This is a conversational interview (YouTube) where Amber Tamblyn discusses making a dark-comedy film, inspired by a real adoption experience and a tense trip to Italy. She explains that prior adoption scams, a late-match with the birth mother, and being six weeks from the due date during the trip informed the story; she and her husband co-wrote the film during the pandemic as a love letter to their son, who has a cameo and is five-and-a-half years old. The film blends silly violence (shown in the trailer) with personal family material and was created partly to process uncertainty and to celebrate their family.
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So I was watching the. The trailer for. For your movie that you and your husband.
Yeah.
Did.
Yeah. Called I don't understand you.
I don't understand you. It's hilarious, the trailer, like so funny.
Thank you.
And so basically in the trailer, what I could tell is that this couple goes to Italy and then.
Through a series of events, they end up just having to kill people to cover up the last one sort of a thing.
Yeah.
And then they have a surrogate. Is the surrogate back in L. A?
Yeah, the surrogates in California goes into.
Labor with their kid and they have to go back. It's pretty. Pretty hilarious.
Yeah, it's a. It's a really fun.
So the best part of the trailer is when they just ran somebody over with a truck and they're like, when we get back to L. A. We can't do this. We can't just kill people.
Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we're going to hit violence from like a silly end and a series end today.
But it's in you somewhere for sure. It's funny. What was the process for. For getting that made?
It was really interesting because we had the first act of the movie is real. We had been in the adoption process for a while. We had been scammed, which happens more than you would like it to, I suppose. And we had kind of taken a break. And then it was about to be our 10th anniversary. We had this big trip planned. We had kind of like the. The scam had kind of like split us. Not in any direct way, but just we were sort of like reeling from it. And we processed that kind of very differently. And we were like, should we go? Should we not go? And then a couple days before, and we had stopped. When you're in adoption, they send you like a paper when a situation comes up. And it's like, Janine is a 37 year old waitress. She has two children already. She's underemployed. She could be these potential fathers. She wants to place with a queer couple, a lesbian couple, whatever, you know, just a bunch of information, like sort of very surface level information. There's been no exposure to drugs or alcohol. You know, Would you like to apply for this? Oh, thanks. Circumstance. You send your stuff about your family. She reads that if she likes it, you guys get on the phone. We hadn't applied in like six months. And then right as we're about to go, David was shooting a movie, I was at home. We both got this one and like both had a weird feeling about it. And we're like, maybe this is the right one to send in for again. Start over, essentially.
What did the sheet say?
Nothing interesting. I mean, nothing. No, Nothing out. Yeah, just feeling. And then we sent it in and two days later we had matched with this woman and that's the mother of our son. We were. Went on this trip and the whole time, the first time we talked to her was like set minutes after we landed in Italy. It was so tense and we were.
How far along was she?
We had six weeks about oh wow. To till he was born. And so, you know, we're there and we're like. You're so emotionally open because you're like the thing that happened before could happen again or some other terrible thing could happen. And there's a reason that you get a nine month window, you know, and lead up to having a kid and we didn't have any. And like, you know, we didn't have a crib or anything. We had nothing, you know, so we're like, okay, should we just bail or what? And then in our kind of the chaos of that feeling, I get us stuck in a ditch on our actual anniversary in like the sort of Hills have Eyes part of Italy and we're both like terrified that we're going to get killed or abandoned or left for whatever, you know. And that's where the movie came from. The pandemic started. We had. Our son was born. He was cool, you know, simple potato. We had nothing better to do, so we just started writing together and not even with the direction because we're like, we don't know when the business is going to happen or if it will ever happen again and. And so we just wrote what we wanted to write and made each other laugh and kind of made fun of each other in this fun way and.
Yeah, it kind of has that vibe.
Yeah, yeah, it was loose and fun in a super cool way.
Are you proud of the way it turned out?
It's so idiosyncratically us and it's also like such a love letter to our kid and.
Yeah, I hadn't thought of it as. It's kind of a tribute to your son in a way.
Yeah, totally.
When do you think he'll get it?
I think he gets it now. I mean, in that it's like.
How old is he?
He's five and a half. I mean, I think he, like, he can. He's in it. He's with a little. He's in it for a minute at the end of the movie and he got to see himself on the, you know, big movie screen, and that was, like, something wild for him. And he, like, knows he's in a movie with Nick Kroll, and he, like, hears him in cartoons, and he'll be like, oh, Nick's in this movie, huh? Like. Like the one we were in, you know? So it's like, it has some meaning to him. Like, he'll always know that we love him. We. You know, we. That this was a five years of work about how much we pursued this reality as a family.
He's gonna have an incredible relationship with movies.
Yeah.
Like.
Yeah. He already wants to do A Good Chance.
He's. Yeah. He's an actor or something.
Yeah. He wants to do him. He's like, when we told him we're doing another one, he's like, can I work on it? And you're like, yeah, what do you want to do? And he's like, I don't know. Maybe I'll write it. And you're like, okay, we should learn how to write. You know, like, literally write to work. Yeah.
