Joe Swanberg sets his first feature in nearly a decade against the vast landscapes of Anchorage, Alaska, a marked departure from the cramped apartments and coffee shops that have long defined relationship dramas. Joe reflects on what it meant to trade those intimate confines for bush planes and sprawling terrain, and how directing on that scale changed his day to day approach behind the camera.

Known for building loose, outline-driven scripts that let dialogue emerge in the room, Joe considers whether a larger crew and the added complexity of shooting in Anchorage forced him to tighten his structure, or whether his cast still found room to reshape scenes on the fly. He also touches on returning to 35mm for this production, and what that format brought to a story centered on people navigating their messy thirties from a more reflective, slightly older vantage point than his earlier work, without slipping into easy nostalgia.

This marks Joe's fourth collaboration with Jake Johnson, and he weighs in on how their long partnership keeps evolving, particularly given how closely this story draws from his own life. Joe also opens up about directing Dakota Fanning and Cory Michael Smith, who had no prior films of his to measure this experience against, and what that dynamic looked like without any shared history to lean on.

(Photo credit: Mitchell Hansen)