Justin Cook chats with director Natalie Krinsky about her film The Broken Hearts Gallery…
When the book is written on 2020, there will be a short chapter in it devoted to the brave movies that ventured into cinemas, despite less than ideal conditions for theatrical distribution. And while, presumably, much of the chapter will be devoted to a certain large scale, cerebrally-stimulating mind-bender (that shall not be named), it would be wise to make mention of the modestly-budgeted romantic comedy that served as a nice bit of counterprogramming to the year’s regularly scheduled doom and gloom.
On a purely sentimental level, The Broken Hearts Gallery may be so effective at what it’s trying to do because it is strikingly innocent. Filmed in summer 2019, it serves as a well-timed reminder of life in a bouncy, brimming, time-capsuled New York City and all of the happenstance it has to offer.
But, framing all 2020 art within the year’s larger social context notwithstanding, The Broken Hearts Gallery, at its core, is really fun, funny and big-hearted, in equal parts being a contemporary rom-com and a throwback to genre classics.
The film follows Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan), a 20-something gallery assistant, who in one night loses her job and her boyfriend, only to stumble into Nick (Dacre Montgomery), a cool, guarded, hotel developer. An “emotional hoarder,” Lucy decides to channel her heartbreak into an art exhibit at Nick’s under-construction boutique hotel, where similarly-scorned New Yorkers display mementos from previous relationships.
Steering the ship was first-time director Natalie Krinsky, who wrote the film as a broken-hearted, recently unemployed 26-year-old, only to receive the call several years later that No Trace Camping wanted to produce the film — with her in the director’s chair. Another four years later, and the film debuted in theaters with a charming cast (also including Phillipa Soo and Molly Gordon) and an especially notable executive producer: Selena Gomez.
Krinsky’s production experience before directing was largely limited to writing gigs on 90210, Grey’s Anatomy and Gossip Girl, so the film marked a major departure from her usual on-set experience.
For the home entertainment release of The Broken Hearts Gallery, Flickering Myth was able to speak with Krinsky on a variety of subjects, from how she tackled her directorial debut, the state of romantic comedies in 2020, working with Selena Gomez and more…
In this movie, Geraldine and Dacre’s characters seem to mesh so well together because they almost have antithetical personality types? How did you initially get the sense that these two actors would have such a fresh, genuine chemistry with one another?
I cast Lucy first, and so Geraldine was who we hired initially. I had been a big fan of her work in Blockers and Hala, and I saw just the incredible range that she has and this amazing ability to express herself so well just with her face. And those eyebrows! I say I could write an ode to her eyebrows. And then, when she opens her mouth, she’s got this Lucille Ball sense of comedic timing, but can also hold vulnerability and depth underneath that. And so, I think she’s got this really incredible range.
After that, we cast Dacre. And the first thing we did, before signing and sealing everything, was having them do a chemistry read. And I think that always helps, even though it’s the first time these two people had met, and we’re in this little room in Los Angeles, the casting director’s office. It was totally blank, and it’s sort of this completely blank canvas to start, but I think you can always tell right in those first few moments if there’s going to be a little sparkle there, and there definitely was. And certainly in a romantic comedy, if you don’t want them to end up together, you don’t really have a movie. And I think from the beginning, you really do feel that you want these two people to end up together.
I understand that you wrote The Broken Hearts Gallery based on very personal experiences when you were roughly the same age as the protagonist Lucy. When the script was bought several years later, and you were asked to rewrite it, what was it like revisiting something you had written during a completely different period in your life?
I think any writer will tell you that, I would rather be buried alive than read something that I wrote six years ago [laughs]. It definitely can be cringeworthy. I think I had grown so much as a writer and learned so much in the intervening years so that was just very helpful from a structural point of view and from a character standpoint, to go back and improve on the original script. I think that a lot of the plotting changed in this iteration, and especially Nick’s character changed a lot, the love interest, just in terms of his profession and his point of view on the world a little bit. But, at its core, I think Lucy is very much the 25-year-old me in some ways. I think the soul of that character very much remained the same and her point of view remained the same, but it was definitely a challenge to get over that initial blow to your ego and dig in [laughs].
How does it feel to have released a movie that is in a lot of ways an ode to New York City, and the spontaneity of life there, in a time where a lot of what we love so dearly about the city has been put on pause?
I know, it’s a strange time. I love New York, and it really is a love letter to New York, even though we mostly shot it in Toronto, we only spent two days in New York. But I think that the movie is optimistic in its outlook. I think ultimately I’m optimistic about one day, hopefully in the near future, returning to the New York that we know and love because that’s the thing, you nailed it, the thing that’s so incredible about living in New York is that spontaneity and that ability to make things happen, whether it’s socially or artistically or whatever it is that’s filled with inspiration. And I think that that’s just part of the soul of New York and even in these difficult times, I don’t think that that will really go away. People in New York always push themselves to be really creative, and so I’m hoping that this time will yield some of that [creativity] and have more of that on the other side.
Each song on this soundtrack is so fun and spirited and really grounds the movie in a modern context. From Big Thief to Mitski to Kali Uchis, there’s such a wide range of artists on this tracklist. How did you go about choosing the needle-drops for this movie?
Oh my gosh, my music supervisor, Melany Mitchell is just an absolute genius, and I owe a ton to her. We started working together even before we shot a single frame of the film. We started together in pre-production, and what Melany did, which was incredible, was just make us a playlist for the film. Even before we chose any needle drops or any of the songs, just for shooting. On the days, we would sometimes play a song to get in the mood of a scene, and it really helped guide us as we moved forward into post-production, when we were actually choosing the music. We wanted primarily female artists, we wanted it to be really youthful and fun and convey that New York spirit and that energy. And so those were kind of our edicts as we were moving forward and Melany worked so hard to find all those different tracks.
And also, the final song in the film, which is an Ingrid Michaelson remix, [Ingrid] remixed just for us because we loved the lyrics and the idea of the song, but we needed it to be really fast and upbeat, so that was a gift also that Melany helped us snag.
Of course, this movie marks your directorial debut. What were some of the bigger surprises or lessons you took from this experience from a directorial standpoint that you think you would carry with you to future projects?
I was so enamored with the job, I loved it so much. I really felt that I found my calling. And so, I felt like I had limitless energy and I, honestly, was running on adrenaline, and that surprised me the whole time. My husband jokes that I maybe slept 24 hours the entire shoot [laughs]. I also think just having a true understanding of the craft and all of the incredible artisans and people that help take an idea into a film is truly unbelievable. The appreciation of that is something that I will carry forward.
I had been on set before on different shows and I had watched cuts before, but I had never really worked on putting a cut together with an editor, day in and day out. And the first time you see the first assembly, most directors will tell you, you put your head in your hands and you’re just depressed. You’re like, ‘I can’t believe it, this isn’t what I made!’ And then, it’s like rewriting, and the slow process of just every day chipping away, which was really tough for me in the beginning. And then, ultimately, I found such a deep appreciation for the post process and what’s possible, and so I think that is really exciting to know moving into whatever the next project is going to be.
So you would like to direct again in the future?
Oh my god, I would love it! It’s the happiest I’ve ever been!
One thing this movie got a lot of attention for was Selena Gomez’s involvement as an executive producer. How did she come to be involved with this project and what was your working relationship like with her?
Well, Selena, you know, has been producing for the last few years and has made some really incredible television. She got the script actually through her agents, they sent it to her, and she read it — and she’s no stranger to a bad breakup, we know [laughs]. She read the script and really loved it, and saw some of herself, I think, in Lucy, and in that kind of collecting. And so, we had a meeting, and I had brought my lookbook of what I thought the film was going to look like and feel like, and we just had this really incredible creative meeting where we talked for two or three hours about the film and about casting and all the various things that we were both thinking. She was incredibly supportive and throughout we would check-in, and she would watch cuts and we would have little chats. She was really phenomenal and has a great eye and a great creative sense, and so we were very lucky to have her.
What were some of the visual examples that you included in the film’s lookbook? Because a lot of romantic comedies are sometimes a little polished, a little overlit, but this has a genuine visual aesthetic, so how did you come to that?
I wanted it to live somewhere between what you’re saying — I have an allergic reaction to some of those overlit, almost false looking romantic comedies. I think sometimes they just aren’t reflective of the world, but I also didn’t want it to be totally indie, indie dull. I wanted it to live in this really warm glowy place. It’s definitely maybe a little bit of a heightened world in many ways, but I used a lot of photography. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those Selby books, which are about people’s spaces in their homes and how they collect things. And so, I drew a lot of inspiration for Lucy’s room in particular from that.
My production designer Zazu Myers and I talked a lot about the color palette, so Lucy’s palette, even in the lookbook was very, womb-like almost. It was pinks and yellows and these softer colors, and then when you go into Nick’s hotel those colors are very saturated because we wanted to, sort of, connect them, palette-wise. Nick’s hotel was deeper reds and deeper greens and deeper yellows, and Lucy is lighter in that color sense. When Harry Met Sally was actually a big inspiration for me because I think that that film feels like New York, and it’s got a realistic point of view to it, and so that was the one that I used with my DP a lot to talk about how I wanted the movie to look and feel.
A very welcome surprise for me in this movie was the Roy Choi cameo, just cause I’m a huge fan of The Chef Show. How did that cameo come about?
I’m also a big fan of The Chef Show, and I know that it’s a little bit sacrilege because Roy is really an LA chef [laughs], but to be honest, I just loved him and we wanted a real chef to play that part, and we thought it would be really fun for Roy to [do it]. And honestly, we just called and asked and he agreed. I’m a big food person as well, and I love cooking and love restaurants and love that whole world, so I was just a fan. Truly. And even bigger fan after having met him because he’s a lovely, lovely human being.
The Broken Hearts Gallery embraces diversity and is very naturally representative of people you would find in New York City. Some would say there’s almost been a revival of the romantic comedy in the past year or two — would you say the current state of the genre is starting to go in the direction of embracing that inclusivity?
I think so, and I hope that for all films. I think that we need to make films that are reflective of the world we live in, and the world we live in has a broad swath of people. That’s what makes it incredible and fun and funny and complicated and emotional, is just what the world looks like. That was something that was really important to me, I wanted it to feel like a young group of friends in New York. And that’s what they look like. And I do think the genre is definitely moving away from the kind of cookie-cutter examples of the 80s and 90s and early aughts. You can fall in love if you’re not a size two blonde, it turns out [laughs] — not that there’s anything wrong with [being a size two blonde]!
What if you saved a souvenir from every relationship you’ve ever been in? The Broken Hearts Gallery follows the always unique Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan), a 20-something art gallery assistant living in New York City, who also happens to be an emotional hoarder. After she gets dumped by her latest boyfriend, Lucy is inspired to create The Broken Heart Gallery, a pop-up space for the items love has left behind. Word of the gallery spreads, encouraging a movement and a fresh start for all the romantics out there, including Lucy herself.
Bring the fun-loving comfort of The Broken Hearts Gallery into your home! The film is now available on Digital, Blu-Ray and DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Many thanks to Natalie Krinsky for taking the time for this interview.
Justin Cook
