In the opening scene of “Splitsville,” a couple, Carey and Ashley, are driving to their friends Paul and Julie’s beach house when suddenly something tragic happens on the highway.
Although physically unscathed, Ashley, played by Adria Arjona, drops a bombshell on Carey, played by Kyle Marvin.
He takes off running for Paul and Julie, played by Michael Angelo Covino and Dakota Johnson. who, in a conversation about different kinds of marriage, tell him for the first time that they decided to have an open marriage the last few years.
Now the stage is fully set for a movie billed on the poster as “an unromantic comedy.”
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Hookups and breakdowns ensue. Best friends brawl in a fight that trashes much of the beach house. Longtime partners and new flings move in and out of frame with remarkable frequency.
And if there’s any chance to misunderstand what one’s loved one is thinking or doing, Carey, Ashley, Paul and Julie will indeed misunderstand it.
“In the ’70s, this was sort of a very well-tried area where people would go to movies and expect to see these more farcical sex comedies and have fun with them,” says Covino, who directed the film and cowrote it with Marvin, his longtime creative collaborator.
“It felt like this perfect amalgamation of all these things that we were super-interested in,” he adds. “There were very contemporary ideas that a lot of our friends and people around us were exploring.
“At the same time, it was an opportunity to make a film like films of the past that we love, and that we fell in love with as we were developing as filmmakers.”
“Splitsville” opens in theaters on Friday, Aug. 22, after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Covino and Marvin discussed the origins of the story, casting Johnson and Arjona, the inspirations behind “Splitsville,” and more.
Q: Michael, you were about to get married when you and Kyle decided to write a screenplay about two couples whose happy marriages go wildly off the rails. I wondered what your wives thought about that.
Michael Angelo Covino: Yeah, I think it came out of some version of Kyle being married for 20 years and me, you know, feeling the butterflies and all the things you feel, when you decide that you’re gonna propose to someone and get engaged.
Kyle Marvin: I think my wife and Mike’s fiancée are used to the number of times we mine our own personal (bleep) to put into the script. They’re just like, ‘So I died? Fine, whatever.’ [In the duo’s 2019 film “The Climb,” a spouse character does die.]
Q: Talk a bit more about the relationships you created for the characters.
Covino: I think it excited us to explore characters who at the outset seem diametrically opposed to one another. Or really, all the characters seem to be occupying different philosophical foundations around love. They all coincide, but they’re all in different places at the beginning of the film.
And some of them maybe present a way of thinking about things that isn’t what they actually feel or think, and that felt very true to life and felt very human. You know, people putting on a face or pretending like they’re OK with something that they’re not.
That felt very exciting, dramatically, to be mined for emotion, but certainly for comedy. Because there’s a long history in the cinema of these themes being explored.
Q: What are some examples of ’70s films like that? The first one that comes to my mind is Paul Mazursky’s “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.”
Covino: Those Paul Mazursky films are amazing. Like “Blume In Love.” And certainly a lot of Woody Allen films. But really, we kind of ended up becoming deeply obsessed with some of those Italian comedies from the ’70s like Lina Wertmüller’s films “The Seduction of Mimi” and Ettore Scola and “The Pizza Triangle.”
Even the French did a lot of really fun, ridiculous movies like Bertrand Blier’s “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” which was something that the whole crew watched with us. It was sort of like this mind-opening thing of like, “Wait, characters do do this?”
Marvin: The Italians in that period were definitely more bold. I mean, the Americans were being bold, but there is something so audacious about what the Italians were trying to do at that time with sex comedies.
Q: As far as cowriting the screenplay, who does that work for you? Is there a particular process?
Marvin: We don’t have a rigid process when it comes to writing. I think for us, the character is always first and a lot of our time is spent just discussing the character and really honing in on what we find fascinating. Then it’s just a game of stacking obstacles in their way. Just sort of lay out a plot and then semi-dismantle it by introducing scenes between the traditional scenes and then stripping things away.
Covino: We’re always looking at scenes that we’re writing. We’ll write it multiple times, but we’re always kind of continuing to layer and try to beat it. I think we come from a place of not wanting to bore ourselves and wanting to create an engaged sort of experience for an audience where they don’t really know what’s going to happen next.
I think that at the outset that felt like a tough thing to do with something that on paper looks like a romantic comedy. But as we started exploring it and weaving the plot and writing it, we found there were actually a lot of places we can go to, not intentionally subvert, but at least make it feel exciting.
Q: Let me ask you about Dakota and Adria, who are both terrific in the film. They’re in-demand actresses – how’d you end up getting them for it?
Covino: We were massive fans of Dakota and Adria, and as we were writing, had both of them in mind in some form or fashion, but not necessarily expecting that they would say yes.
But Dakota we had met. She was a fan of a previous film we made called “The Climb,’ and we were a fan of her work. So there was a line there to her. We had mentioned the project, and she said, “Yeah, share it when it’s done.” So we shared it and she immediately responded to it. We engaged in a really creative conversation and she came on to produce the film with us, too.
Once Dakota came on, the project really kicked into gear because she’s, for lack of a better description, bankable, a star who you can get movies made with. So Adria, in very quick succession, we shared the script with her and she got really excited about it and had great creative ideas about the character and where it would go.
It was a strangely simple process. The short answer is we got lucky.
Marvin: We were confident that the script was good. We love the script.
Covino: Testament to the script. The script reads really funny. There are also moments that maybe could be funny that aren’t because we go for the more dramatic. And I think they got excited about that tone and that balance.
Q: What was it like writing the female characters? Did Adria and Dakota’s creative input help shape Ashley and Julie?
Covino: Certainly we tried to write characters with agency. But really, it comes down to those two women are not going to embody characters and not bring them to life in fully realized ways. So even if we wrote thin characters, Dakota is going to embody it and make it her own and bring it to life in a way that just feels grounded. We trusted the collaboration with her would find nuance and depth to the character. And the same with Adria.
Adria’s character, Ashley, she’s searching, and she’s explosive and like dynamite at the beginning of the film. And that was very exciting for her. But it was also exciting for us to see how she could blow the whole world of their relationship up at the beginning, and then bring us back to her at the end – where we go. I love this character even though she has no redemption.
Marvin: I think one of the things we do is try and push the line as far as we can of being reprehensible. But you understand those decisions, and we ask that of everyone participating in the movie. And Dakota and Adria, they embraced the same risk we did.
They were saying, like, yes, we want to take it right to the line of how far we can push these characters to the breaking point and still bring empathy and heart and understanding to the role.
Q: There are some great set pieces in the movie. The revolving door at Carey and Ashley’s apartment. The birthday party. And in particular, the fight scene between Carey and Paul, which goes on forever, and it looks like its all you guys, no stunt people.
Marvin: There are no stunt people.
Covino: Yeah, we didn’t use any stunt doubles.
Q: So tell me about choreographing the fight and performing. I didn’t time it, but it just keeps going.
Covino: Yeah, it’s like seven minutes or something. Maybe a little more? I think the intention on this was to create an effect where the audience might go, “Wait, is that them?” I think there’s something subconscious or conscious that it does for an audience when they go, “Oh, I’m really watching something,” as opposed to watching what I usually see in a fight, which is this big spectacle and suspension of belief.
And because it’s these two friends, and they’re not really trained fighters, and it’s sort of messy in a way, it felt maybe honest and maybe in some ways more visceral to shoot it in this more restrained way. So yeah, we rehearsed it, I don’t know, for four or five weeks. Every night we would beat the (bleep) out of each other.