Talking 'Permission' with Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig

The short description of filmmaker Brian Crano's stirring romantic comedy "Permission" is that the film explores what happens when two very different couples-one gay, the other straight - start to talk about scary, but important, desires and the life choices that have to be made to pursue those desires.

It all begins when Will (Dan Stevens) and Anna (Rebecca Hall) meet for dinner with Anna's brother Hale (David Joseph Craig) and Hale's partner - and Will's longtime best friend - Reece (Morgan Spector). Reece, knowing that Will is getting close to proposing to Anna and having drunk a little too much wine, blurts out his opinion that the two of them might want to slow things down a little and maybe take a chance to look around a little before committing for life. After all, neither of them has ever been with anyone else; they've been romantically attached since childhood.

It's an awkward moment, but it passes soon enough. Except... it doesn't. Reece's words stick with Anna; perhaps she's been thinking the same thing to herself? In any case, she suggests to Will that the two of them give each other permission to sleep around, just a little, in order to be certain that they are the soulmates they believe themselves to be. Her ultimate justification is that if they both know about the other's forays, and support each other in their sexual investigations, it can only bring them closer together. Soon enough they both forge rewarding new friendships, Anna with Dane (Fran�ois Arnaud) and Will with Lydia (Gina Gershon), and softly, sweetly, they begin learning how to navigate the excitement of their new relationships while holding on to the tenderness that binds them. Unspoken, of course, is a deeper and more frightening undercurrent: What if they come to find out that they aren't as compatible as they've always assumed they are? What if the experience is like the forbidden fruit of knowledge, bringing discord to their cozy little garden?

That's what Reece worries about, and he regrets having said anything as he watches fretfully from the sidelines, hearing all about Will and Anna's adventures while working with Will at the furniture making business they run together. Meantime, Anna and Hale gossip about it at a park - where Hale takes note of a handsome father (Jason Sudeikis) with an adorable baby, and his own previously unexpressed desire to become a parent starts to bubble up. This in turn causes a rift with Reece, who is unwilling to entertain the notion of parenthood.

The film's rom-com sensibility makes it fun, but instead of crude naughtiness, Crano opts for prying off the lids of each of his characters and seeing what spills out. The journey is rewarding - and the destination a surprise.

EDGE had the opportunity to chat with both Crano and his husband, actor David Joseph Craig, about the film's unexpected twists, the experience of working together, and the value of communicating with your significant other.

EDGE: This movie strikes a very measured balance in tone and message. Brian, what did you have to go through, as the writer and director of the film, to make sure the pieces were all in the right place for this?

Brian Crano: I think it was from the conception, the idea that we wanted to make a movie where there wasn't necessarily a villain - meaning that the characters' intentions were all reasonable. And so I feel like that sets you on a pretty stable road. But making any film that isn't sort of straightforward, genre-wise, is always a challenge. You have to really balance the humor of it with the seriousness of the consequences and so forth.

EDGE: Here's a true story: I once had a friend explain to me that he never had a "slut phase" before he settled down with his partner, and eventually his partner encouraged him to venture out and gain more experience - in part so that he'd become a better lover! Is that what's going on with Will and Anna?

Brian Crano: No... I think what is interesting about that is, if that's organically in you, of course, you should do it, you know what I mean? I think the real spine of the movie is some characters trying to be something other than what they organically are, or denying what they want, in the case of the straight relationship. I think that's sort of more kind of where I fall, which is less prescriptive, in a way, than that. To say, you know, "You should do this," or "You shouldn't do this."

To me, the center of the film is if you need a child, you should ask for it; if you need to sleep with other people, you should ask for it. It's sort of a love letter to communicating better with your partner.

EDGE: Although those conversations can be very difficult to have, and that's part of the movie as well - when you see how Will and Anna, whose attempts to address what they want are sweet and caring. But things don't necessarily go that well with the gay couple, who can't quite reach a point where they both feel comfortable having a conversation about becoming parents.

Brian Crano: Right. I mean, this is the reason that drama exists, right? Relationships are hard, and we always endeavor to understand them in a different way.

EDGE: When writing the story, did you sort of say "Here's what's happening with the straight couple; here's what we might do with the gay couple so they can have something to work out?" Or did you bring some autobiography into that? I know that in my marriage we certainly had that discussion about kids.

Brian Crano: For me, it's the one thing I really resent about being a gay man, is the difficulty and enormous expense when it comes to acquiring children. That's always a central concern of mine because, you know, we definitely want children as a couple and to get them is very complicated - emotionally, socially, and certainly financially. That aspect of the movie was always there - that there was going to be a counterpoint to this more frivolous conversation of who you sleep with, to this very serious conversation about who you're going to raise and what your family is going to be. I thought those two things paired nicely and reversed the dynamic that you often see in films, where the gay couple is incredibly non-monogamous and the straight couple is trying to hem them back into something. I wanted to spin that because I find that's not true in my experience.

EDGE: I went into this film wondering if that familiar dynamic was what would be happening, and what a pleasant surprise that you turn that on its head.

Brian Crano: Thanks. Yeah. Across the board, we wanted to look at different [possibilities]. Like, women are often, in films, never allowed to have a sexuality unless they're psychopaths. For me, it was very important to look [beyond that sort of thing]. That's not true to life. That's not true to my life experience. So I wanted to look at all of the different ways that things are represented and do my little part to spin it on its head.

David Joseph Craig: Also on that side, in the way a woman's not allowed to have a sexuality, a gay man's not allowed to look at a computer unless he's checking out porn. I actually thought that was one of the most - even watching the film myself, when [Reece] catches me on the computer and then there's the jab of him going, "Oh, are you watching porn?" - and then when he actually turns [the laptop] around, [Hale] was checking out adoption websites. Even watching that today I was thinking, "Oh, that that's charming, I've never seen that in a film before, of a gay man looking at adoption sites."

EDGE: Another thing that happens along those lines, David, is that your character is talking to a man in the park and not cruising him. He's interested in his experience as a parent, and a little envious as well.

Brian Crano: Yeah, I thought it was a cool idea that the affair that you suspect will materialize form that relationship is, he's actually having an affair with the baby. He just wants to sort of play parent. I thought that was deeply human, and definitely something I notice David doing whenever there's a baby around.

[Laughter]

EDGE: So you want to be a parent in real life, David?

David Joseph Craig: Oh, yeah, definitely. Yes.

EDGE: But you're not there yet?

David Joseph Craig: No. Brian and I have been talking about it for quite a long time and, you know, like he said earlier, the ebbs and flows in the nature of how to acquire a child for a gay man - even though we have all the options in the world, we're not offered the natural one. That makes it hard to decide how to actually acquire the child. We're on the same page that we want to have children together.

I think what ended up happening was our conception came into play of how we each wanted to have children and we were getting somewhat close to a decision, and then the election happened and halted our whole situation for a while. That was kind of a natural pregnancy stopper for a while. It's just been recently that we've started communicating again about how we want to do it. It seems that the conversation is getting us to a place where we can start talking about that again, But that's just another development in that whole storyline of communicating.

EDGE: David, this movie is so stuffed with gorgeous actors - like Dan Stevens, who has never been more adorable than he is here - and Jason Sudeikis is in this, too -

David Joseph Craig: He sure is!

[Laughter]

EDGE: Yeah. He's great, he plays the man in the park. It's not like you have any reason to be intimidated by the men you're starring with, but... were you intimidated?

David Joseph Craig: Honestly, no, because Brian and Dan and Rebecca have had a decade-plus long relationship with each other, and Brian and my relationship I've gained them as allies as well. I think because they are talented and I've also been a fan of theirs so much, I was coming into the situation as a fan getting to work with such accomplished and wonderful actors that were also my friends. It made me feel like I was in a comfortable situation. Honestly, working with Jason for a day was one of my biggest delights as a performer - even though that was the coldest day of the entire shoot.

[Laughter]

EDGE: And your scenes with Rebecca Hall feel so natural, too - in the film you're supposed to be brother and sister, right? It comes across. You have that vibe between you.

David Joseph Craig: Yeah. Rebecca and I have gotten along very well from the beginning. I think we have a good rhythm between us. I don't know, I can't speak for Brian, but I think it might have been easy for him to write us in a situation that felt comfortable. I love her.

EDGE: Brian, was the writing of this film something that you and David did together to some degree? Or was it more that at some point you turned to him and said, "You know what, why don't you act in this film I'm doing?"

Brian Crano: I had the idea to write it, and then usually how I write is I will write some pages or a draft or something, and then give it to him for feedback. He's a really good reader of my stuff and he'll say, like, "Yes, no, whatever."

I wrote the dinner scene for the movie, and I was so excited because it did what I wanted it to do, which was to feel organic, friends having a conversation, and sometimes friends say things that are a little cutting, or get drunk and say more than they mean. I love that as a setup because there's no malice behind it, particularly, but they reveal a true thing that nobody can ignore. When I gave David the scene he was, like, "Do we need to have a talk about this?"

[Laughter]

"Is this your shitty writer's way of opening up our relationship?"

[Laughter]

David Joseph Craig: That is the way Brian shares his emotions with me most times. He'll write these beautiful, beautiful soliloquies that I'll read and then go, "Okay, you can say this to me in person." Obviously, I'm a huge fan of his work, and his writing was clearly one of the first things that attracted me to him. It's always nice to get to get to read beautiful things that are pointed toward me!

Brian Crano: And I'll tell you another thing that's really useful: There's a huge degree of trust between us artistically, so if I show him a cut of something, I know I will get his true opinion. It won't be colored by any other concern, other than whether it's accomplishing what I'm trying to accomplish. Some people are, "I can't imagine working with your husband," and I'm, like, "I can't imagine doing it the other way." It seems like you'd be much more on your own.

EDGE: Have you directed David in other projects?

Brian Crano: We've done short films, web series, and then, you know, just randomly around the house.

EDGE: Nice! So it's not like you went into this film with any feelings of anxiety around working with each other.

Brian Crano: No, not at all, though it's definitely an unusual experience to direct husband in a love scene with one of your best friends. That's an odd day at the office.

[Laughter]

It's fine - after a couple of takes, it's just like anything else. You're like, "The light's in the wrong place. We need to go again."

EDGE: David, did you have much input into your character? Were there times you were saying, "You know I'm sure about this line, I'm not sure about what Hale's doing here?"

David Joseph Craig: I didn't have any real questions - I mean, I went into the project fully invested in who Brian wrote the character to be, and obviously I got an insider's look as to what he was thinking about the character. So, going into actual shoot days and stuff, it was easy for me to understand who this person was. I definitely, as an actor, had the day to day going like, "Now that we've gotten to this place, is this how he'd actually react to a certain thing?" That definitely evolved, sometimes on the day [we shot it]. And I think Brian and I work quite copacetically in terms of figuring those things out on the day if we needed to. But yeah, I got to see every draft of [the screenplay] as it was [being written], I got to be a firsthand witness to how my character was evolving. I went in with a good sense of who he was off the top.

EDGE: Brian, as a film director, are you feeling influenced by the amazing stuff we're seeing on television these days?

Brian Crano: I think the thing that has influenced my directing the most is just work of other directors that you hugely admire, and trying to reverse engineer a beautiful film and see what they were doing technically - filmmakers like John Cameron Mitchell and Todd Haynes. I obsessed about their movies - in a healthy way!

[Laughter]

All I've cared about since I was a very little boy is telling stories, and when that's what you're super into you just try and find the best way to do that. To communicate emotionally to other people's life experiences is a really fun challenge.

David Joseph Craig: If I can just add to that, I think that something that I admire in Brian's work specifically is he's such a genre junkie. He'll get into a genre and then just eat the whole thing up. I think what he then does is he flips it on its head, because he'll take the genre and he'll apply his - like, he's amazing with writing characters in a personal way to each other, and I think that's why it's so special to see him write in a specific genre, because it feels like it's something different than what you'd typically see. If you consider this a romantic comedy, then the twists are solely based on these characters alone; the [story] is not driven by plot at all, it's driven by what these people need, and I think that's what so wonderful about his admiration for each of his heroes.

EDGE: You know, that twist you mention - wow! I didn't see that coming at all, and it's so honest and so authentic. Did you wrestle with that at all? Or was it that you found yourself saying, "There's only one way that I'm going to finish this movie?"

Brian Crano: You know, the liberal in me wanted to find a different ending, My investment in the story was to try and tell the most progressive version possible. But the way that... without giving anything away... the way the film ended up, as we wrote drafts and drafts and drafts of the ending, it never felt organic and it never felt as satisfying until I came to this conclusion. I wanted to have the viewer, at the end of the movie, have to have a difficult conversation with their spouse - boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever - about their own personal life choices, because I feel that so often we just kind of accept; we fall into something, we don't question it, and I speak for myself in that, so for me the idea was to present a dramatic situation that forces the conversation when you're on your way home. Like, "Wait a second! Did we ever talk about this? Or did we just assume that we're monogamous?" Or, "Did we ever talk about this, or did we assume that we're not monogamous?" And that is actually what is consequential. To get to that place took some work because that was my intention and what I wanted to do. So, okay: How do the characters get us there on this ride that we feel something about?

EDGE: Something I felt gave the movie a lot of its visceral power was the music selection. Did you have the music already selected for various scenes, or was that something you left up to your music supervisor and the score composers?

Brian Crano: No, no, no, I am hugely influenced and obsessed with music choice, and including the incredible work by Joan Wasser and Thomas Bartlett who together did the score of the movie. Thomas is an incredible producer and musician, and Joan is one of my longtime heroes. She's played with everybody - Rufus Wainwright, Antony and the Johnsons, and Jeff Buckley - and her own music has been in every film I've ever done. To get to collaborate with them on this film was a real treat.

But, yeah, I think that music is so [much a part of everything], especially in New York, when you're in public a lot. A lot of this movie happens not in apartments. But there's music everywhere, and it does influence the mood of any scene, in your real life or in a film, so getting that balance right was very important... on top of, it's just fun to do.

"Permission" starts in theaters Feb. 9.