Julia Louis-Dreyfus was pretending to use an imaginary mixer. This was onstage during the Sundance Film Festival in January, during a spontaneous improv exercise to introduce her latest film, “Downhill,” at the annual Park City, Utah, festival. For her part, she manned the fictional contraption convincingly, but was it a subtle nod to her dual functions as actor and producer for this movie, a role in which she was among the key people mixing up this cinematic souffle?
Over the phone a few days after the film’s debut, Louis-Dreyfus laughs at the suggestion. “That hadn’t even occurred to me. It was just the first thing that popped into my head. But now that you’ve said it, let’s say I was going for something higher.”
That “Downhill” is close to Louis-Dreyfus’ heart is evident from the circumstances under which she became involved with it. The actress was still hard at work as star and executive producer ofHBO’s “Veep”when she was told that Fox Searchlight was developing a remake of Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s 2014 Cannes award-winner “Force Majeure.”
“I’m such a huge fan,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “When I heard from my friends that Ruben was interested and eager to have an American adaptation of his film, I said, ‘Oh my God, sign me up.’
“I thought it was a tremendous opportunity to put an American lens on this story and sink my teeth into the character of the wife and mother. It was an opportunity not to be missed.”
Like “Force Majeure,” “Downhill” begins as the story of a family’s alpine vacation before evolving into the portrait of a suddenly troubled marriage. In both films, it is the panic over a controlled avalanche that appears to veer out of control that sparks trouble. In “Downhill,” Louis-Dreyfus is cast as a lawyer, Billie, and she can find no defense for her real estate agenthusband Pete (Ferrell) when he runs away from her and their children during what could have been a disaster.
As a producer, Louis-Dreyfus was involved in all the hiring decisions. English writer Jesse Armstrong had written an early episode of “Veep” and was recruited to pen the “Downhill” screenplay with directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. “Silicon Valley” star Zach Woods, cast as Pete’s co-worker and friend Zach, was also someone Louis-Dreyfus knew as a guest actor on her show. But she had never met Ferrell. She only knew his work. In particular, it was his rare dramatic turn as an IRS auditor in 2006’s “Stranger Than Fiction” that sold her on the idea of Ferrell as Pete.
“I had the sense that he would be able to tackle not only the comedy but the drama of this film,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “When I heard he was interested in playing this role, we got together and met for the very first time. We talked about the script and his take on it and talked about how I was feeling about it. We got along as if we’d known each other for all these years and the fact that we didn’t is still baffling to us.”
One of the key changes between “Force Majeure” and “Downhill” is in the children. The couple in “Force Majeure”were in their 30s with children younger than 12. Billie and Pete are older and have teen twin sons.
“To be honest, I’m old,” says Louis-Dreyfus, who turned 59 in January. “We wanted to write that into the story, and we do allude to it, that they had fertility issues and we’re sort of factoring in, ‘Well, could they become parents at a late age?’ And so often couples who do that end up with twins. We thought that would make sense for them.”
The “Downhill” shoot took place in the Austrian Alps in January, February and part of March 2019. Staying at a luxe resort and getting to ski as part of one’s job might sound like the definition of a working vacation, but Louis-Dreyfus notes there were challenges that worked against that notion.
Their workdays started at 4:30 a.m. when a Sno-Cat took the cast up the mountain (so early in the day, the lifts were not yet operating). The short winter days made it a race to get an entire day’s shooting done before the light faded. And though actors are used to waiting while directors and crew set up their shots, it is not often that they have to do it while standing around in snow boots in frigid weather.
“我们必须改变位置和镜头和场景ll the time. Everything was constantly moving,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “It was very organic, only because the weather was changing. We had to follow the weather all of the time. It added an element of thrill-seeking to the making of the movie.
“I was astounded to see — I’d never skied on camera before — our amazing crew, who were able to ski backwards with cameras on their backs and the focus pullers who were getting you in the shot. I found the technical aspects of making the film pretty astounding. It was pretty intense, but it was also very playful.”
“Downhill”opens Friday, Feb. 14.