Sundance Film Festival

Director Ryan Shiraki and I are patrolling the very gracious lobby of the Park City hotel looking for exactly what we found: two high backed Chesterfield-esque chairs in a quiet corner next to a high window near a tasteful fern. We settle in.

Shiraki is here (again) with Spring Breakdown, a “Girls Gone Wild” story with heart staring Amy Poehler, Parker Posey, and Rachel Dratch, who co-wrote with Shiraki.

Shiraki’s DP Frank DeMarco shot Hedwig and the Angry Inch a film Shiraki loved for its extravagant and pointed use of color—something he wanted for his own film. “I love the way that in certain scenes these isolated bright colors would pop out of the sea of gray and blue,” he says of DeMarco’s work on Hedwig. He explains that his movie deliberately kicks off with his three heroines singing a campy version of Cindy Lauper’s “True Colors” and that each has an hero color (Amy: yellow; Parker: red: Rachel: blue) that travels with them from morose to magnificent as they bust out with the college kids on Los Padres Island at Spring Break.

With this commitment to color, Shiraki brought all his designers together and laid the color philosophy out, the way it would track and connect to the unfolding stories and scenes—through light, costume, and production design. With no DI, it all had to be there on the film—the muted tones of the women’s DC lives and the warm, exploded palette of their spring break adventure.

His other tool was editing. Editor Tom Lewis came from Adam Sandler’s comedy world, and it’s immediately clear as Shiraki talks that this was one of those priceless collaborations. “I can’t stay enough about how much I appreciate and respect his work—he taught me so much as a filmmaker about the editing process and the possibilities of editing—I think together we really came up with what the comic timing would be. Having that kind of synchronicity with the editor—he knew if said hold a beat, my hold was three frames not six—is priceless. He cut the shit out of that film which is what I wanted—to give this thing some meth and let it run.

“As a director, I always tell my crew—my editor, DP, production designer, costumer, that they each need to get me at least 20 jokes. The more collaborative the comedy effort is the more successful it will be—I don’t presume myself to be the funniest person on the set; I’m expecting other people to bring more humor to the table, whether it’s a troll doll on the table, or the way that Frank shot Gayle finding the cat—sad and funny at the same time,” he says as the publicist is coming to get us out of our comfy chairs and back to the business of Sundance.