Michael Shannon and Judy Greer on the profound poignancy of 'Eric LaRue'

Michael, first of all, congrats on directing your first film

And second of all, congrats on making Judy Greer the lead. Yeah, yeah. It was a no-brainer

You should leave yourself open to healing and praying. Oh, stop talking to me like that

I'm not a child! I don't want to talk about what happened to my son

I feel the same way. Your son isn't gone, Janice. Your son is alive

I feel very fortunate to get everybody I got in the movie

But Judy's, I don't even know how to put it into words. She's just, what she does is so complex and beautiful and nuanced and present

She just is the person. There's no BS, you know. It's just the real deal

I mean, it's really incredible because, I mean, Judy, you've done a lot of different things

but this film is a very dramatic film, but not in a like shirt-rending kind of way

So it's a lot of subtlety and you do such a marvelous job. I'd like to hear from all three of you kind of how this tone developed

because I know it was a play first that you wrote, Brett. So can you tell me a little bit about the evolution of going from a play to the screen

and like how did that translate? Sure. I wrote the play in like 98, 99

And then we was produced at a Red Orchid Theater room. Mike is one of the founding members and I'm part of the ensemble now I think about two years after

we did the show I would join the ensemble and then after that production it was produced at

Royal Shakespeare and some other places and my manager Megan Schumacher for like 15 years was

like you got to turn this into a screenplay and I was like I'm gonna I'll get to it and my daughter

was at camp for like two weeks and I was like I got a window and as a parent people that are

know that one where you like oh there I have this I got to cram it in So I crammed it in and I wrote it and she and I went back and were with some notes And then Michael and I were working on a play called Traitor that he directed a play that I wrote And it was closing night and we were going out to celebrate And I just

brought it in an envelope. I said, hey, can you take a look at this? Because I value my friend's

opinion a lot. And he, about two or three weeks later, just sent me a text saying that he liked

and that he said, I think I might want to direct this. And that's sort of where it ended up

So Michael, for you, having been an actor for so long, what made you go, I want to do the leap and direct this movie

Yeah, well, I think part of it had to do with the fact that I, like Brett mentioned, I'd just been directing a play that he had written

And I was in, Brett has a very unique, distinctive voice as a writer

And I was, because I had just been working on his writing, I was in that headspace to process it and visualize it

I just had so much affection, honestly, for all of the characters in the story

I thought, well, if you just pick one to act in it

then you only get to deal with that particular journey. But I kind of wanted to be a part of the whole thing

all the journeys, all the relationships, building that community. I saw it very vividly in my mind

I could see what it looked like, what it felt like, and I could imagine the actors that could bring it to life

And I also thought that it wouldn't be too demanding technically. There weren't a lot of special effects or big set pieces in it

It the kind of film I like which is people just interacting with each other um so although having said that i i did like i said i i saw a very distinctive look for the film uh beyond just the

the dialogue and the acting i i wanted it to look a certain way yeah i wanted to ask about

that where you chose to shoot the film and why that was the space and beyond that i know that

but it's also where Blue Velvet was shot. So I'm curious. That's it. Yeah, Wilmington, North Carolina

That was shot? Was it in our... You never saw the apartment building

That's the exterior. Oh, I actually shot... Oh. You're in Blue Velvet

You just don't remember. You were Laura Dern's friend. Wow, you were just all over Wilmington, North Carolina

I have a lot of friends there now. But we did wind up there kind of circuitously. We were going to originally shoot the film in Arkansas

and when the Dobbs decision happened, Arkansas was the first state to activate their trigger laws

And my production designer was on the ground there looking for locations and I called up our beautiful producer, Sarah Green, and said

I think we should move, get out of Dodge. So we moved to North Carolina because of that

To my knowledge, we're the only film that did anything like that

I don't think anybody else moved. Yeah, I looked at an article and it said

while there was a lot of kerfuffle about it, it seems that Eric LeRue was the only one that actually said

we're not going to get into this. I mean, it took a lot of work to do all that

I mean, fortunately, one of the reasons we wound up in Wilmington is our production designer, Chad Keith, lives in Wilmington

So he's like, well, if you go to Wilmington, that'll give me a... Wilmington is a really great place to shoot

I've shot so many things there and I love it. They have a great community

It's really fun. There not a lot of traffic And they have so many talented people who make movies and TV shows there Like You can get such a great local crew Well when you wrote the play that was kind of in the wake of Columbine

which, I mean, I was in high school when Columbine happened, and I remember at the time it feeling very much like

this is terrible, but things are going to change and this isn't going to happen again

That was the kind of thing as a teenager I kind of gripped onto. And now it's all these years later and the movie is still very relevant

Yeah, unfortunately. And when I wrote it, it was before Columbine. And when Columbine happened, I'm like, oh boy, here we go. And then it's been sort of an unending pattern that to this day

The play and the movie is about the aftermath of what happened in the school shooting

And that's the thing that I think is the focus of this specific story

That's why I feel like it's an important way of showing how it affects just regular Americans

And the struggle and, as Mike calls it, the confusion that happens as a result when everybody's gone

and you're just left to deal with this violent act. and the people that you know that were a part of this

or were affected or lived on the block or were you went to church with or you work with

And that never seems to end. It isn't just the shooting itself

It's the way that the people are affected by the violence. And I think that's the thing we just don't focus enough on

is the effect that the trauma has on a community and all of us just trying to survive out here

And we're suddenly thrown into this thing that we should not be having to deal with

It's horrible. You're going to come through the other side of this and everything is going to be better

Do you believe me? Eric killed those boys. I? He shot them