Open: Stars Doleac & Williams on Building an 80s Rock Star Musical

Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Movies | Tagged: Amber Reign Smith, Elena Sanchez, exclusive, interview, Jeremy London, Lindsay Anne Williams, Miles Doleac, open, virgil films, William Forsythe

Director Miles Doleac and co-writer/star Lindsay Anne Williams spoke to Bleeding Cool on the 80s bands that inspired the musical Open.

When Miles Doleac and Lindsay Anne Williams conceived Open, they didn’t want to tell a story of an open marriage gone wrong. Still, they wanted to create a rock musical experience unique to the decade they’re passionate about, the 80s in Open. The film follows Krista (Williams), a woman in a troubled marriage, who falls for a former TV star and teen heartthrob Erik (Jeremy London), whose previously promising career has collapsed. All the while, Kristina experiences music video-like hallucinations wherein she fronts an 80’s new wave band. Doleac, who also directed, plays Robert in the film. The two spoke to Bleeding Cool about developing Open in the middle of a hurricane, which 80s bands they wanted to evoke, and their rock personas in the music videos.

How ‘Open’ Became a Rock Ode to the 80s

Bleeding Cool: What’s the inspiration behind ‘Open’?
Doleac: We had been talking about the film’s basic conceit for quite some time: a couple in a long-term marriage experiences a personal tragedy. Their marriage has lost a bit of the old fire. They seem to be struggling to connect, and they decide to try this path of opening their marriage to see if they can add a little of the mystery back in, perhaps find something new. The wife falls for this ex-TV star and teen heartthrob who’s fallen from an industry favor and is not doing well emotionally, and the repercussions of that play out. We’ve been thinking about that conceit for a while. In the late summer and early fall of 2021, Hurricane Ida hit here in New Orleans, forcing us to evacuate to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where we were stuck together for a couple of weeks in a cabin with our five dogs. It forced us to sit down and do something to write. We had no Internet or other responsibilities at the time. Power was out all over the greater New Orleans area. We churned this script, but in that process, I had this crazy idea, “What if it’s a musical? What if, instead of something like voiceover, our main character, Kristina’s internal monologue, plays out in songs in these music video fantasies based on early MTV-era music videos?” As a child in the eighties, I grew up with those wonderful, crazy, wacky, bonkers music video landscapes where you could do absolutely anything. We started incorporating that element into the script, working on the lyrics of the songs and melodies, and the whole thing came to life.

How did the scenarios play out as far as what sequences warranted their musical number, and were there ones that were cut?
Williams: It happened organically as we were writing. It felt like there were button moments in [Kristina’s] life where she was thinking something, so we wrote a song for it. It was already built in it. It wasn’t like we wrote the main real-life script, then went back and decided where to put music videos that came along.
Doleac: It felt like there were natural moments that required an emotional punctuation mark or exclamation point, and those were the moments that we added a song. Regarding the cutting room floor, this is the first movie we’d ever shot. I’ve directed seven, and Linds produced many of them with me, where every single scene that was in the script is in the movie.
Both: In some way, shape, or form.
Doleac: There was nothing left on the cutting room floor. Everything we shot, every scene in the script, is in the movie in some respects.

What musicals helped you develop the types of songs in ‘Open?’
Williams: While we’re both big fans of musicals, we didn’t base this on a traditional musical layout. The music that inspired all the songs is the 80s, post-punk, new wave, and synth wave, and there’s not a musical that exists that could work that operated as a blueprint. We didn’t want it to be like a traditional musical. It is something in its world in that this is not only her inner monologue but also a part of her psyche. I don’t think that traditional musicals probably can do that often.
Doleac: We were inspired by those music videos. Our video playlist includes things like Duran Duran’s ‘Union of the Snake,’ Scandal’s, ‘The Warrior,’ The Police’s ‘Synchronicity,’ or Howard Shore’s ‘Tides of Hope.’ We took inspiration from that world much more than any specific musical. Maybe the closest thing is something like ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch,’ John Cameron Mitchell’s wonderful musical that had a movie version of it play out because, in some ways, it is a similar vibe in that the songs from that are Hedwig’s internal monologue. That’s the closest as far as inspiration we had to our film.
Williams: There is some somatic inspiration from ‘Phantom of the Opera.’
Doleac: More of a literary Easter Egg.

What did you model your rock personas after?
Williams: Each character in the hallucination, like in the Void, has some counterpart. Miles’s character is like Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes.
Doleac: Maybe a little bit of [David] Bowie, maybe. As we wrote the script, we thought, “Who would be the real-life counterparts of these players in the band?” The first person I thought up for Robert in the music video world was Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran, a brilliant synthesizer and keyboard player for that band who has the panels of keyboards that he commands so beautifully in their music. For Kristina, we thought we had Patty Smyth from Scandal, a little bit of Pat Benatar in there, no doubt. Our original inspiration for Erik was Robert Smith from The Cure, but he morphed into something a little more Richie Sambora [laughs] from Bon Jovi. With Elena’s [Sanchez] character, Emma, we were going for a Go-Go’s type vibe with her. We had these ideas all along the way for how these characters would embody their music video personas and inspirations. When you get into it, you start looking at costumes and talking about makeup and wigs; they all take on a life that is uniquely their own.

Virgil Films’ Open, which also stars William Forsythe, Elena Sanchez, and Amber Reign Smith, is available in theaters and on digital.

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