Art Imitates Life for Chelsea Peretti With ‘First Time Female Director’
Chelsea Peretti is in the unique position of getting a glimpse into exactly what her character Sam in her new movie is going through. The film is titled “First Time Female Director” and is directed by and stars Peretti as just that — it’s Peretti’s directorial debut.
“It really is art imitates life and life imitates art,” Peretti says of the experience of talking about the subject of the film and her own experience. “There’re so many times where I’m turning to someone like, ‘I feel like I am Sam right now.’”
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Peretti is in the lobby of her hotel in New York, “wearing my glasses because an email just made me cry in a good way,” and still processing the release of her film into the world.
“It kind of felt like if you had a newborn, and then there were 500 people in the hospital with me from every walk of life, every stage of life you’ve ever been in,” Peretti says. “So it’s kind of all a blur. The thing that meant the most to me is none of the actors had seen it. To have Kate Berlant and Benito Skinner and Megan Stalter saying that they loved it, those are people that I just love so much. Just to get that cast was such a huge achievement for me and just to feel like I got their stamp of approval was so meaningful for me.”
The movie centers around Sam, a theater writer in Los Angeles who gets tapped to try her hand at directing one of her plays for the first time. The idea came to Peretti, known for her acting role in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and writing on shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “Saturday Night Live,” in the aftermath of her booking a slot at Upright Citizens Brigade on Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles.
“I just wanted to force myself to write something. I somehow came along this idea that I was going to write an excerpt of a play, and then we would do a really pretentious Q&A afterward with the cast of the play and sort of in character and the play would be really bad,” Peretti says. “I’ve always loved these sort of Southern, rural drama tropes since I was a little kid. My mom took me to a lot of theater. We had Berkeley Rep tickets, which is an amazing theater. We went to ACT in San Francisco. So there was just this language of theater and these tropes that came to me very firsthand, so I just made this little slice of a Southern play.”
The original play was about 30 minutes long, but the real gems came from the following Q&A.
“The audience questions were really funny and kind of hostile. But they were just pointing out discrepancies and issues in this script. I was getting really aggressive back with them and being really hostile back. It was just really funny,” Peretti says. “I think comedy fans are so funny a lot of times in the things that they.…Obviously, their tastes are in line with whoever they’re going to see, so they were asking really funny questions.”
She wasn’t planning to take it any further, but slowly it turned into a feature film project, with Amy Poehler helping to produce. (Poehler also stars as Peretti’s therapist in the movie.)
With the character of Sam, she was interested in exploring the likability of women in the industry, particularly in the director role.
“I really was meditating on that and just thinking about the pressure of being like, ‘OK, well, you’re a female director and everyone wants to like you, and we’re supposed to like you, but what if you’re not that good?’ I was just trying to meditate on a variety of things at the same time,” Peretti says. “But it’s funny because there’s so much obsession with female characters being likable, even in comedy. There’s so much more pressure on that than if you look at ‘Curb [Your Enthusiasm]’ or you look at ‘It’s Always Sunny [in Philadelphia]’ or you look at any popular male comedy characters; I don’t think there’s really any pressure for them to be likable. For me, I didn’t find Sam to be that likable. I mean, I had empathy for her, of course, and her journey, but it’s weird. People really seemed to like this character.”
With the ongoing writers’ strike, Peretti’s next move remains in the air, but becoming a second time director is certainly of interest.
“I think part of why I enjoyed it is there’s just never a dull moment. As an actor, there’re a lot of dull moments because you’re waiting so much of the time for lights to be set up, this, that, the other. But as a director, while those lights are being set up, you’re talking about something else. I just found it very intellectually stimulating,” she says. “I learned so much that if I make a second film, which I would love to do, I learned so much about how I would do it next time.”
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