Photo courtesy of David Anderson
Sarah Chalke and Matthew Morrison in After the Reality
Sarah Chalke and Matthew Morrison in After the Reality
Believe it or not, growing up in Minnesota as a Nordic skier and student body president at Wayzata High School was what Los Angeles-based writer and director David Anderson calls the “perfect grooming for filmmaking, because it’s about endurance and dealing with difficult people.” In fact, he even had to impeach his vice president during a “complicated political time at Wayzata High School.”
But political turmoil aside, Anderson (a former Mpls.St.Paul Magazine columnist and the son of the late Mpls.St.Paul editor Brian Anderson) keeps coming back home.
After a web series that aired on and off from 2008-2011 (guest starring the band Weezer and former Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak) and an award-winning short film in 2012, he embarked on writing and directing his recently released first feature film. After The Reality tells the story of Scottie (Matthew Morrison), a Bachelorette-esque reality show contestant that must return to his family cabin in northern Minnesota and reconnect with his estranged sister Kate (Sarah Chalke) after their father dies of cancer.
We catch up with Anderson about writing and directing his first film, his love for Minnesota, and—of course—the obsession with The Bachelorette that made the movie possible.
How did you get the idea to write After The Reality?
My father died of leukemia in 2010. I was very close with my dad and went through tremendous amounts of grief. I would find myself alone in my little apartment, or my friends’ houses, watching episodes of The Bachelorette. It was mindless television, but there was a sense that the contestants on these shows were equally as sad as I was. I felt a kind of kinship with those guys, and so then my mind started spinning, and I came up with this idea of a reality show and loss. I wanted to tell it through a reality show and the real world, as Scottie, the main character, jumps between the two worlds. I wanted to show that dichotomy of grief as constantly changing and how the world doesn’t quite feel the same, and that the realities you live in are so stark and different.
Why did you choose to return to Minnesota for the film?
I wasn’t going to find that cabin location (where Scottie and Kate’s father lived) anywhere else. I have such a love for Minnesota, and there’s a rebate the Minnesota Film and TV Board offers that made it financially possible. We shot at Nelson’s Resort, which has been a family-run resort for decades. We scouted more than 100 cabins in northern Minnesota. The suburbanization of the lakes within a couple hours of the Twin Cities has gotten worse since my childhood. You can’t get that alone cabin feeling because the lakes are heavily built up. We went up to Crane Lake, which is four miles from the Canadian border. The isolation and the nature were really what we were seeking.
You have some well-known actors in the movie. How did the casting process work?
It’s so important to try to get the biggest name you can for an independent film. The casting director said Matthew Morrison might be interested, so he sent the script to him, and, unbelievably, he responded right away. He was ending Glee and was about to start both a feature film and Finding Neverland on Broadway. We had this very tiny window of time with him. He had worked with Sarah Chalke before, so he talked to her about the movie, and she loved it. Then he reached out to Laura Bell Bundy (the reality show vixen Kelly), whom he knew from Hairspray on Broadway. They already had chemistry, which was awesome.
Did you use any local actors?
We did! Nathaniel Fuller (who recently played the title role in the Guthrie’s production of King Lear) is the father, who collapses on the beach and dies in the beginning of the movie. And most of the members of the elementary/junior high school basketball team that comes to help clean up the cabin are all local to the Iron Range, which was really fun. They were all on the school basketball team and wore their own school jerseys. When we screened it for the Duluth Superior Film Festival at the Comet Theater in Cook, the basketball team came to see it. It was two years after we shot the film, so they were all grown up and it was fun to see them. They had such a good experience. They loved the car ride with Kate when she drops them off at the school. They loved that time driving around with Sarah Chalke.
OK, spill. How many seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette did you watch to nail down the reality show scenes?
I don’t want to admit how much I’ve watched. That’s time you don’t get back. But I’ve certainly gone through my fair share of seasons. One thing for me, because I work in film and TV, watching a scripted TV show isn’t always relaxing for me because I’m thinking about the writing, construction, and how they shot it. My creative mind doesn’t turn on when I watch a reality show. It’s a true mindless experience. That said, now I watch it critically because I know how hard it was to create a fake reality show, make it look real and feel real. That was extremely challenging, faking reality. We never wanted to turn it into a Saturday Night Live spoof because you need to feel some sympathy for Matthew and Laura’s characters. You can’t just say they’re ridiculous.
Did your own father’s death influence how you wrote and directed Scottie and Kate’s grieving processes?
Absolutely. It’s like having a crater in your world. In the movie, the father was more estranged to the children. That wasn’t my relationship, but when somebody dies—at least with my father—there’s this loss of all the things that were, and all the things that will never be, and all the things that you’d hoped for in the relationship. It’s truly devastating. It’s something I’ll probably struggle with the rest of my life.
What was the most memorable thing that happened while filming?
Bringing a film crew to northern Minnesota was heaven. Everyone stayed at the resort, and we all ate together, so it was like filmmaker camp. We had a talent show, the crew would go canoeing, and we joked that we held swim class in the morning. Most people would try to go out for a swim before we started filming. It was such an experience. Then on our day off, my high school buddy drove up his boat from the Twin Cities, and we all rented a houseboat. The entire crew went out on the lake, and we waterskied, and we sat in a hot tub on the houseboat. Local Crane Lake people came out on their boats, too. It was such a communal creative experience and it was a wonderful celebration. We were celebrating Minnesota on the water. I got to show off my waterskiing skills and hold up an After the Reality sign. It was so cool. A lot of the crew was from California and had never experienced Minnesota, so being able to share that with them was wonderful.
The film is now available on streaming services.
