Almost Adults writer Adrianna DiLonardo and director Sarah Rotella make friendship funny again

When filmmakers set out to make a film about the nature of friendship, it helps if the people making the film just so happen to be friends in real life. Such is the case with the charming and hilarious Toronto produced comedy Almost Adults (now available VOD and On Demand), and the relationship between screenwriter Adrianna DiLonardo and director Sarah Rotella.

DiLonardo and Rotella teamed up and have overseen the beloved YouTube channel UnsolicitedProject since 2012, which boasts over 370,000 subscribers and over 100 million views. For years they have entertained people on the internet with a combination of skits, vlogs, and general silliness told from an entirely female and LGBT perspective. The success of their YouTube channel and their many fans certainly helped when trying to secure the funding for their first feature film, as the Kickstarter campaign for Almost Adults produced half of their budgetary goals in less than 24 hours and went on to more than triple their target goal by the end of their 30 day campaign. When watching Almost Adults, it’s easy to see why so many have placed so much support and faith in DiLonardo and Rotella’s authorial voices. Almost Adults (which had a successful Canadian premiere last year at InsideOut) is a very funny, and keenly perceptive film about two best friends trying to remain supportive of one another in the face of almost completely different life directions.

Straight workaholic Cassie (played by Natasha Negovanlis) has recently broken up with her boyfriend, and despite her dumping him, she isn’t dealing with things well. She’s stressed out with trying to finish school, recently lost her internship, and she feels like her best friend and roommate, Mackenzie (Elise Bauman), isn’t giving the kind of support that a best friend can give. Mackenzie, on the other hand, feels the same way about Cassie, but for different reasons. Mackenzie has just come out to most of her friends and family as gay, and for the first time in her life, she’s openly comfortable expressing her sexuality. Just as Cassie has ended her relationship, Mackenzie is staring an awkwardly cute relationship with a soccer player she has been crushing on. Mackenzie kind of resents Cassie for always being a needy sad-sack, while Cassie is justifiably miffed that Mackenzie told pretty much everyone else she was gay before she approached her childhood bestie with the same information.

We chatted with DiLonardo and Rotella via phone on the day their film hit VOD to talk about the casting process, their approach to depicting friendship, and adjusting their senses of humour to making a feature film.

I think something at the heart of this film is something that a lot of people can relate to is that feeling you can get when you’re in a completely different place in your life than your best friend is, and I think that’s something that I’m surprised no one has built an entire film around like you guys have with Almost Adults because it’s such a universal thing that almost everyone goes through at some point in their lives. There are so many times when you can’t fully support or feel happy for a friend because of something else going on in your own life. What was it like building your film around these complex feelings that most other movies either relegate to the background or don’t expressly deal with?

Adrianna DiLonardo: That’s interesting because in the film Cassie and Mackenzie are going on the same kind of journey, but neither of them realizes it. The same things happen to them, but they just find that these things are happening at different times. When Cassie first breaks up with her boyfriend, they’re emotionally missing each other at that point, and when Mackenzie is going through a breakup, Cassie is doing well at her job and isn’t feeling as sad. They just keep missing each other. One of the things we really wanted to touch on in the film is that at certain points these characters are being kind of selfish, and they aren’t being good friends. Part of being a good friend is that when your life is either going great or not so great, you’ll still be there and be supportive in that friendship

Sarah Rotella: And I think the second reason we wanted to make this movie was because we didn’t see too many films that touch on platonic friendships in LGBT movies. Quite often when you have a film that has a gay character and a straight character as the leading roles, they usually fall for each other. We really thought about this movie as two different ways of relating to a break-up, I really related to this because I know that I’ve had falling outs with friends, and sometimes those platonic relationships can be even harder to get over. You can really still think about people you were once really good friends with that you just had a falling out with.

Adrianna DiLonardo: Yeah, we really wanted this to feel as possible as we could to how we had experienced certain relationships to our friends. The hope was that all of what we felt showed through in the film.

Sarah Rotella (left) and Adrianna DiLonardo (right) on set of Almost Adults

Did your comedic sensibilities or approach change at all between what you were doing previously on your YouTube channel to making a feature film?

Adrianna DiLonardo: Well, on YouTube a lot of our sketches can be really silly, and we have a wider variety of things that we can do on there. We can bounce around between sketches, parody, satire, or just do videos about how terrible it is to be thirty or something like that. (laughs) The comedic aspects of the film really just extended to making sure that these characters were funny. I wanted the audience to recognize them as real people who told jokes, and when they told jokes, the characters would laugh at them. That’s what people do in real life that they don’t do in the movies. They actually laugh because a joke was funny, and usually not because a situation was funny. If you pitch this film, it doesn’t sound on paper like a funny film.

Sarah Rotella: The film doesn’t actually have a hilarious premise, if you think about it.

Adrianna DiLonardo: Exactly! It’s a film about best friends that are breaking up, and that’s kind of sad. What’s funny about it is how these characters interact with each other.

Your leading performers, Natasha and Elise, have worked together before on things and are actual friends off screen. Their chemistry here together is amazing, and I think it brings out what you’re saying about making the characters feel real. Was that sort of pre-existing connection between the leads important to you, and was it one of the reasons you cast them?

Sarah Rotella: They had worked together and known each other for a few years before we went to camera on Almost Adults, and they had worked with us on some of the films on our YouTube channel before. We had met and known about them for awhile, but we still had a normal casting process. When we had callbacks, we would just do chemistry reads and pair Cassies with Mackenzies, and we knew as soon as we saw Elise and Natasha together in these roles, we kind of knew right away that they had a relationship already in place. You could see it in the room, and they knew how each other worked. If one of them messed up a line or whatever, they would find a way to catch each other, pick back up, and keep going forward. They knew each other’s sense of humour, and they really added to the script as we went along. For a movie about two people who have been best friends since they were kids, we thought it would be so great to start with two actors who clearly had a relationship instead of starting from the ground and working our way up.

Elise Bauman (left) and Natasha Negovanlis (right) as Mackenzie and Cassie in Almost Adults

I saw Mackenzie as having an endearing awkwardness to her, and I could really understand Cassie’s frustration with where her life was heading, but it’s sometimes hard to make those two personality traits come together on screen in a friendship because they often aren’t complimentary. How did you balance these feelings that are new to these characters lives while maintaining a sense of long term friendship that the audience can understand without having previously known these characters and their pre-existing relationship? What did you guys talk about in terms of balancing these sometimes contradictory feelings, and how did that change when you brought the actors on board?

Sarah Rotella: Hmmmm. That’s a good question. When fleshing out Cassie and Mackenzie’s relationship, we had a rehearsal period where some key moments in the movie and in that relationship sort of evolved. There’s that bit about how they met over a Barbie and Ken doll, and when we hear that Cassie had a boyfriend, but we don’t see it. We kind of had these improv scenes as part of the process where Elise and Natasha would know what the scene was and where we were trying to go with it, and I would just let them go through how they saw it as these two friends first. We worked out how they would console each other, how they would approach or avoid each other when talking about things. I think it really developed mostly with them. When we got closer to going to camera, I would call Elise and say, “Pretend you just got into a fight with your parents and call Natasha as the character.” We would do a lot with that. Once we started pre-production, they really took on the roles of the characters and worked on it with each other.

Adrianna DiLonardo: I also think that since they’re playing these characters that have been best friends since childhood, we’re catching these characters at the right time in their lives for this rift to happen because as you get older, you start to become your own person. The bond is there and established, but because they have been friends for so long, they know what the other is like. They have these clashing personalities, but they have been friends for so long that they just expect to understand who the other person is. I know Mackenzie’s gonna play dumb sometimes, and Cassie knows that’s going to happen. Mackenzie knows that Cassie has a Type-A personality and likes things done a certain way, and she can accept that, as well.

Sarah Rotella: You know what else I’m thinking about right now? I have a friend who I grew up with since elementary school who’s not the kind of person I would have probably necessarily met as an adult. I think with Cassie and Mackenzie, if they had met in university, I don’t think they would have been friends. I think they needed to meet as kids. Even Natasha told me once that if she had met her best friend now, she didn’t know if they would have been friends because you never would have corssed paths.