A Screwball Comedy About Cabbage? Director Evan Twohy Can Make It Work.

Evan Twohy’s directorial debut, Bubble & Squeak, based on his original play of the same name, is part bizarre fable, part screwball comedy. The film follows newlyweds Declan and Delores, played by Himesh Patel and Sarah Goldberg, respectively, as they find themselves accused by a sinister customs agent (played by Steven Yeun) while en route to their honeymoon in a fictional, seemingly quaint European nation. Detained and stranded, the couple is forced to embark on an unexpected journey through the lush wilderness, which leads them to question their desires in life and in love. “To me, it’s a love story,” the director told us when we tracked him down at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere. “But it’s just not a love story that ends where most love stories end.” After the screening, in the lobby of a Park City ski resort, Twohy joined us to discuss the film’s unlikely inspirations, from Greek myths to Cary Grant and, of course, cabbage.

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JULIETTE JEFFERS: I was at the premiere of Bubble & Squeak, and what struck me about the movie is just how you created your own fairy tale.

EVAN TWOHY: It’s true.

JEFFERS: Not just with your writing, but also aesthetically. Have you always been drawn to fables or fairy tales?

TWOHY: I think I have been. I can remember books of Aesop’s Fables and Greek myths always lying around. To me, everything is sort of an abstraction. The act of making a movie is an abstraction of real life. So I’ve never been afraid to push it to the extreme. You certainly place for autobiography and realism, but you’re always asking an audience to buy into some sort of abstraction one way or another. There’s something exciting to me about not disguising it, and a fable does that. A fable is sort of our world watered down and boiled down into the core elements. Bubble & Squeak qualifies as a fable in that way.

JULIETTE JEFFERS There’s definitely that sense of the core elements. You have this abstract concept of a honeymoon which gets a completely new redefinition in the movie.

TWOHY: Absolutely. It’s largely about how abstract all the relationships we have are, anyway. There’s one absurd rule in this movie, which is you can’t have cabbages.

JEFFERS: How did you decide on cabbages, by the way?

TWOHY: I don’t really remember because I started it so long ago, but I assign no value to a cabbage. It’s like a purely neutral item in our world.

JEFFERS: They’re pretty bland, too.

TWOHY: They’re pretty bland. It’s hard to think of anything else that is in the pure middle of all. If you lined up all the objects from good to bad, nuclear weapons up to flowers, the cabbage is somewhere right in the middle. You can get some dishes out of it. But they’re just not that good very often.

JEFFERS: I wanted to ask you about constructing the fictional country where the movie is set. How did you go about that? It’s a little bit Scandinavian, it’s a little bit Eastern European.

TWOHY: The benefit of film is that there’s so many tools to help you build and stretch where it exists in the world. Obviously, we had a fake language created for it that is a mishmash of Lunarian, Latvian and some Nordic languages. We start the film with throat singing, specifically Mongolian. It was important to sort of have a cast of extras who don’t necessarily look like they’re from one place. I wanted it to feel sort of mythic.

JEFFERS: Totally.

TWOHY: We shot it in Estonia, so we had the natural beauty of Estonia standing in for this country. The exercise is, how do you pull it away from just being Estonian and start to pull other places into the costumes, props, and set design? It’s all an exercise in blurring the geographical lines.

JEFFERS: You had some really beautiful things happening with the set design, like the church made of hay. What was that process?

TWOHY: It was really hard, but I had an amazing production designer who made it her life’s mission. Hay was surprisingly hard to come by in Estonia. It’s hard to ship hay, so it ended up being very costly. A lot of our resources and time went into building this church, which was ultimately very solid. Somewhere in Estonia, this church of hay is still standing in a field somewhere.

JEFFERS: Really?

TWOHY: I have to imagine.

JEFFERS: Was it actually made entirely of hay?

TWOHY: There’s some wooden construction beneath the hay.

JEFFERS: Cool. So, Bubble & Squeak is about a marriage that, by the end, is not really a marriage anymore. For me, the takeaway from the kind of fable that you present is that we have this idea of a honeymoon, where you’re supposed to be in paradise with this person you’re in love with, but what actually creates bonds between people is often struggle and being together in weird, miserable situations.

TWOHY: Totally.

JEFFERS: Where did that come from?

TWOHY: That’s lovely. That’s all true. The path of making this in many ways sort of mirrors the relationship in the sense that you’re sort of married to the work while you’re trying to get something made. I’ve had such a roundabout way into making this. It took so long, almost like a decade-and-a-half since I started writing it, but over time I started to identify more and more as Delores as opposed to Declan.

JEFFERS: Interesting.

TWOHY: Early on, I was definitely a Declan. I wore head-to-toe J.Crew and tapered jeans.

JEFFERS: The costumes were interesting, a very specific millennial aesthetic.

TWOHY: Yes, exactly. The idea is that Declan has dressed Delores, or at least he’s bled into her life to some degree, so she’s been following him. He’s the more stable one. I’ve always sort of sought stability in that way, but as I got older, the stable path didn’t work for me. I was so insistent on blending into a crowd and not being observed in any way. Thus, I never sort of went off the expected path for myself. I started to embrace zigging when other people were zagging because it was the only strategy that was working for me. And I started to identify a little bit more with Delores. That is the story of this relationship, in some ways. Delores finds that for herself and pulls away from Declan because she needs to hold on to this part of herself.

JEFFERS: She can’t even accept her own sabotaging of the honeymoon in the beginning. We’re more than halfway through the movie by the time she puts the cabbages in her pants.

TWOHY: Whatever the cabbages mean to people specifically, I do think that it is Delores’s particular arc to come to terms with the fact that she is sacrificed. She is trying to damage the marriage. She wants out of it, which doesn’t make sense to her, but she can’t even talk about it with him because she just knows what he’ll say. I identify with both sides of it. I’ve definitely been the Declan where I’m not saying something that I can see in plain sight. They’re equally complicit in this non-discussion.

JEFFERS: He very much supports her in her self-deception.

TWOHY: He knows what happens if he calls it out, and she knows what happens if she calls it out. They love each other, so neither of them wants to mention the elephant in the room because that means the end of their marriage. They get to the end and they have to face this truth that will hurt them as a couple, but maybe it’s not the worst thing for them by the time they’re able to do that.

JEFFERS: They seem to find peace at the end.

TWOHY: Yeah. Love is acknowledging each other. That imagination game they play at the end of the church is an act of love, and their whole journey is an act of love. I would never say it’s a breakup movie. To me, it’s a love story, but it’s just not a love story that ends where most love stories end. It’s the different kind of love they have for each other because they’re not right for each other.

JEFFERS: Backtracking a little, let’s talk about the cabbage pants. That was a really amazing aspect of the production design, and a crazy physical problem that you have throughout almost the entire movie. 

TWOHY: It was a really hard thing to get right, specifically the tone of it. In the original script, I had little cartoons that I made, and the pants were very voluminous. They’re similar to harem pants. It’s a matter of trying to find something that she could have actually done. And there are 39 of them, specifically.

JEFFERS: Were they actual cabbages in the pants?

TWOHY: No, they’re largely styrofoam balls. But then the sound became a big problem as we were walking.

JEFFERS: The squeaking?

TWOHY: Yeah, it’s coated styrofoam balls with sort of squishy balls stuffing between them.

JEFFERS: Gotcha. So they weren’t actually so heavy.

TWOHY: They were hot. That was the challenge for Sarah [Goldberg]. It was summer, and it was very hot.

JEFFERS: Even the physical way in which she’s walking in the movie with the cabbages—she is holding so much physical discomfort in this relationship.

TWOHY: Exactly. She has to waddle the whole time.

JEFFERS: My last question is kind of technical—square formats?

TWOHY: Yeah. So much of making this movie is trusting people, and I trusted almost no one else more than my DP. Early on, if it’s wide, it creates too much escape for them. It’s a challenge because we had so much beautiful landscape. We didn’t want to feel like they could just wander off-screen too easily. I was also referencing and watching a lot of older movies.

JEFFERS: What were your references?

TWOHY: My favorite movies are The Apartment and Bringing Up Baby.

JEFFERS: I love Bringing Up Baby.

TWOHY: It’s probably my favorite movie.

JEFFERS: This has that screwball aspect.

TWOHY: The screwball has so much to say about relationships, but also class. It’s such a lost art in a way. Screwball has lasted the test of time better than any other genre. I can watch Bringing Up Baby and it feels to me like it’s a modern movie. And The Apartment, I feel that way, too. It could have been filmed yesterday. So we wanted to park into some older formats and try to get that sort of timeless feel, which the square helps with.

JEFFERS: Definitely. Thanks for your time.

TWOHY: Well, thank you so much.