I thought we’d kick things off in a fun way with a bit of improv. Let’s imagine that you’re having a dinner party together, and you’ve invited your family and friends over to enjoy a meal while you watch Greener Grass. What are you cooking?

Dawn Luebbe: I love this!

Jocelyn DeBoer: Oh my god!

Dawn Luebbe: There’s gotta be casseroles involved.

Jocelyn DeBoer: Lots of casseroles. Maybe a taco dip… seven layer! [laughs] Dawn, I feel like your family in Nebraska makes jello…art?

Dawn Luebbe: Yeah, strawberry pretzel salad. There’s a lot of things where I grew up in Nebraska that are called salad that have no produce of any kind in them.

Jocelyn DeBoer: One of the things our production designer, Leigh Poindexter, wooed us with beyond belief on our first meeting with her was a stack of pictures of this type of food, and how she wanted to fill the movie with it. We’re like this is perfect, so yes we’d have to serve that. And everything in lots of plastic wrap.

Excellent! The strawberry salad, I’m totally familiar with that. I’m from Indiana, so I understand the concept of the salads with no produce whatsoever.

Jocelyn DeBoer: Well, you’re invited to the dinner party.

Dawn Luebbe: Yes, you must come!

I’m totally there! So Greener Grass started off as a short film, but was later bought by IFC for a series, and now it’s taken the shape of a feature film. What was that transformation from short to feature like, and what were you most excited about expanding upon?

Jocelyn DeBoer: Yeah, it started as a short, and then it was a TV series for IFC. We sold the pilot and then we just sat for 5 or 6 months, and it kinda got to the point where I think what we wrote was so ambitious, and whatever was going on at IFC at the time there just wasn’t the money then to produce it. Dawn and I, we still so wanted to tell this story, and we were really excited to kind of jump into a more micro version of what the TV show was and tell a simpler story in the form of a feature, particularly because it was so important to us to have creative control on the project. We got to direct the feature of course, something we weren’t sure we were gonna get to do in TV. But it was so cool to take these characters that we started in the short film and really delve more into their emotional life or lack thereof [chuckle] in the future script.

I think we really did several versions of the script, we started writing in January of 2018, and I think we did over over 20, I wanna say 22 page one rewrites before we delivered it to our producer in May last year. When the feature really started to click for us was this one morning when we went back and watched the short film. We just kinda were reminded of the simplicity of it and started outlining a version of the story that had all the beats of the short film in it, and that version was really close to what we ended up shooting.