Roughly two and a half years ago, Garrett Abdo made a quip about his love life that ended up turning into the idea for his next movie. After a string of relationships that didn’t go anywhere, Abdo was trying to figure out what kept going wrong.
“I gotta do exit interviews and find out why,” he remembered saying jokingly. Wait, he thought – that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.
This exact moment of inspiration can be found in “Exit Interviews,” Abdo’s new film playing at this year’s Out on Film, Atlanta’s LGBTQ+ film festival. The movie stars Tuc Watkins as Robert, a documentarian who decides to make his next project a series of interviews with his ex-boyfriends as he tries to figure out where each relationship turned sour.
While the idea for the film had been percolating since Abdo made that off-handed comment, the words started pouring out of him late last year during a few days alone on a trip to Barcelona, Spain. Abdo describes himself as an “undisciplined writer.” But, once he forces himself to sit down and write, the words come fairly easily. From the time he finished the script in October to the film’s premiere at FilmOut San Diego on Aug. 22, less than a year had passed.
“Who writes a script in October and is shooting in January?” Abdo said. “No one.”
Writing “Exit Interviews” was an emotional process, the main character and story based heavily on Abdo’s own life. He didn’t draw one-to-one comparisons between Robert’s exes and his own, but rather connected each of the cinematic exes to a specific emotion that he experienced in real life.
“What did I see in this person? What did I pull out of this person? What was my input and output with this person?” Abdo said. “It all just starts fitting together.”
Abdo’s background is in stand-up comedy. He has managed comedians like Rickey Smiley and opened the Atlanta Comedy Theater in 2015. He said he believes his comedy background shapes his writing in that it helps keep him focused on being vulnerable. When he teaches stand-up to aspiring comedians, he always tells them one thing: you need to gut yourself onstage.
“An audience can smell the truth a mile away, and they can smell when you’re making it up,” he said. “There’s gotta be truth based in what you’re saying, or they’re gonna know it, and they’re not going to follow you.”
Abdo is more than open to a little collaboration to help him discover that truth. That’s where Tuc Watkins came in.
Watkins has had a prolific career, appearing in movies like “The Mummy” and more recently “The Boys in the Band,” as well as having a stint on the soap opera “One Life to Live” as David Vickers. When asked what drew him to Watkins as an actor, Abdo’s answer was simple (“It’s Tuc Freaking Watkins!”). But his ability to be open and collaborate with Watkins was just as important.
When Watkins came on board, the two men went back and forth over the character of Robert, building out the character the audience sees on screen from Abdo’s original idea. But, even if he had ideas about how the character should change, Watkins wanted to be involved from the beginning.
“It’s very rare to read something that you feel like, ‘I need to do this,’” Watkins said. “When I read Garrett’s movie, that’s how I felt.”
Watkins said he was initially drawn to the script because he didn’t think that Robert was all that great of a guy, and he thought it would be a challenge to play him without any judgment.
“I thought it would be a real challenge to play a guy who I thought had real blindspots that I kept wanting to fix in rewrites,” Watkins said. “But as Garrett and I worked, I realized I can’t. The mission was not to fix this guy before we started shooting the movie. The mission was to explore these flaws and see what happened with them.”
So much of Abdo can be found in the character of Robert, but Watkins was able to find ways to connect to Robert too. One of Robert’s exes is Christopher (Adam Huss), someone he was with for more than a decade. Watkins mentioned that he once split from someone he was with for 12 years, later getting caught up in the horrors of online dating (can’t we all relate?) before meeting his current partner.
“It’s no one’s fault, but the person who shows up is always different than the person in the pictures on the app,” Watkins said. “Including myself, I’m sure.”
At first, Watkins approached the idea of sitting all of his exes down for interviews like a fun exercise. After all, who doesn’t want to lay into their ex-boyfriends about what, exactly, is wrong with them? But as he got deeper into the character, he was able to back down from that knee-jerk reaction.
“It was, ‘I want to make myself understood’ rather than ‘I want to understand.’ It was hard for me to go in and play this character without doing that, because that was my natural state,” Watkins said. “It took effort to actually sit there and listen to what the other actor was saying, as opposed to waiting for them to stop talking so I could say my next line.”
The effort paid off. Abdo credits Watkins’ soap opera background with his range of emotion, and raved about his and all of the actors’ ability to react and really listen to their scene partners.
“Watching Adam Huss and Tuc Watkins do 10 takes of the most emotional, powerful, scene in the movie, and quite literally crying for real each take … was fascinating for me to watch,” Abdo said.
While there was a lot of emotion to go around, there were a lot of laughs too. In response to a question about if there was anything that didn’t end up making the final cut, Watkins remembered one thing in particular: full frontal male nudity.
“I couldn’t believe I was suggesting it, but I thought it spoke to the vulnerability of the scene,” Watkins said. “Garrett said, ‘No.’ The other actor said, ‘Hm – no.’ Now that we’ve done it, I think they were right!”
“We could have still rehearsed it, Tuc,” Abdo joked.
“Exit Interviews” plays at Out on Film on Sept. 26. The festival runs from Sept. 25 to Oct. 5.