David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano’s new film “I Don’t Understand You,” in theaters today via Vertical, is a comedy that swerves into horror movie territory midway through. But it was also an opportunity for the writer-directors — a real-life couple — to create gay characters that were more than Hollywood stereotypes.
In the film, Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells play Dom and Cole, a couple struggling to adopt a daughter, a process that paralleled Craig and Crano’s real life. When Dom and Cole finally match with a mother eager to choose them as parents, they take an anniversary trip to Italy, where a series of miscommunications turn their conduct from clumsy to deadly. While real-life inspiration stopped once the blood started flowing in the movie, Craig and Crano were excited to bring a well-rounded gay couple to life onscreen.
“It’s very rare that you see queer characters experience joy in any film,” Crano says. “It’s also very rare that queer characters are allowed to be mean, in a not-high school setup, right? Or the bitchy best friend. In fact, that was one of the first things that Andrew said to us when he got on the call. He said, ‘It is so nice to read a script where the role that I’m being asked to represent is not, “Ohh girl … and then what did he say?”‘ In fact, when they read the script early, some of our gay friends were like, ‘Why are you representing us like this? This is crazy.’ And it’s like, ‘Have you met us?’”
Craig and Crano filming “I Don’t Understand You.”
Once the pair developed these characters, they knew they wanted to put them in situations that pushed them to the brink, a throwback to the movies they grew up on.
“Something that’s established in ’90s comedies is that they’re set in a world of their own,” Craig says. “Once you establish something, you’re allowed to just go there. We don’t get movies like ‘True Lies’ or ‘Death Becomes Her’ or any of that anymore because we’re so based in reality. I think a comedy, as long as you can set the characters in a true and honest place, you can do whatever you want with them, and that’s something that we were excited about. How far can you take these characters out into the world and have the audience still be with them? I think it’s something that we thrive on.”
To establish the texture of a couple bumbling through Italy, Craig and Crano made sure that Dom and Cole’s behavior was relatably cringey without veering too deep into Ugly American territory.
“As Americans, I think we expect a certain level of comfort when we travel, and I think that’s what makes us sort of idiots when we travel,” Craig says.
“The great opportunity was to take characters who are so used to Erewhon and the Alamo, whose life functions in a specific and exact way, and take them out of their realm of comfort,” Crano continues. “We were doing the same thing making a movie in a country with an entirely Italian crew, so we were able to find new beats of it through the process of the filmmaking.”
Alternately, the filmmakers wanted the Italian people Dom and Cole interact with to be multi-dimensional.
“We were trying to make it culturally about us, not culturally about them in a very particular way,” Crano says. “We didn’t want the Italians to be scary. We wanted them to be all of the things that we have found in that culture, which are welcoming. It wasn’t these flat stereotypes, but that they were smothering or threatening in a different way because they were emotionally closer or wanted something from these people, so we’re just trying to make it a little more nuanced.”
The adoration for the Italian characters grew as both filmmakers spent more and more time working with their mostly local crew on location. It also gave Craig and Crano the chance to better understand Italy and its people more, insight that ultimately eludes their on-screen counterparts.
“It wasn’t about the work, it was about passion,” Craig says. “Everybody showed up. It made me really love filmmaking in a different way, where it wasn’t about anything other than the passion of making the art while we were there. We were all working, but everybody showed up because they truly liked each other and liked what we were doing together. It showed me a real humanity in what we do for a living.”
Watch the trailer for “I Don’t Understand You” below.
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