STRESS POSITIONS & Interview With Theda Hammel & John Early

Let’s not kid ourselves, four years post-COVID-19 pandemic, have we felt in touch with reality? The pandemic sparked this ultimate craze of the hyper-real and in combination with the craziness of our day to day; the “boredom” has heightened, and the media since the pandemic has reflected such. While the industry’s stability still hangs in the balance of the higher executives, I’m looking at you David Zaslav, and Bob Iger, with incoming a year “anniversary” since the start of the historic dual actors-writers SAG-AFTRA/WGA strikes. Meanwhile, the yearly film festivals and releases since the COVID-19 pandemic have suggested newer ways of thinking about our internal and external isolation. With Bertrand Bonello‘s Coma, both genre expectations and creative filmmaking are placed at the forefront, with the uses of social media’s restrictions and the power of cellular communication becoming a tool for our characters. Meanwhile, other films have fallen victim to placing the film’s narrative around the pandemic. Thus, creating an atmosphere that feels self-centered and locked within its time constraints, with the narrative thread of the pandemic’s “datedness” is still up for debate. With this, however, writer, director, and star of Stress Positions Theda Hammel uses the pandemic both as a backdrop and means of survival for our characters and to compelling effect, displaying how the pandemic changed our ways of transaction, transportation, and perception.

In Stress Positions, we follow the day-to-day of Terry Goon, a recently divorced queer man with nothing to his name. He has internshiped at an office, where he would meet his husband, and is forced to live in his ex-husband’s three-story “party house” with his male-model Moroccan nephew Bahlul, and neighbor Coco, while Hammel‘s Karla occasionally makes her appearance to make even more of a mess. It is a screwball comedy unlike any other. Using both its COVID-19 pandemic tandem with its funky sense of surroundings, alongside continuously compelling character writing. Hammel‘s razor-sharp wit and sense of humor are embedded in John Early‘s sensibilities. With every step he takes within the “party house”, sort of a cause and effect occurs, as if he is sheltered in his mind from the inside as much as the outside; and his feelings towards the virus are hyperbolized to comedic effect, in my view making both Early‘s performance so much more relatable and charming as Terry Goon. Early is a superstar in this fiery and layered performance, and thanks to Hammel, is given a closed-ish open door to his personal life, with still questions to be asked that don’t feel relevant. What I love about Stress Positions comes with the coordination from director Theda Hammel and John Early, both in their performances on-screen more on that in a minute), but keeping that ambiguity both within the filmmaking and Early‘s kind of gatekeeping performance, which then allows Hammel‘s Karla to walk over him in incredible feats of mean and rudeness. Hammel is crude and hysterical; always biting to bring Early down to a delightful degree while also shouting out her feelings of the world. Like many others, Hammel feels restless in her own life, using the house and the relationship with Terry as a haven at points. “Fiction is freedom” is what Hammel‘s character repeatedly yells throughout the film, as her life has been boiled down to someone else’s successful art.

Hammel‘s writing feels so claustrophobic, within both worlds, she creates, both the mental and physical that each character tries to find some sort of escape from the nauseating nightmare. Hammel’s filmmaking matches those confined spaces expertly with Terry’s “party house” nearly acting as a character. It adds a more bare-bones feeling to the filmmaking language at play, with every action having mortal consequences. Hammel‘s direction for these moments of high-strung physical comedy in a fast-paced hyper-real world feels something akin to a Howard Hawks‘ screw-ball comedy, in which a man feels “in over his head”. While Hammel never makes it the outright creative intuition, it’s something I found profound. While it is no secret that the film’s supporting cast Qaher Harhash, Amy Zimmer,  and John Roberts bring such delightful supporting roles, Hammel focuses on Goon’s suffering, using that both as a cathartic sense of “it’s going to be okay” given Early‘s remarkable physical qualms to his character, and also makes his situation so much more dour. There is a frame halfway through the film that I feel Hammel grabs focus from in a character perspective, understanding the house’s architecture, and its heightened comedy and complex physical performance that make Stress Positions one of the most creative debuts of recent. Hammel has a mean, but fair approach to her screenwriting and filmmaking that makes her a voice to recognize within the independent film space.

Stress Positions is currently in limited release in New York and Los Angeles, expanding wide within the coming weeks

Film Inquiry had the extraudinary chance to discuss with actor, writer and director Theda Hammel and actor John Early to discuss Stress Positions.

John Biz for Film Inquiry: Hi Theda! How are you?

Theda Hammel: Good. How are you?

I’m good. Thank you very much for taking this time out of your busy schedule to talk with me about this.

Theda Hammel: Absolutely!

I’m just a huge fan of this film!

Theda Hammel: Oh, wow.

It came out of a perfect time for me, I’ve seen it twice, and I’m seeing a third time on Sunday! I’m a senior college student and it just blew my mind when I first saw it. I just want to ask you a few questions about it.

I just love the idea of the party house. I think it is such a catastrophe kind of obstacle, but kind of character for Terry and everyone involved. What was your intuition behind that? Was it always a party house?

Theda Hammel: Well, actually, no, it’s sort of evolved. The idea was really that first it was going to be almost like an Airbnb house – we had a house lined up that was decorated in a really egregious millennial Airbnb style. And that was a long, long time ago. Before we even got financing, we’re just going to shoot it in a friend’s house. And then the idea, we couldn’t shoot in that house, I didn’t know how we were going to decorate something. And so the idea then became what if we just found one that was  unrennovated mid-decoration, and that somebody, not unlike the film crew, somebody like Leo had sort of parked themselves in that house and decided to use it to their own, just sort of racket. And that allowed us to find a sort of house in ruins, which I think had a wonderful quality and texture to it. And then also, to just let it stand in as basically like, the gay world as the party house is just the gay world. And Terry is trapped in it, John’s character is trapped, and Bahul is sort of trapped in the basement. And, ultimately, Karla, the character that I play, who has nominally left the gay world, you know, she’s very eager to get back into that house, by one way, under one pretext or another. So the house really is a nice stand. And also the fact that Terry’s trying to clean it over.

I think each of the levels add so much, it’s also hilarious, because you have Coco at the top and everyone else. Yes. I think it adds hilarity every time it goes down the stairs. It’s always something really funny. My favorite shot of the whole movie is when you see the projection of Terry and Leo’s love, and he’s just broken back – I think that is the defining moment of the movie because one it’s such a sad story of Terry, but it’s also he’s a broken man. I just liked the idea that he’s destroyed men, it reminded me of Bringing Up Baby, which I kind of want to go to my next question, what was your kind of influences creatively? I’m for screwball comedies. I just saw it as like a Howard Hawk- ish screwball comedy.

Theda Hammel: Well those screwball comedies are really, really exciting models to draw on. Very, very hard to replicate and I am haunted by their example, because it’s so lofty, it’s amazing. But the idea really that I got was not from Bringing Up Baby so much as like His Girl Friday, and The Awful Truth. But in both of them, Cary Grant plays somebody who is trying to sabotage their ex wife’s new relationship in a weird way. So in His Girl Friday, Hildy, Johnson, and, you know, I forget, oh, my gosh, Russ, Rosalind Russell, has remade her life. You know, she left the newspaper business and she’s going with Ralph Bellamy, and he’s a good man, and they’re gonna move up to stage and he works in insurance and all the excitement and fun in the party is over, basically. And Cary Grant gets wind of that. And his first mode of action is to sabotage it to get in a way to like, be like, no, no, no, I know who you are. I know exactly who you are. And I’m gonna come and I’m going to ruin this reputation that you’re trying to build for yourself with your new sincere fiance. And Karla, the character that I play does something similar to that like, she knows that Terry is trying to remake himself sort of as a, as a good boy, as a good uncle as a helpful benign parent, a caretaker, a homemaker, all of these kinds of things. And for her, the first thing she does is come over and immediately try to sabotage that by being like, well remember this what you did you know, do you know about fire islands like? And so I do think that elements of sabotage is a very screwball right?

Absolutely, I think it plays well, especially with your character kind of like crashing in and just being setting him into this place. I think that adds kind of more humor to John Early‘s characters’ presence because he’s just like, very standoffish, and you kind of just grounded in reality. One of my last few questions is, obviously with the with it setting being locked down was it kind of difficult to kind of go back to those early times of COVID. And kind of remembering that.

I think, if we had shot it any later than then we did, it would have been a lot more difficult. We shot it in the fall of 2022. So there COVID protocols were still in effect, they were a little looser than they would have been earlier. And the memory was still alive, sort of for people enough that you could refer back to it. But I would say like, just speaking personally, as soon as the movie was wrapped all of that world, it was like that whole world was totally closed off and locked in the past. And like thinking about wiping down food containers and, you know, being on zoom all the time, like, you go, Oh, that’s something that is totally buried now in my memory. And that didn’t work for the movie, I wouldn’t have any will to access it or to dig back into those memories, because there is such a such a weird, unpleasant time. I think it wasn’t enough it was alive.

I think John Early’s character just handles that perfectly. Especially because it’s just so humorous the way he does it. And I think you kind of find great i to me, at least I find great solace in that it’s just a young person. Was that more of a hyper specific trait that you came up with? Or was that all John?

Theda Hammel: John’s vigilance in terms of COVID protocol, and it’s more emblematic of a tendency that I think many people like passed through it in the COVID phase, like there were people who became very, very vehement about their protections and their distance, and all that kind of stuff. Uh, just as often those same people have almost like a reaction against it, when they throw it all away. Like, as you know, they got tired of it and are willing to like, Okay, enough with an asset, never want to wear a mask. Again, I’m never gonna, you know, wash my hands again, or something like that. The character is hysterical, about the theater of it, at first wiping things off, spraying things off, wearing huge, enormous gas masks.  But when push comes to shove, he will drop it in an instant, like he will fold like a Kleenex, and has no will to maintain it. And I do see that tendency, you know, broadly in the culture, I felt like there was a big theater of vigilance. And then there was, and then when the moment came to let it all go, here was the kind of yielding there was like a yielding laxness thing that I, I think the character embodies. Just what John brings to it is that he performs that consummately and in such a comedic way, you make that into something funny.

Specifically, I think your performance is just so hilarious. Here’s a guy who you feel, you want the best for him, but he’s constantly just going through these emotional moments in his life. And I think that’s something I could take solace to as like kind of 20 something year old, kind of just struggling through life and that’s where I’ve just really drew close with it. Just kind of want to ask you a few questions on your performance. I know there’s a kind of a lot of physical but also kind of joke like quality to it. There’s kind of a clear difference of that. Which do you prefer the more stunted physical comedy or more of the conversational.

John Early: I don’t want to pick one but I would say as I get older I prefer the conversational requires less of a physically like I this was a crazy like we delayed this movie because I had back surgery. It was very, very scary for me to do those pratfalls. We did them in a very safe way to get a stunt coordinator we have mats underneath but like it was, it wasn’t scary for me because I didn’t feel coerced into doing it at all. It was scary for me, because I know myself and I know that if I can make someone laugh, I will not think about my own safety. And this has always been a problem for me. If I get on stage, I will like do backwards roles, like I will do anything – I have essentially been concussed and untreated from like pretending to fail on stage. You know, so that was really scary. For me. It was like I knew we didn’t have a lot of time. And I knew that I wanted to, I was so touched that Theda wrote a movie that was as high minded as it is, but also has pratfalls like that’s why I was like, I can’t wait, we have to do this right now. That’s always the goal for me is to combine the high and the low like that. So it’s hard to choose. But as my body continues to fall apart, I would say the conversational.

You mentioned going back previously, that it’s kind of a movie to shoot right now. And I agree with you, I think it’s the really the only COVID movie that has kind of really tackled that subject in a very, not really showing much of the world, but still giving an idea through kind of hyper specific characters, was it difficult as an actor to return to that kind of tumultuous time for everybody?

John Early: It wasn’t, you know, like, it was because it’s fake, you know, it’s, like, not COVID but a movie making is fake. I didn’t find it kind of traumatic in that way. But I did find actually, I think very cathartic to make fun of some of those early adaptations we were making and COVID that were, you know, that we’re on the outside and we’re about public safety. We’re often by the wrong people. And I include Terry in this like us to alienate people, you know, like code the COVID protocols quickly became a tool for people to kind of surveil each other and to judge each other too poorly and it became the vehicle that we got to like, kind of air out our national grievances with everybody. I think what this movie kind of accomplishes especially with you and your relationship with status character is that it’s so mean with each other, but there’s still a very long standing love for each other. It’s just not showing it in a way. Yeah, no, there is a there is a big moment when they get, I love the scene in the doorway after the big birthday party scene where-

That’s, I am very sorry to intrerrupt, that is my favorite shot in the whole movie to me. And I’ve said this since I saw it at Sundance was the sequence of when you are kind of hunched over your back and you see yourself in the door doorframe. But you also see in the background, a picture of Theo and your character married. And I think that it is just it speaks to the film is both like a comedy of just like, this is a crazy high jinks moment. But also that there’s it’s sad. It’s a sad story in the in the beginning?

John Early:Absolutely. And yeah, there’s I think underneath there is a lot of meanness these characters are vicious with each other. But there is like if you if you’re patient enough with that, like there is a real sad core to this. That I think I think everyone gets pretty, like humanized. And by the end, right? If you’re some people aren’t,

I think we also Theda and your character specifically have crossed a nice threshold barrier is that it’s also yes, this is a mean person, but and kinda is unfollowing the wayside, but it’s also he’s been screw over in a situation where it’s you feel bad for him, you want to root for him.

And I think that’s, that’s the driving force of it. And your performance just captures that so wonderful. It’s just it’s so i It’s I’ve been thinking about it for so long. It is I just have to say that. Just tour. My last question. What was the since your character so hyper specific in just where the time period was? What was the kind of direction data was giving you? Just to give you that understanding of this is the character that you’re playing?

John Early: Well, we talked a lot about he talked a lot about, and this has kind of always been one of my preoccupations comedically, and so it’s kind of in like, all of my work, which is this kind of like, this day care, this gay guy who’s kind of like, enjoying the moment of like, kind of cultural like progressiveness, a little too much like, like, gay marriage, like the gay marriage or Supreme Court ruling. It’s like that, like this kind of character I play and everything. It’s like, he’s he would have I imagined Terry would have been really kind of using that at parties to like, kind of bring attention to themselves to talk about the landmark ruling. And, you know, that’s so I think, Terry’s specifically when this movie is happening, is kind of gay identity no longer has cultural cachet. And he’s, like, full of resentment about that.

Like the discourse through social media and through like, our crazy, crazy world is changing so much every single day. And I think he’s, he’s, I’ve described him before as this, but I think he’s like the gay millennial, Tony Soprano. He’s kind of like, you know, Tony Surrett, the beginning of sopranos, Tony Soprano was like, What happened to John Wayne, you know, that one of the real men, and I think, I think like, I think Terry has a kind of reactionary thing in him, like, what happened to just like, gay guys, you know? And is that why is that? Why did everyone move on so fast? Like, wasn’t this supposed to be like, such a big moment, like, wasn’t? Like, I think he feels entitled to, to be celebrated just for being gay. And so, I think he’s seeing the discourse shift over to Carla, because of like, the trans discourse and, and I think he’s, I think that is the source of there’s we talked a lot about that and kind of the humor about the darkness of that right to begin.

And so prior, so, just a side note, prior to this, where you two were, what was your relationship to Theda prior to this?

John Early: I have been very close friends with Theda since like 2009. We met in a kind of very, very low tier New York theater. And, and we were co-hosts of this variety show called Show gasm I did in Midtown, for like five years and and that’s where we really kind of established our, I would say, like mutual comedic worldview and our rapport you know, and then we did a Wallace Shawn play together, Maria Bruce, and I produced it and he started it and like, and that’s my thing. We got a little more serious as collaborators. And then yeah, so we’re old friends. She knows me very well. And that’s why this script is so specifically suited to my sense of humor.

There’s so many moments where I’m like they have to be really good friends because this is just me. But that being said, thank you very much again for speaking to me about your performance. I am going to be there a MoMA. So I hope to see you there.

John Early: What is that basic poster behind you?

So I go to film school, and this is the poster. It’s perfection.

John Early: Beautiful. I’m so glad you liked the movie this much. Hoot and holler, scream off the rooftops

Film Inquiry would like to thank Theda Hammel and John Early for taking the time to speak with us!