Collias in Cannes, wearing Louis Vuitton.Photo: Julian Ungano
The movie was shot over 12 days in Bedford Stuyvesant and then in the Catskills, where the tiny cast stayed in a rented house. “If you walked two minutes you were in the middle of nowhere,” Collias says. Having been a high school student in Los Angeles not long before stepping in front of Donaldson’s camera, this was a crash course in indie filmmaking. She met her costars, McCarthy and Le Gros, the day they began shooting: “I was kind of like, how is this going to happen in such a short period of time?” But she drew confidence from the older, experienced actors, whose enthusiasm convinced her they were doing something special. “James in particular,” she says. “He’s been doing indie films longer than I’ve been alive, so to feel that from him was important.”
Collias can’t tell me about the projects she has lined up—though one of them, she hints, is a film of much grander scale than Good One. I’ve caught her in a time of settling into her new life in New York—she has an apartment downtown, a coterie of art school friends—and she’s been reading books and going to exhibitions and plays and repertory cinemas, feeding her interests one by one. (She just saw the play Pre-Existing Condition, is determined to get to Oh, Mary! on Broadway, and is reading the grief-struck memoir Molly by Blake Butler.) “I feel very grounded,” she says, even though you can tell it’s a heady time. She was in Paris last spring for the Louis Vuitton anniversary show, an invitation from the fashion house that came a little out of the blue, and initially felt to her like a scam. But her mother is French and she spoke the language with her at home in LA and on summer trips to her grandmother’s house in France. She brought her brother to Paris and marveled at Nicolas Ghesquière’s creations up close. Another art form to experience; even more to take in. “The movement, the weight of the pieces, how they look when they’re actually being worn and walked in. I could go on a whole spiel about how exciting it was to see fashion like that.”