Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.
In “It’s What’s Inside,” you can’t take an actor at face value. Throughout the comedy/thriller (currently on Netflix), characters constantly swap in and out of each other’s bodies, leaving performers with the difficult task of portraying several distinct roles. This calls for precision from the filmmakers and actors, all of whom must ensure the audience never loses track of what character inhabits which body at a given time.
But James Morosini is no stranger to playing multiple parts.
Morosini, one of the leads of “It’s What’s Inside,” attended Leonard Maltin’s Theatrical Film Symposium class in late September to screen the film for hundreds of students. Morosini joined Greg Jardin – the movie’s writer, director and editor – for a Q&A with Maltin and students after the screening.
For Morosini, showing a film in USC’s Frank Sinatra Hall was akin to playing at home. The actor himself was a Trojan during his undergraduate years, graduating from the School of Dramatic Arts in 2014. During this time, Morosini took a number of classes in the School of Cinematic Arts, getting involved with multiple student projects.
Soon after graduating, Morosini showed his interests lay beyond only acting. In 2018, he released “Threesomething,” a film about three friends spiraling in the complex aftermath of an uncomfortable attempt at a threesome. Morosini starred in the film alongside Isabelle Chester and fellow USC alum Sam Sonenshine. On top of acting, Morosini directed and edited the film and served as a co-writer with Sonenshine.
Four years later, Morosini found acclaim with another film he wrote, directed and starred in: “I Love My Dad.” The movie won both the Grand Jury and Audience awards in the Narrative Feature division at South by Southwest. “I Love My Dad” follows Morosini as Franklin, a struggling young man who ends up getting catfished by his estranged father (played by Patton Oswalt) in a desperate bid for reconnection. The dramedy, though outlandish, is based on a true story – Morosini’s.
Morosini has even worn multiple hats at USC. Today, he has returned to his alma mater to serve as an adjunct professor. He now teaches acting to students in the School of Dramatic Arts.
For his new film “It’s What’s Inside,” Morosini sat down with Annenberg Media to discuss his career and time as a Trojan.
Loving: Thank you so much for sitting down with me. This is such a privilege.
Morosini: Oh yeah, man, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for wanting to chat.
Absolutely. Why don’t we start with telling me a little bit about “It’s What’s Inside.”
I got the script a couple of years ago. I remember just being impressed by how ambitious the whole concept was and had this feeling that it was either going to be really, really cool or not work at all. Luckily, I think it turned out great. I’m really impressed by what Greg [Jardin] was able to pull off and just got to work with a ton of great actors on the project. I’m super happy with how it came out.
This is probably one of your bigger acting vehicles and acting feats to date. You get to play multiple characters, you get to play characters who are fighting with the original character that you were portraying […] You weren’t writing, you weren’t directing. What was that feeling like for you?
It’s interesting, man. I mean, I’ve been doing plays and my own movies and doing TV stuff for a long time now, so it didn’t feel like it was like this major step up. I kind of approached it the same as I would any other role. The difference here is that it was preparing for, really, three or four different roles in one project because you literally have to consider the story from all of these different perspectives […] I had to develop and imagine my relationship with all of these different characters from all these different points of view.
You got to take this movie back to your alma mater and you got to screen it in Leonard Maltin’s film class, which is a very notable course at USC. Could you walk me through what the experience with that was like?
I met Leonard Maltin because I actually screened my movie “I Love My Dad” there a year or two ago, and so he and I got to know each other a bit when I did that. Before that, I had brought my first movie that I directed, “Threesomething,” to USC. So it’s just been really cool, you know, since I guess 2016, bringing movies back that I’ve worked on to this place that I really learned so much. I got so much from going to school there, and it’s been a large source of community for me, and now being an adjunct professor there, you know, it’s a place I care about very deeply and have been so grateful for being a part of my journey.
You had a really interesting conversation when you were [in Maltin’s class] where you spoke about the ending of this film. You talked about movies as metaphors and that you think that moral equivalent sort of gets in the way of that. Do you think that there is an issue with moviegoers at times trying to approach things as too literal, trying to approach things too much on their level?
I mean, at the end of the day, I think audiences should approach movies however they want, you know? They are to be experienced in whatever way an audience chooses to experience them. Some audiences enjoy going and picking everything apart and having lots of problems with whatever they’re seeing, and some audiences like to go and completely surrender to the experience. I think, at the end of the day, movies are for an audience, and an audience has complete agency to experience it however they want to experience it. It’s not for the filmmaker to decide exactly what that is.
The thing I try to do as an audience member myself is I try to experience the movie through the lens that it was meant to be looked through, you know? I’m trying to frame it for myself in the same way that it is trying to be framed for me, and the times I will have issues with the movie is when the framing isn’t clear or when I’m not framing it properly for myself.
Gotcha. So talk to me a bit about how you got started wanting to make movies. You know, your father worked for IBM, your mother, I believe, studied pre-med at Columbia. When was it that you knew that this was what you wanted to go into?
I always grew up with my father’s camcorder, and both my parents were very creative, even though they weren’t pursuing creative professions. You know, my mom was a singer and was very funny, and my dad is also super creative and was kind of always joking around and had a very big personality. Then my uncle was the actor Christopher Reeve, and so I grew up with an actor and a filmmaker in my family and got to learn a lot about the process of making movies and telling stories every time I would visit him. I was surrounded by a lot of his peers early in my childhood and got to really learn that this was something that I could do professionally if I were to choose to. But for a long time, I just thought it was cool being able to have a feeling or an idea, or something would make me laugh or whatever, and be able to capture something and then show it to somebody and transmute that same feeling to them. I was very drawn to that.
I was wondering, have you gotten to see the “Super/Man” documentary yet [about Reeve]?
Yeah, I loved it. I thought they did a great job. I got to see it at Sundance with my whole family, which was a very meaningful experience.
That’s great to hear. So how did you get to USC?
So I grew up outside of Boston, my grades during high school were pretty bad, so the only way for me to get into school was gonna be to audition. I had done the Williamstown Theater Festival as an apprentice in 2009, and so I knew a lot of actors that had been to USC, and I was really impressed by their work, so I auditioned for the BFA program at USC. I got in there, and I got in almost everywhere I auditioned, but coming from Boston and having lived in New York for a little bit – I took a year off after high school — I guess I just wanted to experience L.A. and have a totally different kind of collegiate experience, and I wanted to work in film and TV. So I was excited about the idea of doing plays and also doing a ton of short films, and so while I was at SC, I was constantly participating in projects at the cinema school and also taking classes at the School of Cinematic Arts. So I got a kind of dual education while I was there.
Had you started working on “Threesomething” yet while you were still here?
When I graduated college, I did a web series called “Single Minded” and I did like an episode every week or so. Each episode was basically a deep dive into an uncomfortable situation I had experienced, and I tried to just make it as uncomfortable as I possibly could for the audience to watch. I made it with whatever I had available to me and, you know, learned a lot about filmmaking just through that process.
Then I wanted to make like a kind of a mumblecore, run and gun, very improvisational movie a la the Duplass Brothers or Joe Swanberg. My buddy, Sam Sonenshine, he was in the theater school with me. He and I made that movie for pretty much no money and learned how to make a movie. I edited it. We sold it together, then we learned how to kind of do guerrilla marketing. We really learned about how movies are made just by going out and doing it ourselves.
I was curious how much of that movie you had scripted out beforehand and how much was improv.
It was all kind of outlined, and some of it was scripted, but it was mostly improvisational in that we would iterate the scenes over and over and over. So like it was written in that we’d find it all together and we’d push the direction of it as we were shooting. We edited it so that it was written very much in the edit, and then we would sometimes reshoot the scenes once they were edited so that we could make them better. It was done in a very non-traditional way.
So how soon after that, or was it during that, that you started working on “I Love My Dad”?
I made “Threesomething,” and then I made another movie called “More.” Both of those movies were pretty much no budget. Then I just started getting obsessed with screenwriting and studied it and tried to get as good as I possibly could as a screenwriter and was reading a script a day and was breaking them down and writing constantly. Then I wrote “I Love My Dad,” and that project won this screenwriting competition called “ScreenCraft” over 2,300 other entries. Through that, Patton [Oswalt]’s manager saw that I won and wondered if it would be a good fit for Patton. I was such a fan of Patton, so it kind of all came together through this competition win.
So talk to me a bit about working with him. I mean, he seems to be a really good fit for your style of writing. You said you draw off of a lot of uncomfortable life experiences, and a lot of his stand-up is similar.
It was amazing to work with him. He brings so much heart to his work and was really just the perfect fit for that character. So it was kind of just an amazing […] Once he came on to the project, it all worked out with everyone else. He was perfect for that movie.
Now that’s a really emotionally raw movie. You know, it opens with you saying it’s based on true experiences, and it’s this very heartfelt screenplay while also, you know, there’s that element of “Oh, this is kind of disturbing, but it feels very emotionally true.” What was the process of writing that like for you?
I wanted to make as entertaining a movie as I possibly could, but I also wanted to excavate real feelings that I had and also just make a movie that was just really dynamic and had a lot of dramatic irony, you know? It kind of opened up for me when I realized that Franklin was going to be seeing the girl he imagined, but that we as the audience know is actually his dad. That’s when I realized how many fun set pieces could come out of that and also just how we were gonna be able to do something cinematic with what would otherwise be a lot of texting and phone screens.
So you got to work with some real legends of comedy in that film. You got to work with Patton Oswalt, Lil Rel Howery, Rachel Dratch. And I saw in a New York Times profile that you called your father, who part of the movie is based off of, one of the funniest people you know. Who are some of your comedic influences in your writing since comedy is such a profound part of most of the things that you’ve worked on?
I think really grounded comedy, discomfort comedy. I mean, I grew up obsessed with Louis C.K. I love Nathan Fielder. I think some filmmakers are hilarious to me — Spike Jonze or Paul Thomas Anderson I think are just hilarious. And even people like, you know, Yorgos Lanthimos has a really dark sense of humor that really resonates with me, or Luca Guadagnino, he’s also really funny. Those are some comedic influences for me, and then also just like a lot of British humor. Like the British version of “The Office” was a really early influence for me, or “Mr. Show with Bob and David” was a huge influence for me early on. Yeah, man, I grew up constantly watching a ton of stand-up and trying to find my own voice comedically by doing a lot of improv at UCB, so I’m sure a lot of that influenced the way this movie came to be.
So I’ve noticed something interesting across several of your films as an actor where you… In the politest terms possible, you lack vanity as an actor. You look at movie like “I Love My Dad” where you’re having essentially sex scenes with Patton Oswalt in one of your first big films, and then “It’s What’s Inside” opens with your character in a very compromising position in the very first scene. How much of your love for cringe-out humor makes you want to commit to those parts, and does a part of your wish that you would just play, like, a fully normal, suave guy at any point?
Oh man, I feel… That’s hilarious that you’re asking me this.
*Laughs*
Oh God, how do I, how do I […] Dude, I find acting to be […] it’s kind of it’s kind of embarrassing. It’s fundamentally embarrassing. You’re an adult playing pretend, and other people are watching you, and you have to take yourself very seriously. The thing I think that makes me uncomfortable about acting is, like, trying to look cool at all and my own instinct to try and be liked by other people. So I almost try and intentionally shoot myself in the foot in that way by, like, taking the least cool roles I possibly can so that I have to extinguish any part of myself that wants to be seen in an appealing light by other people. It allows me to really kind of surrender that impulse and then fully focus on whatever my point of view is in the story.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t do that because it’s *laughs* it would be nice, I guess, to reap the rewards of being cooler in stuff and not just, you know, seem *laughs* conflated with many of the characters I play. But, you know, I don’t know, man, I enjoy […] It’s also fun being able to invite people to laugh at you and make fun of you. My favorite artists are the ones that are willing to not take themselves seriously, you know? Andy Kaufman was an early inspiration for me, and I like bringing a similar kind of egoic recklessness…
*Laughs*
…to what I participate in.
When you’re shooting a scene like the part of “Threesomething” where Isaac is performing a song for Charlie and Zoe, is the driving motivation “How uncomfortable can I make this?” or is there something else you’re looking for there?
Yeah, it’s kind of like a combination of things. It’s like, I want it to have a lot of heart, but I also want there to be layers where we’re watching somebody performing a version of themselves that’s, like, not quite landing. Because I often find that that’s what’s happening in real life is that we’re, like, trying out different versions of ourselves, but, seen from a third perspective, we realize how bad at performing those versions of ourselves we actually are. I think that’s one of the reasons hearing our voices or seeing ourselves in video can sometimes be so painful, because we can see so clearly behind the curtain. There’s just something so embarrassing about seeing ourselves “efforting” toward a certain kind of perception.
So you’re now teaching at USC. You’re an adjunct professor. What has that experience been like for you, getting to come back to your alma mater where you were learning acting and now convey that to students of your own?
It’s one of my favorite things in my life, man. Watching people discover their voice and find freedom of expression in the work they do, it’s helped me unlock other parts of my own work. It sounds trite, but I feel like I’m learning as much about my work as I am in helping younger artists discover their own. I get so much out of it. It’s one of my favorite things.
What’s the biggest lesson you want those artists to take away?
Gosh, I think being willing to fail again and again and again, and putting themselves in positions where they are failing in front of other people, and doing it over and over and over. I found that those are the creatives I’m most drawn to and most inspired by, and I’ve found that that’s really what it takes to do anything well. Not just in the creative zone. It’s how you learn, and it’s how you find your path: by going down a bunch of paths that are wrong. How you find out what feels right is by feeling what doesn’t feel right.