Tribeca 2014: America Ferrera's X/Y

X/Y: Tribeca Review

by Frank Scheck

The Bottom Line

It's painful spending time with these morose, unlikeable characters.

Director-screenwriter

Ryan Piers Williams

Cast

America Ferrera, Ryan Piers Williams, Melonie Diaz, Jon Paul Phillips, Amber Tamblyn, Common, Dree Hemingway

Ryan Piers Williams' film portrays the dysfunctional love lives of a quartet of relationship-challenged New Yorkers.

NEW YORK — Early on in the relationship drama X/Y, one of the major characters, a budding screenwriter, is advised by his exasperated agent to make his latest script more commercially accessible and to not make “a movie for an audience of five hipsters in Williamsburg.”

It’s a lesson that writer-director-star Ryan Piers Williams (The Dry Land) failed to heed for his sophomore feature, which received its world premiere here at the Tribeca Film Festival. Depicting the lives of four interconnected New Yorkers struggling with career and relationship issues, it begins with a longtime couple having bad sex, and breaking up only gets more depressing from there.

The central characters are Mark (Williams), the aforementioned screenwriter still looking for his big break; his girlfriend, Silvia (America Ferrera, the director’s real-life spouse), who sends him reeling with her confession that she’s slept with a co-worker (Common); Jake (Jon Paul Phillips), a handsome bi-sexual model, DJ, artist and Polaroid photographer who buries his pain over a break-up with a longtime girlfriend by engaging in casual sex; and Jen (Melonie Diaz), whose unlucky love life includes a recent Internet hook-up with a man who turned out to be married and who may have infected her with herpes.

Following each of these figures as they haplessly attempt to find happiness, often via cheap sexual encounters — Silvia screws her co-worker in restaurant bathrooms during lunch hours; Jake, who has a habit of painting in the nude, seduces Mark, etc. — the film adopts a relentlessly mournful tone with endless shots of the actors looking miserable and constantly checking their cell phones for text messages, all to the accompaniment of Will Bates’ (of the band Fall on Your Sword) dirge-like musical score.

Although clearly meant to be sympathetic in their fruitless desire for emotional connection, the morose characters — the title refers to their falling between Generation X and Generation Y — mainly come across as dysfunctional and self-absorbed, with the hard-working actors failing to make them remotely likeable. The exception is Dree Hemingway, quietly moving as a sweet young woman who musters up the courage to ask John out for coffee only to find that he’s emotionally unavailable.

Ultimately coming to resemble a series of unfortunate romantic encounters arranged via a dating website, X/Y fails to bring much insight into its gloomy portrait of relationship-challenged New Yorkers.

Exclusive: America Ferrera, Melonie Diaz, Ryan Piers Williams talk 'X/Y' at TFF

In the early hours of April 20, Heineken threw an epic party celebrating Ryan Piers Williams' latest film "X/Y," which was produced and stars his wife America Ferrera. The film is a character driven drama centered around four friends living in New York and their interactions with one another as they search for a sense of balance. Earlier in the evening we caught up with the cast at the film's Tribeca Film Festival premiere.

America Ferrera stars in the film. 

Tell me a little bit about your character in the film.
America: I play Sylvia, in "X/Y," which is really about four different young New Yorkers navigating their relationships and emotional lives. Sylvia is a complicated person, I think all the characters are. Their behavior sometimes is questionable and shocking and yet I feel like our work was to dig beneath what you're seeing and trying to bring to life, the emotional life, of each of the characters. I had such a great time playing Sylvia, it was difficult at times, to be in the state of mind that she was in to be in that place, for the duration of the filming, it was definitely a challenge to explore her and find the many dimensions of her character.

Can you speak about collaborating with Ryan?
America: This is our second feature that we've done together, him as a writer/director, me as a producing partner and actor in front of the camera. We love working together, we met working with together and we have a really wonderful creative relationship. He makes me stronger and I hope I make him stronger.

What do you love about New York? This is a New York tale.
America: It's absolutely a love letter to New York, I think, Ryan and I we fell in love with New York early on in our relationship when we were falling in love with each other, so those two things are a little bit inextricable. We love being in New York because of the unpredictability of every moment and the potential to have your life path crossed with somebody's just for a moment and be changed by that or be influenced by that and I think there's nowhere else in the world where you feel the energy and the possibility that you feel in New York.

Ryan Piers Williams

What inspired it?
Ryan: I was inspired by just being in New York City and witnessing not only the people in my life but other people in the city really struggling to find those personal deep relationships. So I wanted to tell a story that really put our generation struggle into perspective. There's no personal truth to it, it's really just observations and my creativity making things up. It's not based on anything true, but it was really inspired by witnessing people around me and seeing people on the subway and thinking "What is their life like? What's their personal struggles?" in terms of their relationships. I think the city really inspired me.

Did you write this for America?
Ryan: I didn't write it for her specifically. I wrote it and then I gave it to her, she really liked it, and we talked a lot about it and she really was interested in playing the part, I wasn't exactly sure if that would be a good idea or not, but after really talking to her about the character and developing it more with her, we decided it would be cool to do it, not only her being in it, but us both do it together.

Speak about the production process.
We shot for 4 weeks here in New York, 6 day weeks, it was a 22 day shoot. It was stripped down, with a small budget, we really had to be resourceful with how we shot it, we asked a lot of friends and family to shoot in their apartments, in their restaurants, a lot of it cast are people that we already know well, so we asked them to be a part of it. So working with a small amount of resources, we really had to think out of the box.

Melonie Diaz stars in the film. 

Tell me about your role in this film.
Melonie: I play Jen, she's America's best friend in the movie, she's kind of a hot mess, she's having that quarter life crisis, trying to figure out who she is and what she wants. She has a really bad shopping habit and no job, so that makes for more of a complicated life, but she's fun. A lot of fun.

Speak about collaborating with America.
I met her on "Lords of Dogtown" when i was 19 and she was 19 too. We are old friends. When American and Ryan called me about it, obviously Ryan is this amazingly talented director, and the chance that I get to work with my friends, it's nice to be able to do that.

Did you ever go through that kind of crisis to figure it out? Was acting always your thing?
No everyday I'm like "What am I doing? Who am I? What am I putting out into the world?" As much as I pretend I have it together I probably don't.

UPDATED 04/23/2014

"There is a lot of sex scenes in the movie..."

America Ferrera Talks Starring In Husband Ryan Piers Williams' Film 'X/Y'

And the same with you Ryan, you had a very passionate love scene in the movie with your friend Jake [Jon Paul Phillips]. Actually, there was a lot of sexy love scenes in the movie

Williams: I think that what I was trying to do with the sex scenes in general was to illuminate everyone's struggle to connect. The movie starts out with a sex scene between America and I, or Sylvia and Mark rather, and you see such a disconnect between them. Then, throughout the movie, people become different variations of connectivity through the sex and it's a reflection of how each person is dealing with their emotional life. With the sex scene between Jake and Mark, I think that they're both in such a lonely, really depressed place and they do have a real, true love for each other as friends and it's one of those moments that just happens between them. In a desperate moment, they find this connection with each other and through that connection, they're able to heal a part of each other.
I think sex for an audience, people can immediately relate to it on some level. Whether it's a funny moment or a super sexy moment or just a moment of deep connection, it's such a visceral way for an audience to relate to the character's struggle immediately and kind of understand where they're at, because it's oftentimes a reflection of their own life or their friend's life or whatever.

UPDATED 04/24/2014

America Ferrera films sex scenes for her husband

American Ferrara and her husband Ryan Piers Williams put their marriage to the test in new drama X/Y - the writer/director filmed his wife making love to rapper Common.

In only his second feature, writer/director Williams cast the Ugly Betty star as Sylvia and himself as her ex, Mark - and then found himself behind the camera for voyeuristic sex scenes.

The couple knew the film would shock family members, so Ferrera and Williams sat them down before X/Y premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last weekend, and attempted to explain why sex scenes between them and others were important for the project.

Williams tells WENN, "When I told my mum about it I was like, 'Mom, we have this movie in Tribeca and I want you to see it before you decide to come out or not! There's a lot of sex in it and it's very intense'. And she's like, 'Ryan, did you make a porn?' I was like, 'Mom, I did not make a porn. I'm not a porno filmmaker!'

"She watched it and called me crying after and loved the film. It was really touching to hear my mum respond in such a positive way."

Ferrera had a similar experience: "My sister was at the premiere and she really loved the film and came away with the emotional impact and journey more than, 'I can't believe I had to watch my sister and her husband make love!' All of the sex in the film is in service of something so much deeper.

"It's not as graphic as the experience of watching it might feel. It does feel incredibly intimate, like you're watching something between us that you probably shouldn't be watching. Sexuality is complicated and sometimes it's as simple as a hand touching the curve on your back and it's the most sexual, intimate thing you can experience. Of course, as an actor, I appreciated Ryan didn't get gratuitous with the sex!"

But Williams was really tested as a filmmaker when he had to shoot his wife making love to another man: "It's an intense experience to direct your wife in a sex scene or be in a sex scene yourself. You have to really make yourself vulnerable and that can be uncomfortable. Common was very respectful and my job was to make him feel comfortable and provide a space for him to do his best work in the scene."

The actress, who also reteams with her Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants co-star Amber Tamblyn in the film, admits the sex scenes weren't the most difficult thing about the movie - she also had to pretend her relationship with her husband had ended.

She tells Entertainment Weekly, "Some of the intense fighting scenes our characters had to go through were difficult. I also found that some of the moments where Sylvia is alone were tremendously sad. You have to put yourself in such a vulnerable position to convey those sorts of things and really feel them, which made sitting in these characters day after day really kind of hard."