Michael Cera and Dustin Guy Defa on The Adults, Poker Cinema … – The Film Stage

Its February in Berlin and Michael Cera is dodging bullets. Whats it like, one reporter asks, to be a new dad? Its like a new obsession, the actor explains, its all you care about. Filming Juno? My memories are very nebulous, but it was fun! Keeping in touch with Elliot Paige? We dont speak very often, but its always nice when we get together. Can he talk about Barbie? Ive been told I would be punished. Working with Greta Gerwig? A really confident and very fun and collaborative director. Being mistaken for Jesse Eisenberg? He told me he gets that, too! His dream role? Zuckerberg? Dustin Guy Defa chimes in, getting a big laugh, That would be the best.

The director and star are seated at a roundtable for their new film The Adults. Its Defas first as director in six years, the last being Person to Person, a sprawling Brooklyn portmanteau in which Cera appeared as a goofy reporter. In The Adults, Defa puts Cera center stage as a young man who returns home from Oregon to the leafy North Easta place called Newburgh, Defa explains, Its across from Beacon. Beautifulto see his sisters for the first time in three years. His youngest, played by Asteroid Citys sprightly Sophia Lillis, is ecstatic. His elder, played by Hannah Gross, perhaps less so. The film, a nicely sweet and sour family drama, is as much about the complex dynamic of their relationshipfleshed out in the film through some infectious, theatre-kid play-acting (characters, impersonations, musical numbers and such)as it is about the pains of returning home and feeling all that carefully constructed adulthood melt away. Of course, its also about poker.

Amongst the hubbub, we got some questions in about the sting of regression, card movies, and shifting from Persons interweaving narratives to a more focused approach.

The Film Stage: To go from Person to Person, a film with five separate arcs and an ensemble of actors, to this more intimate project is an interesting switch. Was it part of your thinking when you wrote it, a desire to focus in?

Dustin Guy Defa: Definitely. I mean, that movie was very hard to do. We were in New York City, so there were many locations, many characters. I did the best I could, but it was really like my mind was in a lot of different places. What I learned from that was that I wanted to be more relaxed and focused, and be very present with the actors. Person to Person was sort of like a rushjust like, GO. So yeah: it was a very intentional thing.

We had an amazing production. It was so special and it was built to be calm and focused. I went from ensemble thinking with all these characters to, like, okay, Im gonna hone in and get very intimate with these charactersbasically these three people. I needed to go deeper and it was the way to go deeper.

When you were filming Person to Person together, did you start to have a future collaboration in mind?

Defa: I sort of hoped that wed do something but we didnt know what it would be.

Michael Cera: Yeah, me too. But also, like: since then you worked on so many scripts. I didnt know what you were gonna do.

Defa: [Laughs] I know, I didnt know what I was going to do.

The film kind of presents regressing to childhood roles as being not always necessarily a negative thing. I was wondering what kind of experiences you were drawing from.

Cera: For me, going home is similar in a lot of ways. You know, going back to people that knew you when you were little and trying not to become your little baby self again. Its very relatable. But everything thats in the movie was fully developed in Dustins writing, and theres nothing really particular to my relationship with my own sisters which is reflected that I can think ofother than the general feeling of reconnecting with your siblings that youve known your whole life and checking in with them at a new moment in your life when youre a different person.

Im also a middle sibling and were just a few years apart. I kind of feel like, in a family dynamicat least in my familyyou kind of fill in whatever role is needed in a certain situation. Like: if people are arguing, maybe you try and lighten it up, or if people are too happy, maybe you bring a bad mood just to mix things up. You know? You kind of find your lane.

Defa: I was definitely inspired by my own childhood, my own relationship with my sister. My sister and I loved each other so much when we were kids; we really were each others world. When we were children I think we just knew each other. And now shes had so many different experiences and Ive had so many things that we dont know about at all. And shes her own person and we still havent figured each other out as people. So that is sort of the place I was coming from, a desire to try to understand that a little bit more.

The dynamic thats represented in the movie is similar. We really had our own world in our own bubble. There was nobody else there. And she looked up to me in a way that is very similar to how these sisters look up to Eric and how much love there was before and how that love is either no longer possible or being retained by Eric.

Photos by Jen Koch at Berlinale 2023

We learn about their shared history, in a way, through the songs and characters that Eric and his sisters perform together. Michael, you have a background in Second City in Toronto. Did that experience help in developing these sequences?

Cera: To be honest, I didnt really go very deep in Second City. I did weekend classes where you play improv-based games with other kids. I had so much fun doing it but they were just fun classes. It wasnt with any kind of purpose of going onto the stage or anything. But it teaches you to listen, so its a good class for people who want to become actors in any wayjust because youre making everything up on the spot. You have to listen to what other people are saying or else you get lost.

The characters and songs in the film was stuff that was very scripted, but we all worked together to flesh it out and make it very distinct so that we didnt have two characters that occupied the same kind of energy or anything. We just needed to lay everything out very technically.

Defa: Writing them was actually sort of easy for me, just because I did it so much as a kid. With my sister, we didnt have a whole locker of characters that we would break out, but Sesame Street was a fundamental thing for me. I was really attached to it, so I think the influence of that really seeped into me. The truth is, still as an adult I constantly make up little songs about things at home. So actually its sort of natural for me, and I dont take it too seriously so theres no pressure of like making something good. If its a child it just needs to be. Its just stuff.

Poker plays a big part in the movie. Do you play?

Defa: [To Cera] Are you a good poker player? You are.

Cera: Its very subjective. I dont know. Weve played poker together for a long time and it just became part of the language of this character and this movie in a very organic way. It was a big part of our life during lockdown, playing online together with other people. You know, very small stakes, just a way to spend time together. So that kind of seeped into this, it made a lot of sense.

If you have a very overactive brain or if you like puzzles or that kind of thinking, its just so rich because its constantly changing. One hand will end and a new one comes inits a completely different set of circumstances. So if you have a brain that just needs food like that, its like a beaver chewing on wood, its just a way to just get your brain relaxed.

Defa: I mean, its weird. Theres a part of poker where you learn how to deal with the pressure. I mean, you learn that if you get emotional when you play poker you will run into trouble. Thats a very interesting part of yourself to develop. Its not that I dont want to be emotional, but theres something very interesting about honing that.

For the film, it really became very helpful to have this other part of Erics life, like transferring the play and games to an adult place where he can use that same energy. Like hes using that energy over here with these adults and at the same time, in another way, over here with his sisters.

Did you watch any poker films for inspiration?

Defa: There arent many poker films. I mean, I dont want to say Rounders is, you know, not a good movie. [Laughs]

California Split?

Defa: I mean California Split is amazing.

Cera: Yeah!

Defa: I love California Split but I didnt watch it for the movie. We wanted to get something about poker that wasnt in a movie before. What was helpful was watching Daniel Negreanu. I dont know if you know who he is but hes a very good person to watch. He talks a lot at the tables, about what hes thinking, what other people are thinking. And that helped, because if you have a character speaking about what theyre thinking or what other people are thinking, it often wont work. But it works because youre at the poker table and Eric is able to say things that you normally wouldnt say in a movie.

Cera: I think thats probably the other aspect of it that really felt like it would be good in the movie: how people interact at the poker table and what we experience playing with these people. It was fascinating, kind of seeing certain personalities cornered in a certain situation and seeing how people react.

The Adults opens in theaters on August 18.

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Michael Cera and Dustin Guy Defa on The Adults, Poker Cinema ... - The Film Stage