If you were anywhere near a television set in 2005, you probably remember hearing about the Terri Schiavo case. But for Laura Chinn, Schiavo’s story hits a little closer to home.
In 1990, Schiavo had a heart attack at the age of 26. After eight years spent in a vegetative state, Schiavo’s husband and parents engaged in a years-long legal battle over whether or not her feeding tube should be removed. The right-to-die case garnered national attention and controversy, and in 2005, protesters were a regular occurrence outside of the Florida hospice where Schiavo was staying – the same hospice where Chinn’s brother was a resident.
Chinn’s brother was diagnosed with brain cancer when she was just a teenager, an experience detailed in her 2022 book “Acne: A Memoir.” In the new movie “Suncoast,” written and directed by Chinn and based on the time period surrounding her brother’s entry into the facility, she zeroes in on grief’s gray areas, the story set against the backdrop of the Schiavo case and detailing the complexities of dealing with the death of a loved one.
Nico Parker stars as Doris, a lonely, shy teen whose life revolves around the care of her brother. Her brother’s illness means Doris has had to grow up quicker than most, and most of the film centers on Doris’s prickly relationship with her mother Kristine (Laura Linney) and her budding friendships with her peers at school and a grief-stricken protester (Woody Harrelson) who spends his days outside of the hospice facility.
“Suncoast” is at its strongest when the mother-daughter relationship is at the forefront, Parker and Linney bringing something ultimately warm to the story despite the brutal nature of some of their scenes together. Rough Draft Atlanta recently spoke with Chinn about the film, which is now playing on Hulu.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I know this is a very personal story for you, and I believe you also just had a memoir come out that covers similar ground as this movie. Did the writing process for those two things coincide, or did you start thinking of one before the other?
Laura Chinn: I started thinking of “Suncoast” first. I started working on “Suncoast” in 2018. The book is stories that I’ve been compiling for, you know, decades. I’ve had a word document of little stories forever. So the book was a lifetime thing, but I didn’t actually conceive the idea to do and write and start the book until after the movie.
One thing I really enjoyed about this movie was how authentic the teenagers and the relationships between them felt. Doris’s exclusion from that center group felt very natural to me, and I feel like movies about teenagers have a tendency sometimes to contrive those differences. Could you talk a little bit about how you approached writing those scenes and casting those characters?
Chinn: I built in that dynamic just from the story, like the idea that this girl has been in her home and dealing with this thing, but she’s not very open about it in school. She’s not very open that she’s going through this. It sort of came out organically from this character and the story that she’s going through, as to how she would be at this private school with these sort of upscale kids.
It also was based on my real experiences with my friends growing up – like how supportive they were and how kind they were. As much as we were all very young and they sometimes didn’t know the right thing to say or the exact right thing to do, dealing with death and grief and all of that at a young age, they still were very much there for me. I think a lot of people are surprised that the girls don’t turn mean and cruel [laughs]. I just never had that experience. I never had that experience with people ostracizing me because my brother was sick or something.
Yeah, I feel like we’re almost groomed to expect that to happen. There’s a moment where Doris thinks her brother has died and asks a friend to take her home from a party. When she comes to school the next day, you’re just waiting for the friend to get upset with her, but that never happens. Which was lovely.
Chinn: I was really just capturing what I experienced in my youth, and the reaction to it was surprising to me! Everyone was like, wow! They never turned on her! And I was like, oh yeah! It wasn’t any intentional [thing of] I’m going to flip this trope. It just was the story that happened to me. But I feel like it’s such a great reaction, because I feel like people are ready for stories where girls are supportive of each other [laughs].
I want to talk a bit about Nico Parker. Something I thought about while watching this – I don’t know if you’ve seen this movie – but while watching Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” I thought a lot about an actor playing a version of the person who is making the movie. Obviously, this story has some differences from your real life, but it’s still very personal. What did you see in Nico that made you want to cast her?
Chinn: Well, it doesn’t hurt that she’s a supermodel. [Laughs] I was like, yes! You will play me, supermodel!
It’s really about Doris, right? I separated myself so much from this story, just so I could direct it from a point of view of watching it with less bias. I really wanted the actors to come and create characters, and bring what they interpreted from the script and not have me breathing down their neck and being like, I wouldn’t say that, or my mom wouldn’t say that, you know? I really wanted that to kind of be its own story and have them be their own characters. But for Nico, I mean for Doris, I wanted to find someone who you believed was an old soul – who you believed had gone through this thing that these other girls hadn’t. And as much as Nico is very young, and she hasn’t had extreme loss in her life, she’s just a very deep person. She’s a deep thinker, and she’s highly aware and intuitive. I think she brings that to the character, and you believe that this is a girl who’s gone through more than her peers.
Yeah, she definitely has that quality to her. She feels a lot older than she is.
Chinn: And she’s so talented. She’s just so, so talented. When I read with her over Zoom, I mean – those performances that are in the movie, she’s doing that over Zoom. She’s just at that level already. Even her auditions are just like, you know – you could film it and put it in theaters.
I want to talk a bit about some of the other actors, and the mother character specifically. She’s pretty complex and difficult to root for, in some respects. I think having an actor like Laura Linney softens some of those darker moments because we have so much background with her. But how did you navigate writing that character, showing us how her actions are affecting Doris and letting us see her grief at the same time?
Chinn: I think when I sort of found the way into her through the grief counselor, I feel like that really helped unlock her. Because I think before, in an early, early draft of the script, I didn’t have those scenes in it. It was still, you’re just getting this one-sided woman who’s wanting her teenage daughter to be there for her, and wanting her teenage daughter to wake up, and wanting her teenage daughter to help her son and all these things. But I think once you see her with the grief counselor, you see this other side of her. You see the softer side of her. She opens up about what she’s feeling. I think that really helped us from just keeping the character one note. I also think Laura Linney is not capable of being one note. She reads the scene, and she finds levels and ways to make it, you know – you see in her face the pain that is behind the anger. I mean, she just made the character, in my mind, somebody that you can’t help but root for, even if you’re like, “Oh, don’t say that to your daughter.” [Laughs]
Yeah, and she does get to some really tough places with that, but when you’re going through something like this I can imagine that’s also a very real dynamic.
Chinn: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, it’s not been widely released yet, but the people that have seen it – the reaction of people that are like, that’s exactly how my mom was! Or people being like, that’s how I was when my daughter was sick. That, I think, is so wonderful. Because I don’t want Kristine to be seen as a villain, and if people see themselves in Kristine, it’s not like a shame on you. It’s like, yeah – you’re going through a hard thing, and have grace for yourself.
I want to talk a bit about Florida for a minute. You created the show “Florida Girls,” and obviously this story is set in Florida and you grew up there, at least part of the time. I’ve always considered Florida to be one of those places that is just incredibly cinematic – like you see it, and you know it. What do you think are the qualities that make it so cinematic?
Chinn: Well, it’s really so different than any other state. We don’t have a tropical state besides Florida. North America has a sort of – I don’t know – like a “North American” feeling from coast to coast, from top to bottom. It kind of has similar-ish weather partners. It gets winters and it gets snow, or it’s dry and a desert. But there’s a tiny little sliver that is basically like Hawaii, you know?
And it’s a vacation destination, right? It’s the place where every other state goes to vacation because of its beauty. Because of its sunsets and the colors, and – in Clearwater, anyway – there’s talcum powder sand beaches. It’s so special and it’s so unique, and it somehow doesn’t belong in America. And then it also is everything that America is in one state. It’s a very interesting place.
In the movie, the brother character ends up in the same hospice that Terri Schiavo was in. It’s one of those things where I thought, this has to be a movie invention – but I understand that it isn’t. It’s just so cinematic, in that way. Jumping off of that, I wondered how it feels to take reality and fit it into a cinema-like structure. This is something that took up multiple years of your life. How do you boil that down to an hour and 40 minutes?
Chinn: It took me a lot of years to figure that out. The kernel of truth is, I happened to be at the same facility as this woman while my brother was going through this, right? So that I knew, and I also knew I was a teenager, and all of the emotions I felt because I was a teenager going through this thing that most teenagers don’t have to go through. Other than that, I just invented, right? I want to express that I felt jealous that my brother got all the attention in the family. I want to express that I felt guilty that I didn’t spend enough time with my brother, or that I wasn’t kind enough to him, you know? It was taking all the emotions that I felt and literally listing out, what did I feel during those six years? And how can I create characters and circumstances that can express to an audience all the ways I felt, and maybe that audience can relate to those feelings?
So taking the kernel of truth and expanding it.
Chinn: Yeah, it was taking this kernel of truth and then using the emotions of the experience to try to figure out – because I wasn’t Doris. Doris is this kind of – she stayed home, and didn’t have friends, and took care of her brother. She’s almost saintlike [laughs] compared to me. But I felt like Doris sometimes. I felt like, poor me. So it’s just trying to figure out all the ways that I felt, and then how do I turn that into a story?