Safe Spaces

By starrymag | May 31, 2019

By: Ashlee Dell’Arciprete

 

Fran Drescher

 

Q) Can you tell us a bit about the film?

 

A: So, it’s about a Jewish family and my mother is terminally ill in the hospital even though we’re a fragmented family with divorced parents and all the kids are kind of doing their own things and maybe are a little at odds with each other. This problem, the depths of the scare, this sad time, actually draws them close together as a family, and the loss that they all share, even with my ex-husband (Richard Schiff), ultimately prevails.

 

Q) Please share with us some information about your charity for cancer.

 

A: Yes, CancerShmancer.org. I suggest everybody go to it and click on Be The Change. That’s our new video that’s out with Jamie Foxx, Jeff Bridges and myself. Jamie is an angel – he’s the star of it. It’s educating, motivating and activating and it’s free. It’s fun and funny and informative. So, I suggest everyone go to it and learn how they can reduce their risk of disease.

 

Q) What are the other upcoming projects you are working on?

 

A: I just shot a pilot with NBC and we’re waiting to find out. I have a good feeling about it. I’m also going to be doing a night time talk show for Bravo. Actually I’m doing stand up now so you can go to Showtime OnDemand and catch my standup act called Funny Women of  a Certain Age.

 

 

Justin Long

 

Q) What can you tell us about the movie Safe Spaces?

 

A: Yes, it’s a movie about a family and the struggles that this family is going through. The matriarch to this family is dying and it deals with how tragic that that brings people that have a lot of conflict together. How when something that major happens, all the other struggles that you’re dealing with kind of pale in comparison a little bit. And so, that’s the backdrop for the whole movie and it’s something I’m sure everyone, unfortunately, can relate to. I hate to say, we’re all going to die. You can use that as a nice soundbite. We’re all going to die.

 

Q) How was collaborating with Daniel Schecter?

 

A: With Daniel, I felt a very immediate connection with him. We have similar neurosis, for better or for worse. We’re quite similar so I think I initially responded to the script, and I think it’s because I felt very close to the writer. I think he’s a little bit more neurotic than me but we have a similar sense of humor and stuff.

 

Q) How was filming in New York?

 

A: I live here. I love it here. There were difficulties because it was such a small budget so we couldn’t lock down streets and stuff. So, I was doing a lot of this, like during the scenes we’d get a lot of people crossing the behind us that weren’t. So, I would do a lot of in the middle of the take, “Hey, sorry, could you guys just – one second,” and then I would go back to the scene.

 

Q) What was one scene when you were like, “Oh my God, that was the best scene! I’m so glad I filmed it?”

 

A: I think the family scenes with Fran [Drescher] and Richard [Schiff]. That stuff, you never know if it’s going to work until you get there. And they’re such natural grounded actors that I just kind of had to be there and it felt very safe, it was a safe space.

 

Q) What’s next for you?

 

A: Next, I think I’m going to watch the movie and hopefully not feel a really extraordinary sense of insecurity, so that’s my next hurdle. I’m doing a show on Netflix called “Giri/Haji.” It’s a BBC Netflix co-production that comes out in the fall. And I’m doing a podcast that launches on May 13th.

 

 

Nic Inglese

 

Q) Congrats on being a part of this film! Can you talk a little about your character in the film?

 

A: So, I play Alan. He’s Josh’s (Justin Long) cousin in the movie and Alan isn’t as close to the family as he wants to be, so he’s trying to get closer to them in the film.

 

Q) What’s your character’s journey like throughout the film?

 

A: I think he starts as kind of being nervous. It’s kind of awkward being the youngest family member in the situation when your grandmother is sick, especially when you’re not close with your grandmother. So, I think by the end of the film he feels more at home with his family.

 

Q) Did your role in this film teach you anything about valuing time while you have it or your perspective?

 

A: So much. I mean, my grandmother personally was sick while I was making this movie, so seeing how the story was so relatable to my real life. Absolutely. You gotta cherish that time you have.

 

Q) What was it like working with Daniel Schecter, the director of the film?

 

A: It was great to work with Dan. I learned so much from him. I’m also an aspiring writer and director so seeing the way he worked on it and learning as much as possible from him while we were shooting and editing. It was a blast.

 

Q) That’s great to hear! Do you have any upcoming projects that your directing or working on soon?

 

A: Yes, I’m doing short films, writing, trying to write as much as possible.

 

 

Lynn Cohen

 

Q) How was working with Daniel Schecter?

 

A: It’s a word I don’t use actually, exciting. It was an honor. He understood women. He was very vulnerable. He was so honest and so open.

 

Q) How was working with Justin Long in the film?

 

A: It was wonderful. He was so generous. You want to work with a generous actor because they’re there. And in the film look at me. That’s just the way it is. You want to work with somebody who’s just there even when they’re not on camera.

 

 

Bern Cohen

 

Q) How exciting was it to be in this project?

 

A: This project was very exciting. Working with two generation of superstars, Justin Long and Fran Drescher, amazing, absolutely.

 

Q) Talk about working with Daniel Schecter.

 

A: I can’t tell you enough about how smart he is as a director. Just absolutely understands human nature and understands actors. Very smart.

 

Q) Can you tell us about your character in the film?

 

A: I play Doctor Peterson. It’s one of the few sad moments in the movie. It’s a comedy, but my scene is not a comedy. I play a doctor who has to tells Fran and Justin, their characters, that there’s no way they can save their grandma from dying. That’s not comedy, I think I had the only scene in the movie that’s not a comedy.

 

Q) Do you have other theatre or films projects that you’re working on?

 

A: Right now – Do you know who John Glazer is? – I’m Jon Glazer’s father in his new series “Jon Glazer Loves Gear.” You know about “Mrs. Maisel?” You know that scene “We got the rabbi?” Well, I’m the rabbi.

 

Q) And how was working on that?

 

A: World class, world class.

 

Q) Might we see the Rabbi from “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” again?

 

A: I sure keep him by the Star of David cross. I sure hope so.

 

 

Ryan Willard (Co-Producer)

 

Q) What drew you to working on this film as co-producer?

 

A: Honestly, Dan Schechter is one of the top talents to me in terms of as a writer and a director and his last film, to me, was something that I thought was tremendous and the film that really got it for me was a film called Supporting Characters. So, I was in a writers group with him and when I got to read this script and he gave me his vision for it and I just had to get involved. And he asked me if I’d produce and I said yes, so I was the day one guy that took this script from nothing to where we are right now and it just snowballed. It’s one of those things where if you’re a producer, you read something and you know that it just has to be made – and this was one of those movies.

 

Q) How was working with Justin Long?

 

A: I mean, it’s Justin Long, man. [laughs] He’s one of the legends. I’ve wanted to work with him for so incredibly long and when you actually–you see his performance, that’s one thing–but when you actually work with him, he is one of the nicest guys in the game. What you see is what you get. He’s actually even nicer than his actual persona and when he turns it on, every take is a home run. It’s money.

 

Q) What do you hope people take away from the movie?

 

A: I wanna know what people take away from the movie, that’s what I hope. I wanna hear conversations because I think there’s a lot of different thoughts and perspectives you can take in this. And when I create a piece of art, I really want conversations to start and I think this is gonna start a lot of conversations and you can’t watch it without feeling something.

 

 

 

Daniel Schecter (Director)

 

Q) What was your inspiration behind writing this film?

 

A: Life. My life roughly. I would probably say half fiction – half true, but it was a lot of my family is in it. A lot of personal experiences I’ve had in my love life or teaching and then your try to fill it with a bunch of made up gibberish and hope that no one can tell where one ends and the other begins.

 

Q) Working with your family, were there any difficult points of that?

 

A: No, I don’t know how people survive without wildly supportive family. They made me weak because they’re always there to support me and love me and they’re all here tonight which is really cool. So, no, they’ve been a total pleasure. My nieces are – this ones the easier one, this one’s the wilder one – but they both have a little bit of magic on screen, which is great.

 

Q) What was the casting process like for casting Lynn Cohen as the grandmother in the film?

 

A) It’s a funny story because literally every casting director in New York said, “You’ve got to cast Lynn Cohen.” We even talked to five of them.

 

Q) The overarching storyline in the film revolves around loss. Was any of that difficult to bring to the screen?

 

A: Yeah, but what’s kind of cool about it that literally everyone has been in the hospital with someone that they love. I think that’s what been so cool about the few people that we’ve shown the movie to already is that it’s a pretty universally story that the older, beloved people in our family tend to die in a sad way in a hospital and the best we can do is be there and give back everything that they’ve given to us. But, yeah, it was basically based on my grandma, the week she passed away. It was sad, it was an oddly choice week. We laughed our asses off, we all hung around the hospital around the clock, she passed very peacefully and I would sign up for that today. It was very nice.