'Palm Trees and Powerlines' Explores Grooming
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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. We just finished a conversation about the emotional lives of teenagers, and there's a new film that examines the vulnerabilities of girls and what can happen when loneliness and disconnection seep into a kid's life. In the critically acclaimed movie Palm Trees and Power Lines, we follow a sensitive and bored Lea, a 17-year-old in a dull town during the dog days of summer, no school, immature friends, a selectively attentive single mother.
Lea meets Tom, someone who makes her feel incredibly special. He is handsome and charming. Tom woos Leah and focuses on her in a way boys her age don't and well, it's because he's twice her age. She can't see the big red flag that the 34-year-old smooth talker has. It's an agenda and it's a dark one. It's a cautionary tale of manipulation and control with breakout performances by lead actors Lily McInerney and Jonathan Tucker. Palm Trees and Power Lines premiered at Sundance last year winning the prize for best directing for our guest, Jamie Dack. The Guardian calls it unnerving, a remarkable debut and it's a critics pick from Variety who call the film a gripping drama and praise Dack's trancelike skill as a filmmaker. It premiered in select theaters. It's streaming now on demand. Jamie Dack, welcome.
Jamie Dack: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Alison Stewart: This is so interesting because the film [unintelligible 00:01:24] as a short, which was inspired by a series of photographs. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of the film?
Jamie Dack: Yes. The film stemmed from visually a series of 35-millimeter film photographs that I was taking in Southern California. In those photographs, I was really exploring the suburban malaise that I remember feeling as a teenager. Also, the story for the film came from my own experience of having a relationship with someone that was older than me when I was a teenager.
Alison Stewart: Did you always know that the long version of this film-- we said there was a short. It's interesting because there are some lines in the short, which are in the long-form film exactly. Did you always know the long-form film was going to deal with a power dynamic?
Jamie Dack: Yes, but it did begin-- at first, I was just exploring this age-gap in an inappropriate age-gap relationship, but then I was very interested in what I was reading about grooming, and I decided to add that into the feature which wasn't in the short.
Alison Stewart: What was it about this idea of grooming that you thought you could explore it in a fictional film in a way that if we read an Atlantic article we might not be able to get?
Jamie Dack: I think I was interested in it because I was looking back on the relationship I'd had and starting to see it differently. At the time, I thought it was something I was completely in control of and was a willing participant, but as I began looking back, I realized there were perhaps ways in which I had been manipulated, and I just wanted to explore this on screen.
Alison Stewart: My guest director is Jamie Dack. The name of the film is Palm Trees and Power Lines. She's a co-writer of it as we can hear. It's really interesting because her surroundings are generic, and it's a dusty, muted palette. What did you want to convey to us about her surroundings and the impact her surroundings have on this young woman Lea? I found her to be really sensitive and maybe stunted by her environment a bit.
Jamie Dack: That's exactly right. I look at the film as telling a story about this girl that just has the perfect storm of vulnerabilities that leave her ripe for this man's manipulation. One of those vulnerabilities-- the others are the fact that her dad's not around, her mom is, but not really, she doesn't feel connected to her friends, she doesn't feel good enough, she doesn't know what she wants to do after high school, but then there's also this vulnerability, which is her surroundings. As I said, the suburban malaise that she's feeling. I remember being a teenager and being taught the term suburban malaise and going, "Oh, that's what I'm feeling in this town I'm growing up in."
Alison Stewart: The film does a really good job of really capturing teenage language and behavior at this moment, horrifyingly in some ways. How did you research this film? How did you find the language? What parts of being a teenager in the 2020s did you want to make sure you included?
Jamie Dack: It's always so funny when people react to the teenagers and say that the dialogue or just their behavior is really accurate because I'm in my 30s, and yet it's taken directly from my adolescence. Some of the things that boys say are things that were literally said when I was a teenager and somehow it still holds up and still is an accurate portrayal of teenagers. What's different now for teenagers than it was for me is probably technology. I was just adding little bits in there where they're on their phones or on Instagram or using a filter to change their face or makeup tutorials.
Alison Stewart: There's moments in the film that Lea seems really perceptive. As I said, I think she's really a bright kid, sensitive, but she gets sucked into this relationship. I'm going to play a clip from the film Palm Trees and Power Lines. This is right after Lea, who's 17, meets Tom, who's 34. He saved her in an altercation at a diner, we won't give too much away, but he's definitely saved her. She's run off and now he is caught up to her, next to her in the car. She's walking home, and he drives up next to her, and this is how they start to engage. This is from Palm Trees and Power Lines.
Tom: Hey.
Lea: Hi.
Tom: Are you okay?
Lea: I'm fine.
Tom: It must have hurt. Do you need any help?
Lea: No, thanks.
Tom: Even just a ride.
Lea: No rides from strangers.
Tom: That's a very fair, responsible point. Understood. I'm probably just going to have to keep you company while you walk then just to make sure you get home safely. What do you want to listen to?
Alison Stewart: The relationship takes off from there. Talk to me a little bit about the casting process because you really have to get the two right actors in this part. Lily McInerney, she's a relative newcomer. What was it about her that made her the right person to play Lea?
Jamie Dack: I was excited by the idea of discovering someone new for this role. It was very important to me that they felt like a real teenager. I'm often taken out of films and TV where it's a 25-year-old playing a high schooler, and they just don't look young enough for me. I also didn't want people to say, "Oh, there's so and so actor playing this teenage girl." I wanted people to be able to get lost in her performance, so I worked with a really amazing casting director who had discovered Lily.
She auditioned for the film, and we watched her tape, and as you can see from watching the film, she was just amazing. Even though she had never been in a film before, that did not seem to be the case, and I was very excited to cast her.
Alison Stewart: Tom is played by actor Jonathan Tucker, who is one of these actors who as soon as you see his face, you know you've seen him before. He's been in the Virgin Suicides and in Westworld and Snowfall, City on a Hill. When we first meet him, you don't hate him right away, which is part of the lore of it, but Jonathan told Variety watching himself in the finished film was really challenging for him. He said, "I just deplore this man and it broke my heart for a week or so after I watched it." Tell me about working with him because he has a very difficult role.
Jamie Dack: We often talk about-- it's not a competition, so I don't mean it like that. It's so easy to see what Lily did in the film and think about how hard that performance must have been for her, but what Lily and I sometimes talk about is that what Jonathan had to do was, in many ways, so much harder. I know he struggled with it but handled it so professionally. It was hard for him. He and I joke that it was after he watched the film for the first time, I honestly didn't know if he was going to speak to me again. He was so horrified by his performance, but that's what's so amazing about it. It's a really incredible performance.
Alison Stewart: What did he bring to that role of Tom that you weren't expecting?
Jamie Dack: I'm not sure there was anything I wasn't expecting because I cast him because I knew what an incredible actor he was, but it really was his ability to combine his charisma and his charm with the darker qualities of Tom and calibrating that and when he was going to show us each of those things.
Alison Stewart: We're talking about the film, Palm Trees and Power Lines with its director Jamie Dack. Lea seems to be in control of herself until she realizes in a really intense moment, she isn't, that this man who she's become so attached to has put her in danger, and we can feel the panic and the fear. How did you prepare for that scene? Also in the more sexual scenes, was there an intimacy coordinator on set?
Jamie Dack: Yes, there was an intimacy coordinator which I think is pretty standard nowadays to always have on set. It was super helpful to have her there, but it was like having someone if we needed them and I didn't feel like we needed them. I felt like the most important thing was the relationship, the trust that was built between me, Lily, and Jonathan. Just becoming really close, the three of us, and spending a lot of time together before shooting, having open conversations, making sure that everyone knew that they could speak up at any point if anything made them uncomfortable. I think often someone would go to an intimacy coordinator, perhaps if they didn't feel they could speak up among their co-star or the director. I feel like we really established that trust.
Alison Stewart: I also want to point out there, it's not graphic at all. There's barely any nudity in this film at all. Why was that your choice?
Jamie Dack: It's a story about someone being exploited and objectified. I, as the director, wasn't going to do that to her any further than what was already happening to the character. That was a very conscious decision. I think it's very interesting that in one very climactic scene, people are so disturbed by it. I often think to myself, "It's not even shot in a graphic way, there's no nudity. Why are people so disturbed?" I feel like you put people in this perspective of this teenage girl and it's just unbearable.
Alison Stewart: Again, there's nothing violent, there's nothing directly threatening at all in this film. What is the lesson that we should take away from that?
Jamie Dack: A more subtle coercion, a more subtle manipulation can be just as powerful and dangerous, I guess, is the takeaway.
Alison Stewart: I understand this film was really well received at Sundance. You won an award, yet one of the pieces I read talked about it wasn't-- studios reacted not in the way that films that usually are critically acclaimed at Sundance. Usually, they didn't really react to it in the same way. Could you tell us a little bit about that experience?
Jamie Dack: Yes, I think people were afraid of this film at many different steps of the process of getting it made, and finding distribution to get it financed was incredibly difficult. People were really afraid of it. I don't want to spoil the ending, but people wanted me to change the ending and make it a more Hollywood-tied-up in a neat little bow happy ending, but I didn't feel that was real.
I wasn't willing to do that. Then yes, as you said, it was out of Sundance, it was so super exciting because it was very well received, but it took us months to get distribution. There was even a distribution company that made an offer but wanted us to get rid of that, or said they had problems with that very climactic scene. I just think people are afraid of it and I hope moving forward that people can move past that because I do believe it's a really important story that's being told and that so many women identify with it. Not just women, but specifically women.
Alison Stewart: What kind of conversations do you hope the film brings up?
Jamie Dack: As I was just saying, so many people share with me after they see the film ways in which they identify. I've had people, strangers, reach out to me, Instagram, I've had strangers come up to me after seeing the film if I'm there and share their own stories of things they've experienced that are similar either in a concrete way or in a small more subtle way. I just think it's important that people are getting to see their story on screen, and I hope that those conversations continue.
Alison Stewart: If I can ask, what are you working on now? What's next for you?
Jamie Dack: I'm working on two features. One of them I'll tell you about, it's I optioned the rights to an Italian novella that was written in 1947, and I'm adapting it. I'm very excited.
Alison Stewart: What's the logline?
Jamie Dack: It's about a woman who murders her husband, on the first page and then we go back and follow their relationship and how she gets there.
Alison Stewart: We look forward to that. The name of the film is Palm Trees and Power Lines. The current film, Jamie Dack is the director and the co-writer. It's in select theaters and on demand. Thanks so much for being with us, Jamie.
Jamie Dack: Thank you.
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