A filmmaker with a vast range of experience working on films, music videos, and promotional content for major companies like the NBA, Parker Croft is best known for his award-winning short Suncatcher and his most recent work, As Easy As Closing Your Eyes. Parker Croft co-wrote the feature film Falling Overnight, which garnered awards at Cinequest and gained streaming on major platforms such as Netflix. Parker’s talents extend beyond the camera; he holds acting credits in Big Little Lies and American Horror Story.
What can you tell us about your upbringing?
I grew up in rural Vermont which is basically like living inside of a postcard, you know, little stores where they know your name, covered bridges, everything is green, and the air is clean; it was paradise. My mom was a jazz singer who worked as a florist at the local grocery store, and my dad was an architect and a painter. I was their only child and I had it pretty good.
When or where did film as a career option enter the picture for you?
There’s not much of a film industry in Vermont, and movies were like rocket ships to me, they were the coolest thing I’d ever seen, but you could just make one, not a real one. The closest thing to making movies I knew of was local theater so that’s how I got into acting.
Then right after high school I moved to New York, I did not have a clue what I was doing, but I just kind of threw myself at it, trying to book any job I could get. I got lucky with a few things, small movies and what not, but for me it didn’t matter, being on set was the coolest thing I could think of.
Then, some buddies were taking a trip out to LA so I decided to tag along – even though I was always told it was basically a dumpster fire of a city – a week later I was packing up my Jetta and driving west to live in LA.
When I got there, I got this audition where they said if you book it you have to shave your head and I think most people were not into that, but I was down, and I booked it. That was my first T.V. job, Nip/Tuck. After that I just kept chipping away at it. Doing little parts here and there.
Working on set started to show me a little bit about how the sausage was made and I knew I wanted to be more involved in the process so that’s when I started screenwriting. I knew I didn’t really know anything about it, but I didn’t know much about acting either and it hadn’t gotten in the way, so I started to work on my first feature screenplay, Falling Overnight. I co-wrote, executive produced, and starred in the film which was truly a labor of love created with some of my favorite people.
We took it out on the festival circuit and I remember we could only afford one hotel room at Cinequest, so four of us shared a bed Willy Wonka-style. It was actually one of the funniest weeks of my life and we went on to win the Special Jury Prize.
After that, I booked a few acting gigs on shows like Big Little Lies, Once Upon A Time, American Horror Story, and Roadies but I still craved the experience of being behind the camera. So, in 2017 I started Paper Horse Pictures with my smoke-show of a wife Elisa Croft and started directing.
What are some of your favorite films and why?
In no particular order, these are some movies I really dig. I could go on and on about each of the film’s below but in general, I think they fill me up in a sense, they enrich me:
Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters
Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, Zone of Interest
Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, and A Hero
Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure, and The Square
Phil Tippette’s Mad God
Terrence Malick’s Badlands, A Hidden Life
Florian Zeller’s The Father
Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, The Master
Julia Ducournau’s Raw
Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful
Joachim Trier, Worst Person in the World
Steve McQueen’s Shame, 12 Years A Slave
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
Yorgos Lanthimo’s Killing of a Sacred Deer
Wes Anderson’s, The Royal Tenenbaums
Barbara Loden’s, Wanda
Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon
Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King
Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round
Jerry Schatzberg’s Panic in Needle Park
Todd Field’s Tár
Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges
James Cameron’s Titanic
Having worked on indie projects as well as large-scale Hollywood productions, what was a standout experience? What was it like, for example, on the set of American Horror Story
Productions are like boats, the bigger they are the harder they are to turn if they’re headed in the wrong direction. One of my most memorable experiences was shooting an HBO show called Lewis and Clark that got shut down after several months of shooting. It had a huge budget, like a 100 million bucks or something. When it started, it was my dream job, but everything that could have gone wrong did, from wildfires to tornado warnings, we fell so far behind that they fired the director and shut it down. It’s a reminder to me that no matter how big a project is, it’s fragile.
Are you more comfortable in front of or behind the camera?
I would say at this point I feel more comfortable behind the camera.
What are qualities that, in your opinion, make someone a great director? What separates the best from the rest?
I think that the directors whose work I really admire, have a clear vision for the story they want to tell, but beyond that, I think they are able to somehow bring out the best in their collaborators, they often seem to say in interviews, that they just pick the right collaborators and get out of their way. I don’t really know to be honest, but I assume having a big ego and a bad temper isn’t part of it.
Where did you and your co-writer, Aaron Golden, draw inspiration from when writing As Easy As Closing Your Eyes?
As Easy As Closing Your Eyes began with a quote and a question. The quote was from The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. Aaron stumbled upon it while doing some research for a different film. It goes “Death is a tragedy. . . when people speak of losing a part of themselves when a loved one dies, they are speaking quite literally, since we lose the ability to effectively use the neural patterns in our brain that had self-organized to interact with that person.” Essentially, there is a part of your brain dedicated to each person in your life. There’s a part for your mom, a part for your favorite teacher, even a part for that neighbor who’s name you can barely remember. Now, these little areas of our brains are unique because they only light up when we’re with the person they’re dedicated to. Consequently, these areas also go dormant for the rest of our lives when that person dies. There is literally a part of us that is lost forever when we lose someone we know.
The question was. . . what if we could get it back? What if we could actually spend time with that piece of our loved ones that lives within us? What if death was no longer the end of our relationships? What if we could grow old with a lover that was lost, visit our parents in our eighties, or raise a child that passed away? The time we spend with those we love is our most precious treasure and Amesten is the fictional key to unlocking more of it.
As Easy As Closing Your Eyes was developed with the belief that a new fictional technology like Amesten would allow us to explore one of the oldest and most universal human questions from a fresh vantage point. It’s a film that asks how far we would go to get more time with the ones we’ve lost, a film that explores the unanswerable riddle of loving what is mortal.
Love and death have been central to my work throughout my career and, in many ways, my work has been an effort to understand something that I fear. The specter of death has colored much of my experience since my mother was diagnosed with leukemia in my early twenties. It has given me a painfully acute sense of gratitude for the time I have with the ones I love.
Everyone I’ve shared this story with has given the same answer when asked if they would take Amesten to see a lost loved one. It’s the same as my own answer, an undeniable “yes”. That dream, that pull into darkness to be with the ones we’ve lost, is a stunning revelation of the human heart.
Walk us through the casting process. How did you go about looking for Lila, Kieran, and Bodie?
We really took our time to cast this film, I can’t remember how many tapes we saw but it was hundreds. We cast a wide net because you’ll often be surprised by something and fall in love with it. I’m pretty sure we cast Laura first, she was one of the first tapes we saw, and I was just blown away by what she brought to the role, it was such a sincere sorrow and it really broke my heart every time I watched it, and then we saw all these other tapes and there were some great reads but it was clearly her role.
Kieran, we saw the most tapes for, and we were really struggling to find someone who could make it work. Then I was hanging out with one of my oldest friends, Sean Marquette, who is known for his work in comedy, and I asked if he would mind reading the scene with me. He did and it just clicked. He understood the role like no else.
As for Bodie, we were pretty worried that we wouldn’t be able to find an actor that would be able to play seven and handle the material. I’ve worked with younger actors in the past and it’s just hard when you’re that young to, you know, show up and do the work, and do it well. I mean it’s hard for anyone, so when we found Dawson Sweeny, I felt like we struck gold. He was a dream to work with and a tremendously talented young actor.
How would you describe the atmosphere on set? What was it like working with Laura Coover and Sean Marquette?
It was one of the best sets I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on to be honest. We were a small film crew and we had our fair share of challenges and setbacks, and everyone really pulled together to make a place that felt safe and supportive for everyone involved. Laura Coover and Sean Marquette are both outstandingly talented actors and incredibly good people and I was fortunate to be able to collaborate with them.
As Easy As Closing Your Eyes is set in the future, but the technological elements are minimal. Was that a creative choice? Why did you choose to keep the science fiction minimal?
Yeah, that was definitely deliberate. I think there’s an instinct with a lot of sci-fi to show off a lot of ideas, and that really works sometimes but it can also get in the way. I didn’t want this film to focus on that. I wanted to focus on the characters and how they are affected by this drug. You know, if you think back ten years, the world has definitely changed a bit, but it’s not unrecognizable, it’s familiar, we still drive on the ground and talk on our phones, and that’s how I wanted this to feel, familiar but a little different, so I tried to keep a lot of the changes on the edges of the story.
Were there any important lessons you learned while working on the film?
Prepare as much as you can, and when the plan falls apart, be flexible.
What’s next for you? Are there any projects that we can expect from you in the near future?
I’m currently in pre-production on a surreal drama titled Kallisto that I co-wrote with Nolan Gould, which is inspired by the Greek myth of the same name. I’ve also just finished the script for my first animated project, based on the short story Hell by Spike Milliken. Looking into next year, I’m really excited to begin shooting the feature Late Radiance, which expands on the world we see in As Easy As Closing Your Eyes.
