LINOLEUM: An Interview With Writer/Director Colin West

I’m really good thank you. And thank you for talking to Cinema Scholars today, our movie site by movie fans, for movie fans, and what a movie you’ve crafted. I want to talk about the cast you have assembled first of all, and then some areas that really stood out for me.

Colin West:

Great! Yes, of course.

Glen Dower:

First of all, your lead actor, Jim Gaffigan. Perhaps known to audiences primarily as a stand-up comedian and his TV work, That 70s Show, for example. How did you know he was the actor to carry this movie as the lead character, Cameron?

Colin West:

Well, we had a lot of conversations with our casting director, Jessica Sherman, and she kept bringing up a lot of comedians, as far as the lead role goes, and as our list grew and so forth. And I thought that was such a sort of a wonderful take on the film because it is about a children’s science TV show host, so we needed somebody who could carry that sort of levity.

Glen Dower:

The Bill Nye Science Guy feel.

Colin West:

Yes! That Bill Nye thing. And somebody who has that enthusiasm and can sell that to kids, but also have a kind of deeper melancholy within. And I think Jim when his name came up, it was so obvious that he was great for the role, and he has been doing a lot more dramatic acting lately. It was sort of a joy to work with him playing two characters, actually, in the film. He is next level. I think that the talent that he has for comedy and stand-up really translates to acting and film acting. Every day and every time I see the film, I certainly am blown away by his performance.

Glen Dower:

Definitely, you really feel for him throughout the movie, what he’s going through, the
inner melancholy.

Colin West:

He was really able to keep it inside. He never wore his emotions on his sleeve. And so there’s a lot of great interpretation I think that the audience puts into his character because of that kind of stoicism that he has. He’s great, I could go on and on.

Glen Dower:

At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to Cameron. He is the host of a failing children’s science TV show, but he aspired to be an astronaut in his youth, but it didn’t work out. Dreams Fade. And then he fell into a quiet suburban life with his wife and two kids. Then his life changes when a series of events befall him, including a satellite falling from the sky into his backyard. He suddenly finds himself reinvigorated. But perhaps not with the initial support of his wife, played by Better Call Saul’s wonderful Rhea Seehorn.

Colin West:

Oh yeah, indeed! Better Call Saul of course and countless other roles. The amount of hours that she has put into film and television is unbelievable. She came with so much professionalism but also such sort of, softness. She was such a great person to have with the crew  She was so lovely. Rhea treated everybody the same and was very active with her character and her approach to this film and her character’s arc.

Glen Dower:

What an arc. When we first meet her, my notes read ‘BITCH’…

Colin West:

Ha! Yeah!

Glen Dower:

But there’s a point in the film when she softens, she then begins to glow and her eyes come alive, this is after the breakdown scene in the car with her daughter, then she reevaluates some decisions. She was amazing. I warmed to her immensely after that.

Colin West:

I’m glad. I’m glad, Glen. Yeah, she really did. And I think there’s something about her that’s so sort of magnetic and I’m really glad that her name is continuing to get out there more and more. And she’s just a powerhouse.

Glen Dower:

Then, we have Katelyn Nacon as Nora. She’s luminous in the film. I really enjoyed her performance. Was it her work on The Walking Dead or was it in her audition that she won the role, I can picture her blowing you away?

Colin West:

Yeah, it was an audition, Glen. She sort of walked into the room and had this great ease to let herself into that character. And, of course, she’s this really bubbly person in reality, but I think she was able to hold onto this kind of troubled teenage soul in the performance. It was very impressive. And I thought the way in which she, I don’t know whether it’s because she started acting so young, or did so much work on The Walking Dead, she was just so effortless. It was like every time I’d say Action, she’d just sort of fall into it very gracefully. It was very impressive to watch. I definitely learned a lot from those three actors that we’ve talked about so far.

Glen Dower:

And I want to talk quickly about the legend, Tony Shalhoub. What a treat it is to watch him in
the film in a curious role. It is difficult to describe. On the first viewing, he seems tired, maybe hates his job, yet takes on an insightful almost ethereal quality.

Colin West:

He was great. He’s so great to work with. I would be thrilled to work with him again because we had such a short time on set. I mean, he only came on for a day to shoot his scenes and then took off. But it was so much fun. And he, like his character, was so right. He’s kind of the all-seeing eye of the movie. But you think he’s totally insane because we set up the character so that we see him through Cameron’s eyes, through Jim Gaffigan’s eyes. So, it feels like what he’s saying is completely bonkers and off the wall. And then yes, when you come to re-contextualize the whole movie at the end, you realize that no, the doctor was actually this sort of the more coherent one. And yeah, it’s Jim that was misinterpreting it all. It’s kind of an interesting sort of double play there. And I think that’s what attracted Tony to the part as well, so correct!

Glen Dower:

I really don’t want to touch too much on the story, we want the audience to come to the film as fresh as possible but there are certain threads I really want to talk about. The cinematic zeitgeist at the moment – is very much multiverses, altering timelines, and interpreting time. We have the Marvel Cinematic Universe taking the lead, The DC Universe catching up, and of course, Everything Everywhere All at Once tipped for Oscar glory. Do you think your film can be put into this category or genre? Did it help with the production and the creative side of things, do you think?

Colin West:

I think yes, it falls into that category, but I don’t think I did sort of purposefully. I started writing the script in 2015, so it’s been a long journey to get here. But again, it is part of the zeitgeist. A lot of these scripts, for example, I was listening to an interview with the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert, writer/directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once) recently, and it took them many years to write their script too. We were all writing these together and somehow, it’s all kind of coalescing at this time. And I like that. I do feel really connected to these kinds of stories that are breaking out of the normal structure. And I typically do that with my films that kind of weave time in a different way. And I don’t know whether it’s like we all grew up on Charlie Kaufman or something, but there’s something in the air that is making us all do this. But yeah, I would hope that people would enjoy it. I had a reviewer call it a multiverse movie and I was like, ‘oh my God, I’m in the multiverse club!’ It was just kind of funny. I don’t know, I think people can categorize it as whatever they feel, I think it is a little bit hard to categorize.

Glen Dower:

Absolutely. There’s one storyline that I really enjoyed. Being a father of two myself, and that’s (SPOILER).

Colin West:

Yes. Got it.

Glen Dower:

Now, I’m a crier at movies, and proud. When that particular story was resolved, let’s say the room got very dusty for me. I wanted to ask, as the writer of the film – if you take that thread out, would it impact the story in any way? As there are certain interactions in film or lack thereof, how important was it for you to keep that thread going and then have it resolved? As I knew early on something was afoot there.

Colin West:

Well, I’ll try to keep it without spoilers, but I think for me that thread was the linchpin of the dynamic happening between Cameron and Erin in their middle age. We find them a few years after this event occurred and therefore that event set off a kind of web that led to this, in a lot of ways. So, it was important to me to show that. And I do think the story would be impacted, but maybe not in a plot way, but I think emotionally I think the story would be lacking quite a bit without that thread.

Glen Dower:

Excellent. In the resolution towards the end, I’m really fascinated by how that’s constructed. For the montage, did you plan ahead with storyboards, as a director? Is that done in the editing suite? As you say, you are making two movies or three at the same time? It’s amazing.

Colin West:

Yes, I did storyboard a ton of it, well, all of it I guess. But it was way more organic. I mean, I knew in the writing process, I knew that the end would be told cinematically. I knew that there’d be no way to actually get it on the page. So what I did was actually write a version of the ending that had all of the pieces. I knew that I needed, visually and auditorily, to make the editing sort of happen. But it was structured a little bit differently. But I think it had the same feeling. People would read the script and they would call me up crying. And it’s the same thing. I think a lot of people got hit with the emotion of it in the script phase, but the script had to be different necessarily because the ending uses cinematic language so heavily that it can’t be done in any other medium. We all knew that going in, especially our editor Keara Burton, who’s incredible and was really instrumental in constructing this finale. And she’s like, ‘Okay, what do we learn in this shot now? What do we learn in this shot?’ And being very specific about it. And I think that was incredibly helpful. And having her kind of walk me through almost what interpreting my own kind of enigmatic brain triggers. It was a challenge, I’ll say that Glen, it was a challenge to get that ending to really work with all those things coming together, but we really focused on the emotion rather than the logic, if that makes sense.

Glen Dower:

Absolutely. Directing the actors throughout the film, how did you achieve the different, layered familial relationships? How a certain character had a relationship with another certain character, how did you influence the performances as a director?

Colin West:

There were a lot of conversations about that kind of thing because the film is a time travel movie at its core in a lot of ways. And with that comes a significant amount of paradoxes. I mean, you can’t make a time-travel story without having all of these kinds of issues come up. And I think we pretty early on decided, again, to focus less on the logic and more on the emotion and to be present in the scene, not to overthink the wider web of what’s going on and just try to focus on what’s happening in this scene right now. And I think that really helped everybody kind of settle a little bit because the actors I think came in a little nervous about how they were going to act because it’s like, ‘how do I talk to myself and do I know it’s myself?’

Glen Dower:

Studying mannerisms, even walks?

Colin West:

Yes, I think they all sort of started to mimic each other a little bit automatically. That wasn’t even something I talked about and it just started to happen. I think we also shot this in October of 2020 during Covid. And so we were one of the first projects to get greenlit in that time period, so we had a ton of restrictions in place, but one of them was that we all had stayed in the same hotel and sort of sequestered together. And that actually made things really nice because everybody really got to know each other very well. We couldn’t go out, couldn’t anywhere. So when we were done shooting, we’d come back to the hotel. It was a very ‘camp’ atmosphere. I think that helped along the way too, to help the actors kind of get to know each other and their own kind of quirks.