When it was revealed earlier this year that divisive indie stalwart Joe Swanberg had cast Oscar-nominee Anna Kendrick as well as Olivia Wilde, Ron Livingston and Jake M. Johnson to star in his upcoming dramedy “Drinking Buddies,” anyone familiar with his output probably did a double-take. “Something fails to compute,” wrote our very own Eric Kohn in his own critical take on the news.
So when we got a chance to sit down with Kendrick in Toronto — there to promote her found-footage police thriller “End of Watch” (out this Friday) — naturally we grilled her to learn if “Drinking Buddies” in fact marks a big departure for the ‘mumblecore’ auteur, or if we’re all getting bent out of shape for naught.
“I think he totally sold out, don’t get me wrong,” Kendrick joked. “I’m not the lead,” she continued, “I’m a lead. It’s a four person piece, like a little chamber play. I guess because of that it’s unclear to me who’s movie it is. But there’s nothing traditional about the way that Joe does things.”
For one, Kendrick stressed that the whole film was improvised, and that she “never got one piece of paper — never once.”
“I think the most we got into the structure of the story was a conversation I had with Joe for about an hour on the phone,” Kendrick said. “But half of that time was talking just about the character and what the filming process was going to be. Somewhere in that hour he told me more or less what the outline was. But that was as close I ever got to knowing what the hell was ever going on. You show up and he just sort of says, ‘This is what this scene is about. Have at it!'”
And as for the sex quotient in “Drinking Buddies” (Swanberg has in the past featured a lot of it), Kendrick said that she for one doesn’t have any in the film. That’s not to say there isn’t any. “To be perfectly honest there’s a possibility that there’s a sex scene that I don’t know about,” she said. “I remember one day somebody talking about shooting in the park, and I was like, ‘Oh, what did you shoot in the park?.’ But then I said, ‘You know what, don’t tell me.’ I don’t want to know! Maybe there’s an orgy that I’m not involved in.”
Kendrick said “Drinking Buddies” recently wrapped principal photography, so expect to likely see it in theaters sometime next year (it’s without a distributor for now). Swanberg will next be in theaters with the anthology horror film “V/H/S,” which opens October 5th and is currently available on VOD.
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