Buddy movie
GOOd pOSturE i Actress Dolly Wells makes her directorial debut with a little help from her friends…
Ilive in Brooklyn,” says London-born actress Dolly Wells (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Can You Ever Forgive Me?), who here directs her first project since helming a school play when she was 14. “In a way, Good Posture is a love letter to my relationship with Brooklyn, because I moved there about six years ago and felt a lot of the things that Lillian feels.”
We meet lazy, spoilt Lillian (Grace Van Patten) when she’s dumped by her boyfriend and moves in with her parents’ old pals Julia and Don Price (Emily Mortimer, Ebon Moss-Bachrach). Adrift in Brooklyn, Lillian slowly finds focus when she begins to furtively make a documentary on Julia, who’s a celebrated English author and a recluse.
Casting was a cinch. “Emily and I have been best friends for
many, many years,” laughs Wells, who co-created sitcom Doll & Em with Mortimer, which the pair also starred in. “We met at a birthday party when we were four. My father was a writer and satirist, and hers [John Mortimer] was a playwright, so we moved in similar circles. We went skiing together when we were seven and became best friends at 21, consoling each other when boys were being mean to us.”
As for rising star Van Patten, Wells says, “She played my daughter in a play that I did in New York [The Whirligig]. And weirdly, she lives next door – literally next door – to Emily.” In, you guessed it, Brooklyn.
A dramedy about finding your path, Good Posture deals, often amusingly, with pain and loneliness. “It’s autobiographical in knowing those feelings,” says Wells. “It’s a film about finding your identity. Pain is useful – you need to go through something. It’s like Martin Amis says: ‘Happiness writes white.’”
ETA | 4 ocTobEr / Good PosTurE oPEns This AuTumn.