EIFF 2013: Drake Doremus on Breathe In

With his long-distance romance drama Like Crazy, writer-director Drake Doremus had one of the breakout hits of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The film's depiction of a young married couple separated on either side of the Atlantic after a red tape snafu struck a chord with audiences and established Doremus as a young filmmaker to watch, but he didn't sit around to bask in the adulation. The director had already begun to think about his next film and he shot Breathe In in the summer of 2011, reuniting with Felicity Jones, who starred in his previous feature and has seemingly become his muse. "It started completely from her," he tells me from his home in L.A. "It's such a performance piece and I really wanted to tailor it for her. I wanted her to play a different character, and to play something darker and more mysterious."

In Breathe In, Jones plays an English exchange student whose arrival in New York disrupts the lives of the family she is staying with. She quickly forms a deep bond with frustrated music teacher Guy Pearce, but Doremus skilfully avoids the clichés of this premise by suggesting that their connection is a spiritual and artistic one rather than one driven by romantic urges. "It's no secret that older man/younger woman stories have been done since the beginning of time, and I definitely didn't want to try and reinvent the wheel," Doremus admits, "but at the same time I wanted to make a movie about a man who was reawakened by a younger soulmate, essentially." The film benefits from subtle, textured performances from the cast and the fact that the story provides a more intimate setting than Like Crazy's transatlantic tale. "It's hard to make a love story where pretty much most of it takes place over text and phone," the director says. "The goal here was to explore the themes in a different and more mature way."

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"It's no secret that older man/younger woman stories have been done since the beginning of time, and I definitely didn't want to try and reinvent the wheel" – Drake Doremus

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Doremus also likes to explore those themes in a very particular way. After beginning with a 50-page outline, he works with his cast to develop their characters and the ideas in the story through improvisation exercises, and while Felicity Jones was used to his methods it proved more challenging for Guy Pearce, who had no experience in this field. "Guy was really nervous and I think at first he really didn't want to do the movie because he wasn't comfortable improvising, let alone in a foreign dialect. When you think about it, it's kind of amazing what he did." Gradually, Doremus and the actors (including Amy Ryan and newcomer Mackenzie Davis) settled into their roles and the result is a film in which the characters and their relationships feel tangibly real. "They'd play board games, they'd go to dinner, they'd hang out and play music together, and we really wanted to get a sense that they were completely and utterly comfortable. They could 100% be themselves with each other so we could get that sense on screen," he says.

When asked about the film's production, Doremus tells me, "I feel like I was a different person at the time, and talking about it definitely does feel like I'm talking about something that happened way back in the past;" it appears that he is not a man who likes to spend time standing still or dwelling on past achievements. He is already looking towards other projects, sharing his excitement about The Beauty Inside, an ongoing interactive web series that allowed him to explore different forms of storytelling, and confirming that he is currently developing "a sci-fi love story" with Moon screenwriter Nathan Parker. This is a another fresh direction for the director, with a full screenplay being written for the film rather than a mere outline, but he is still determined to leave room for that vital element of surprise: "At any point anything can happen, happy accidents can happen, and we can discover new, exciting moments of truth."