Mind The Gap

The film

A young gay man brings his older partner home to meet his parents for the first time. The film sits at that table and lets the evening play out.

Age gap relationships tend to get met with a set of questions that are, on their face, reasonable ones, and they rarely get examined honestly on screen. I wanted to put every side of that conversation into the film rather than argue for one. Some of it comes from being in an age gap relationship myself, which meant I could write the questions accurately, including the uncomfortable ones, and then get into the nuance of when a relationship like this can be a genuinely good thing.

Finding the tone

The hardest creative problem was tonal. Too dramatic and it becomes an issue film. Too comedic and the questions stop mattering. I wanted certain beats to land as real while keeping enough levity that you actually enjoy watching, and then to turn, at the end, into something you feel. That final conversation is the thesis of the whole piece, and it lands on the line the film is really about: I’m here now, and it’s good.

The production

A USC production: three days, eleven and a half pages, a crew of about thirty, and a budget just over $10,000. The challenge was arithmetic as much as craft, getting real coverage of every scene inside a schedule that had no slack in it. Knowing which shots carry a scene, and which ones you can lose before you lose the scene, is the difference between finishing the day and finishing the film.