In the span of only three films, writer/director Adam Leon has proven to have a significant feel for New York City and those who populate its streets. His debut film “Gimme the Loot” premiered at SXSW and then the Cannes Film Festival; his follow-up “Tramps” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was picked up by Netflix. Both films focus on teenagers blitzing through the city, captured by Leon’s on-the-ground filmmaking. Both are also highly recommended, especially in witnessing how Leon’s tight plots unfold with naturally charismatic young people at the center.
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Leon’s latest film, “Italian Studies,” places Vanessa Kirby (“The Crown,” “Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw”) in the middle of Leon’s take on New York City. This time it’s a much more loose and experimental approach. The film has a striking air of curiosity to it that’s different than the street-savvy nature of his previous two movies, based on Kirby’s character, who suffers from amnesia and walks around the city. She is an author of a series of short stories called “Italian Studies” (hence the film name), but she does not remember it. She gravitates to free-spirited teens (including the charming Simon [Simon Brickner] and the musically talented Annika [Annika Wahlstein]) who further color her new way of looking at the world. In my review, I called it “a striking mix of open-hearted storytelling and atmospheric filmmaking, with an overall confidence from Leon and Kirby that’s more pronounced than the script’s slippery nature.”
Ahead of its world premiere at this week’s Tribeca Festival, we spoke with Leon about how this third film was made differently, the various approaches that Kirby took with her performance, the ways that “Italian Studies” made him a better filmmaker, and more. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
The film’s timing feels especially pertinent, given how many of us saw our environs in a new way during lockdown last year. Did you walk around the city during lockdown at all?
We had finished shooting the movie at that point. I personally was walking around, was mostly on my block. I had this experience where I grew up here, and I’ve worked here a lot and made movies here a lot. [“Italian Studies”] is really about seeing the city with different eyes. So I had this sort of year-long experience, pre-production, production, and post-production, really trying to take certain walks and have experiences in the city where I was as much as possible in a state that would be similar to Vanessa’s, and thinking about that. And then [during lockdown], you’re seeing the city in very different circumstances. I’ve had a trippy and intense relationship with the city in the last couple of years.
When in the making of “Italian Studies,” did Vanessa Kirby become the surrogate you want for this experience?
I’ve known Vanessa for many years, and she’s a very close friend of mine. Vanessa actually called me up and said, “I’m going to be available in New York periodically over the next year.” We had wanted to work together, and we talked about certain ideas and concepts that we were exploring in life.
So it actually started with her. We built the story and character with her, and we started very quickly, just communicating all of the time. I’d be sending her treatment ideas to a script and developed it. One thing that I said to my team was that we would shoot this movie somewhat piecemeal. We would want to not make a movie that we normally want to shoot over six weeks continuously, but instead to have a process that relates to the story and how we’re making the movie.
How did shooting it piecemeal help the performances and story?
I think it helped everyone’s performance in some ways. We knew the story and what we wanted to get there, and we had a script, but it allowed us in summer to get to more city exploration stuff. So, the first thing we did was we had three days of shooting with Vanessa, over July 4th weekend, where we talked a lot about the character. She had done a lot of research on memory loss, we were in constant conversations about it, but we hadn’t done on-set rehearsal. We were able to allocate three days, for the most part, to have her explore and find and interact with the city and connect and disconnect from it. And then see what was working for an audience in terms of that.
We were able to sort of play and fail. We talked about that we should be pushing ourselves to go a little too far this way and a little too far that way. We were doing a lot of interactions with random people on the street. Some of that stuff was very funny, some of that stuff was very odd, and ultimately when we put it in the edit, it felt too far away from the film. People were not going to run toward that. There were more childlike versions of Alina, there were versions of Alina that were a bit more pointed and defensive, and we knew storywise that it would make more sense if she identifies as an author at the halfway point. We had this wonderful gift from our producers and our team to find our rhythm and character there.
Then we took three or four weeks off and edited that and looked at it, and were able to course-correct. I mean, I love reshoots; all my other movies have reshoots. I was joking but not joking that “this movie is all reshoots.” It started as a three-day production, but it can be all informed by what happened. And so then we did a lot of the teen stuff for the rest of the summer. It allowed us to rewrite those as necessary and focus on which people together would work really well. Simon really emerged more as a lead in that process.
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I’m defensive about this a little bit because I really hate the idea of an “improv movie.” We were not making this up as we were going along, but it felt right for the story and the movie and the character to do it this way.
