Vanessa (Jillian Bell) mourns the death of her best friend Jennifer (Natalie Morales). She decides to travel for self-care, but is soon interrupted when she wakes up shortly after with Jennifer in her kitchen, claiming she is an alien sent to study the human species.
I’m all right also stars Blake Anderson, Harvey Guillén and Kyle Newacheck. It was written by Alisha Ketry and directed by Brandon Dermer.
“I want people to have fun, but also take away the real human message that’s in this movie, which is that it’s okay not to be okay, and to live in those moments and experience them and be present, no matter how hard it is,” Dermer said.
The script of I’m Totally Fine
Before writing I’m all rightKetry worked on projects such as fuller house and American father!both widely respected and well-known shows. I’m all right marks her feature film debut and was inspired by COVID and was previously friends with Dermer.
“It was kind of a COVID inspiration. The director Brandon Dermer and I have been friends for a while, and I had a break from American father!, which is the show I’m currently working on… we both had huge plans, and we were so excited to do stuff, and then everything just disappeared. And so everything suddenly became a grieving process. We mourned the loss of our projects and things like that, and then Brandon came to me with an idea about that feeling and how he really wanted to make it into a feature film,” Ketry said.
That idea of an idea reflecting their feelings about losing projects to COVID then took the form of Vanessa mourning the loss of her boyfriend, only to return as the hilarious alien character who is both drama and comedy. keeps in balance.
“It all starts with Alicia Ketry’s script,” Dermer commented on how they achieved that balance. “She worked really hard to make sure it had both the heart and the humor there. When we got the chance to work with Kyle Newacheck as a producer who spent so many years in the saddle as a director of comedy, we talked a lot about that balance. When we were so lucky to get Natalie and Jillian in, who are writers as well as directors, and have a deep understanding of the story, and then bring it to their characters… we were talking about that kind of pace from when we went to have these real moments and these really funny moments… so we looked at the script as a roadmap and we followed it to make sure we were soaked in the comedy, the sci-fi and the heart at the same time.
Jillian Bell and Natalie Morales in I’m Totally Fine
“The day Jillian was sent the script because she was reading it in front of the other actors, I got nervous. I couldn’t believe that something I wrote would end up in the hands of someone I admire so much. It was just the connection with Kyle and Brandon, and Blake… it was like this world came together with these amazing people,” Ketry said.
“Natalie is so successful and has worked on so many things. When she got to the set, we basically tweaked the dialogue the way she liked the character. Once we found it, the rewriting started to shift to more of the not-of-this-earth… someone who doesn’t understand emotions,” she continued, explaining how they were able to capture what it’s like to be an alien. to be in the way they did. “It changed every day on the set, every scene we tweaked a little bit… Natalie liked the character from there, and it was like a waterfall of changing and adapting from that perspective.”
“They brought so much to the table,” Dermer commented on Bell and Morales. “Not just as an actress, as they are also executive producers on the film. They were really involved in the development… we thought about their characters from all perspectives, not just how they were going to perform that day, but what it’s going to be like production-wise… Jillian and I talked about our own fears and our own tensions and how they manifest and how we can look at that through Vanessa, and then with Jennifer, we actually talked to Natalie about following the emotional response of the alien and how you would feel these things for the first time . ”
I’m all right is available in theaters, on demand and digitally on November 4, 2022, from Release DECAL.