Latest news with #IDon'tUnderstandYou
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘I Don't Understand You,' adoption hopefuls stumble into comic violence
There's a wonderfully simple emotional appeal embedded in the opening of 'I Don't Understand You,' a comedy from co-writer-directors Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig. Well-meaning, well-off gay couple Dom and Cole (Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells, respectively) are eager to adopt a baby. In watching them record an appeal video — selling themselves as fit parents to an unknown mother — you want the best for them. It's a heartrending, nervous-laughter scene: Are they sincere without being desperate? Charming yet not edgy? In between the stops and restarts, they both wittily let off steam about the absurdity of the process. How hard does it have to be for willing adults in a loving relationship to start a family? That's where 'I Don't Understand You' devotes its more darkly humorous energies when it sends Dom and Cole to sunny, pastoral Italy for an anniversary trip, dropping them into a series of lethally unfortunate situations that probably only Patricia Highsmith would consider a proper vacation. Soon after landing in Rome, they're buoyed by news that a receptive pregnant mother named Candace (Amanda Seyfried via video chat) is touched by their story, their vibe being everything she wants for her baby. It's a cautious optimism, though, competing with the anxiety Dom and Cole generally feel as gay men on the alert for everyday microaggressions, also as tourists who don't know the language and urbanites not exactly comfortable navigating another country's backwaters at night. That last concern is what kicks off their nightmare, when the couple's rental car gets stuck on a private road that leads to a remote farmhouse where they have a reservation for an anniversary dinner. A mild panic bubbles up. The gruff, irritable and armed local who shows up only fuels their notion that death is surely around the corner. And it is, just not the way they or we may have imagined when they eventually reach the rustic home of retired restaurateur Francesca (a nonna-authentic Eleonora Romandini) and find a voluble soul who can't wait to serve her only guests a celebratory candlelit meal. Subtitles helpfully let us know what the skittish, suspicious Dom and Cole never quite understand about their friendly host. When Francesca's hulking, inquisitive son Massimo (Morgan Spector) appears, suggestively brandishing a knife, a blunt fiasco of an evening suddenly tips over into a bloody farce of fear-driven misjudgment. Despite the game commitment of everyone on-screen (starting with Kroll and Rannells' believable portrayal of loving, vulnerable gay marrieds), 'I Don't Understand You' is only sporadically funny. The writer-directors are themselves a real-life couple who adopted a child, so ostensibly we're getting an exaggeratedly autobiographical peek into what self-preservation on the cusp of dadhood looks like at its off-the-charts hairiest. And it's encouraging that the filmmakers opted to turn their experience and its attendant emotions into a silly horror comedy instead of one more earnest social-issue drama. (Amanda Knox is a listed co-producer too, and when the Italian arm of justice gets involved, you'll understand why.) Just as its opening triggers hope for its wannabe family men, you want 'I Don't Understand You' to really nail its downward spiral, and yet it's something of a misfire, albeit a likable one. The tone swerve into body-count humor and the nuts and bolts of violence eventually prove too much for Crano and Craig to effectively mold into a comedy of perception and privilege.
Los Angeles Times
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
How a filmmaker couple's adoption story inspired the bloody dark comedy ‘I Don't Understand You'
A bloody horror-comedy isn't the genre that springs to mind as a 'love letter' to one's 5-year-old, but for Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig, it's the perfect way to express their devotion to their child. The married filmmakers started penning the semi-autobiographical screenplay as a therapeutic exercise during the COVID-19 pandemic shortly after adopting their son. 'With the tiredness of having a newborn, it was kind of our mutual catharsis during that time,' Craig said. But a deeply serious, emotional script about their difficult road to fatherhood didn't interest them. Instead, the final product begins as a lighthearted comedy then turns dark — complete with a few dead bodies. 'I Don't Understand You,' which hit theaters Friday, stars Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells as characters loosely based on Crano and Craig, who also co-directed the movie. The beginning of the story faithfully follows the real-life couple's journey to become fathers, including a heartbreaking experience with adoption fraud. They had been trying to adopt a child for nearly three years and felt weighed down by the challenges. In a twist of fate, they were matched with a birth mother just as they were traveling to Italy to celebrate their 10th anniversary. That trip was essentially a comedy of errors. Their car got stuck in a ditch during a relentless rainstorm and the couple was rescued by an old Italian woman and her family, whom they couldn't understand at all. When they told their friend — and the movie's eventual producer — actor and filmmaker Joel Edgerton about the travel nightmare, he encouraged them to get writing. But how did Crano and Craig go from crafting characters loosely based on themselves to making them (mostly accidental) murderers? By adapting their real-life coping mechanism to the film. 'We processed our own trauma around what happened to us personally through really dark comedy to each other,' Craig said. 'It just felt like that was the story we were prepared to tell.' 'Doing a polemical, flag-wavy, tear-jerky adoption movie felt like really the wrong vibe for us,' Crano added. As the couple described the process of making the film, they frequently finished each other's sentences. They were in sync despite being on a Zoom call from different coasts, with Craig in New York ahead of the film's premiere and Crano in L.A. Their overlapping responses seem to mirror their writing process — each is attuned to his partner's strengths and how his mind works, and they're both 'obsessed' with iteration, as Crano said, hoping to find the perfect turn of phrase or one-liner through repeated conversations. 'Not to interrupt, Brian,' Craig interjected at one point, 'but I think this is where you were going.' Kroll and Rannells' Dom and Cole, like Crano and Craig, learn the happy news of a match after adoption struggles, get their car stuck in a ditch on their anniversary trip and find refuge in an old Italian woman's home. Then the plot departs from reality and descends into macabre humor, with Cole accidentally pushing the old lady down the stairs, killing her. The duo didn't have much of the plot drawn out ahead of time. Crano said they just wanted to explore the question: 'What's the worst thing that they could do next?' For Kroll and Rannells, playing characters inspired by their directors enabled them to tap into the emotional heart of the story in an authentic way. Both actors, speaking to The Times via Zoom, said the directors were transparent about their adoption experience. 'It would be so funny if we had been like, 'Hey, what was it like when you found out that you weren't gonna get the baby?' and they were like, 'How dare you?'' Kroll quipped. 'But it was super helpful to have them as references and resources, but also at the same time, their willingness to let us make choices that may not have been exactly what they would have said or how they would have said it. David and Brian had a really clear vision for it, but also were quite open to things organically taking shape that was new to the film.' Rannells, who was working with a directing team for the first time, commended the duo's ability to run the ship collaboratively. 'They were very much always on the same page, which was great,' he said. 'That was maybe a little bit of a fear of going into it. I was like, 'How is this really going to work?' Like, 'Who are we listening to and how?' But they did it really seamlessly and it never felt overwhelming.' Much of the comedy Kroll and Rannells deliver is rooted in cultural misunderstandings. Dom's Duolingo streak proves insufficient in helping the couple communicate in Italy, and they often mistake the locals' remarks or actions as homophobic. Craig said the characters' frequent misinterpretations took on the role of the 'monster,' since this is a horror movie without a true boogeyman. Their ignorance leads them to believe they're in danger. 'Our monster is their own perception of hostility,' he said. 'There's such a deep desire to be comfortable that they would almost rather do violence than be uncomfortable,' Crano added. Craig chimed in, 'And have to talk about it with somebody they can't communicate with.' Although they have committed American tourist faux pas like their characters, Crano and Craig said the adoption story is the most true-to-life aspect of the movie. The couple's beloved dog Axel — who died just a few months after they wrapped shooting — is Dom and Cole's pet in the film and their young son, Washington, nicknamed 'Washy,' plays Dom and Cole's child in a brief scene. After seeing himself on the big screen at the film's debut at South by Southwest last year, Craig said the 5-year-old thinks he's a movie star. His one demand, they said, was to wear a cowboy costume for his scene, which they obliged. Crano and Craig said Washy will likely be allowed to watch 'I Don't Understand You' at a younger age than he should. 'The thing we really hope he gets out of it is the true message of the movie: 'What would you do for your child?'' Craig said. 'And we hope he really understands that we would do anything for him.' 'It is a love letter to him,' Crano said. 'In a purely strange way,' Craig added, finishing his husband's thoughts once more.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘I Don't Understand You' Filmmakers on Channeling Their Own Adoption Nightmare Into the Well-Received Horror-Comedy
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.'' More from The Hollywood Reporter 'From the World of John Wick: Ballerina' Review: Ana de Armas Slays in a Hard-Charging Spinoff That Makes for a Mindless Summer Treat Jimmy Buffett's $275 Million Estate Sparks Sprawling Margaritaville Legal Battle 10 Hermès Gifts You Can Get for Under $100 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. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood's Most Notable Deaths of 2025 Harvey Weinstein's "Jane Doe 1" Victim Reveals Identity: "I'm Tired of Hiding" 'Awards Chatter' Podcast: 'Sopranos' Creator David Chase Finally Reveals What Happened to Tony (Exclusive)
2 days ago
- Entertainment
Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells team up for new horror comedy ‘I Don't Understand You'
ABC News' Linsey Davis sits down with actors Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells to talk about the final season of 'Big Mouth' and their new horror comedy, 'I Don't Understand You.' June 4, 2025
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Andrew Rannells and Nick Kroll Go on a Babymoon in 'I Don't Understand You'
Andrew Rannells and Nick Kroll Go on a Babymoon in 'I Don't Understand You' originally appeared on L.A. Mag. Writers, directors and husbands David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano had one major stipulation after their comedic thriller I Don't Understand You opened to an uproarious response at the South by Southwest fest in March 2024: They wanted it to run in cinemas.'Our biggest takeaway … which is why we pushed so hard [for] a theatrical release, was the infectious temperature we got [from] seeing [the audience] react at the same time,' Craig says. 'I want other people to have that same feeling.'Star Nick Kroll agrees. 'The best movies to see in the theater are the ones that make you laugh collectively and get scared shitless collectively, and this film has both of those feelings in spades,' he says.I Don't Understand You, distributed by Vertical, hits theaters nationwide June 6. Kroll teams with Andrew Rannells as husbands Dom and Cole on an anniversary trip to Italy. The couple are anxiously awaiting the birth of their soon-to-be-adopted child. When they veer into the Italian countryside one evening, however, they experience a series of unfortunate misunderstandings — virtually all stemming from their inability to speak the native tongue. 'The first act of the film is sort of autobiographical,' Craig recalls. 'We were going on our 10th anniversary trip to Italy, and right before the trip we found out we had matched with [a] birth mother and that she was due in a couple weeks. We decided to make [the trip] our babymoon. And on the night of our actual anniversary, we were driving to this remote pizza restaurant, and Brian directed me off the side of the road and we got stuck in a ditch for about five hours.'Crano says they were in what felt like 'The Hills Have Eyes' section of Italy. Luckily, a local family rescued the pair and fed them pizza and grappa well into the wee hours of the morning. Still, the incident birthed an idea of how things might've gone horribly writing I Don't Understand You, Craig and Crano's real-life personalities naturally bled onto the page, though the pair say the film is a 'fun-house mirror' version of themselves. Kroll and Rannells immediately picked up on the couple's rapport. 'It was easy to see from the jump who was who in the script,' Kroll says. 'We were able to draw on that as we built our characters leading up to production. But also, being in production in a foreign country is its own adventure, with highs and lows. And being able to observe David and Brian individually and as a couple who were working together was very informative and helpful.'Rannells notes the intense location shoot with an entirely Italian crew helped him quickly adapt to the iconic surroundings, even though it was his first time visiting Rome.'When you have to casually walk by the Spanish Steps or the Trevi Fountain to get to work, you really feel like a local,' he in the film, as Dom and Cole cruise the Italian countryside, a familiar Southern California voice provides the soundtrack to their upcoming adventure. 'I had just watched a beautiful documentary about Linda Ronstadt, so she was most definitely on my mind,' Rannells explains. 'When David and Brian asked me about song ideas, ['Different Drum'] popped into my head. … It seemed like a good tone to set for our characters before things got unexpectedly intense.'Even in 2025, stories centered on gay men feel a bit anomalous, particularly when divorced from being presented as tragedies like Brokeback Mountain or It's a Sin'We wanted to depict queer characters [where] there wasn't something queer happening to them all the time — [that] we're not always victims,' Craig explains.'I think we contain multitudes,' Crano adds, then describes a scene that depicts 'gay joy' without the sting of something horrific — a scene that's so moving you'll have to watch the film to find out.'We need to expand the genre of LGBTQ films,' Craig says. 'I feel like we're finally at a place where we might not need that genre anymore, and we can expand ourselves into drama and comedy while having queer characters. I think we have the privilege to now make stories involving queer characters that aren't just about being queer.' This story was originally reported by L.A. Mag on Jun 4, 2025, where it first appeared.
