‘I Don't Understand You' Filmmakers on Channeling Their Own Adoption Nightmare Into the Well-Received Horror-Comedy

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As partners on and off set, I Don't Understand You's David Joseph Craig and Brian William Crano needed to confront the distressing experience they'd previously shared en route to parenthood. The writing and directing duo had been defrauded during their first attempt to adopt a child together, and it took a global pandemic for them to truly reckon with it. Their therapeutic heart-to-heart coincided with the writing of I Don't Understand You, so they channeled their adoption struggles into their horror-comedy's story about prospective parents, Dom (Nick Kroll) and Cole (Andrew Rannells).
'Neither of us really emotionally connected over how traumatic that [first] experience was for us,' Craig tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of I Don't Understand You's June 6 theatrical release. 'We both handled it very differently. I went way more inward, and Brian talked to everybody about it. So we didn't really connect until we started writing this movie and going, 'We both had a really traumatic experience that we need to talk about.''
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Fortunately, Craig and Crano eventually matched with another birth mother and became parents to a son after three challenging years. (The young boy has a delightful cameo in the film.) However, right when they received the good news that their son would be born in six weeks, they were about to embark on an Italian getaway for their tenth wedding anniversary. That's where Crano accidentally directed their car into a ditch during a rainstorm, inspiring Dom and Cole's own eventful night in the film.
Craig and Crano were soon saved by an older Italian woman in a Fiat, and despite the communication barrier, she welcomed the couple into her family's home where they wined and dined all night. Dom and Cole also end up at the home/restaurant of an older Italian lady, only Cole accidentally pushes her down the stairs during a power outage. She's the first of several bodies that begins to pile up, and the genre turn is meant to embellish the perils of adoption and parenthood, as well as the extreme lengths parents go to for their children.
When Craig and Crano shared the script with potential actors, they received some reservations in return about turning two gay characters into satirical villains. But they were admittedly tired of seeing gay characters depicted under the most tragic circumstances, or as 'the friend' who offers counsel to a heterosexual girlfriend amid her own dating woes. In other words, they were interested in seeing flawed gay characters for a change.
'We're of the age in which all media about gay people was either a tragic coming-out story, a tragic AIDS story or a tragic AIDs and coming-out story,' Crano says. 'So it was a really validating thing to shoot scenes in which queer characters were doing something other than asking their girlfriend about what he [the girlfriend's male love interest] said. There was a gay Bechdel Test thing going on.'
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Craig and Crano also discuss how Joel Edgerton gave them the push they needed to write the film, as well as how their long-term friendships with Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Hall and Morgan Spector influenced the film.
***
There are certain films that immediately feel very personal, and is definitely one such example. Just how personal is this tale?
BRIAN CRANO It's really personal in the sense that the first act is a fun-house mirror version of our life experience. We had been in the adoption process for years. We'd had a bad experience matching with a birth mother who was sort of scamming us, and then we had an incredible experience that led to us getting our son. And right as we had matched with our actual birth mother, we were set to go to Italy, and that's where we got stuck in this ditch [on the way to our tenth anniversary dinner]. So the part where the movie diverges is there was a lot less screaming than there was in real life.
And the pile of bodies.
DAVID JOSEPH CRAIG Contractually, we're not allowed to say the honest truth. (Laughs.) But the catharsis we went through from the experience was how we came up with the second half of the movie.
During the adoption process, did the two of you make your own self-conscious self-tape where you were editing yourselves while recording?
CRANO We didn't do that, but we had to contextualize ourselves a lot through the adoption process. We had seen some other people's versions of those videos, and oh God, if we had to do that, it would've been rough.
CRAIG Mostly because we are in the writing-directing world, and we definitely would've spent many sleepless nights editing down a video that explains who we are as humans.
You applied a part of your story to Dom and Cole, as they, too, were defrauded by a birth mother, and that leads to the saddest story I've ever heard. They drove around all night returning the baby gifts that their friends and family got them.
CRANO I really wanted to shoot that, and everyone was like, 'Too sad! We can't do it.' (Laughs.) And I was like, 'No, it's a great open! We'd put them in the deepest hole possible.'
Please tell me you didn't have to do that in real life.
CRAIG We didn't have to do that specific activity. In our world now, everybody Amazons their things to you, and so we didn't have to drive around giving gifts back. The true similarity is that we had told a lot of people that we were matched with a birth mother, and they were all on our side, giving us emotional support. So we did end up going back to them and being like, 'We're no longer pregnant.' When we later matched with the actual birth mother, we were much more tightlipped about who we shared that information with. Every time we had to go tell somebody that it didn't work out was way more brutal for us than it was for anybody we were telling. So that detail came from that experience.
CRANO When it finally went through, it led to the real emotional engine for us wanting to do the movie. Our birth mother was amazing; she is ultimately the hero of our lives and our family. But we could not think of a film or a television show in which a birth mother was portrayed in a positive way. So it was really important to us to construct a film in which that character was the hero of the movie. She's not the protagonist of the movie, but it was very important to us to center that kind of conversation.
Essentially, are you using genre to illustrate how fraught the adoption process is? Is that a fair summation?
CRAIG I think it's just parenting. What would you do for your kid? What would you do to have a kid? Our experience through the adoption process was arduous. It was a three-year experience in total from when we decided we wanted to have a kid to how we wanted to have a kid. The process of actually having him and getting him were things that were front of mind for us the entire time. We weren't given the gift of natural birth, so we had to think about everything. That's not to say that anybody having a natural birth is in a less difficult situation, but that was our experience. One of the biggest things Brian and I talk about is that the physical pregnancy wasn't in front of us, so neither of us really emotionally connected over how traumatic that [first] experience was for us until we started writing this movie. We both handled it very differently. I went way more inward, and Brian talked to everybody about it. So we didn't really connect until we started writing this movie and going, 'We both had a really traumatic experience that we need to talk about.' That showed itself through the movie.
CRANO That also led to the genre choice. We're both deeply silly people at a base level. So we were like, 'Let's write a horror film,' and then these jokes just kept coming into our brains that were too good to not use. And when we ended up hiring Nick and Andrew for the movie, they're so naturally funny that it made the movie more pleasurable in that regard.
How did you arrive at Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells as your central couple, Dom and Cole?
CRAIG Well, you get sent lists or whatever, but we'd had Andrew in mind for quite some time. He's funny as hell, and he's a great comedian. He's also a great actor, and we noticed he hadn't done anything like this before. So we approached him with it, and we hit it off right away. We knew Nick socially, but we had also listened to an interview he had recently done about his own experience being a new dad, which was very similar to ours. So when we were talking to Andrew, we volleyed the idea to him on a Friday, and by that following Monday, he had already slipped the script to Nick before we even had a chance to go out to him. So Nick wanted to do it, and it just felt right from the beginning. It felt like they really got who these two characters are.
Are these characters a response to the types of gay characters you haven't seen all that much on screen?
CRANO Totally! Holy shit.
CRAIG Thank you for asking that.
CRANO Yeah, we're of the age in which all media about gay people was either a tragic coming-out story, a tragic AIDS story or a tragic AIDs and coming-out story.
CRAIG Most of it involved the characters having to talk about their sexuality as a thing.
CRANO And our life experience is not that. It just isn't that. We're very rarely sitting around, going, 'My queerness dictates that I order the soup.'
CRAIG But we do order lots of soup.
CRANO We do, yeah. But the movie was an opportunity to center two people who want to have a family, and the validating/infuriating response to the script was a lot of heterosexual executives being like, 'Wow, this could be a man and woman. This could be two women.' And I understand what they're trying to say, which is that this is a really relatable script. But part of our responsibility as a creative entity, not just us, but as a business, is to talk about more than just heterosexual white people. So it was a really validating thing to shoot scenes in which queer characters were doing something other than asking their girlfriend about what he [the girlfriend's male love interest] said. There was a gay Bechdel Test thing going on.
CRAIG Don't get us wrong, we love those movies. It's just not the kind of movie we make. So we're happy to fill the genre with a different point of view.
The topic of who should be able to play whom has quieted now that the industry has faced all sorts of existential threats the last five years. It's still a valid question, but it's predicated on there actually being an industry.
CRANO (Laughs.)
Based on Nick's casting, I assume you don't mind if straight actors play gay characters. Is it just a matter of gay actors also getting opportunities to play whomever?
CRANO That's exactly it. So many of our friends are gay actors, and they're often not on lists that they should be on because they're out. And, to me, it's crazy to limit anyone's casting for anything. All of it should be on the table. It should just be about who is best for the part.
CRAIG And who truly connects with the material. When sending this out, there were quite a number of queer readers who didn't understand why we were making villainous queer characters. But, as a new father, Nick a hundred percent connected with the material's satire and bombast from the beginning. There was excitement around it, and we were like, 'He's perfect for this.' He and Andrew also love each other, which was so useful in the movie. They're in 98 percent of the movie together, and we needed two people who just truly love each other like they do.
I talked to a couple other filmmakers who've released horror comedies this year, and they both said that it's a rather difficult subgenre to get made. Studios resist it at every turn.
CRAIG It's comedy in general.
That's true. Did you also have a heck of a time getting made?
CRANO We had kind of a weird experience. But we're hearing a lot more of that now, and it all seems to be coming out of marketing departments either having a reluctance or not knowing how to market these movies. This movie came together really organically during the pandemic, so nobody really knew what was going to happen anyway. Kara Durrett, who produced the movie, is incredible, and Jessamine Burgum, who is the head of Pinky Promise, got the script immediately. She got why it was valuable, and so we were off to the races. It was pretty straightforward. But all of this ends up pointing towards the same group of people. Why are these casting and genre limitations being put on? It's like they're the same little band of people choosing what to take risks on, and I get it. It's a lot of money and it's a lot of risk. And if you fuck up, you lose your job. So it's a big deal, however, I would encourage those people to take more risks. If you look at the movies that have hit in the last couple of years, they're genre agnostic, and they're cast all over the place. They're funny, they're fucked up, they're weird, and the audience is there. You just have to communicate that these stories are available to them and that they want to see them. Nobody likes being talked down to, and the movies that are delivering more than one kind of dopamine hit are what's connecting.
CRAIG We weren't being asked to change it, which could have been something that happened years ago. They'd say, 'Well, you can get this movie made with a man and a woman in a second at a studio.'
CRANO And we could have. We could have made the movie with a man and a woman at a studio for more money. That is a basic reality. I get that it's market driven, but again, there is a responsibility to change that.
The brothers Edgerton, Joel and Nash, are credited as producers. Nash is also one of your stunt coordinators. David, was their involvement born out of and ?
CRAIG Yeah, prior to making this movie, I worked with Joel for close to a decade. I made The Gift and Boy Erased with him, and working with Joel and Nash was essentially my film school. It was how I learned to make a movie and operate in this business in a very respectful way. And when we knew we had a movie with all these wild stunts, we knew we needed to get Nash. He's not only a stunt coordinator, but he's a fantastic comedic director. So him being on set with us was needed, frankly.
CRANO In fact, Joel is the reason that we started writing the movie in the first place. When the real experience of us being stuck in the ditch happened, we told Joel about it. And he was like, 'That's a horror movie, guys. You have to write it. You must.'
CRAIG 'And if you don't, I will.'
CRANO & CRAIG (Laugh.)
David, Rebecca Hall shared a scene with you in . She also goes way back with you, Brian. So the casting of her husband, Morgan Spector, was likely a byproduct of that long-term relationship. You also have a history with Amanda Seyfried, who plays the birth mother. What's the proper story behind your collaboration tree?
CRANO I met Rebecca when I was 18, and we were both fresh out of drama school in England. I was doing my first play reading, and she was in it. We sat down to lunch, and we just immediately hit it off. So we have been besties ever since, and 20-plus years later, it's wild that we now have children. We talked about all these things prospectively happening, and now they have come true. So it's a real gift to have old friends.
CRAIG I feel like all of them were friends before we collaborated. These weren't friendships built out of work, so they last past what we're making. Rebecca, Morgan and Amanda are all, for lack of better words, godparents to our son. So casting Amanda in this as the birth mother was so natural and organic. It meant something to us personally, not just for the project. To have her give the baby over to our characters was just so heartwarming, and we got to honor our own experience with someone who is so near and dear to us.
CRANO Amanda is amazing in this. And we've essentially known Morgan since his first date with Rebecca. We know how deeply funny he is as a person and also how dark can be, but he's always cast as this brooding leading man.
I didn't recognize him at first.
CRAIG When we called him to ask him to do the role, I said to him, 'Morgan, you need to be intimidating. Can you bulk up for me?' And I was completely joking.
CRANO It was an obvious joke.
CRAIG But when he showed up to set, all of the wardrobe that they had gotten him was too small because he spent the last four or five months bulking up to be even bigger than he was. Thankfully, it works, but it was just so funny. He was like, 'You asked me to bulk up.' And I was like, 'You were the most intimidating person before you bulked up even more.'
CRANO But he was so happy to come do it. He really wanted to do something different and silly. Part of the joy of having such talented friends is knowing what they usually get to read. We talk about everything all the time. It's the same with Joel. I'm sure he would love to do a comedy. So it is a privilege to be able to write something for a friend and be like, 'Look at this version of him. This is the guy I know. He's hilarious.'
I'm very familiar with the work of your DP, Lowell Meyer, particularly the very intimate handheld approach he does with Celine Held and Logan George. His work with M. Night Shyamalan on and had a little bit of that, but it was mostly very controlled and deliberate. So what were you working off of when you hired him?
CRAIG Oddly, we have a personal relationship with him. He is married to our producer, Kara Durrett. So I don't think you could've gotten a more familial set than the one we had and created. It was wonderful because we all had kids of a similar age at the same time in Italy. So it was this little incubator of a bunch of Americans making an Italian movie in English. Lowell had always been somebody we've wanted to work with, even while he and Kara were dating. We knew Kara beforehand. Like you said, his handheld work is something that we've always been in awe of, and he's also such a color head. He is so zeroed in on creating a picture in front of you, and that is something that speaks so much to us. We wanted the action to pop out of the frame, and he's just such a technician when it comes to that. He's a true artist.
CRANO A lot of times, comedies are incredibly brightly lit and shot in this flat, stagnant, shot-reverse kind of way. That's something that doesn't really speak to us. Part of the reason for making the movie in Italy was to ask, 'What if this beautiful painting came to life in this horrible grotesque way?' We were looking at a lot of violent frescos, and we wanted to translate that into a cinematic language that's both pretty and scary. So Lowell was just such a wonderful collaborator.
CRAIG We were bringing a huge comedic presence, and because he shoots utterly beautifully, he's able to juxtapose those two things. That's why Knock at the Cabin worked the way it did for M. Night. Lowell was shooting his beautiful cinematography with the action that was actually happening, so it made it much more prestigious than it could have been.
Lastly, I'm sure you're trading ideas all the time, but is there a frontrunner as far as what could be next?
CRANO Yeah, we wrote our demented version of a Christmas movie. It's about what would happen if the emotional violence that your family perpetrates on you during the holidays was physicalized. So it's in the same space [as I Don't Understand You] with a bigger cast. If The Family Stone was armed and dangerous, what would that be like? So we're doing that with Scott Free [Productions] and Kara, and we're casting it now, which is super fun.
***I Don't Understand You opens June 6 in movie theaters nationwide.
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