Driveways (2020)

Interesting facts

Driveways is a 2019 American drama film directed by Andrew Ahn and starring Hong Chau, Lucas Jaye, and Brian Dennehy, from an original screenplay by playwrights Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen. The film had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 10, and its American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival April 30. FilmRise released it via video-on-demand in the United States on May 7, 2020, in lieu of a theatrical release due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It tells the story of a woman who has come to the house of her late sister to pack it up and prepare it for sale. While there, her young son strikes up a friendship with an elderly widower living next door.

Production

After the success of Spa Night, his feature debut, director Andrew Ahn was looking for his next project to be something more distant from his personal experience. "I felt really sick of myself", he told Filmmaker. "I didn't want to talk about being gay and Korean-American anymore."

According to Chau, who had already reached out to Ahn to express interest in working with him, she was even further intrigued when he told her how he had told the producers that for his second film he was interested in telling an intimate family story. She found it a departure from the ambitions of most directors of well-regarded debut features, who in her experience want to move on to big-budget franchise pictures.

Paul Thureen says the inspiration for the story came from his co-writer Hannah Bos's background working in her mother's antique shop as a child. "She usually had to go into people's houses after they died", he recalled. "So she's interested in the stories objects tell about people." Kathy and Cody's relationship is modeled on Bos's relationship with her mother.

The hitchhiking trip Del recounts taking as a younger man after his military service in the film's closing monologue is similar to one Thureen's father took at a similar stage in his life. Thureen, like Cody, was shy and anxious to the point of vomiting before his own birthday parties or other stressful social events, as a child, leading him to value relationships with adults.

"What I love about Hannah and Paul's writing is that they understand characters so well and the dramatics of a scene," Ahn said, particularly singling their work out for the respect they showed their characters. "There's a real tension to their work but in a beautifully subtle way, and they are doing things that I wouldn't be able to do." Specifically, in Driveways he pointed to Del's final monologue as one of them.

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