All We Are; an interview with writer/director Will Stewart

I was introduced to Will Stewart in the most Southern of ways. I was vacationing with my parents at the Mississippi CPA convention in Destin, FL. While the accountants were in the conference, the spouses (and some “kids,” including me!) - mostly women, were playing bingo. Being the anomaly I quickly became the main focus of conversation. When it became known that I was an actor, someone at the table mentioned Will, living in Los Angeles, also from Mississippi.

“You should reach out to him. I’m sure he can help you!”

I did reach out to Will, even meeting up with him when I eventually moved from NYC to Los Angeles. LA was a very quick experience for me - one that didn’t quite end as I had hoped, with me back in Mississippi almost a year to the day that I had arrived.

Back in Mississippi, I started programming LGBTQ films for Oxford Film Festival, and when Will made his film directing debut with All We Are (co-written by Jonathan Herman), we were connected again. I was thrilled to program his film, which went on to win best LGBTQ short film at OFF. Now, me having moved back to Los Angeles, Will and I are great friends. I had the wonderful pleasure of interviewing Will ahead of All We Are’s public release on YouTube, June 1st.

In the film, two men, connecting through a personal ad decide to meet. No names, no strings. As they continue this anonymous relationship, they begin to connect more deeply which leads to painful revelations about the past, causing them to question what future, if any, they might have together.

THE ORIGINAL IDEA

“I had had this idea for All We Are, in some form or another, since the Actors Strike in 2000. I had left LA for two months and gone to Florida, and while I was there I rented all these foreign films from Blockbuster. I fell in love with this movie, An Affair of Love. It was a French movie about an older man and woman who were having a no-strings attached affair, and it varies greatly from there, but that premise, I was like - why can’t that be two gay men….

“This idea of two people physically so intwined and slowly letting all the personal stuff become attached to that even though that’s not want they wanted to begin with. All they wanted was physical.

“Another film that added to that was Weekend - about two guys who spend a weekend together and kind of fall in love together in that moment but are not destined to be together.”

WORKING AS A CASTING DIRECTOR

The lovely casting in All We Are shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, knowing Will’s background as a Casting Director.

“I had started dating my now ex and one of his great friends who became a good friend of mine was an executive at Warner Brothers, the WB, and he started calling me the Walking IMDB - that’s my instagram, that’s kind of stuck, because I had all this useless knowledge of actors and all their credits and nowhere to put it. And he was like, “have you ever thought of casting?” And I said, no…how would I go about that? And he said, “let me see if I can, you know….do you mind working for free.” And I said no. At this point I would not. It sounded exciting. It sounded fun just to be involved in the process of casting and TV, just somewhere, starting somewhere.”

Will ended up interning during a pilot season for Greg Orson, casting a couple of pilots while the agency was also casting Dawsons Creek!

“And then from there I cold called 10 casting directors, and I went in and helped out Libby Goldstein on a pilot and she, at the end of it was like, “I can’t hire you, but I’m going to find you a job. Try calling these 5 names.” And one of them was Linda Lowy and John Brace, and they were not casting at that moment. John just happened to be in the office doing some paperwork when he answered the phone, and he said, “I was just about to release a breakdown looking for an assistant. This is crazy.” And we met at Starbucks, and I was hired by them, and I worked with Linda and John as an assistant and as an associate and a casting director for almost 12 years.”

I asked Will when he knew that he wanted to create his own work as a writer and director.

“I think I always had that dream, I just never thought that that was possible. I never thought that was attainable.”

I asked, “When did you realize it was attainable?”

“When I parted ways with Linda,” Will said. “I guess it just felt like I had nothing to lose at that point.”

CASTING ALL WE ARE

Both Matthew Risch and John Lacy are not only perfect but also somehow - at the same time - a bit unexpected if you compare them to much of the other queer characters that were in the majority of the submissions I was seeing at the time.

“It’s interesting. Both of these guys were on my radar when I wrote this. John Lacy who plays James - I had been auditioning for years, and we had cast - I mean, I think he was in Private (Private Practice). I think he was on Grey’s (Grey’s Anatomy). I can’t remember if he was in Scandal. It would be crazy if he wasn’t, but I always loved his face, and he’s this bigger, kind of imposing guy, but there’s such a kindness and compassion to him… and to his eyes and to his face, and I wanted that kind of juxtaposition in that role.

“And then Matthew, oddly enough, in the very early stages of this coming together - I had had a coffee with his agent Matt Jackson, and Matt asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was writing this short, and he was like, oh that sounds perfect for my client, Matthew. He’s gay, and he gravitates toward gay roles - the gayer the better. He wants to be able to bring something of himself to these roles. Let me send you his reel. And once I saw it and saw him - we had a conversation, we probably spoke for 45 minutes to an hour over the phone because he lived in New York…. We were just on the same page. He was that character in my mind from that moment forward.”

THE INTIMACY ON SCREEN

These days almost every film and TV set with sex scenes or even kissing has an Intimacy Coordinator, but a few years ago when All We Are was shot, they were a rarity. The intimacy both Matt and John portray in the film is quite touching, erotic and personal. I asked WIll how he managed that.

“I think it was the chemistry that Matt and John had. Immediately John wanted to start texting or calling Matt the minute they were both going to do it, so I think they had a trust from the get-go. I led from making the actors comfortable, so the whole way through it was “is this ok, is this ok…”

Discussing the bedroom scene specifically, Will said - “It wasn’t an easy scene to shoot - choreographing, but we did make sure every step of the way that the actors were comfortable…. And it’s not easy. It’s uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable - any kind of intimate scene when you have a small crew around you watching, it’s just not the easiest thing to shoot, but we figured it out, and I think it turned out as good as it could have.

THE SECRET (mild spoilers)

One of the things I love so much about All We Are is that it feels different than so many other queer films I saw over the years, and one of the major parts of that difference is a twist that manages to both shock but feel completely natural and organic at the same time. Will told me that it was one of the last bits of the puzzle that came to him while writing it.

“I was hiking one day, and it came to me. It just came to me. It was probably years of working in Shondaland, casting all those shows, all those amazing twists that came out of nowhere that were just perfect and beautiful and only the mind of Shonda Rhimes could come up with.”

THE NEW EDIT (mild spoilers)

I originally saw a longer cut of All We Are when Will first started submitting to film festivals. Then I saw the festival version which we ended up showing at Oxford Film Festival and which played all over the world. Now, beginning June 1st, everyone will have an opportunity to see a brand new version of the film.

“I knew that I wanted (All We Are) to live online, on Youtube, and I could not use the song in the bedroom dance scene that I had for festivals unless I wanted to pay $10,000. That was not feasible, so I had to find a new song for that reason, or else it was going to live in obscurity….

“I have a girlfriend, Christine Solomon, and she was working with this artist, Desi Valentine, and I thought of that, and I just went on Apple and went through every song of his just to see, because his voice is so silky smooth and, I was like, there’s a reason - there’s something drawing me to him, and I heard “Shades of Love,” and I was like - I think this is even better than the song we had. Because…the song we had I loved, and from the minute I was writing the script it was in my head, but it also telegraphed a little more the ending of the short and set a kind of a sadder mood, and I feel like the new song is more of a falling in love, which I think makes the ending even more devastating.

The bedroom scene clip with new song, “Shades of Love”

“And since my editor was going back and doing that we just added in something we had cut for time for festivals…in the sex scene over the kitchen counter - all the flashbacks, that was not in the festival version. You get to see them fall in love all over again, and then the ending happens…I really liked that.”

WHAT’S NEXT

“I have written a feature called “Those We Leave Behind.” It’s a very personal story, coming of age in Mississippi. We’ve had a lot of great response, done really well in a lot of the bigger script writing contests. We made it past the first round of Sundance. It was featured on the Blacklist website. I have gone down the road with two producers, and both of them…it fell apart, and so I’m still making my way, trying to get this film made.

“Part of me wonders if I need to shoot something else before I shoot this one because it is so personal - I’m less likely to compromise much.

“Also, in the back of my head I would like to turn All We Are into a feature film, which is an idea that I’m working on.”

All We Are will be available on June 1st via this link!

Also - in the month of June, for Pride, $1 per 10 views (up to $500) will be donated to the Trevor Project.