Interview With Writer And Director Colin West For LINOLEUM

Who knew a children’s science program, existential dread and Jim Gaffigan would go together so well? They really do just that in Linoleum, a 2022 film about growing older, whimsy, science, and all that goes with them: both the humor and the pain. I sat down with writer and director Colin West to talk about his new film, the legendary Rhea Seehorn and Bill Nye, how he channeled his anxieties into a mind-bogglingly heartfelt film and more.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.

Jackson Stern for Film Inquiry: So I wanted to start out by congratulating you on the film’s successful festival run last year and on it being the recipient of the Sloan Science Award at the San Francisco Film Festival, I’m sure that’s got to be a great honor.

Colin West: Yeah, yeah that was great and thanks for the kind words, for sure. It’s been quite a ride. Honestly, it’s like a great opportunity for like a filmmaker because, y’know, most movies are seen in the theaters and then maybe you hear about it online or something but it’s kinda cool to go around and travel with it and see it when people talk about it y’know, to come talk to me about it so I feel really happy about that.

That’s great. I’m very curious to know, as an up-and-coming director, was it ever intimidating to work with some already well known, very seasoned performers like Jim Gaffigan and Rhea Seehorn?

Colin West:Y’know, it’s funny, like I felt sort of… I don’t know what, maybe nervous or something before production started but at the same time, like the second I met them it was like all of that went away. I mean they’re just really normal people, I think I was intimidated in a certain respect but I think that I also felt confident in my approach to the movie and directorially and stuff like that so it wasn’t too bad. I was just sort of, y’know… if nothing else I was mostly just sort of star struck by these like incredible performers and just watching them in their process, I actually learned a lot from them so that was sort of really fun for me actually.

I’m sure. And speaking of [Jim] Gaffigan, was his role, this kind of this Bill Nye type figure and his “antithesis” as the film describes, was that role written specifically for him and if so, why cast a sort of former, well known comedian instead of a seasoned actor?

Colin West: Sure, sure, well it’s really like, I don’t necessarily really often write with actors in mind, sometimes I do for certain roles, but for this one, the writing process was so long and the character had so many sort of developments along the way as I was writing so I never really had like a very strong physical picture of a person in my mind, y’know, like an actor in mind. So, Jim‘s name sort of came up through our casting director, Jessica Sherman, who’s incredible, she got our script out to the agencies and it was kind of floating around and Jim‘s agent got ahold of it and thought Jim would be good for it. Jim read it and loved it and so we had a conversation and I immediately like… y’know, it’s funny, I didn’t ever think like “Y’know, this guy sort of… like doesn’t have the experience, it was more like I was so impressed by how thoughtful he was in that first phone call and how much “homework” he had done, more or less, and he came in with such great ideas and such collaborative intuition that my gut was immediately feeling very happy, I was like “He gets it, he really gets it and he’s passionate about it” and he is, he’s a really passionate actor and I think he came into this in that way. He obviously loves comedy and he’s very good at it but one of his real passions is dramatic acting and to see him in this film sort of shine, especially playing both characters, I think was a joy for everybody.

Sure, sure. And what was it like working with Rhea Seehorn?

Colin West: God, Rhea Seehorn, I mean… yeah, you love her, I can see that.

She’s fantastic.

Colin West: She’s so fantastic and speaking of seasoned, the amount of hours and hours of film and television that she’s done in her career is astounding and she was so quick, her ability to sort of take notes and mold herself was astounding, I just really found her incredibly impressive and I continually felt so honored to have her on this set. She was very, very good. She came in with great ideas for her character and really helped improve the script along the way, in the last few weeks leading up to the shoot when she came on, she had some ideas that were really forward-thinking for her character so we made some changes to the script and I think it helped a lot, to sort of arc her character much more strongly.

I got Spielbergian, whimsical vibes – there’s a dinner scene near the beginning that I got major Close Encounters vibes from and then as it goes along, it kind of descends into this Charlie Kaufman-esque existential angst so I was wondering what some of your inspirations were, directors or specific films, for this?

Colin West: I mean, look, for my film to be in the same sentence as Spielberg or Kaufman, of course, it’s an honor. I am glad people are seeing that because those are some of my favorite filmmakers of course and I think it’s hard to… y’know, I grew up on these people, Charlie Kaufman was like… brain explosion, through the years, still is, I mean I think he’s still making some of his best work now. Those two are of course huge influences, that kind of nostalgia that Spielberg brings, those 80’s films that he made, were definitely considered as far as the look and the sort of over-saturation that we were dealing with in post, and of course, Charlie Kaufman, Richard Kelly‘s Donnie Darko was a huge inspiration for it of course, especially that first act and some of the set up and then there’s this French film called Lola, it’s from the 60’s, it’s Jacques Demy‘s first film… do you know this movie?

Yep, I know Jacques Demy, huge fan of his.

Colin West: Oh my god, huge fan of Jacques Demy, thank you for knowing who he is!

Absolutely.

Colin West: And so, I remember seeing his film, Lola, and it was sort of serendipitous because it was maybe a few months before we started shooting and I was just like “Yes! Here it is!” and it really made more confident in this sort of ensemble world could be built with all of these overlapping characters so that was sort of a great “You can do this!” and “That was his first film and this is sort of my first bigger film” and so forth, so yeah, those are some of my influences.

Sure… and speaking of that 80’s vibe it gives, I really enjoyed the overly lit, saturated veil it has and I was just sort of wondering why this sort of style instead of a more contemporary look?

Colin West: Sure, it kind of comes down to the production design and the cinematography and the production designer, Mollie Wartelle, was really instrumental in making the look of the film work because the film is… you don’t know this at first but it’s set in three different time periods all at once, without letting you know so it was a challenge but it was an interesting challenge to kind of deal with and we kept saying, we kind of kept returning to this idea that the film is set in a tone, not a time. So, that was very important and I think it was all about kind of constructing this world that felt cohesive and felt sort of like our planet and right next to it but just a little bit different.

And then Ed Wu [cinematographer], had the same conversations of like “How do we make a look in camera that feels sort of nostalgic but that also could be contemporary?”. So, we actually came across these lenses that were new lenses but they were made to look sort of vintage and that sort of thematic idea really clicked for us. We were like “Oh yes, let’s go down that route” and some of these angles we were using… it was a really fun challenge, I think that’s what made a lot of people on set enjoy the process too.

Absolutely. There are a lot of common themes throughout the film about getting too old to fulfill your dreams and there are these fears of never living up to your full potential… are these fears you’ve personally grappled with, especially as an aspiring, up-and-coming filmmaker?

Colin West: Totally man, of course. All the time. Y’know, I don’t think that’s ever gonna go away and I don’t think that’s a bad thing but yeah, I’m always sort of like aspiring and dreaming and like I said, I was writing this script back in 2015 and at that time I was just starting graduate school for film and I was sort of feeling like there was a liftoff happening but I was trying to like put those insecurities down on paper I think and I think a lot of that, that idea of like I’m maybe not old but I do know what it’s like to be older than I was and I think this idea of looking back at your life and looking forward to what you think your life could be is very much a part of this movie and it’s very much sort of this existential angst that I have all the time that sort of neurotically drives me crazy.

And then, continuing onto that, there’s this line spoken throughout, almost a motif, “It’s not that simple” as a young artist, have you heard this a lot from family or peers and did it give you more drive to kind of fulfill your dreams and destiny so to speak?

Colin West: For sure, yeah my destiny! I agree, like, I think that motif, that saying, “It’s not that simple” that everybody says in the movie at some point is actually more of a sort of scientific idea and I tried to thread throughout the movie this kind of scientific concepts that are thematically reflecting what’s happening in the story emotionally to these characters. And so that idea of “It’s not that simple” is a very common thing in the sciences where it’s sort of about “The simplest answer is usually the right one”. And I think that often we overcomplicate things, I definitely do, I sort of overthink my “destiny” and it prevents me from living in the moment and towards the end of the movie, Jim Gaffigan‘s character says “Oh, it’s not that simple” and he ends up saying “Well, I think maybe it is”. And it’s just sort of like this zen, “let it go” kind of a thing that I think helped me in my own process of making this movie, to sort of overcome some of those challenges.

The opening of the film is this homage to Bill Nye, it has these very fantastical, DIY effects and that comes into play in the final act as well. Where did the decision come from to combine those more Charlie Kaufman-esque moments with this children’s television style?

Colin West: Yeah, well, I was talking to this person who had this screenwriting podcast and they were asking about it and I’ve kind of latched onto this idea that I could use the idea of this television show as a conceit to sort of stitch the movie together as a kind of resident theme capsule, for lack of a better way of putting it. It really made me feel that… it all clicked. So as I started to interweave the show throughout the movie, it often was used as a transition, throughout scenes and throughout characters. And look, I love Bill Nye: The Science Guy, I’m still a huge fan, I wanna meet him so bad: I was at a festival that I think he was at and I was searching for him and asking everyone where he was at but I think I missed him which is too bad but… one day, one day. But yeah, huge inspiration for the movie, I think that idea of wonder and dreaming is a big thing with Bill Nye and science and this idea of making it fun for a kid to learn about the world around them I thought was really cool and really important. So, yeah, I guess it just comes from my love of that and my love of science.

And on the topic of those final moments, without giving too much away, it ends on this cathartic, rethink-what-came-before sequence. During the writing process, was it tricky to perfect making all that cohesive?

Colin West: Yeah, it was. I think the script gave the same feeling as the final film does but they’re very different, the way in which it ends, because it all kind of happened in the editing process, as far as the film goes. We knew that the end would be this kind of orchestral montage of character conclusions but we didn’t know exactly how that was going to happen. So yes, on the page when I had written it, it was a little more comprehendible and dialogue based and when people read the script, they would tear up and cry and I think that was sort of a big selling point for the script in the first place. But going into the film, I knew that we would have to speak using the language of cinema to make this final montage work. And going back to Kubrick talking about how much the edit is cinema, that being the only thing that exists in cinema that doesn’t exist in other mediums. And that’s really true, it’s sort of like writing a book, performing on stage, and then editing. There was just a lot of writing done in the edit and my incredible editor, Keara Burton, had a huge hand in that so yeah, it was a challenge but it was fun too, along the way.

Sure… did a lot get cut or was it pretty close to the shooting script in the end?

Colin West: It wasn’t that a lot got cut per se, we did cut a little bit of dialogue but it was more like… the movie is like a time travel movie in a big way. And with that comes all these paradoxes. So it was pretty quick that we recognized that we needed to throw logic and just sort of focus on emotional conclusion rather than logical conclusion with the movie. And in the last ten, fifteen minutes, it reveals a lot but as credits start to roll, often people have told me like “I feel all these feels but I don’t know why!”, it’s that kind of idea. So, I’m proud of that but it was definitely a long process to get there, I think we spent over 50% of our editing time on that last ten minutes, which is kind of funny.

And my final question, you’ve mentioned in previous interviews that the film is very inspired by and dedicated to your grandfather. Has your family seen the film and what was their reaction to it?

Colin West: Thanks for asking me that. Yeah, they have seen it, they really like it. My parents have been incredibly supportive along the way. My grandparents, those are my dad’s parents that it’s sort of focused on or based around and I think it’s been great to watch it, travel all around. It played at a festival back at my hometown, Cinema Columbus, Columbus, Ohio, so I was very taken by everybody who showed up and supported it and old friends coming out of the woodwork to support it. It’s been a very great process in that way.

Film Inquiry would like to think Colin West for speaking with us.

Linoleum is now playing in select theaters across the US.

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