If you are familiar with the critically acclaimed 2009 indie hit Humpday, then filmmaker Lynn Shelton needs no introduction. For Your Sister’s Sister, her fourth feature effort as both writer and director, Shelton incorporates the same improvisation-based technique that is signature to the mumblecore movement, and which subsequently results in a hilarious and thought-provoking triangular relationship with a grieving Jack (Mark Duplass), his best friend, Iris (Emily Blunt), and her lesbian sister, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt). After a drunken fling occurs in a remote cabin between Hannah and Jack, and a morning surprise visit from Iris interrupts their hangover, commotion is cued while the trio’s individual members battle to conceal their secrets and true feelings, with love being the main instigator at hand.
“I have played a few sisters in my career, and what I’m struck by, because I have half-sisters that I didn’t grow up with, is that there always has to be so much love,” says DeWitt. “The heart of all these relationships is love. Especially the familial relationships, even if it’s someone you think you hate, which is not the case in this movie, there’s nothing interesting to the audiences if there’s no love. You go home.”
In bringing in two seasoned actresses that are used to scripts and structure, Shelton was faced with the obstacle of preparing Blunt and DeWitt for the challenging task of improvisation ahead. “Humpday had two very veteran improvisers who really are at their best doing it, and love doing it, and feel very comfortable doing it,” Shelton says, referring to Duplass and Joshua Leonard. “Because I knew the two folks in this film (Blunt and DeWitt) were not that way, were used to working with scripts, I approached the actual document going in differently. Humpday was just an outline, a ten-page description of what was going to happen in each scene, but no dialogue. With this, I actually wrote out words and lines of dialogue. The idea was they were never tied to their lines, but it would give them a jumping off point—a gist of what the scene should be and could be.”
Emily Blunt insists Shelton’s methodology was the reason she signed on to play Iris in the first place. “The first movie I did was all improvised,” she says. “Years had gone by, and I hadn’t worked like that since.”
READ MORE: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2012/06/your-sisters-sister-interview-kinship-with-a-dose.html
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