential moments.”
There were TV interviews with Harbaugh sandwiched between his stars, Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids, This Is 40) and Andie MacDowell (Groundhog Day; Sex, Lies, and Videotape), who said of her role in the film: “I’ve been waiting for something like this for such a long time.”
And in June came the distribution deal with IFC—a coup for any young director.
WM caught up with Russ in Baltimore prior to the IFC announcement, our interviewers talking by phone from the College radio station overlooking Hollett Little Giant Stadium, where the English major and former All-American quarterback led Wabash to an 11-1 season and an NCAC title in 2005 before heading off to film school.
WM: So, how are you these days? Enjoying this reaction to your first feature film?
Harbaugh: Giving the film to an audience is thrilling. I’m really proud of the movie, and giving it to an audience has finally allowed me to feel it—a deep satisfaction.
Is this stage of the process—looking for a distributor for the film—something that you’re enjoying, too, or is it something that you sort of have to survive because of your passions as a writer, director, and creator?
It’s both. I am enjoying it right now. I’ve never done it before. It’s as though my whole life has been about building this movie for close to 10 years. My dad died in 2006, I started working on a version of this movie that became my thesis film [Rolling on the Floor Laughing] at Columbia in grad school, and we shot that in the fall of 2010.
So it’s just been years of “I really hope this works.”
The business stuff feels like I’ve tricked them into letting me into the boardroom. You know what I mean? I’m hearing all these conversations and trying to keep a straight face, trying to pretend to know what everyone’s talking about. I’m learning a lot. But yeah, it’s fun.
And there is a certain responsibility in it. Someone saw enough of an opportunity in our little art movie to give us an enormous amount of money to go make it. So now it’s not a little art movie anymore—it needs to recoup a certain amount of money. The game in trying to figure out how you do that is fairly interesting.
When you put so much time into a film, does the kind of response you’re getting make the effort feel worthwhile, or are you satisfied regardless of what the public or critics might think?
My co-writer, Eric Mendelsohn, who is my mentor and one of the most important creative people in my life, goes out of his way not to read reviews.
I think there’s a fine line between having a healthy interest in the response to the thing you’ve made and also protecting yourself from the potential pain of reading reviews that misunderstand what you’ve done or don’t like what you’ve done.
Thankfully, we’ve been very lucky—the two big reviews have come out uniformly positive.
I still have that kind of childish fear of being caught as an imposter, which is probably just a function of not having done this before.
You said that for 10 years you didn’t know how this was going to turn out. How do you keep the faith—keep encouraging yourself when the markers of success are so far apart?
I made a deal with myself while we were putting the movie together: As long as the movie is advancing, I’m good. Even if it’s advancing by tiny clicks, as long as I felt like it was moving forward, I wasn’t worried. And I made this another agreement with myself—that if it ever felt static for longer than six months, then I would kind of reassess, but that just never happened.
You really have to be obsessed in a way. With Love After Love, I wondered, Can you make a movie that expresses that part of life where it just feels like one event after another after another are slamming up against you and you feel like you can’t catch up? It was at a time when everything kept changing almost out from under my feet, and I thought that was a cinematic feeling. I wondered, Can you make a movie that feels like that, that can give that feeling to someone else?
We made a lot of decisions based around what we thought could make that feeling happen, and I think the movie has it.
You have said that Love After Love was designed to give the feeling of dropping the audience into a scene already in progress and a scene that will continue after the camera departs.
I feel strongly about that approach. So much of what I’m interested in can only exist if you can make an audience believe that the world expands far beyond what you’re looking at through the camera. I want them to wonder, How did they have the camera on to catch that? How are they so lucky to catch that with the camera? I try to make a whole movie happen out of those moments.
When do you know when you have something good—how do you know that a moment or a thing needs to be there? Do you just trust your gut?
If nothing else, I just feel like the tuning fork that’s in my gut has been confirmed.
When you’re making a film, you need something that tells you whether or not you’re close to the idea that’s in your head. I lean heavily on reference points. There were several movies I really leaned on for this one. I did a lot of prep work—I made this 86-page “image bible” that covered the movie from the beginning to the end in chronological order, and it included things like paintings and color palettes and film stills. For me, it’s about establishing real strong reference points that you can test the movie against as you go.
One of the great challenges of a movie is so many collaborations all at once—if you can’t get everyone to be working under the same kind of aesthetic umbrella, it’s going to get out of control.
And that’s the quarterback in you, isn’t it?
I thought about that constantly on set. I called [former Wabash football Coach Chris] Creighton the night before we started shooting and told him, “The only way that I’m capable of going in there tomorrow is because I’ve had this experience with you and playing football.” I think I was really prepared to work creatively on something like a movie from playing football.
In football you prep for the week preceding the game, you try to galvanize a group of a hundred people around certain ideas about what’s going to happen in that game. Then you get in the game and it’s chaos, and you’re trying to both respond to what’s happening immediately in front of you while also holding on to the idea of your preparation.
And a movie is exactly like that.
Andie MacDowell said of her role in Love After Love: “It’s unusual for mature women to be offered something like this. There just aren’t that many roles out there that are written for women that are complex and this interesting.”
That’s very kind of her, though part of me wonders if that’s even true. There are women characters in the movie that I feel like I really struggled to write.
Some of what Andie’s character does in the movie is based on experiences that my mother had, but I’m not trying to guess at what that felt like for my mother. I’m trying to guess what that would feel like to me. I’m getting at that set of feelings about love and sex in the wake of losing someone that are my feelings.
So if the characters are strong, it’s because they’re human.
HARBAUGH with some of his production notes and scripts at Enlow Field in his hometown of Evansville, IN: "On set, you really lean on this sort of preparation to give you the boundaries of what you’re going to shoot, but you’re also looking for what you can grab that’s outside of it. On set you try to strike a balance between what’s been prepared and what’s happening in front of you."
It sounds like you’re saying the way to write a good part for a woman is being an honest man—an honest man going through grief.
I think the movie is about grief in a lot of ways, though I still don’t really know what that is.
One of the real difficult tragedies of losing someone is realizing that that loss becomes incorporated into your life. It gets whipped up into it, where it remains. It gets dulled over the years, but there was no point at which you could say, “Oh wow, today’s a brand-new day. It’s beautiful outside and no longer am I touched by that awful thing that happened.”
The magic trick of the movie, and the thing that I love the most, is that the movie makes you watch, in a kind of very unblinking, stark way, this man’s decline. You watch him die in this house, and then no one talks about it for an hour in the movie. And I loved that. No one is saying, “I’m so sad.” We’re cataloging behaviors in the wake of this thing that feel related, but only by association, and only because you watched the thing happen for so long.
You’ve cited as an inspiration Maurice Pialat’s 1974 film, The Mouth Agape, a portrait of a woman with a terminal illness and her family.
That movie changed my life. It altered for me not just what a movie could be, but what art was for. It’s about his mom’s dying. He had become fixated on this idea that his mother was never going to grow old and die in the way that his grandmother had. That fixation turned into wanting to see what happened to the body of his dead grandmother, and when they were shooting The Mouth Agape he filmed the actors opening the casket of his grandmother. It’s not in the movie because—ew!—but I remember reading that and being so struck by what the act of making a movie could be—not just about making something, but a way of living. I want to make a lot of movies in my life, and I always want to make them with that interest in exhuming the different parts of my life that I haven’t looked at.
It was roughly five years from your father’s passing to the release of Rolling on the Floor, and six years to Love After Love. Do you find yourself in a markedly different place now?
I’ve never been on the other side of this movie before. From the time after my dad died up until now, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make something that got at whatever that experience was like. And I do feel I did that with this movie. I feel ready to move on from it. I feel like I got as close as I could to putting on the record the assortment of feelings from the wake of that, and I did as well as I could. Now I want to be obsessed with something else.
How important has this creative outlet become to your own working through the loss of people, the loss of relationships in your life?
It’s not even a decision at this point. I think that I’ve spent so much of my early adult life processing the world in this way that now it’s just what I do. When I have a day that I don’t work on whatever I’m working on, I feel it. Things pile up.
I’m in therapy twice a week, which I really love and rely on. It’s hard to see the boundary between the part of my life that is me being an artist and the part of my life that’s me being me. It’s like there’s no distinction anymore, and I love that. I’m so happy to have arrived at that kind of a life.