AUSTIN, Texas — When Spencer Parsons calls his film "I'll Come Running" a "broken romantic comedy," one thinks of emotional nausea, untidy endings and fated heartache. None of that is off the mark in a movie that explores young love in all its cruel imperfections and dizzying unpredictability.
"I'll Come Running" bears numerous trappings of the modern independent rom-com. The movie sways to loose, naturalistic rhythms created by the fits and starts of tentative romance. It has a pop exuberance pushed by the smart verbosity of its characters. It's sweet and funny.
And then it pulls the carpet on all of it.
The story is landmined with too many twists for a proper summary, including a whopper that ricochets the action into jarring emotional territory and physically all the way to Denmark. Starring Melonie Diaz ("Raising Victor Vargas") and Jon Lange, it's a drama of spontaneous romance and sudden loss, about sex and "The Simpsons," about people connecting and breaking off.
Shot half in Austin and half in Denmark, "I'll Come Running" is Parsons' first full-length feature. Parsons, 35, is a well-known figure in the Austin film community, and the movie boasts its Austin-ness often and proudly. He taught film at the University of Texas for seven years and this fall began teaching at Northwestern University in Chicago.
"I'll Come Running" premiered this year at the Los Angeles Film Festival to strong response. Parsons has landed an agent and spent this week "taking meetings" in Los Angeles. We spoke by phone.
Chris Garcia: What's it like making a feature for the first time? It's a colossal pain, isn't it?
Spencer Parsons: Oh, it's horrible! It's a really terrible experience. (Laughing) I can laugh about it, but it's really difficult and painful, and there's no way to do it but to do it. It really is kind of a nightmare. With my short films, there were days of frustration and me wondering what the heck I was doing. But a feature's a whole other animal. I don't think anything can prepare you. Still, I didn't have a uniquely bad experience. I don't want to give that idea. Everybody I worked with was fantastic.
The film really upends the traditional romantic-comedy form. Did you set out to do that?
Not necessarily. I discovered that I was doing that while I was working on it. I had this kernel of a story idea and that led me to working with romantic-comedy ideas and tropes. But obviously, with the way that the story goes, it breaks with all that. It became kind of exciting to see that I was working in romantic-comedy zone, and yet, by doing what I do with the story, by default I'm messing with the form. There was no agenda. It was organic.
There's a flurry of writing credits at the end of the movie, suggesting that all the performers had a big hand in the film's creation.
I thought it was important to credit them. I'm definitely not working like Joe Swanberg ("Hannah Takes the Stairs"), where everybody's making up the movie. While there was a traditionally written screenplay by me and Line (Langebek Knudsen), there was a great deal brought out in the rehearsal process through improvisation. It was important to work with their ideas to make it as authentic as possible. The actors, the producers, the editor all contributed quite a bit, so it really was written by all of us together.
Complicating things a bit was that you had two separate crews, one in Austin, one in Denmark.
There was some crew overlap. We were very lucky that we got a Danish film grant that allowed us to bring some of our Danish crew members to the States, and they really enjoyed working in Austin. At the end of the Danish shoot, which was first, we got a little sad and afraid of what it was going to be like to shoot without these Danish crew members, who all of the American crew had come to love. We were up to speed as a working unit, so it was really great when that grant came through and we could keep working together.
Chris Garcia writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: cgarcia AT statesman.com