This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
The multi-hyphenate talks to Shondaland his new project, what adult friendship means to him, and the film that made him want to make films.
Dan Levy is a known auteur who values the cultivation of a familial vibe in his work and workplace. After all, we’re still obsessed with rewatching all six seasons of Schitt’s Creek, the hilarious Emmy Award-winning series the writer, producer, actor, and director made with his dad, Eugene Levy (his sister Sarah’s in it too). He also has a clear aesthetic vision, as proved with DL Eyewear, a line of prescription, blue light, and sun specs he’s worked on since 2013. Since Schitt’s Creek wrapped, Levy knew he wanted to veer as far away as he could from a cheeky exploration of blood ties that bind and move into darker, more emotionally complex territory with family of the chosen variety. “Coming out of Schitt’s Creek, which was ultimately a story about family, I wanted the next thing I did to be an exploration of family by way of friendship,” he told Shondaland over Zoom.
He’s certainly pulled it off with Good Grief, a moving film he wrote, directed, acted in, and co-produced about the jarring and devastating heartbreak of sudden loss, and the self-discovery that can happen in its wake with a little help from your closest friends.
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Without giving too much away, Levy plays Marc, an artist who seems fine with his larger-than-life husband getting the spotlight in their lives. But when his husband, Oliver (Luke Evans), unexpectedly meets a tragic end, Marc’s best friends Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel) show up to hold him up, eventually embarking on a soul-searching trip to Paris to learn some uncomfortable truths about themselves as well. Read on for Levy’s take on the inspiration and cathartic process behind making Good Grief, what adult friendship means to him, and the film that made him want to make films.
VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: What a moving, incredible film, Dan! Grief is something that touches all of our lives, yet we spend so much time in fear of it. What inspired you to take it on as a topic?
DAN LEVY: Funnily enough, I have a lot of friends that spend the majority of their waking hours thinking about death. I don’t know what that says about my friend group! [Laughs.] The older we get, I think the more scared of death people become. I, up until very recently, virtually never thought about it. I guess it’s like people’s relationships to flying — you’re either thinking about a plane crash the entire time you’re on the plane, or you’re blissfully unaware of it. It wasn’t until I experienced loss in my life that I was confronted with grief in a major way.
VMS: How have your own experiences with grief and friendship informed the film?
DL: I have a very small, close-knit group of friends that are the ultimate support system and are an extension of my family. I just hadn’t seen a lot of movies that celebrated adult friendships in a way that focused the friendships over the romance. Because, when someone is single a lot, all you have is your friends, and a lot of romantic comedies and even a lot of dramas tend to focus on romantic relationships over friend relationships, which can be incredibly romantic, as I tried to kind of convey in the movie. So, that’s where it started — the conflation of experiencing some grief in my life and knowing that I wanted to tell a story about friendship. Then, it became a conversation of what if I told the story about the need for friendship post a major loss? What would that look like? What would the conversations be between these friends, and what would it crack open in them? What levels of honesty would grief force to be exposed into this little trio of best friends? It was a really fascinating idea that came to me quite quickly, so that’s sort of where the movie landed — it’s a love story about friendship.
VMS: And how those friendships buttress you through life’s challenges. Spoiler alert: Toward the end of the film, Marc grows away from them a little bit, and I think they have to realize themselves in their own way.
DL: That, I think, is a natural thing about adult relationships — your brain is developed. In our teens and our 20s, you’re still in brain-development mode and everything’s, like, intensely dramatic. As an adult, what I love about my friendships now is the maturity of being able to have really significant conversations, and also the understanding that certain relationships and certain friendships can exist for short periods of time or long periods of time, and both can be meaningful. In the case of this film, it was about understanding that there were cracks in these friendships that needed to be repaired in order for them to save the long-term friendship. Those are conversations that I’ve had in my own life. They’re very real conversations that we have with our friends. Sometimes, you’re in two very different places. It’s very much like a relationship. If it doesn’t work at that time, you have to sacrifice sometimes the comfort of being around them all the time to really work on what it could be like to have them around, like, for the long run. You reach those crossroads where you think: I don’t know, man; this person is really not understanding me right now. Do I give them the benefit of the doubt, or do we just say it’s been great, and let’s celebrate what we had? This was the active choice of saying, I want these people in my life forever, so what do we have to do now to fix something that clearly had gone unnoticed for so long?
VMS: When someone you love dies, it opens a veritable Pandora’s box. You have to give yourself closure in so many ways because there’s the person you knew, but there’s also the person they really were. Why was that aspect of loss so important for you to explore in the writing of it?
DL: I think because I hadn’t really experienced it before — I have friends that still haven’t — I wrote it into the movie. There are certain people who just haven’t had any significant loss in their life, and I was one of those people up until very recently. It unlocked this level of philosophical life stuff. It forces questions, it forces you to examine your own life, it forces you to examine what you’ve prioritized in your life because it can go away so quickly. I think it forces a kind of recontextualization and recalibration of who you are and what you want to get out of life. That was kind of the biggest takeaway for me.
My dog died, I want to say, five days before I started writing the script. I was making a movie at the time. I was stranded in Atlanta in a hotel room in a snowstorm, just pacing around my room. In a way, I was able to really get everything out in that very short period of time because I had quite literally nowhere else to go. He was an older dog by the end of it. I remember as I was developing the movie, looking at him some nights on my bed, and I was like, Don’t you dare leave me during this process because I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle it. Yet when it happened, I think the vulnerability and the raw nerve endings that were going on in my head and in my heart allowed me to articulate a kind of feeling I don’t even know I would have been able to understand or articulate had that not happened. In a way, looking back on the movie now that it’s out and people are watching it, it feels like the only way I could express how I felt. I think that’s a lovely thing. My grandmother had passed away a year prior to that as well, and I think when you have an artistic outlet, sometimes that’s all you can do to understand and [find catharsis for] your own grief.
Himesh Patel, Dan Levy, and Ruth Negga attend the Los Angeles Premiere of Netflix’s Good Grief at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood on December 19, 2023.
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin//Getty Images
VMS: I was going to ask if you found the process of writing it cathartic somehow.
DL: Incredibly so. I came to realize it was all I could do to honor my grandmother and honor my dog, who was by my side for 10 years. It has nothing to do with them, yet the feelings are swirling all around it. Even reading the script, when we got to shooting, which was many, many months later, there were scenes that I didn’t even remember writing. That’s kind of a wonderful thing, to realize that the human brain has this capacity to just go if you have that artistic outlet, if you have the ability to write or paint. It’s why Marc is a painter in the movie because it’s just this idea of — I think Theo says it in that one scene when they first meet — “Where does it go otherwise?” It’s memorization of pain.
VMS: You’re channeling all of the emotions into something. It’s like a funnel; it moves through you.
DL: Exactly. Some people just cry for months and months and months. I cried for quite some time, but then I took to my laptop and started to try and get it all out there.
VMS: You wore all the hats on Schitt’s Creek. What’s the most gratifying thing about executing your vision from soup to nuts?
DL: Ultimately, I think seeing it come to life. In my case, this film, I didn’t know whether I was going to direct it or not. By the time I finished the screenplay, I had such a clear vision for the movie that I kind of felt like it was an inevitability. It had to happen because I just knew it so intimately — not just the storytelling and how I wanted the characters to feel and be, but also aesthetically speaking. The tone of it, the language, the visual language of it, the production design, the costume design — all of these things that I knew were going to play very important parts in the, like, lushness and sumptuousness of the movie. I just knew that if someone else came in to do that, I would just be buzzing around, and I didn’t want to annoy anyone. Ultimately, I wanted to annoy myself. It’s an amazing thing. As a television writer, I always looked at screenwriting and thought, Gosh, that is something I don’t think I could ever do. Then an idea comes to you, and you try it. I was lucky enough that Netflix said yes to it and wanted to make it — especially given the fact this is such a 180 from anything I had done previously. It took a leap of faith, and I’m really grateful for that. I think to have something out in the world that you made is always a surreal experience.
VMS: So gratifying! You have such great chemistry with your co-stars Ruth Negga, who plays Sophie, and Himesh Patel, who plays Thomas. What went into writing and casting those roles?
DL: I’II normally write with actors in mind. In this case, I didn’t — I just wrote. I was very much in my head and just wrote the story down. Afterwards, it’s harder when you don’t write with certain actors in mind because then the neck is so wide that you think, Okay, well, let’s see everyone. It was the same thing with Schitt’s Creek. There’s this beautiful thing in the casting process — if it happens — where the right person walks into the room and understands the material, or interprets the material in ways that you didn’t even expect. In the case of Ruth and Himesh, both of them came into the room and showed a level of vulnerability, and enthusiasm, and specificity to the character that only made me look better [laughs]. That’s the amazing thing about the relationship between a writer and an actor — actors take the words and make them something.
I think when you have an artistic outlet, sometimes that’s all you can do to understand and [find catharsis for] your own grief.
VMS: They embody what your intention was.
DL: I think the great joy of this movie is every actor in this movie is playing against type. There’s no actor that’s like, Oh, they’re doing this again. It was a dream to get this cast together and to watch it all come together. Ruth and Himesh and I spent two weeks rehearsing, which wasn’t even rehearsing. We would just get together at my house and talk about life, and talk about relationships, and talk about our relationship to grief and what it means. Those conversations were so helpful because of the relationships that came from that. We just love each other, we are friends still, and deeply care about each other and check on each other all the time. There was something very meaningful that happened while making that movie for all of us. When Luke [Evans, who plays Oliver] came into the picture, we went to the Soho Farmhouse, which is just on the edge of Oxfordshire in England, and we spent a weekend together, like, in the country bonding. Not only did I need to have that intimacy with Luke, but Ruth and Himesh needed to have that love for him because that character runs through the entire film, right? They had to have love for him, the admiration for him, his enthusiasm, and the way he captivated everyone around him, so we just had the greatest, greatest time. It really worked on the chemistry because I think you can really feel it. These relationships feel so lived in, and it’s because we all were falling in love with each other while we were making the movie!
VMS: It’s palpable! Can we talk about the aesthetics for a second? The film is something of a visual feast for the eyes — the interiors, production design, all of it. What went into choosing the locations of London and Paris for your story?
DL: I knew that I wanted Marc to be a transplant. I knew that I wanted him to be in a place that wasn’t his home, home — it was his new home. That sense of isolation: Leaving home, his mother died, he found these friends in a place that was kind of foreign to him. It instantly bonded them together. He chose to live there. That sense of him being away in a place where he doesn’t have the same accent. He physically stands out — that felt really important. Then, for the adventure part of it all, Paris felt like a really nice hour-long jaunt they could take that would allow them to come and go quite easily, not to mention just the beauty of it and the romance of it. It laid this really nice backdrop to Marc’s grief. He’s in a city that’s so romantic, and yet he’s feeling the lowest he’s ever felt in his life. We got to explore so many different parts of the city. The fact that we were able to just spend a day amongst the Monets, just ourselves, was so special and so beautiful. It was just a real privilege. All my favorite movies take me places and provide this kind of lovely escape, and I really wanted the movie to feel like an escape for people, that they would find something new with every different watch, little details here and there or just spending the time taking in the locations. It was really important that every location we chose had that sumptuousness and warmth. It was all kind of muted color palettes. I wanted it to feel very timeless and in terms of when it was set, like a movie that people could come back to every New Year’s Day and just feel, have a cry, and feel good about themselves by the end of it, and just get lost in the beauty of London and Paris. Alice Normington, our production designer, and Ole Bratt Birkeland, who shot it, did such a beautiful job of really bringing those locations to life.
VMS: You grew up around the business, and your dad, Eugene Levy, always wrote and acted in his own stuff, but outside of that, was there a film or TV show you saw as a kid that made you go, “I have to do this”?
DL: One of my all-time favorite movies is Mary Poppins. I have watched it millions and millions of times. Going back to the early days of what inspired me, I think the combination of that movie being so visually gorgeous and dynamic, and the performance and Julie Andrews, had it all for me. There was song and dance, and heart, and intrigue, and adventure. That, I think, is the earliest memory that I’ve had of watching something and feeling like I wish I could do that.
VMS: What’s your guilty pleasure? Not that there’s any reason to feel guilty about pleasure. What do you do when you need to turn your brain off?
DL: I could eat pizza every meal of every day. I only say it’s guilty because if left to my own devices, I would, and that’s not healthy. Now I need to kind of parse it out. But when I’m happy, I eat pizza. When I’m sad, I eat pizza, and everything in between. Ultimately, at this point, I could probably do a show on pizza.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.