INTERVIEW: Director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte puts new spin on coming-of-age story

As You Are, which opens Friday, Feb. 24 at Village East Cinema in New York City, charts the ups and downs of three teenagers entangled in a relationship in the early 1990s. It’s an unconventional indie that is told through memories that are prompted by a police investigation, and the characters certainly speak to director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, who also co-wrote the movie with Madison Harrison. These characters are so resonant because when the director made the film, he was still in his early 20s, not too far from the age of the three main characters.

The cast features Owen Campbell (The Americans), Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things) and Amandla Stenberg (The Hunger Games) as the three teenagers, and Mary Stuart Masterson (Fried Green Tomatoes) and Scott Cohen (Billions) as the adults in their lives.

“The movie started as a short film that I made when I was at Bard College, and it sort of came from wanting to tell a story about the town that was I from, which is Albany,” Joris-Peyrafitte said recently in a phone interview. “I was 22 when I made the feature, but I was only 19 when I wrote the short. I kind of wanted to do something that was going to use my proximity to that age to its advantage because, you know, everyone is trying to make movies, and that felt to me like the thing that I could offer. … It also started to become an investigation into a lot of the relationships that I had or a lot of the relationships I saw friends having.”

The coming-of-age story is a tried-and-true narrative that dates back hundreds of years in literature. Authors and directors have been fascinated with stories that explore the time period in one’s life when childhood is left behind and adulthood begins. Joris-Peyrafitte wanted to put his own spin on the often-told tale.

“I think that it’s overrepresented in the wrong way and underrepresented in the right way,” he said. “It’s obviously really a ripe age for these kind of stories to be told, and I think a lot of people do that, some to an incredible effect and other people to a lesser effect. But for me, the issue with a lot of those films is I always kind of felt they were condescending to kids, that it was always kind of the problems of children or something to get through to become who they actually are going to be, kind of that principle of coming of age, of being this transitory period. To me living inside of that transitory period was the thing that was actually interesting, and not treating it as if it was something lesser than what you would become, but actually a complete experience in itself and something where the stakes feel unbelievably high.”

The director called this time in a person’s life the most difficult, most emotional and most raw. These characters are experiencing certain emotions and events for the first time, and he wanted to capture that energy and not discount it.

“I really love the idea of watching these three kids just navigate this love for each other without putting labels on it, without them feeling like it is certainly one thing or another, the sort of freedom for those kids to navigate that space and the pressure from the culture to sort of define that space,” he said. “The collision of those things — the characters and the landscape — was really this spark that made me realize, OK, this is the story that I want to tell.”

As You Are, which will also open in Los Angeles March 3, has been met with industry recognition and plenty of plaudits. The film won the Special Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and was also selected for San Sebastian Film Festival. For Joris-Peyrafitte, this sudden success is both novel and thrilling.

“I never met somebody who had a film who went to Sundance,” he said. “I didn’t really know very many directors even. The idea of Sundance was sort of, oh, Sundance, that place that real directors go and show their movies.”

He added: “The experience of going there and actually having people respond to it was unbelievable and kind of really galvanizing in a way because for the rest of my life of creating things, the one piece that has always been missing is an audience, which is so obviously important to what we do.”

Joris-Peyrafitte said he feels particularly happy with the cast he was able to put together with the help of his casting directors. The first person cast was Stenberg, an actor Joris-Peyrafitte didn’t even realize was a possibility to join such a small indie. He saw her in the role but wasn’t convinced that reaching out to her was worth the time.

“I had no understanding that this was a real movie and that we could actually ask Amandla Stenberg if she would be in it,” he said. “So for me it was like, let’s find somebody like Amandla, and then they [the casting directors] were like, ‘Why don’t you offer the part to Amandla? You can do that.’ And we did it, and she agreed. So that was the first person we had on.”

Campbell and Heaton came after a large casting search with screenings of tapes and auditions. Joris-Peyrafitte said Campbell is an actor who has been studying the craft for a long time and understood the role almost on a mathematical level. Heaton, on the other hand, is relatively new to acting and has an incredible amount of raw energy and charisma.

“I think they balanced each other in this really nice way and also intimidated each other in a nice way because they were both kind of envious of that,” the director said. “So obviously it was going to be really important the way that these three kids got along, and we were all living in a house together. So it made it even more important, and they just fell in love immediately. They were hanging out every day, playing music together every day, taking naps and watching documentaries on Nirvana together every day. Like it was a really beautiful thing.”

The adult cast came about by pure happenstance. Masterson read the script and liked it. Plus, it didn’t hurt that the famous actress was familiar with Upstate New York and truly understood the setting of the film.

“Scott Cohen was someone who I hadn’t been really familiar with, and the casting directors educated me on him,” Joris-Peyrafitte said. “I met with him and realized that this guy has an incredible intensity and an incredible intelligence that was going to be really important to making sure that that character wasn’t just hitting the single note of being this sh—y father but was actually somebody who was capable of being loving and of being kind and of being charming, which is ultimately the sort of tragedy in his character.”

Today, Joris-Peyrafitte can watch how these characters are interpreted by that one crucial element that has been missing from his professional career: an audience.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

As You Are is currently playing in New York City and opens in Los Angeles March 3. Click here for more information.