Keeping up with ‘Jean of the Joneses’ filmmaker Stella Meghie

Canadian filmmaker Stella Meghie has come home, which is appropriate since her critically acclaimed debut feature Jean of the Joneses (opening this weekend in Toronto at Cineplex Yonge and Dundas and Cineplex Scarborough) is about that very thing. Returning to Toronto from Los Angeles where she has been directing her follow-up – an adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s young adult novel Everything, Everything for MGM and Warner Brothers – she endured a several hour flight delay before conducting press in advance of the film this week. Thankfully, she doesn’t have to turn right back around and head back to the west coast. She plans on spending the weekend with her family, which in many ways influenced the story and characters of Jean of the Joneses.

The Toronto and Brooklyn shot production that she had been workin at on and off since she started writing it in 2010 put Meghie on the map in a big way following favourable premieres at SXSW and TIFF, the latter of which she was unable to attend because of her duties on Everything, Everything. The filmmaker, as many storytellers do, put a lot of herself into the story of Jean (Taylour Paige), a successful writer with a messy personal life. Recently dumped by her boyfriend, Jean finds herself homeless and drifting through spending time living with each of her three aunts. Anne (a scene stealing Erica Ash) is a fun loving nurse who has been sleeping with a married doctor. Mother Maureen runs a tight ship. Aunt Janet (Gloria Ruben) is married with kids, but is deluding herself that a divorce isn’t on the horizon. Meanwhile, grandmother Daphne (Michelle Hurst) is trying to cope with all of her kids and grandkids asking questions about why her former husband turned up on the doorstep on the night of a family dinner only to keel over and die.

Jean of the Joneses is a film that’s not only about Jean’s second tenuous and conflicted chance at happiness with a kindly EMT (Mamodou Athie), but everyone in the family at the same time. Unlike most family comedies, this one isn’t only controlled by a largely black female cast, but boast a slyly witty tone instead of a broader crowd pleaser. It’s a delicate balance that has rightfully place Meghie in the pantheon of up and coming talents to keep an eye on.

We caught up with Meghie at a King Street hotel to talk about her first feature effort.

Are you surprised at how far this little film has taken you? I know you just finished shooting Everything, Everything, which is your first major American studio film, so congrats on that.

Stella Meghie: Thank you! I really had faith in the story of Jean, and I always felt that people would relate to it, so it’s nice that they actually did when it was made and the final film was made into what I always wanted the film to be. The response has just been exciting, and I think the way the film relates to people has been what has taken me further. It’s so affirming and fortuitous, really. I think a lot of people know what it’s like to back-up family and then take a moment to tell a family member how wrong they were. Another thing that I get people relating to a lot is having a missing father who has either gone away for good or somehow reappeared. That was something a lot of people really gravitated towards.

Stella Meghie

When you make a family comedy of any kind, I can imagine that it’s hard to sell a dry family comedy, especially one with a predominantly black and female cast. I can imagine that it would be very easy to make the same film, but make the humour a lot more broad. Was the tone of the film ever something you had to explain to people?

Stella Meghie: Sometimes with some people, yeah. I got some comments at the script level that always said that the film didn’t feel specific enough to one culture. For the most part, though, people have been open minded about it. I sometimes think that maybe on the page it came across as too dry and people were unsure if this was even a comedy. Sometimes that’s really hard to convey without showing people. It can be hard to read. But in my mind I always knew that this was funny and people were going to laugh, and it’s always nice to hear people laugh in a cinema when they see it, but because so much of it is in the tone of how everything is said that it was hard to get it made for that reason, but now that it’s here hopefully people will start to realize that you can make this drier kind of family comedy and still make people laugh just as much as a broad comedy can. And there were times even during the editing process where I saw that I could have made the broad version of Jean of the Joneses just from what I had, but I knew that version of the story wasn’t the one I intended to tell.

Is that kind of where the line towards the end of the film where Sam tells Jean he thought her book was sad, but Jean insists it was a comedy came from?

Stella Meghie: (laughs) Yeah. I think so. I always think there’s humour even in the saddest of things. I think there’s also a really sad version of this story, and sadness within this story that the audience can see, but I think that I found the humour in these kinds of grieving situations that people find themselves in. In Jean’s case, I think most people would find her life and situation sad, but I think Jean is one of those people who has to find the humour in these moments, but Sam is someone who can see through all the humour and down to the pain that was there.

And when you do this particular kind of dry humour, I think you need to make that pain known by showing how these characters interact with one another. Characters like Jean’s ex-boyfriend or the married doctor that Anne has been sleeping with help to inform that, because from our perspective as an audience member, we can sympathize and laugh along with them, but from the point of view of these side characters, people like Jean and Anne look borderline crazy. What was it like creating the supporting characters that operate on the periphery of the film that inform how these women see the world around them and interact with each other?

Stella Meghie: Yeah, it’s a story of people going through heartbreak who aren’t dealing with it in the healthiest way possible. And you’re right that those characters on the side are kind of the least drawn out and have the most work to do in order to be potent enough to make sense in the lives of the women at the centre of it. It was always about these women and how they react to each other and how those relationships are changed through that. I just focused mainly on the chemistry the characters had with each other, and took only the most necessary glimpses into their lives outside the family that depicted either their personal relationships or their poor outlook on love. I had some great folks playing those roles, people like Demore Barnes, who plays Gloria Reuben’s husband in the film, who were able to come in and make the most out of their characters with very little screen time.

It’s an interesting way to tell a story because although Jean is bouncing around between staying with various different family members in the film, the focus of the story usually shifts somewhat to tell the tale of whomever she’s staying with. Even though Jean is the title character, did you always want to make this a somewhat observational film where Jean often acted as a bit of a guide or conduit to her other family members?

Stella Meghie: Yeah, and she was always kind of passive in the story, which is one of the character’s bigger problems. She’s a lens into the family, and I think it could have been on page or screen as more of a romantic comedy between her and Ray, but the relationships between the family members were so strong that I realized that should be the focus on the movie. How Jean reacts with her family specifically informs how she reacts with men. Being the youngest in this generational story means that she’s seeing things in new ways that she didn’t realize before all of these events happened.

I know it’s hard to create a realistic family dynamic on screen and sometimes it takes a lot of work. I also know that on a film like this that doesn’t cost a lot of money that you might not have had the time or luxury to do that. Did you get a chance to pair the actors off to create their personal relationships or was that not something that you had a chance to do?

Stella Meghie: We didn’t have a lot of time or money, but we did try to pair people off a little. We did have some time with Taylour and Mamoudou to work out some of their scenes, and we had some time for Taylour and Sherri Shepherd. Those two we did rehearsals with together so we could go through some specific scenes. And we didn’t have a ton of time where Taylour was spending time with Erica Ash, but those two clicked so immediately that it almost wasn’t necessary. Their scenes together, I think, are some of the best in the movie. They’re just like Frick and Frack. Those two together never needed a rehearsal. I think the film gets off to such a strong start because we have that scene at the beginning in the kitchen where we had to get through a lot of pages and didn’t have a ton of time, and the chemistry between Taylour and Erica ping-ponged off each other and infected the rest of the case. In that moment we became like a real family. Throughout the shoot we would go around Toronto and have karaoke nights and just have fun together. The cast members would always go to each other’s shows or stand-up shows. I just picked a great cast that really fit together and have stayed friends. I was so lucky that way.

It’s so rare to see any film from a black, female filmmaker making their debut with a comedy, and I think this is the kind of film where it won’t be what audiences will expect it to be. It feels a lot more like a film by someone like Whit Stillman or Noah Baumbach, which I know are comparisons that you’ve heard before, but bears the hallmarks of a mature filmmaker. Have you found that sometimes people are going into Jean of the Joneses with a different set of expectations?

Stella Meghie: Yeah, but not really since the script level have I had to really explain or justify the tone. I think with the film itself now that it’s done, I’ve been really lucky to have it play at TIFF and SXSW, and that helps take any kind of stigma away. If it’s playing at SXSW or TIFF, I think that takes away people’s expectations that it’s going to be broad. The festival circuit, who is an intelligent, thoughtful crowd of people were the first people I got to show it to. It is different from what people think a black family looks or sounds like, so I’ve been lucky that people understand and embrace that about the film. Plus, I’ve gotten some good reviews, and those don’t hurt. (laughs)

People have been cool and open minded, and through that I get those comparisons to such interesting filmmakers. I’m inspired by a lot of different filmmakers from a lot of different backgrounds, and I find it refreshing and exciting that people pull names like that out of hat. People see past the blackness of the film and understand what kind of film it is. I like that because of where we’ve already played and opened that people no longer need to be prepped as to what to expect.

For me, I think that comparison to those two filmmakers comes in because they’re two of the only male filmmakers who can write witty, dry female comedic characters.

Stella Meghie: It is a very specific kind of humour, and I will say that those comparisons are the most interesting because I think that people who go into this expecting a broad comedy will still come out of it and like it. I don’t want to make a film that’s just for upper middle class people of all colours. I want it to be witty and dry, but I also want it to have heart so that everyone can enjoy it, and it’s not so cerebral and highbrow that it’s lost on people