Directing Mark, Mary & Some Other People was only Hannah Marks’ second time behind the camera for a feature film, but the 28-year-old captures what it’s like to be a 20-something with startling accuracy in the 2021 Tribeca pick about a pair of young newlyweds trying out ethical non-monogamy for the first time.
“We made the movie with all friends, so it was a very last-minute effort,” Marks told MovieMaker‘s Micah Khan. “My friend and I both found ourselves a window of time where we could make something and so we just set out to do it, and literally in 48 hours, we were in prep.”
From what it feels like to be on mushrooms to the aftermath of a party gone sour, Marks captured the unpredictability of being in your 20s — something that she’s gotten to know well over the course of her filmmaking career.
Marks explained that she had originally wanted to go in another direction with Mark, Mary & Some Other People, but life — and the Disney/Fox merger of 2019 — had other plans.
“I was actually going to make it a slightly larger budget for a while, and then I had gotten this movie called Turtles All The Way Down, which is with Fox. It’s s a John Green movie, so I was super excited and I put Mark, Mary on the backburner because I went into prep on Turtles, and then the Disney merger happened with Fox and the movie got put on hold,” Marks said. “I waited around for a couple months in the hopes that everything would come back together, and when it didn’t, I was really depressed and felt like I shouldn’t just wait around. I wanted to grow and sharpen my skills and make myself better for when that movie came around. So, that was when, you know, our friends all got together and made this,” she said. “So that was really what it came out of, is just like not wanting to sit still.”
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Marks ended up making the movie with her friends during a holiday break between Thanksgiving and Christmas, with the main goal being creative freedom and exploration above all else.
“It was just super low-budget, run-and-gun on the fly with all of our friends. And so there was not a ton of stakes when making it, you know, it was all about having a fun time and enjoying each other’s company and getting to grow together and experience new things and take risks and experiment,” she said.
Sounds like a perfect description of being in your twenties.
“It wasn’t about like what festival we got into or if we’re going to sell the movie, what distributor, any of that,” she said.”So hopefully that’s what you were seeing on screen — was just us trying to learn and grow and have fun.”
Watch the full interview above.
Main Image: Hayley Law and Ben Rosenfield in Mark, Mary & Some Other People.
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