When director Jeff Baena's producer told him she had been looking for a film to shoot in Italian medieval villages, he had the perfect pitch.
It was for his latest movie, “The Little Hours,” a comedy that follows a group of mischievous nuns in a medieval convent. The cast features Baena's romantic partner Aubrey Plaza, Alison Brie, Kate Micucci, Paul Reiser, Adam Pally, Dave Franco and a plethora of cameos.
“I wanted to do something a little bit more feminine after my second movie, 'Joshy,' which was so masculine,” Baena said.
Turns out, making a film about nuns in the Middle Ages wasn't such a hard sell. Baena recalled:
“When I brought up this idea [for 'The Little Hours'] to my producer, she [said] one of the investors — who had previously invested in my first two movies — had been asking for years for people to shoot in these medieval villages that she has access to.”
A month later, Baena was in rural Tuscany scouting locations for “The Little Hours.”
Baena cast several actors in the film that he had worked with previously. He says he thinks of them as the “mother dough” for his movies.
When he visited The Frame, Baena talked about having actors who know his process can set the tone for the rest of the cast:
When you have new people coming in and you sort of want to show them the ropes, it's always easier to have people that know the process and are able to sort of just do their thing, and then everyone can kind of follow their lead. I find that really useful. Plus, who doesn't want to be around these people? I mean, Paul Reiser's one of the best people in the world. Adam Pally ... I love writing for him. And Aubrey's my girlfriend so it's a really great shortcut when you're making a movie to be able to around the person, because otherwise you'd be gone for like four five months and not get to see them. Plus, she's an amazing actress and I always want to work with her. I couldn't think of a better partner than her.
The screenplay of “The Little Hours” is based on a story in “The Decameron,” a collection of novellas by the Italian Renaissance writer Giovanni Boccaccio. Baena was intrigued by Boccaccio's depictions of life during the Middle Ages:
For us, when we think about the Middle Ages, it's sort of this rarefied, distant time that we have no connection to, especially if you grew up in America. Nuns or priests, it wasn't like a calling necessarily, it was almost like they were forced into it ... It was almost like this punishment ... like being in a prison. And the vast majority of women that were in these convents didn't want to be there. And a lot of times they were rebelling by doing crazy stuff. They were getting wild and getting drunk and having sex acts and getting busted all the time for this.
Boccaccio, he was kind of making light of the situation and just sort of how hypocritical this all was. And how vast of a difference between what we thought was going on and what really was going on just blew my mind, and I wanted to kind of highlight that.
Though the film is set in the Middle Ages in Italy, the characters speak in contemporary American English and obscenities are often involved. This was a deliberate choice for Baena:
Some people think the whole point of it is to have nuns talking like sailors. And for me it was less about that and more about just nuns talking like us ... My ultimate goal was to humanize these people, people that we think of as being something that we have no connection to ... They're just like us, just in a different time period with a different set of circumstances. Obviously minus the technology ... I just sort of figured the best way to kind of get through that is just have them speak in somewhat contemporary but non-slang language that we would relate to.
Even though it is a comedy, Baena aimed for realism and naturalism in the film. He says everything in the film is historically accurate — from production design to wardrobe. When it came to filming a particular scene involving nudity, Baena says it wasn't an issue:
I wasn't expecting that amount of nudity to be portrayed. I thought I would just have to figure out ways to shoot around it so it didn't look like I was avoiding nudity. When the performers arrived, they basically offered it ... It was sort of like a snowball where everyone kind of just was down with it, ultimately, because they believed in the movie and they wanted for it to achieve what it was trying to achieve.
Before directing his own films, Baena worked for director David O. Russell. He recalls a prophetic dream and experience he had during this time in his career:
I had this really weird dream where I was driving in a car and there was this big, white, sort of spherical motorcycle ... There was a little reflector light on the side of it and I clipped it. And just as I passed by it, I saw a cop and I was like, Oh god, I'm going to get a ticket for doing this. And then as I looked in my rearview mirror to see if this cop was going to pull me over, a green truck lost control and hit me from behind.
A couple days later, I was paying real close attention my driving, and I was at a stoplight and I looked in my rearview mirror and a green truck went out of control and hit me from behind. Just like in the dream. And there was all this dust in the air ... I told David, I told everyone about this dream, and everyone was like, I can't believe it — your dream came true! And David, for whatever reason, was just so fixated on this white motorcycle. And I'm like, What about the green truck?
Hours after the accident, Baena's almost could not open one eye because some dust from the accident got inside. Russell's then-wife, Janet Grillo, took Baena to the eye doctor and they discovered he had an ulcerated cornea. Baena says:
If I hadn't gone to the doctor, within minutes I could have actually lost my sight. And then we realized that the cap being knocked off the big white spherical thing was, like, my eyeball, and that little thing was like the ulcer. It was super insane.
Despite the harrowing experience, Baena continued to work in the film industry. He wrote several screenplays with Russell, including “I Heart Huckabees.” Baena says he learned a lot working with Russell:
When we were writing together it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I mean, he's such a genius and so smart. And being in your early 20s and working with someone who's established like that and has such a clear vision — I just learned so much from him.
We would sit side-by-side, sometimes being in a doctor's waiting room, wherever we would be we would just be constantly writing together. And I think we wrote four scripts together. And, yeah, he mentored me in terms of writing and, to some extent, directing. And I'm thankful for everything I learned. There's what you learn in school and then there's what you learned with someone like that, and there's no comparison.
To hear John Horn's interview with Jeff Baena, click on the player above.