With its ethereal atmosphere and stunning vistas you can’t help but gawk at, it’s baffling that Lake Tahoe is so underrepresented in cinema. Co-directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams’ debut feature Last Weekend gives the Northern California destination some much-deserved screen time, though the characters they choose to plop into the heavenly locale are far from angelic. It’s a film about miserable, self-centered people so obsessed with taking their frustrations out on each other that they take their beautiful surroundings for granted. If you’ve been to Lake Tahoe, you know that people like this are in great abundance. You also know that you probably wouldn’t want to watch a movie about their petty squabbles. Trust your gut.

The Green family is a perpetually dysfunctional clan of well-to-do yuppies who have been summoned to the family’s grand lakeside estate by their free-spirit matriarch, Celia (Patricia Clarkson). She along with her husband Malcolm (Chris Mulkey), who earned the family their wealth with his fitness center empire, welcome their sons Roger (Joseph Cross), a petulant investment banker, and Theo (Zachary Booth), a screenwriter. The boys are less than thrilled to obey Celia’s marching orders for different reasons, though Roger’s is the darkest: He made a multi-million dollar mistake and got fired by his firm, the news of which should be reported in the business papers shortly, surely spelling years of shame in the eyes of his father.

Theo’s brought along his boyfriend Luke (Devon Graye), who feels out of place in all the opulence, and another couple (Fran Kranz and Rutina Wesley, whose characters’ significance to the story is beyond me). His actor friend Blake (Jayma Mays) pops in later in the weekend. Roger’s brought his girlfriend Vanessa (Alexia Rasmussen), who’s stealthily trying to convince Malcolm to back her line of organic flavored water. (This mini-plot is genuinely funny.) Roger eventually fools around with starlet Blake on the lake, but this leads nowhere, like the rest of the film’s crises.

What he film boils down to is a maelstrom of unpleasant people slinging hateful barbs at each other over dinner tables, jacuzzis, king-size beds, and kitchen counters. The barrage of impoliteness is taxing. These people are so unsympathetic in their narcissism, bull-headedness, and obsession with their non-problems that it’s a challenge to want to stick around to see what becomes of them by the end of the weekend. Almost everything about the Greens is authentic to the idea of American affluence, but the film endeavors to do little more than observe the Greens and their idle bickering, which is so uninteresting you may feel more inclined to count the various tchotchkes peppered throughout the background. A handful of eye-rolling contrivances–a groundskeeper getting electrocuted, someone choking on food at dinner–do little to alleviate the monotony.

It’s a shame, because the cast is actually very, very talented across the board. Clarkson’s prowess is proven, and her scathing exchanges with Cross are wickedly intense and shocking. Mays takes a potentially cartoonish role and skillfully grounds it, and Graye provides the most fleshed-out, emotionally layered performance of the bunch. But the material is more sizzle than steak, giving excellent actors like Kranz and Rasmussen no room to flex.

The only nugget of thought the film offers is the reality that one day, the wealth and comfort the Greens enjoy will be gone. The bigger tragedy is that Theo and Roger have already slipped through Celia’s fingers, made clear by their venomous treatment of her. She and Malcolm secretly plan to sell the family vacation home, because there’s barely a family left to enjoy it. Clarkson elucidates this epiphany well, with her acceptance of loss acting as the film’s grand arc. But since Celia and her flock are long-since disbanded from the moment we meet them, it’s hard to identify the weight of what she’s lost, what she’s lamenting. The love is so anemic in Last Weekend that the film winds up being little more than a shapeless, cold family drama set in a pretty place.

Last Weekend trailer

A handful of siblings and their significant others gather at their wealthy parents’ home in Lake Tahoe for a weekend of awkward arguments, divulged dark secrets, and a couple of near-death experiences in Last Weekend, the debut feature by co-directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams. The film stars Patricia Clarkson and Chris Mulkey as the parents, with the rest of the ensemble filled out by young stars on the rise: Zachary Booth (Damages), Joseph Cross (Lincoln), Alexia Rasmussen (Proxy), Devon Graye (Dexter) and Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods).

In a roundtable interview with other journalists, we spoke to Cross, Rasmussen, Graye, and Kranz about what drew them to the project, the restraint of the material, shooting in a beautiful place like Lake Tahoe, their “intimate” rehearsal process, learning from their more experienced co-stars, getting permission to jump over couches, and more.

What about the screenplay hooked your interest? What made you say, “This is a movie I want to do.”
Devon: I thought it was just so funny. I was doing another movie at the time, and I was laughing out loud in my trailer. I never laugh out loud. It’s taking real things, and it’s hard to do to make those things funny. It’s grounded so much in reality and almost doesn’t know it’s funny.

Alexia: It’s that acerbic wit that Patricia’s character has. And one has the feeling that every mother is a little bit like that, you know? [laughs] It was nice to see that portrait and to see all these different people’s feelings about her. Throughout the script you can tell that each person’s perspective on the house is very clear.

Fran: Definitely Patricia’s character was pretty fantastic. It’s weird, because someone gets electrocuted and there’s a helicopter and she jumps in a lake, but at the same time, I liked how it was very un-dramatic. It seems strange, because I say that a lot. “It’s really wonderful how it’s realism, and yet it’s not so overblown.” And yet, there are these really momentous occurrences that would be very extraordinary in a typical weekend. I just thought there was a lot of restraint in the script, which I think is different and unique. I was happy to be a part of it, and the cast is really excellent.

Joseph: I think it was Patty that made us all want to do the project. When the script came Patricia was already attached, so when you see in your email box a movie that has her in it, you just go all-out and try to do it. Usually with a movie, somebody who’s already in it has to be somebody you want to work with. Whether it’s the writer, the director or the actors.

Talk a bit more about the restraint in the script. Jayma’s character could have been a cartoon, but isn’t, for example.
Joseph: She did such an amazing job of rooting that role. She’s fantastic in that part, and across the board with all the actors, nobody was hamming it up or playing into anything silly. With family dramas, I feel as if any moment it could tip into melodrama, and I think you want to explore all the exciting drama you can without making it seem over-the-top. It’s always this funny balance.

What was it like living in such a beautiful place during shooting? Were you living near the house?
Joseph: Lake of the Sky Motel. It was beautiful. We were right across the street from the lake, and we would go swimming every morning. Lake Tahoe was too much fun.

Fran: We might as well have been living with each other. When we were working on set, we were in a house, so that’s where we all hung out. It was like summer camp. It was an incredible experience. It was also September, so it wasn’t the tourist rush of Tahoe. It was [really hot] out when we started, and we could jump in this cool lake or go on a boat.

Alexia: It was dream location time.

You all have intimate relationships in the film. How did you work on bringing that chemistry to set?
Joseph: We all made out all the time.

Alexia: A big orgy.

Joseph: It was a big orgy, all the time. [laughs] We all spent a lot of time together.

Devon: We had a rehearsal period before [shooting]. We had three days of rehearsals in L.A. We’d sit at the table and script-read through the scenes, and we kept finding [scenes] where we were like, “We’re going to ruin this. We’ve got to save it.” We had to rehearse a little bit, especially with my character and Zach’s being a new relationship.

Joseph: It’s a really funny thing about making movies, whether or not to rehearse.

Alexia: [Me and Joseph] would read lines a lot together. I hung out with him and his real girlfriend.

Joseph: I was like, “I’m really sorry, but my real-life girlfriend is going to be home.” [laughs]

Alexia: It was nice to get to know each other before we went up with the group. You’re so nervous. Am I going to hate these people?

Joseph: It was a good group of people.

Chris was very complimentary of you younger actors. You had these two veteran actors around in he and Patricia; did you try to pick their brains, or did you learn from them by simply being around them?
Devon: I worked with Patty before on another film where she played my mom, and I found that I was doing little Patty things a year later. On this film, with this being a very different character, she does things so well that you just have to find where you fit into that equation.

Joseph: You’re attracted to working with older actors like Chris and Patty because you can just let them set the tone and follow and learn from them as you go.

There were two directors, so how was it working with them on set?
Alexia: It was interesting, because Tom Dolby is the writer, so there was that authority on that end, and Tom Williams had a more practical authority on filmmaking. [It was] like a right-hand-left-hand thing where they needed each other, so I thought it balanced out really well.

Fran: Personally, I think all the input you can get is great. It didn’t necessarily bother me. You had two people you could talk to in a position of authority.

Joseph: It was almost like with parents: If you knew one was going to tell you no, you would go to the other one. [laughs] You knew who to go to for what you wanted to do. One time, I wanted to jump over the couch and Tom Dolby was like, “No! You can’t jump over these couches! These are very expensive couches!” And Tom Williams was like, “Maybe Roger would jump over the couch.” I was like, “Thank you, Tom. I’m jumping over the couch!”

A handful of siblings and their significant others gather at their wealthy parents’ home in Lake Tahoe for a weekend of awkward arguments, divulged dark secrets, and a couple of near-death experiences in Last Weekend, the debut feature by co-directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams. The film stars Patricia Clarkson and Chris Mulkey as the parents, with the rest of the ensemble filled out by young stars on the rise: Zachary Booth (Damages), Joseph Cross (Lincoln), Alexia Rasmussen (Proxy), and Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods).

We spoke with Mulkey in a roundtable interview about working with Patricia, the talent of the film’s young cast, whether his on-screen marriage reflects his own, working with Dolby and Williams, shooting a love scene at the exact right time, and more.

Just as a preface, we interviewed Chris in a room at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. The setting was very…casual. Check out the images below and you’ll understand why this was the most amazing, epically sexy interview setup of all time.

Had you worked with Patricia Clarkson before?
Chris: No, but I like her work. It’s such a great match. You meet people and you go, “Oh this’ll work.” Like you guys. You guys walked in here and I was like, “I got you guys. It’s good.” Sometimes you walk into a place and you go, “Oh dude, this is so wrong.” You know what I mean? I think it’s magnetic electrical. I met Patty and Tom Williams and Tom Dolby, and I went, “Oh my god.”

In the film you play a couple that’s been married 35-40 years. What did you do to sort of ferment that relationship on set?
Chris: We talked about our love lives. I’ve been married for 32 years. We had a simpatico going. It was amazing. Patty and I had a ritual. She had a voluminous verbiage that she delivers with great acumen. The reason she delivered that well is because, every night when we wrapped, she would come up to me, put her little fingers together, and go, “Mulkey. After dinner. My place. Let’s go over the lines, please?” She’d learn ten more pages and we’d just run them and run them. Then we’d get on the set, and she was just…[makes some kind of spaceship noise]. There used to be a great TV show called “Soul Train”. Don Cornelius would come on. “Soul Traaaain!” Patty would get on set and it would be like “Soul Train”. She would smoke that stuff. Realistically, she wouldn’t smoke anything…but we did drink a lot of wine learning those lines.

You’ve been honing your craft for a long time. When you come onto a project with talented young actors like this one, do you make a conscious decision to impart knowledge?
Chris: Well, being an experienced actor, one of the things I try not to do is tell too many stories or anecdotes, because I appear to be the ancient sage on the hill. You know what I mean? All the actors in this film are super smart. I don’t have to say anything to them. Fran Kranz and I just finished shooting another film called The Living out in New York. We’d go back and forth, but these guys came fully loaded.

You were working with two directors. What was the division of labor like? What are they each like as directors?
Chris: In truth, it felt seamless. We never got to a point where there was a lot of indecision at all. Tom Dolby was the author of the piece, and Tom Williams was his editor, in a way. It was the originator and the shaper. I think that’s the term. They both worked on all the shots. I felt completely comfortable.

The family dynamics in the film are sometimes shockingly authentic. Do those dynamics reflect what you’ve experience in your own family?
Chris: The dynamic on screen was that…I think Malcolm was in the moment as far as time having gone on. He realized that he was nearing retirement and that the kids had grown. Things had freaking changed, right? Whereas, Celia hadn’t quite arrived there yet and still treated the boys as if they were in junior high school. Malcolm’s job was to wait for her to arrive patiently at that timeline. You do that with someone you really love, and they loved each other very much. Patty and I talked about that. A spouse gives another spouse a leash as far as how long they want to let them run with a certain assumption before they [talk to them about it]. Usually my wife gives me a long leash, and then she goes, “Honey, you’re done. You’re done. It’s been great, but no. That’s over now.” We did a Jane Martin play about the war in Iraq, and we did the world premiere in Minneapolis, took it to Los Angeles, and then took it to New York. On the third production we played husband and wife. We started this one particular scene, and I said, “Remember in Minneapolis and Los Angeles we did it this way.” And she said, “Honey, we’re in New York. We have a different cast. It’s a different show. Okay?” and I went, “Got it.”

That’s why you’re still married. [laughs]
Chris: It’s true. There’s that scene [in the movie] where Patty’s like, “I’ve had all these wrong assumptions about how things are with the kids!” She has that big moment, and we look at each other, and we start to kiss each other and make love. It’s at that moment that they come together, and she and I were always going, “How is that going to feel?” Luckily, when we shot it, to Tom’s credit, we shot it late in the movie. We shot that scene at exactly the right time in our relationship. We didn’t have to choreograph anything–we just knew it.

A handful of siblings and their significant others gather at their wealthy parents’ home in Lake Tahoe for a weekend of awkward arguments, divulged dark secrets, and a couple of near-death experiences in Last Weekend, the debut feature by co-directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams. The film stars Patricia Clarkson and Chris Mulkey as the parents, with the rest of the ensemble filled out by young stars on the rise: Zachary Booth (Damages), Joseph Cross (Lincoln), Alexia Rasmussen (Proxy), and Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods).

We spoke to Clarkson in a roundtable interview about questioning whether she could handle the role of Celia, the role taking a toll on her, being opinionated on set, working with her younger co-stars, and more.

Your character in the film says, “30 years ago, I could have never imagined my life turning out like this.” How about you, Patricia Clarkson?
Patricia: You know…be careful what you wish for. I think the life I have now is very close to the life I hoped for, which is very moving to me. Is it perfect? No. I’m 54 and I’m working like crazy, and it’s a struggle sometimes, but I think my life is pretty great. I’m quite happy with where I am now.

Your character takes a lot of crap from her family, and represents a mother’s struggle in a way.
Patricia: I always play mothers, but I’m not a mother myself. I have sisters who are mothers, I have a mother who is very much present in this world. But I think Celia was a bit of a tough “yes” for me, which is good for me. She was a complicated woman. Unsympathetic. I thought, can I do this? Can I enter this woman’s world and shift my sight? I had to change the way I viewed her life, and suddenly when I entered her world I realized, she’s right! [laughs] That’s all I needed to know. She’s right! That’s what I had to come to. I don’t care what anybody else says; she’s right!

Was that discovery a surprise to you?
Patricia: Yes. When I was preparing for this and we got to Lake Tahoe I was thinking, “I’m not prepared for this”.  I don’t look like Celia. I’m not a west coast person. I had to become more malleable, more loose and odd and different and lose my edge. I had to lose my lipstick, my tight skirts. I was like, “She doesn’t wear heels?” [laughs] It’s a really massive character. It really ate my lunch. It took a toll on me, and that’s a great thing. The metaphor of jumping off the pier was a little bit of my own metaphor. I didn’t know when I’d come of for air with this character. I just jumped. I had to just jump.

I had Tom and Tom–“Tom Tom” [laughs]–these two beautiful men on either side of me. They’re different men, but they’re both family men. Both very kind and fiercely intelligent. They each had me in different ways throughout this character. And I had these exquisite young actors who are just so beautiful and lovely.

With this being the two Toms’ first film and you with all this experience behind you, what was the working process like? Was it a lot of sharing on your part?
Patricia: Oh yes. I was opinionated as Patty, and as Celia I was even more opinionated! [laughs] I was a little tough, but sometimes the character invades your space, and Celia’s invasive. She knows what she wants, and then she has nothing, which is heartbreaking to me. What is she left with at the end of the day?

She asks Malcolm if he thinks that they’re good people.
Patricia: Can you imagine asking yourself that? Have you ever asked that to your family? “Am I a good person?” You have to come to a very specific place in quite a long, complicated life to say, “Are we good people?” But finally she’s able to ask that question. She wouldn’t have even had the thought of that question, but she finally finds the words and is able to articulate. She had what she thought was a full life, but maybe it wasn’t so full.

Judith Light plays your neighbor, and there’s that scene where she confronts you about selling the house. You don’t receive her with any defensiveness. It’s a beautiful scene of acceptance and forgiveness.
Patricia: That was the breaking down of Celia. That was charting when her cells start to reinvent. I remember for that scene I said, “Tom, she has nothing to lose.”

Your interactions with Joseph are so venomous.

Patricia: Joe is tough. That scene where he grabs me got really tough. Some of that was so close…He’s an intense actor. We had to go there, enter that world. We had to.

A handful of siblings and their significant others gather at their wealthy parents’ home in Lake Tahoe for a weekend of awkward arguments, divulged dark secrets, and a couple of near-death experiences in Last Weekend, the debut feature by co-directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams. The film stars Patricia Clarkson and Chris Mulkey as the parents, with the rest of the ensemble filled out by young stars on the rise: Zachary Booth (Damages), Joseph Cross (Lincoln), Alexia Rasmussen (Proxy), and Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods).

We spoke with Dolby and Williams in a roundtable interview about the history behind the house they filmed in, the strange effect the isolation of Lake Tahoe has on relationships, the serendipitous nature of the casting process, the deep roots of their partnership, and more.

The place where you filmed is exquisite. It’s significant not only in cinema, but for you personally.
Dolby: My parents bought the house in 1979. And, as you know, it was in A Place in the Sun in 1959, which is part of the amazing history of the house. There was a lot of restoration they had to do to it. There was some awful 1970s “casino carpeting” [as my mom called it]. They tore it up and found these amazing hardwood floors underneath. They found some vintage photographs and were able to restore it to what it was in 1930.

You called the house a crucible for what’s happening inside. Was that true in your personal experience, and was that what you used to propel your characters forward?
Williams: I’d been to the house a couple times before filming because Tom and I have known each other for about 20 years. It’s interesting and unique because of how isolating it is up there. When you’re in Lake Tahoe, you’re an entire world away from anything else. There’s a strange feeling you get there. You’re at a high altitude, you’re in a place where they had to carve out civilization from this really rugged landscape. There’s a sense that you’re sealed off from civilization and all outside influence, which can have an interesting effect on characters who know each other too well and characters who don’t know each other very well. You put them in almost a petri dish and watch the relationships unfold.

Dolby: It’s the fish tank effect.

Williams: You can’t escape, and there’s something great about that from a storytelling perspective. There are the literal gates within the film, but even if you got outside the gates, you’re so far from everything else.

Dolby: That’s what we love about the weekend form; whether it’s in novels or short stories or novels or film, you have this very limited amount of time. You have these people that are thrown together and suddenly put into this very intimate circumstance. A lot of characters in the film don’t know each other, so it’s just sort of seeing what happens in this great social experiment. For me, personally, it’s always been a very relaxing place. I’ve never had that dramatic a weekend there, thankfully, but that’s where the fiction part comes in.

Patricia and Chris have incredible resumes and have been doing great work in film for years, but this young cast is really savvy. Anyone who pays attention to the indie film scene knows they’ve done great work there and that they’re on the brink of coming into their primes as actors. Talk about assembling the young cast members.
Williams: We had three weeks of casting in L.A. and New York. We worked with a wonderful casting director called Mary Vernieu. She gave us some interesting people; there were some people who we asked to meet and some who came out of the woodwork. There were some people where, we had already cast certain actors, but they’d tell us to look at other actors who they knew personally, and we ended up casting them, too. Tom and I knew the characters so well. He’d written the first draft of the script about two years before we started the casting process, so we’d been living with these people for a while and had a good idea of what we wanted. When the people that we casted walked into the room…

Dolby: We knew that they were right. And they came to us through this wonderful sense of serendipity. We had obviously settled on Patty, and that was all set. The script went out to managers, and people started coming to us. Joseph Cross was actually one of the first people we met with, and we we said, “Oh my god, he understands this character so much. He’s Roger.” And then we had to go meet with 20 other people. [laughs] Devon Graye’s acting teacher in San Francisco is a friend of mine, and he had been telling me about Devon for two years. I asked our casting director if we could meet with him, and the second he walked in the door it was that same thing. We had a great conversation, and he totally understood who the character was. He actually helped us find our Theo. He recommended Zachary Booth.

Williams: And by the way, we talked to him on a Saturday and he was in Lake Tahoe with us two days later. Casting turned out to be an easy process.

What was it like working on a first feature together?
Williams: We were in boarding school together, we were at college together, we shared an apartment in New York…One thing that’s interesting about collaborating with someone you know so well is that you’re not worried about offending them. You’ve had every argument you could ever have about anything, from “What are we going to do today?” to “Why did you buy cilantro?” We go way, way back. There’s an honesty required amongst collaborators like that to where you don’t have to worry that anything you say will offend their sensibility. Any process of filmmaking is a collaboration, so to have the ability to both argue out ideas and take in ideas and do it all from a safe place where your ego isn’t on the line is important.