'I Don't Understand You': Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells movie inspired by adoption fraud story from filmmakers

While Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells voice some pretty hysterical characters in Big Mouth, they're now sharing the screen in the horror-comedy I Don't Understand You (now in theatres). Written and directed by married filmmakers David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, the movie had a particularly interesting starting point.
In I Don't Understand You Kroll and Rannells play a couple, Dom and Cole, who have just fallen victim to adoption fraud, but things are looking up. A pregnant woman named Candace (Amanda Seyfried) thinks they're the right fit for the family to adopt her child.
But just before that happens, Dom and Cole take a romantic Italian vacation. Things take a turn when they get lost outside of Rome, trying to find a restaurant. As their stranded in an unknown location, the trip turns to bloody Italian chaos.
As Craig and Crano identified, the first portion of the movie, up until the couple gets stuck going to the restaurant, is quite close to the real experience the filmmakers had.
"We were adopting a child. We had been through an adoption scam, which was heartbreaking, and then had a completely different experience when we matched with the birth mother of our son," Crano told Yahoo. "But we found out that we were going to have him literally like two days before we were going on our 10th anniversary trip."
"And we were like, 'Shit, should we not go?' But we decided to do it, and you're so emotionally opened up and vulnerable in that moment that it felt like a very similar experience to being in a horror movie, even though it's a joyful kind of situation."
A key element of I Don't Understand You is that feeling of shock once the story turns from a romance-comedy to something much bloodier. It feels abrupt, but it's that jolt of the contrast that also makes that moment feel particularly impactful to watch.
"Our sense of filmmaking is so ... based on surprise," Craig said. "As a cinephile, my main decade to go to are outlandish '90s movies, because they just take you to a different space, and as long as you have a reality to the characters that are already at hand, you can kind of take them wherever."
"Personally, the situation of adoption was a constant jolt [from] one emotion to another that we felt like that was the right way to tell a story like this, which was literally, fall in love with a couple and then send them into a complete nightmare. And I think you can only get that if you do it abruptly, and kind of manically."
While Rannells and Kroll have that funny and sweet chemistry the story needs, these were roles that weren't written for them. But it works because Crano and Craig know how to write in each other's voices so well, that's where a lot of the dialogue is pulled from.
Additionally, the filmmakers had the "creative trust" in each other to pitch any idea, as random as it may have seemed, to see if it could work for the film.
"When you're with somebody you've lived with for 15 years, there is very little that I can do that would embarrass me in front of David," Crano said. "So that level of creative freedom is very generative."
"We were able to screw up in front of each other a lot without it affecting the rest of our day," Craig added.
Of course, with the language barrier between the filmmakers and the Italian cast, it was a real collaboration to help make the script feel authentic for those characters.
"All of the Italian actors and crew were very helpful in terms of being like, 'Well I feel like my character is from the south and wouldn't say it in this way.' And helped us build the language," Crano said. "And it was just a very trusting process, because neither of us are fluent enough to have that kind of dialectical specificity that you would in English."
"It was super cool to just be watching an actor perform a scene that you've written in English that has been translated a couple of times, but you still completely understand it, just by the generosity of their performance."
For Craig, he has an extensive resume of acting roles, including projects like Boy Erased and episodes of Dropout. Among the esteemed alumni of the Upright Citizens Brigade, he had a writing "itch" for a long time, and was "in awe" of Crano's work as a director.
"Truthfully, in a weird way, it felt like such a far off, distant job, because everything felt really difficult, and I think with this project it just made me understand that it was just something I truly love and truly wanted to do," Craig said. "I love the idea of creative control and being in a really collaborative situation. Acting allows you to do that momentarily, but I think like every other job that you can do on a film is much longer lasting, and I think that's something I was truly seeking."
For Crano, he also grew up as a theatre kid, moving on to writing plays in college.
"The first time I got laughs for jokes I was like, 'Oh, this is it. Let's figure out how to do this,'" he said. "I was playwriting in London, my mom got sick in the States, so I came back, and I started writing a movie, because I was living in [Los Angeles] and I thought, well there are no playwrights in L.A., I better write a movie.'"
That's when Crano found a mentor in Peter Friedlander, who's currently the head of scripted series, U.S. and Canada, at Netflix.
"I had written this feature and ... we met with a bunch of directors, great directors, directors I truly admire, and they would be like, 'It should be like this.' And I'd be like, 'Yeah, that's fine, but maybe it's more like this.' And after about five of those Peter was like, 'You're going to direct it. We'll make some shorts. We'll see if you can do it.' He just sort of saw it," Crano recalled.
"It's nice to be seen in any capacity for your ability, but [I started to realize] this is not so different from writing, it's just sort of writing and physical space and storytelling, and I love to do it. ... It is a very difficult job, because it requires so much money to test the theory, to even see if you can."
But being able to work together on I Don't Understand You, the couple were able to learn things about and from each other through the filmmaking process.
"David is lovely to everyone," Crano said. "He is much nicer than I am at a sort of base level, and makes everyone feel that they can perform at the best of their ability. And that's a really good lesson."
"Brian literally doesn't take anything personally," Craig added. "Almost to a fault."
"And it's very helpful in an environment where you're getting a lot of no's, to have a partner who's literally like, 'Oh, it's just no for now. Great, let's move on. Let's find somebody who's going to say yes, maybe we'll come back to that no later.' I'm the pessimist who's sitting in the corner going, 'Somebody just rejected me, I don't know what to do.' ... It just makes you move, and that's very helpful for me."

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