2015 Sundance Trading Card Series: #15. Kris Swanberg (Unexpected)

Eric Lavallee: Name me three of your favorite “2014 discoveries” …
Kris Swanberg: I got really in to goats milk yogurt, Taylor Swift, classic sports films, Transparent, Nathan For You.

Lavallee: Seeing that she has been involved in Joe’s films, you have a close proximity to your co-writer, Megan Mercier. I was wondering how writings duties were tasked between the two of you and personally, what was more difficult for Unexpected, writing the dramatic or comedic elements?
Swanberg: Megan and I have known each other for a long time and met through my old ice cream company, actually. We wrote every word together in the same room when Megan was living in Chicago. She moved to LA last January and it got a little more difficult after that, but we still worked together over Skype. During production I ended up having to edit and revise on my own, but even still we managed to do a lot of the work together which was great. I think we always found ourselves toning down the comedy and amping up the drama, but both came pretty naturally to us.

Lavallee: Aesthetically speaking, could you discuss the look that you were aiming for, how you framed Samantha’s interior world/thoughts?
Swanberg: The basis behind everything was naturalism, so that came along with the look too. I was hesitant to shoot handheld for a long time because its often used as such a “device” and when you are shooting in a low-income neighborhood like we were there’s a tendency to make everything “gritty” which we were trying to stay away from. In the end it just felt right and we kept coming back to it.