INDIE SPOTLIGHT: A Conversation with ‘Fantasy Life’ Filmmaker and Actor Matthew Shear

An anxious law school dropout (Matthew Shear) stumbles into a job babysitting his psychiatrist's three granddaughters and falls for the girls' mother (Amanda Peet), an actress in a rocky marriage. A smart, New York-set romantic comedy co-starring Alessandro Nivola, Judd Hirsch, Bob Balaban, Andrea Martin, Zosia Mamet, and Holland Taylor. Winner of the SXSW Narrative Feature Audience Award.

It’s quite refreshing when you get to watch a film that’s new, yet familiar. Where the characters could be people you know (or have passed by on the street or maybe that awkward couple at dinner that you’ve made up countless backstories for) and where the reality of the world is not a far stretch of the imagination. It also helps to have an incredibly stacked cast of familiar faces that wonderfully carry the film.

These are one of the many feelings you get from watching Matthew Shear’s film Fantasy Life. It’s like a love letter to the auteurs that came before him, with a specificity on character, dynamics and relationships – and perhaps a love letter to himself, as you’ll soon read what inspired these characters.

In this conversation with Matthew Shear, we discuss his directorial debut, the personal inspiration for the story and characters, dialing in the visual tone and energy with his cinematographer, and a brief reflection on the eight-year journey from pen to paper to theatrical release.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: Let’s dive into Sam and these other characters. What were you inspired by and was it that you were looking to explore through this cast of characters?

Matthew Shear: Sam is certainly inspired by my experience in New York. I was a manny for a number of years in my 20s. I kind of fell into it and ended up becoming a hot ticket on the Upper East Side. And it was a good way to support auditioning.

When I was writing the script... and there's a certain reality to like, I've had my history with mental health - it didn't intersect with that period in the way it is in the film, but I just thought it might be interesting to kind of bring that experience and put it onto a guy in his 30s… it was just interesting to me to sort of see him get pushed around and have his narrative be kind of a blowing leaf. All of these circumstances are the thing that's kind of bringing him to the next phase.

Dianne and David emerged as, at least sort of instinctively, they felt like interesting foils to Sam. This hyper confident, distracted, somewhat self-indulgent, former rock star guy, and then Amanda [Peet], this very vulnerable, kind of internal person. How would Sam react to each of these people in the way that he is kind of a receiver... doesn't have that kind of active personality in the way that the two of them do.

And he seemed to, in a way, function or be useful to both of them. The characters ended up being kind of ways to sort of bring out aspects that you wouldn't learn about if you didn't have them in relationships.

Sadie: Yeah, what I really enjoyed about this film, reminiscent of films by Noah Baumbach, whom you’ve worked with many times – but these are people just living their lives. However, they are dealing with something emotionally out of their control, which has totally got them losing their minds in the only way they can. And there’s no true character arc – they’re just going onto the next phase of life.

Matthew: I think that style of filmmaking, and I think this is true of Noah's films and Mike Nichols' films... there's this way in which directors, like those two manage to, kind of always walk the line between finding, not forcing character arcs, and in a way, having some unexpected reveals be the drama, so that you're not really necessarily expecting what's going to happen, because you're kind of more involved in the sort of internal and subtle aspects of their experience. And I think both of them are very good at weaving humor into that style, which I think does help the pace and pleasure of that kind of story.

Sadie: The film is beautifully shot. Dialing in the visual tone with your cinematographer, especially utilizing camera, movement, no movement, etc. What were those discussions?

Matthew: In terms of the visual tone that you mentioned - Conor Murphy, my DP we just both kind of instinctively knew that we didn't really want any handheld in the movie, and we didn't really even want the camera to move that much. There are a few subtle tracking shots, but it's mostly just stationary shots. And Conor was like, 'I'm sure we will use handheld at some point.' [laughs] It's very practical, or can be a practical way to deal with certain kinds of scenes. And we didn't do it. We didn't do it at all.

Sadie: You've had a brief festival run, and now a theatrical release – how are you feeling now that you’ve made it to this moment? Especially as an independent filmmaker – this is a feat from pen to paper, believing in your vision, bringing on other collaborators and making the thing.

Matthew: Yes, and it is genuinely hard to believe that... I mean both in terms of just the length and all the nail biters and huge losses, huge wins - to be at the end of the journey is like... it's been eight years or something, I've kind of been involved in this project in terms of writing it, and each stage. So, yeah, there's kind of a sad or a bit of a lost feeling, [laughs] but also very exciting and just sort of both curious and terrified for how it will land. And I think that's just a theme through the whole journey... this swinging of elation and depression... it seems like that's the creative process too. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] This being your directorial debut, anything that you’ve learned on this eight-year journey that you’ll bring with you onto the next project?

Matthew: The first thought I had was, yeah, it did take a long time, and I think this is a feature of the artist's path, but there is at least for me, a reality that no one is going to believe in your script for a while. But I would imagine that a lot of people go through that. And even when you're encouraged... I got passes for a long time - one of the things that kept me going was just a private sense that I had done the absolute best I could. In the sense that, in my way of approaching this, just very exacting in getting the script to a place that I felt was good. So, if you can achieve that, and you think it's good, that's something you can sort of hold on to. And then when someone else thinks it's good, you're like, 'You get it!'

The other just quick thing is feedback can be really hard and sometimes wrong. But sometimes when it really hurts, it's like a secret message that when you're four days later in a different emotional place, it's worth trying, or worth looking at. I just feel like that's been a consistent feature of the process. [laughs]

Fantasy Life is now in Theaters nationwide.