Meet Dane Clark and Linsey Stewart, the power couple driving the creative engine behind feature films and shorts like I Put A Hit On You and Bickford Park as Co-Directors and Co-Writers. Their latest movie, Suze, a platonic rom-com starring Michaela Watkins that explores the unlikely friendship between an empty nest mother and her daughter’s ex-boyfriend, hits theatres on February 23. We caught up with Dane and Linsey to chat about the film, where they draw their ideas from, their tag-team approach to directing and writing, and how they navigate the balance between work and home life.
How did the idea for Suze come about?
Director Linsey Stewart: We wanted to tell a story about the people who pull us out of our darkness and help us get to a better place. It’s a tribute to the people we lean on in hard times. Suze is this woman going through perimenopause, she’s organized her whole life around her daughter, and she hasn’t really built anything for herself. One day, when we were brainstorming, we were like, “What if she gets stuck taking care of her daughter’s ex-boyfriend, and she can’t stand him?” She’s desperately trying to hold on to her daughter, and she’s stuck with this kid that she doesn’t want. But he needs a mother so badly. He doesn’t have any strong role models or people taking care of him.
Director Dane Clark: And she needs a kid to love. They’re both going through the same thing, being left by the same person. It hurts them, but it’s not super dramatic, so we can keep it comedic. They’re both mourning this person who’s just gone to McGill. They’re in a different province. It’s not that bad!
We just wanted to challenge ourselves to do something different. Most of our previous projects, for lack of a better word, are rom-coms, so we wanted to explore a different kind of platonic love.
Linsey Stewart: We’re not these characters necessarily, but we loved that we could see ourselves in them. It’s a movie that tackles mental health at times. Even though Suze is a mother, she’s finding the love of a different child. As aunts and uncles who are invested in our nieces and nephews, we can speak to that. It was really important for us to get into the meat of Gage and Suze. That’s where the interesting, exciting, more nuanced stuff is, and it’s a place that we wanted to explore.
Dane Clark: When you say “coming of age film,” people usually think that’s teenagers in high school. But this moment for Suze is a coming of age as well. She’s going through perimenopause, and her child’s moving out of the house. She’s dealing with not being able to have more kids of her own while getting stuck with one that she doesn’t want. It’s a transition, and we wanted to explore the pain and challenges of that situation while getting through it with some hope.
How did you come to collaborate with Michaela Watkins?
Linsey Stewart: Michaela was top of our list from day one. We just love her, and we got to send her the script. I think she really found a piece of herself in this character.
Dane Clark: The other day at the Q&A, she said when she first heard that the script was about an empty nest mom, she was like, ugh. But thankfully, she kept reading and saw that we were trying to go against those tropes and make it fresh. She crushed it, and she was a pleasure to work with. It’s always nice to meet your heroes and find out they’re lovely humans.
Linsey Stewart: I was working on Workin’ Moms at the time, and Catherine Reitman and Michaela are close friends. When actors consider getting involved with projects, they like to know who the creators are. It was nice to have that commonality so Catherine could say that we’re not completely awful people.
How do you both approach the process of bringing an idea for a film to life? Is it a collaborative effort where one of you initiates the concept, leading to joint brainstorming? Does one of you take the lead in writing and development while the other focuses on the production process?
Dane Clark: We’ll bat around ideas together, and we both have to love the idea enough to want to write it. “Do I want to spend five years writing this for free?” is essentially the entry-level question.
Linsey Stewart: I think we’re at a stage where the ideas are pretty 50/50 between us. There’s no real possessive ownership. If we’re both enthusiastic about the idea, we’ll do it. We’re not scientists, but we call it a litmus test: we take that idea and try and work it through as long as we can.
Dane Clark: We look at it like, “Are these themes that we’re both resonating with? Do we both care enough to write this?”
Linsey Stewart: With the writing process, it’s all hands on deck. Dane does the “vomit draft” because I think if it were up to me, it would never get past the first scene.
Dane Clark: We outline together extensively until we’re both good with it. Then I’ll go and throw up a script. And then Linsey will go and delete all the words that I wrote. [Laughs]
Linsey Stewart: We go back and forth on writing, and then we’ll sit down in the same room and hash out whatever we need to figure out. In terms of directing, I think Producers are always a little nervous about Co-Directors. They’re not sure how it works or what the division of labour is. We do play to our skill strengths. I can sometimes be a bit more vocal. It’s not that Dane isn’t, but sometimes I get in there and want to mix things up a little.
Dane Clark: Her brain works faster. It’s almost like improv. I like to cut and then go and talk to the actors. We have different vibes that touch on all the little pieces of the production, and then we’re both satisfied.
Linsey Stewart: We both love the art of performance, so it’s never going to be one person’s domain or the other. With this project, I felt like we didn’t stop the scene and confer with each other at length anymore. How you react to the scene is probably 99 times out of 100, what the other person is thinking. We just discuss what we feel is necessary for notes or how we want to move forward and give each other the individual space to do that.
Dane Clark: And the only reason that works is because of communication and prep. If I’m talking to one department, and she’s talking to another, we both know what we’re going to say to each person. We just try to over-communicate to death, which is what any Director does in order to make something good.
Linsey Stewart: Collaboration does force you to have clear prep, but you need to leave space for the surprises that are going to come up in the scene on the day. Because we have to sit down and be on the same page, it really forces us to have to know what it is we’re trying to accomplish.
Dane Clark: As we all know, things go wrong on set. But if you have that established base plan, it’s easier to recalibrate and then figure out how to solve the problem.
Do you find after working on so many projects together, you’ve really nailed the process of co-writing and co-directing, figuring out your individual strengths and your working rhythm?
Dane Clark: I feel like early on, we didn’t really know what we were doing. You learn so much from each project, and I always want to keep improving. Our communication has gotten much stronger, and our roles have become clearer. But directing is something that you only get to practice for so many years. You can write all day from home for free, but you don’t have the option to do the actual directing on the floor as much as you’d like.
Linsey Stewart: I think now we just have a true understanding of what our strengths and weaknesses are, as people and as Directors and creators. I know that after a long day on set, I like to come home and be a hot mess for a while; just shower, scarf down food, and not think about the project for a minute. Whereas Dane gets right back to the table, looking at tomorrow’s schedule, and prepping the shot list. He has to get everything organized before he can take a break. And I appreciate that because, by proxy, I benefit from his need to tackle it right away.
Dane Clark: This only works because we’re different people. We can still respect each other, get along and be legally married. If we were both exactly the same, it just wouldn’t work. So thankfully, our personalities are different but complementary, so we work well together.
How do you navigate the balance between the personal and professional aspects of your lives? As a married couple who work together, do you have to carve out these spaces where you put work aside?
Linsey Stewart: I do think we do have to make a concerted effort sometimes to do that. We were just at this film festival, and we actually met a few couples who work together, and we were all talking about our experiences. Often, the perception is that working with your partner must be a disaster, but it doesn’t need to be thought of as a pejorative. It’s just such a really cool, interesting, rich way of getting to know your partner. For Dane and I, we didn’t go seeking this partnership. It just happened organically.
Dane Clark: Thankfully, we met at the Canadian Film Centre, so we were both into filmmaking, so this ended up working out.
Linsey Stewart: I don’t know our relationship any other way than how it is now. But that’s not to say that there aren’t challenges. We incur the failures that we have together together, so that can be challenging. When the mood in the house feels a little bit low, who’s going to be the one who helps crank it back up?
Dane Clark: We share the highs and the lows. Sometimes we’ll say, “Tonight, we’re not talking about work,” but then we’ll watch a movie, and it sparks some idea, and you start talking about work again. Sometimes, you can’t turn it off, but then again, sometimes you can’t turn it on. There are those blocks where we’re trying to figure out what to write next, even though we’ll bounce around a thousand ideas. So essentially, it’s an ongoing struggle. We try to put on different hats, like “relationship hats” and “work hats”, but often they’re blurred lines wearing the same hat.
Linsey Stewart: As we get older and keep evolving as people, we check in and try and figure out what the other needs. Dane knows when I need to procrastinate and not do anything. He understands that I don’t like to graze at work as much as he does – I like to go at it hard, and then I like to turn off. So it’s just giving each other those spaces in order to be the little individual snowflakes that we are.
How do you handle creative disagreements as Co-Directors who are also partners?
Dane Clark: Sometimes we’re not very polite about it. We’ll float ideas by each other and just be like, “Hate it!” [Laughs] We try to stand by the idea that it’s not “me against you.” It’s us against the project. That’s a really helpful way for us to distance ourselves and not make it so personal. It’s not saying, “your ideas are stupid.” It’s more that we’re talking about it and dissecting it.
Linsey Stewart: We all want to be treated with respect and kindness. When we go brainstorm on the couch, we’re colleagues and workers, so how do we stay true to those roles and be respectful? We have this other rule where we try not to fight on set. We just walk away, take a moment, and challenge ourselves to let it go. Because if we’re going to be in that space for the rest of the day, it’s not going to be pleasant. It’s really about parking our egos more and more as we get older.
Dane Clark: If an idea doesn’t work for one of us, but we keep talking about it and bringing it up, often the other person can come around and see what we’re saying and the passion behind it. It becomes an idea that we both understand.
Linsey Stewart: Something I’ve learned, which I don’t always exercise because I’m human, is it’s helpful to try and get past that tense moment. You can revisit it, talk about it at the right time, and learn how not to do it again. They say that couples have the same argument over and over for the rest of their lives, and it’s probably true for us. We just have different degrees of that same fight. We’re going to be acknowledging that fight for the rest of our lives and how to keep doing better than the day before.
What were some especially memorable moments on the set of Suze?
Dane Clark: There are two sex scenes in the movie with Michaela and Rainbow Sun Francks, and we were shooting both of those on the last day we had Michaela. We were supposed to have half a day to shoot these two scenes. We had them all shotlisted, and they were going to be these beautiful shots, nice frames, nice dolly-ins, and all that stuff. And then, as it sometimes does, the day got away from us – somebody was late, the camera gear was missing, and so on. By the end of the day, we had two hours left to shoot these two scenes, and then Michaela was hopping on a red-eye flight at 7 AM to go work on another show. So all these beautiful shots that we had planned, we just had to toss them out the window and switch to a quick handheld. We had a great chat with our DP, Jordan Kennington. We weren’t thrilled about it, but we knew that this was the way that we had to adapt. The options were to have these scenes look different than how we originally wanted or not have the scenes at all. We did all that prep before, and we still know the beats, so it becomes a question of, “is this scene still telling the story if it’s handheld and not as pretty as you want it to be?” Thankfully, we got the scenes just in the nick of time. It was a good example of a terrible situation turning out how it was meant to be, and we were able to pivot because we were prepped.
Linsey Stewart: It was a good learning moment for me because my fear was that this scene wouldn’t feel like the rest of the movie. Would I do it the exact same way next time? Probably not. But it was excellent to learn that in the heat of those moments it’s all going to be fine. One really positive memory for me about this film is that when we finished shooting, I felt different. Sometimes I feel a sort of existential dread after we wrap a project. I don’t know if it’s because we’ve grown as people over the last few years, but we ended up feeling so much hope for the film and as people who work together. That’s really the goal – movies are great, but at the end of the day, we also need to make sure that we’re going to be okay as a couple and that we can keep doing this together. Since the completion of this movie, we definitely grew from the experience and became stronger people, and that’s really all you can hope for.
Dane Clark: I think it’s a miracle when anything gets made. The amount of people that have to come together and make it happen is wild. We don’t produce, so I think it’s just magic. You should surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. We had great actors, and our Production Designer Mercedes Coyle and 1st Assistant Director Aiden Shipley were just excellent. I think we hired the right people and created a positive environment on set.
Linsey Stewart: And now we’re releasing it in theatres on February 23. It just feels nice that Suze is finally getting out into the world. It all feels so much more real. I’m so excited for people to see it!
See Suze in theatres nationwide starting February 23rd. Click here for showtimes and more info.
Click here for a full list of all the DGC Ontario Members who worked on Suze.
