Filmmaker Jamie Dack is no stranger to film festivals. Her short film about teenage malaise in suburban Southern California “Palm Trees and Power Lines” premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival as a Cinéfondatio selection. A graduate of NYU’s MFA program, Dack’s films explore loneliness and insecurity. Partially inspired by a series of still photographs Dack took of her native Southern California, the feature “Palm Trees and Power Lines” is an adaptation of her earlier short, expanding and adding themes of vulnerability, grooming and exploitation.
Filled with rich imagery, the film stars newcomer Lily McInerny as Lea, a disaffected teenage girl in the throes of summer boredom. Her single mother (Gretchen Mol) seems to spend more time working on real estate and crying over bad dates than she does paying attention to the needs of her daughter. Lea spends her summer with her similarly disassociated friends drunkenly hanging out and hooking up. After the group almost get caught cutting out on a check at a local diner, Lea is rescued by the charming, much older Tom (Jonathan Tucker). However, what seems like the ticket out of her listless life threatens to have more consequences than Lea could ever imagine.
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In exploring these complex themes, director Dack and co-writer Audrey Findlay followed the steps of grooming behavior, subverting expectations about active protagonists. Lea thinks she is acting on her own choices, unaware of the manipulative power Tom actually holds over her. Evocative and challenging, ‘Palm Trees and Power Lines’ is a quietly devastating coming-of-age drama that signifies the beginning of a singular career for director Dack.
In honor of her film premiering at this year’s Sundance, Jamie Dack talked to us about adapting ‘Palm Trees’ into a feature, researching the difficult subject matter, and more.
When you were making that short, had you always thought you wanted to develop it into a feature?
I know that occasionally people make shorts that they are purposely making in order to act as a proof of concept so that they can make that feature or something like that. For me, when I went to make this short I was just trying to explore some of my experiences of loneliness and insecurity as a teenager growing up in suburbia. But even as I was making the short, and honestly, immediately after it premiered, I just felt like I haven’t even touched on half of the stuff I wanted to explore here. So I began adapting it – and call it an adaptation rather than an extension, because as you probably noticed, it’s quite different in scope, although it’s set in the same world and a similar character.
I definitely think it feels like an adaptation. When you began developing it you added a lot of characters, and obviously a major change in the narrative in terms of what the two are doing together, the teenage girl and man. How did you come to that narrative choice?
In the short, he actually always was supposed to be significantly older than her. But in the casting process, I decided to go with the actor that I chose, I thought he was the best for the role. So it did seem to be about her with someone older, but not as old. In the feature, I was very clear that this guy is twice her age. That there is a significant age difference here. That contributes to the power dynamics at play. Basically, what happened for me was, when I began reflecting on how I was going to adapt this, and what parts of my experience I wanted to bring to the feature, I was thinking a lot about some relationships I had when I was younger, and how, when I was in them I thought that I was in control of them and consciously choosing them for myself. But now that I am an adult, when I look back on them, I realize that that wasn’t necessarily the case. I wanted to write this character who kind of serves as a proxy for my younger self, which allowed me to explore what had happened to me, but also what could have happened to me.
In working through that did you do further research in terms of grooming and the sort of situation in which Lea (Lily McInerny) finds herself?
Yes, 100%, like, I had had my own experiences in certain ways. And then in other ways, there were things I wanted to add that I had not experienced. For the specific type of grooming that I wanted to include, I had read things here and there over the years, and they always stuck with me as something I would potentially want to explore in my writing. So when I paired that with my own experiences I wanted to explore, it led me to this script. We wrote the script to follow the five stages of grooming, which are targeting a victim, gaining their trust, filling a need, isolating them, and then whatever the abuse ends up being. That was literally the model I used. What Tom (Jonathan Tucker) is doing throughout the script is in that order. I also read many books by women who had experienced this as well.
The role of Tom really requires the actor to be both charming, but also a bit skeevy. How did you work with Jonathan Tucker on that as an actor?
To touch on the casting element of that, when I first wrote this character and thought about casting, I was like, oh, it’s gonna be really easy. I just need to find a good actor in their 30s. A good male actor in their 30s. How could that be hard? But when the casting process began, I actually realized I was looking for something very specific, which is exactly what you touched on. Jonathan is one of the most charming, charismatic guys. He could be a life coach. He’s just super charismatic. He had that, which was necessary for Tom. But I also knew he needed to have this darker side. Jonathan, I personally feel, is not afraid to do any of that as an actor in all of his roles. Many of the roles that he’s most known and most respected for and has gotten the most acclaim for, he is not held back. So I knew he was willing to go there with me.
A lot of the early scenes, he’s so charming, but if you’re watching and you’re older, you’re like, this is so sketchy. But when you’re like 17, maybe you wouldn’t notice.
Yeah. I definitely knew that audiences will know as soon as he pulls up in his car next to her that something is off. Jonathan and I talked a lot about what their relationship actually is. This could sound crazy to some people, but in my eyes, their relationship is a love story. We wrote the script to be from Lea’s perspective, and Lea falls in love with him. I would listen to romantic music sometimes when I was writing these scenes. Jonathan also really believed that even his character loved her, which I also agree with. I think he loves her as much as he’s capable of. I think that was kind of the approach we took. I don’t want to speak for Jonathan, but I don’t think he went into the role thinking like, I am just a master manipulator here and that’s my full M.O. It was kind of a combination of those two things.
This is Lily McInerny’s first major role. What were you looking for when you were casting Lea and how did you land on Lily?
I wanted somebody who felt raw and like a real teenager. There’s tons of actors out there who could have played the role, but I just personally didn’t want somebody known. I wanted the audience to get lost in the film. I didn’t want them to think oh there’s so and so playing this teenage girl. Also, I am always bothered when I’m watching shows on TV about high schoolers, and it’s like these 25-year-olds. I wanted her to feel young and real. I worked with an awesome casting director who really specializes in this and does a lot of scouting and discovery of fresh faces. That’s what I wanted. She was a perfect match for the project. She showed me Lily, and I had watched a ton of tapes, but Lily really was the character for me. She was amazing. I knew that if I could just get her in this film that everyone else would see that as well.
Where did you film and how did the locations inform the story?
The short It was shot in San Diego, and that was always the plan for shooting the feature. Then at the last minute, about three months before we went into production, we pivoted and decided that for financial reasons we were going to shoot in LA. Then I was looking for the parts of LA that felt like San Diego to me, and I didn’t ever want it to be clear where it takes place. It does not take place in LA specifically, but it does takes place in some part of Southern California. LA is very big. We would shoot on one side of LA one day and have to drive an hour and a half to some other completely different neighborhood just for this other location because I liked the way it looked. The power lines are in the Valley and the protagonist’s home is in the Valley.
And where did you shoot the beach sequences?
One of the beaches is the Grand Pacific Ocean in Malibu, but that was not my dream beach. It was what we were able to get. When we shot the other beach scene, which you probably noticed, there’s a big difference. We drove down to San Diego to the San Diego Bay, which is where I had written both scenes originally.
Are there any other films or filmmakers that inspire the way that you approach making a film?
There’s too many to say, but one thing I will reference is that visually, I really wanted it to look a certain way. The project stemmed from these photographs I had been taking in San Diego and other parts of Southern California. So I knew that I wanted it to have a photographic feel. I wasn’t able to fully achieve this because of our resources, but I wanted it to be so that you could press pause and every image could be printed as a still photograph on your wall. So definitely some films that are shot that way are really an inspiration to me, whether that’s Paweł Pawlikowski’s ‘Ida’ or ‘Cold War’. I was definitely inspired by Wong Kar-Wai’s use of locations and textures and colors. These are not things that I fully achieved in this film, just places I pulled little things from.
What do you hope people feel when they finish watching the film?
I really want people to think about the journey of Lea and Tom’s relationship and be able to understand how she got to where she ends up in the third act of the film and at the end of the film. Even if this is outside of an audience member’s experience, I hope that they can come away with a new understanding that any type of vulnerability can cause girls and women to fall prey to this type of manipulation. I hope that women can see their own experiences on screen and identify, whether in a small way or a concrete way. It’s definitely a film that covers some subject matter that some people probably don’t want to talk about, but I think that’s all the more reason why it needs to be seen and needs to be discussed.
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