Director India Donaldson’s first feature film, “Good One,” is, on the surface, a pretty simple story: A family camping trip in upstate New York gets considerably more awkward when it ends up being only father-daughter pair Chris (James Le Gros) and Sam (Lily Collias) and Chris’s longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) spending three days in the woods. Sam’s about to head off to college, while Chris and Matt can’t seem to escape the emotional trail loops, as it were, that they’ve already blazed for themselves. What happens on the trip sets down some of Sam’s path as an adult in ways that feel both heartbreaking and necessary.
But just because something is simple doesn’t mean it was easy. Donaldson only had 12 days to shoot the film, most of it spent outside in the Catskills — on 300 privately owned acres near the Mohonk Preserve and Minnewaska State Park, to be more precise — and with an Airbnb as a basecamp for the cast and 15-person crew. They’d use the Airbnb to charge batteries and then take UTVs into the woods for each day’s shooting. Weather and light, factors that are often sculpted by cinematographers and colorists, were partly controlled by, well, the weather and the light on “Good One.”
Having to accommodate their environment, however, allowed Donaldson and her cinematographer (and producer) Wilson Cameron to be all the more responsive in the kind of textures and details that the camera — and through it, Sam — observes. “Good One” is the kind of movie where an inch can feel as big as a mile, where the framing adjustment on a new composition or the length of a cut betrays the characters’ insecurities and pretensions, because those small adjustments are what inform our opinions of all three characters. To get that alchemy exactly right is a complicated task in just 12 days of shooting in the woods.
Donaldson’s trick, then, is that while this is her first feature, it’s not her first rodeo. She and Cameron collaborated on three short films prior to “Good One” and developed the kind of shared language that allowed them to cover ground quickly. “Our joke is that the way to shoot a movie in 12 days is to have 10 years of prep with your DP,” Donaldson told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast.
“In periods when I was living in New York, periods of being underemployed or freelance, we would go on long walks together and just dream about making a film. It was something we were working towards for a long time and by the time we were doing it, we had not just a shorthand — we just know each other so well,” Donaldson said. “My visual language [is something] I developed in collaboration with him. He’s inextricably linked to it.”
Both shared language and shared taste are something that every filmmaking team needs to build with each other. It’s never completely perfect, but the more projects that filmmakers work on together, the closer they can get. Donaldson had the ability to lean on Wilson finding the compositions that she was interested in “without [me] even having to say it,” Donaldson said. “You can’t get there overnight. It takes time.”
Donaldson did not have a ton of time during the shoot itself, but she did have time to get to know Collias and incorporate her sensibility into how “Good One” shows us Sam’s perspective; it was a stealth benefit, Donaldson said, of casting Collias when she was 17 and knowing they’d have to wait a year to shoot until she was 18 and her underage filming restrictions had lifted. In the run-up to the shoot, Donaldson sat in on Zoom calls between Collias and Le Gros, designed to get them ready for their extended father-daughter trip into the woods — not by rehearsing the script, but by getting to a place where they’d know each other, too.
“James approaches his job from the perspective of a filmmaker, and he always had the attitude of, ‘How can I help the project?’ So he suggested we meet regularly,” Donaldson said. “They didn’t talk about the script, just got to know each other and talked about books and art and life. I remember the first time watching them on Zoom and listening to them, I was like, ‘Oh, these people really feel like a family.’”
And if Matt was left out of those calls, well, that makes him feel all the more like a third wheel on the trip itself. “They all met beforehand but really just got to work knowing each other on Day 1 of shooting. I feel very grateful for those three actors and those three performances,” Donaldson said. “I had just the luck of casting — or maybe not so much luck, just a product of following your instinct. But it’s luck when the right people say yes.”
That is, then, the secret to filming a great story at whatever speed: getting the right people in the same place at the right time.
“Good One” is now in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. The Filmmaker Toolkit podcast is available on all podcatchers.
