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Rooting its central imagery between lush foliage and rushing rivers, director India Donaldson’s Good One continues the great cinematic tradition of pairing existential themes and questions against the backdrop of nature’s enveloping spell. 

The film focuses on a queer teenager, Sam (Lily Collias in a true breakout role), as she goes on a backpacking trip in the Catskills with her dad, Chris (James Le Gros), and his best friend, Matt. Sam spends much of the film sandwiched between the egos of these two men, who occasionally break their bickering to ask for her validation if one is losing an argument. Though never labeled as such, Sam is the de facto caretaker of the two men, simultaneously expected to be mature enough to withstand their teasing while also being too young to understand the depth and nuances of adulthood properly. She spends most of the film keeping her frustrations simmering at low frequency. In many ways, the film becomes about that moment of discovery when we realize our parents are just people, prone to their own vices and suffering under the weight of past and present angst. 

Good One minds the horrors and unsaid tensions in the awkward silences, making the film feel very-lived. “The way that this story is constructed is that these characters have a lot of time to be together in a car or on a walk. I thought a lot about this balance of who’s comfortable with silence and who feels the need to fill the space. Then there’s this element of when people fill the space, what are they filling it with?” Donaldson shared. 

She and Collias spoke with The Spool about crafting backstories for characters beyond what’s on the page, the intentionality behind depicting Sam’s queerness, and finding Donaldson’s favorite shot of the film in the edit. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I read that during the times you two would meet, “rehearsal” consisted less of talking through the nuances of the script and more of having general conversations about art, life, the creative process, etc. How did those conversations influence your performance, Lily, once cameras started rolling, and if that affected your direction, India? 

LC: India and I had conversations about Annie Baker, and later, she brought me a whole stack of Annie Baker plays. I just went in on them and realized how much of Baker’s work revolves around silence and its importance. That helped me feel comfortable with the fact that Sam doesn’t have a lot of dialogue. Even so, though, there’s so much to explore in those moments. I still have those plays. 

ID: They’re yours for life! I wanted Lily to feel comfortable with me and express anything to me. I think letting my actors know I trusted them was most helpful because it enabled them to do their best work. I hoped it allowed Lily to trust herself, which I think she already does so much as an artist, and I wanted her to feel that. Especially because we didn’t have a lot of time to shoot this film, I just wanted everyone to feel respected and trusted.

As a character, Sam doesn’t have many speaking lines. I know you shared that you wrote diary entries to get into Sam’s head. I’d love to hear about the process of crafting those entries and what writing them was like. On your end, India, you offer glimpses of Sam’s life, such as her interactions with her girlfriend, but how much of her backstory did you build out? 

LC: The diary entries were really fun for me. It was kind of in the way that people make playlists for their characters and have these little gateways that I don’t think are very serious but just another way to try to get to know them a little better. Writing spoke to me more than music, especially for a character like Sam. I thought about certain moments in her life with her best friend and just certain moments I felt like before this trip with her dad that she would’ve written about. It was a workshop for me. 

ID: I felt like all the clues I wanted to give were in the script, and then I wanted to leave it to Lily to make the character her own. I cast her because of what she brought to it; there are things that I couldn’t have projected onto the character, and I wanted to give Lily space to build upon that and have her secrets and whatever else she tried to invent for the character. 

India, I know the basis for this story stemmed from the camping trips you’d go on with your father and his friends. Lily, have you gone on a lot of hiking trips before this? I’m curious if you were learning all these new skills (like pitching a tent) on the job … 

LC: (Laughs) Camping is so foreign to me. My dad was nothing like that. He’d rather stay in a bed bug-infested hotel … no I’m kidding; I’m sure he would get into it if he needed to, but we were just never that kind of family. But I’m learning all these tricks like putting dirt in bowls when you’re cleaning them, but I’d turn to India and be like, “What am I doing?”

ID: (Laughs) She would say “Why am I doing this?” 

LC: I learned so much from that. I was almost a little envious … I wish I had experienced more of this. I went on a camping trip with friends for two days and two nights, which was the extent of my camping experience. There was a bathroom five hundred feet away, so it wasn’t real camping. 

When writing the dialogue, India, you avoid the trap of each line being exposition. There’s also that notion that in real conversations, you often respond to something said five beats ago. What was your process for writing dialogue? 

ID: I had an idea of what all three characters were bringing into this trip, what was going on in their lives, and how they felt about it, and I let all those elements bleed into the story. I thought a lot about this balance of who’s comfortable with silence and who feels the need to fill the space. Then there’s this element of when people fill the space, what are they filling it with? I was always thinking about the subtext of why a character was speaking … if in lines, you happen to get a little bit of information about who they are or what their personality is, that’s great.

But I was focused on the following: What is the purpose of their speaking now? Is Chris trying to embarrass Matt? Does Matt not want to be alone with his own thoughts, so he’s just rambling? I read these lines myself and thought about the characters’ different speech patterns. I also encouraged the actors to make it their own and to change it if something felt weird. I wanted them to feel like what they were saying was authentic; that was more important than the precision of the language. 

LC: It’s interesting when you’re dealing with a father-daughter relationship because often, you see a disconnect where they’re not listening to each other. It was fun to figure out and play with that dissonance. It’s very natural, and especially when these characters are with each other for an extended amount of time, you have to tune out. 

There’s this great moment where Sam purses her lips when Matt goes on one of his rambles. It was very funny, and the awkwardness between the characters was so tangible and felt. How intentional were those expressions … was that an instance of your tight script-writing, India, or was that something you brought, Lily?  

LC: Yeah, there was no written expression in the script. 

ID: There would be an occasional stage direction with an emotional cue, but for that scene in particular, we haven’t specifically talked about Lily’s process. Still, she brought a lot of specificity to her reaction. the way she listened, with so much specificity, was not on the page. The words were just a scaffolding, but she brought them to life. 

You had said, India, that much of the “mood,” especially for that pivotal campfire sequence, was found in the editing room with your editor Graham Mason. There’s this powerful shot where after Matt says the gut-wrenching line that turns the film, we see Sam’s horrified reaction but Matt’s looming head obscures it. How did you both land on the final sequencing of that scene? 

ID: In particular, we covered that scene more than other scenes because so much of the film’s tone was riding on it. But that shot you’re talking about is my favorite shot of the movie and part of Lily’s performance. The cinematographer, Wilson Cameron, found that shot. We didn’t plan it, but he found that impactful shot where the audience could look at Sam almost through Matt when Matt was in soft focus. There’s another shot of her profile in a silhouette. These shots came together to give us emotional information and invited the audience to experience everything happening at that moment. Full credit goes to Graham, who beautifully found that scene’s rhythm, especially in such a quick time frame … we cut this movie in ten weeks! 

Speaking to that intentionality, Matt doesn’t speak after the campfire scene. His silence is striking, especially since he’s so loquacious in the earlier parts of the film. It’s almost like the movie puts him on mute. Was that intentional, or did you have other lines for him scripted … 

There were more scripted lines. This was another moment in the shooting process, and in the editing process, I saw an opportunity. There’s this sense that Matt feels this intense shame, amongst many things, after that moment. In a sense, the film ejects him a little bit from the story and focuses on the relationship between Sam and her dad, but there’s also this sense that he ejects himself. He chooses to step away from this story as much as the story chooses to step away from him; it’s this moment where the film and character are in agreement on how this is what’s best to do. His absence allowed for the emotional impact of what comes after to be more felt. 

On that ending, there’s this pivotal sequence where Sam is fed up with both men and is in the car with the doors locked while her dad and Matt stand outside. I remember thinking, “Is Sam about to drive away?” 

ID: (Laughs) Yeah, just driving off into the sunset. 

Was there a take on all of you doing that …

LC: (Laughs) No, but that’s what so many of my friends and family thought. 

ID: I was interested in setting up the expectation that she might or suggesting that it was an option, but then, ultimately, she’s still who she is. Change happens incrementally, especially amongst people who have deeply rooted relationships and dynamics. It was interesting to think that Sam was toying with the idea of driving away at this moment, but in her mind, she was not actually going to drive away in her rebellion. Her passive-aggressive gesture of rebellion comes a little bit earlier. That’s what felt true to the character.

What was it like for you, Lily, to play these different versions of Sam when the film was not shot chronologically? 

LC: Before each scene, we’d give ourselves five minutes to talk through what’s happening. We had these conversations about “Here’s logistically and realistically what’s happened, what’s not happened” at this time. That’s the kind of stuff that works for me and keeps me on track. If I went too far in trying to process, I would lose track of the here and now. 

On a rewatch, something that stood out to me was the handling of Sam’s queerness. It’s not an overstated part of her identity as much as it is present, but it serves as another layer of alienation between the men she surrounds herself with. 

ID: I like it when I see queer characters in film and TV, but it’s not the main content of their storyline. I also like it when it is. For Sam, I didn’t want Sam’s queerness to be a source of turmoil for her at all. But it does operate in the way you describe; her dad doesn’t care, and he’s fine with it, but there’s still so much disconnect between them and their lived experiences, and her queerness is just a piece of that. Matt treats it in a joking way but also in a way that’s significant to the story that Sam being queer will protect her from the unwanted advances of men. 

LC: Especially in this day and age, where more parents are thankfully accepting of their children, there are still these underlying tones of how parents accept this and the motives behind accepting it. That’s interesting to see between a father and a daughter, especially because in the same conversation, Matt jokes about how men are terrible and that women need to be protected from men. Without spoiling too much, seeing that get threaded out in the film itself is fascinating. 

Lily, between this film, Palm Trees and Power Lines, and the upcoming Altar, what draws you to these darker takes on coming of age? 

LC: (Laughs) I noticed that too. People ask me, “Are you drawn to something?” I’m just drawn to passionate, truthful work. I guess I love this niche genre of darker coming-of-age stories because they feel a little more unbiased and are something people can be more willing to listen to. 

ID: But Lily can do anything. Somebody should cast her in a big comedy! She’s so funny.