Patton Oswalt: I remember getting the script, and I responded to it first cinematically because of how it was structured and how the story was told. It had this great quality that I love in movies, which is, “How in the fuck are they going to pull this off?” That’s the kind of stuff that gets me excited.
When I met James and we started talking on Zoom, he told me more background about his dad and his mom and all of their relationships. That’s when it just became, “I have to do this.”
The movie’s dialog is great, because it transitions really seamlessly from actual conversation into text-speak. It’s pretty charming.
They found a really clever way to build it and personify it through Becca and through Claudia Sulewski’s amazing performance. She’s playing Franklin’s ideal version of how he wants her to be responding and how he wants her to be talking, even though she’s just saying the stuff that I’m typing.
I think a lot of us do that when we’re reading social media or texting. We imagine an inflection that’s not there.
It’s interesting to me, as a parent, to think about watching this movie now, versus if a 20-year-old me was watching it. I was just trying to think back to when I realized that my parents were just people who made choices, or even just people.
That can be a scary moment. I remember growing up, I had a couple of friends who had to go through the realization of, “Oh, my parents are still kind of teenagers in a lot of ways. They’re not the final authority on things, and they are still very, very fluid, and still going through changes.” You want that to be stable, so to have that taken away feels like a universal experience for me, at least.
Did working on this movie make you think about your own daughter, or how you talk to her about internet privacy, security, and what we share online?
That was something that we had been talking about already, because any parent can see how this is snowballing and going into very bad directions. Our daughter’s 13. She doesn’t have a phone and she doesn’t have a social media presence yet.
