PopHorror Let's Get Scared
By Design, written and directed by filmmaker Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please – read our interview with her HERE) takes body swapping to a whole new level. Instead of swapping places with say, a serial killer like in Freaky, or *gasp* your mom like in Freaky Friday, in By Design, Camille (Juliette Lewis) swaps places with a CHAIR. Yes, you read that right. A fucking chair. And you know what? It’s actually kind of beautiful.
By Design is a surreal drama that explores themes of identity and validation through the story of Camille, a woman who swaps bodies with a chair, highlighting the absurdity of societal values and personal worth.
To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Amanda and stars Samantha Mathis and Robin Tunney about the film, working together and with Juliette Lewis, and more!
PopHorror: I really enjoyed By Design! I had a lot of fun with it so I’m super excited to talk to you all about it today. My first question is for you, Amanda. What sparked the idea for By Design?
Amanda Kramer: Honestly, I felt like I would like to try something in the genre space of body swaps. I’m obsessed with body swap movies. I’m very compelled by them. I find them to be oddities, fascinations. But you know, I’m me so I had to do it differently and I thought about inanimate objects and wanting to be an inanimate object and what that would say about a human being, and what that says about the beauty in our world and the beauty that we don’t feel about ourselves. It was born from a strange fascination.
PopHorror: That’s so interesting! My next question is for Samantha and Robin. What intrigued you about the script and made you want to be a part of the project?
Samantha Mathis: Miranda Bailey, who is one of the producers from Cold Iron Pictures, had directed me in a movie, and she had reached out to me and was like, “I’m sending you a script. You are getting an offer. Just look at it. There’s no money and you are going to have the best time! She’s incredible, this filmmaker. The part is amazing. I wish I was playing this part, but you get to play it if you say yes and you should say yes, and here’s why.” And then I looked at the materials and I was like, I need to learn everything about Amanda, and I was just completely captivated by her work and how clear it was that she’s just an artist unto herself. There’s so few. And the fact that this movie was getting made, the fact that I would get to work with Robin and Juliette. I mean, to work with Juliette! Icon goddess, someone Robin and I both aspired to be, aspired to work on the level of her work. Boxes were ticking left, right, and center. So, it was very easy. Then Amanda and I got to communicate and she showed her vision with me and I was like, “Yes! When do you need me on a plane? I’m there.” It was a very easy decision.
PopHorror: I bet! The cast is just phenomenal.
Robin Tunney: I saw the cover page and it said it was Juliette Lewis and Samantha Mathis, and I was like, oh, I’m in! My agents were like, “You should read it first!” I read it and I’d never read anything like it. Then I watched one of Amanda’s short films and it was incredible! It was so meticulously designed. It was just so unique. I’m at this really lucky period in my life where I get to do things for me and look at a project and say, “How is this going to make me grow?” as opposed to, “How am I going to pay my rent this month?” That was a reality with me for a long time. I love independent movies, I love movies, and the people that inhabit them on the crew and the cast, it’s a really unique experience because everybody’s there because they love movies. They’re all kindred spirits and you get to have this wonderful experience and then if you’re lucky, it goes to a festival, and if you hit the jackpot, it’s in the movie theaters. I think that when you do television, it’s like this very expected… You know the world it’s going to be in and you know what it’s going to be. There’s nothing unexpected so the adrenaline rush is completely different and it serves its purpose, and I’m so grateful for the time I spent on things like that to allow me these choices now. But it’s just the best way to spend your time. If I’m going to leave my kids, I want to be around a whole bunch of people that love what they do and love movies. That is what independent cinema brings and there’s young people who are at the beginning of their career and I want to support new voices. I want to support female directors. I want to spend my time doing stuff like that. It’s fun! You feel alive. I walked on and I’d never done a role like this and let me tell ya, I’ve been around a really long time and people want to see you do the same thing.
Samantha Mathis: Yeah!
Robin Tunney: It’s like this constant barrage of like, “That’s what you did last time. That’s what she’s good at.” Why would I want to do that? So, I think all of those reasons… I want to stand across from Samantha Mathis and see what she’s going to do in a scene. I want to watch Juliette Lewis. How does she get there? And meet people like Mamoudou [Atier] who I feel like is this emerging new talent. It’s just the absolute best place to be.
PopHorror: I love that!
Robin Tunney: And wear cool clothes! I never look cool. I’ve never gotten to wear cool clothes.
Samantha Mathis: Nothing like that. I’ve never worn anything like that.
Robin Tunney: I wanted to keep every single one of my costumes.
Samantha Mathis: They looked great.
Robin Tunney: Sophie Hardeman [Costume Designer] is so talented and she had no money. I’ve worked with people who had so much more money. She’s so cool.
PopHorror: The costumes definitely stood out. The film is so unique and so inventive. It’s definitely arthouse cinema and I think people are going to embrace that. Amanda, was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the film, no matter what?
Amanda Kramer: Oh, gosh. I mean, everything. I’m fighting. I feel like I wake up fighting. I don’t know if everyone feels this way, but there’s a kind of emotion that comes from being an independent filmmaker but also being one that insists on a kind of surreal and absurd world where you just wake up and you’re fighting. You open your emails and you’re like, “Who’s stopping me today? Who’s trying to stop me today?” And it’s like, that’s not what you should project into the universe. You should project more like, everybody wants me to do it, but it’s not how you feel. You feel the weight of the world being like, “Why are they acting like this? Why do they look like this? Why is this happening like this?” So, you feel like you need to move into rooms and explain yourself but when you cast great actors and you have a great crew, you never do. It’s all conversation and never explanation, and it’s a back and forth and collaboration. I’m always feeling like I’m fighting for everything in the film. But mostly, and this should shock no one, I’m fighting for dance. Nobody ever wants me to have dance sequences! Nobody ever wants me to go into these fantasy sequences ever! Everybody’s just like, “Write the thing and do the thing.” But I don’t know. There are things that human bodies can express that my language cannot express, and we should all know that. Dance is an art form that is transformative and it transports you. I am a great linguist and I’m a trained writer, and I believe in the written word, and I studied Shakespeare, and there’s just a limitation. When my films can pause for a minute and go into these fantasy worlds and I have dancers who are breathtaking, I feel like my films are elevated. That is what I’m always fighting for. So, that’s the main thing. But yeah, I’m fighting for everything.
PopHorror: You know, sometimes dance sequences work and sometimes they don’t, and this is when it did, so I can appreciate the fight to keep. Sometimes it’s like, why is there a dance sequence because it is not working.
Amanda Kramer: Thank you!
PopHorror: Samantha and Robin, was there anything that you were adamant about bringing to your character?
Samantha Mathis: No. I always want to feel grounded in something that feels honest and true, but I wanted to do that within the sandbox that Amanda Kramer created. This was a journey unto itself in that regard for me. Certainly, things came to me as I was reading it and instincts and thoughts and ideas, but Amanda gave me so much to guide that journey of exploration, and I do remember that first day we were shooting and it was the last scene of the movie. I don’t even know if I felt emotionally and spiritually… Robin, I grabbed your hand and was like, okay, here we go! I don’t know what’s going to come out of my mouth. I know the lines will but I don’t know how. But I knew that Amanda had given us this beautiful sandbox to jump into and for this particular journey, I really wanted to give myself over to her fully and completely and knew that she would catch me if I made a complete ass of myself.
Robin Tunney: I think there was a good 15 years of my career as an actor where I felt like Amanda when she woke up in the morning when I’d walk onto set. It became joyless, in ways, to try to feel like you had to protect yourself that much, to not feel safe. It was just a conscious decision where it’s like you just have to try to trust and really enjoy the experience, and put one hundred percent trust. If you say yes, go there. It’s a director’s medium. It’s not an actor’s medium. If you’re going to show up and you’re going to sign on the dotted line, just go and try to see the good in everybody and trust and just go for it because I feel like second guessing people or not committing, it’s not a healthy place for an actor and you’re never going to be your best. You have to be willing to make an ass out of yourself and it’s so great to be old enough where you’re like, you know what? I’m gonna go for it and if this isn’t good, either she’s not going to use it or it’s not going to work. Just fully commit into this world and into this style, and feed off of everybody around you and not have your dukes up about how it’s not going to work how you imagined it and to completely lose yourself in that. You work enough, you’re like, oh my god, they just cut to the feeling! They didn’t show me having the feeling and that’s not what I did! Just let it all go and be like, you know what? I’m going to commit myself to this process and I’m going to show up every day, have a great time, and just really try to trust.
Amanda Kramer: That’s amazing! I need to say this because I feel like no one really talks about this but it’s so important for me to say. I come from theater. If you do theater, the linear nature of theater is so useful for an actor. You work on the first scene, you work on the second scene, you work on the third, the fourth, the fifth. By the time you get to the end you’ve gone on the character’s journey. You complete the show. You’ve gone with the motion of the ocean. In film, these people, these angels, they receive the script, they move through the script in their minds, they create their characters, and then they’re told the very first day of your job will be the very last scene that you need to shoot and they need to get there immediately. And not only do they need to get there emotionally without having been able to be with each other all of this time to grow the character like you do in theater, but maybe you’ve never met. Maybe you have to have sex. God willing, maybe you have to fight each other. You don’t know. And the first scene was the most emotional scene in our film and everybody showed up and no one quite knew what anyone was going to do and a lot of people were meeting for the first time. Juliette let out a sound that I was certainly not expecting. The very first sound. She had done none of her characterization. She had not shown us what Camille was going to look like as a woman. We hadn’t seen any of that yet. She let out this sound and she drops, and Robin and Samantha – unplanned, I did not block this – they went to her at the same time. They went, “Oh!” like to go get her at the same time and they gave me this moment that’s not in the script. It’s so ephemeral to even really direct. It’s too quintessential. It just was immediate feeling, and they had not built that character with each other yet. They had not done other scenes together. They moved in this tandem and they go to pick her up and it’s like, oh of course I’m using that take. It was just such a beautiful, natural thing. Then when we wrapped that day, I was like, okay, now we are just gonna go back and have our conversation. We’d done the big thing.
Robin Tunney: But it was also helpful for the rest of the movie though, when we started with the last scene, because Irene and Lisa, we show up for her in the end in a way we can’t in the beginning. By doing the last scene first, it was this thing where we knew at the core of these characters, it was like there was room to be a bit insensitive and to be a bit self-centered and all that stuff because when the chips were down, we showed up. There was no vanity or anything in it, you’re like, okay, we’re friends! We showed up!
Samantha Mathis: It’s true. That’s such a good point, Robin. It did sort of give us that underbelly of humanity that even though these friends of hers – and we are her friends – however imperfectly we express our love and support for her, ultimately at the end of the day they do love her and show up for her. There’s so many happy perfect accidents when you’re making movies and arguably, you just have to go with what the circumstances are, but you never know what gifts can come from doing the last scene first and that is so aptly put and identified, Robin. It did give us that, “Oh, we do love her!” So we know that. That’s a truth we can build on and put layers of superficiality and self-involvement and everything.
PopHorror: You both mentioned Juliette and how you really wanted to work with her because she’s such an icon but Samantha and Robin, you guys are icons too. To me, you’re on the same level as Juliette.
Amanda Kramer: Of course, of course!
PopHorror: To hear you both went in and just blew Amanda’s mind, I’m not surprised. I love hearing that because that doesn’t surprise me at all.
Amanda Kramer: Absolutely! Blew my mind right away. If you want to know what a gift to a director is, okay. Think about Pump up the Volume, Little Women, American Psycho. Think about the differences in Sam’s characters. Niagra, Niagra, The Craft, Empire Records, think about the differences in those characters. The capacity of that actor to transform and just be a different kind of person. That sounds so goofy to say because that’s their fucking job but so many actors are selling themselves, they’re selling their own brand. They’re showing up to be themselves. Being able to see the range, I knew I was going to get something special. I had said in another interview, I had no clue they were going to be so funny. In their scenes alone when Sam is shooting her lips and she’s not really working off anything. Juliette was speaking off camera but she’s not really working off anything and she’s just doing it. I’m thinking to myself, how can you be so funny? How can you be exactly right? You’re not being given anything! That’s a thing that comes from being given something from yourself.
Samantha Mathis: Juliette was giving me a lot but it was an interesting challenge certainly to think about what could be done with this frame of this mouth, like how can you express wit?
Amanda Kramer: And similarly, when Robin’s in the bathtub scene and she has to just laugh and laugh and laugh and I remember thinking I’ll probably have to tell her she’s gotta laugh more. Not at all. As a director, you think of everything you might have to say and sometimes you’re just like, I did all this preparation and it’s not necessary. One thing I keep hearing over and over again as people ask me: do I have extra footage of the three of them shopping for chairs? I’m like, I’ve got like 20 minutes and no one will ever see it. It’s mine; it belongs to me. But it’s like, they’re just looking at chairs, shopping, being somewhat cutting to one another, being somewhat vulnerable to one another and actually putting together that montage was the hardest editing of the film because it was so difficult to choose and I wrote none of those lines. That’s a testament to understanding your character, being able to just be your character, improvise in your character, and write lines that I wish I had written. There’s this amazing moment where Robin says, “Do you like this one?”, and Samantha goes, “No, I don’t like it.” To have written something so perfect… Irene doesn’t really care if she likes the chair and Lisa doesn’t really know if she’s supposed to like it, and it’s all coming across in the improv. It’s like something I would have written if I could have written it.
Robin Tunney: I spin Juliette and I’m like, “Do you want to go for a ride?” I remember doing it and thinking, this is never going to be in the movie.
Amanda Kramer: But that’s just when you’re like, that’s the one! That’s the trust that you were talking about. I am like, “Guys, you’re never going to look bad. I’ll never make you look bad. You’re always going to look great. Whatever performance you choose, I’m always going to pick the best of it and the best of the best of the best of it.”
Thank you so much to Samantha, Robin, and Amanda for taking the time to chat with us. By Design is currently in limited theaters.
