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.
Met with critical acclaim, the film was nominated for Best First Screenplay and Best Female Lead at the 2020 Film Independent Spirit Awards. Praise focused primarily on two aspects of the film: its depiction of the connections among neighbors, something many people had come to miss due to the social distancing measures taken to control the pandemic, and Dennehy's performance. He had died a month prior to release, and critics said it was an excellent final film for him.
Ahn chose Bos and Thureen's script, derived from their childhoods in the Midwest, for his second feature out of a desire to direct something that was an intimate family drama, not written by him. He also wanted to get away from the gay Korean American milieu in which his debut, Spa Night, was set, although he did later change two main characters from white to Asian for artistic reasons. Maven Pictures backed the production, and filming took place in summer 2018 in the Hudson Valley region of New York, primarily around Poughkeepsie.
Synopsis
Late one summer night in a residential neighborhood in upstate New York, a car pulls up to a dark house. Kathy and her son Cody have come to the house with their sleeping bags. They find the house has no electricity and leave for a nearby motel. Del, an elderly widower next door, watches them from his upstairs window.
The next morning Kathy calls the electric utility to have power restored to her recently deceased older sister April's house; Kathy has come to pack it up and sell it. She learns that April owed the electric company $900. Upon returning to the house they realize that April was a hoarder.
Cody goes outside and tries to get some water to drink from a hose. Del sees him from his porch and tells him to turn the faucet the other way, and Cody does, wetting his shirt in the process. Kathy sees this and assumes that Cody bothered Del. She explains her presence and curtly tells Del she does not let her son talk to strangers. But later, when she learns Del's ride to a local veterans' event has not shown up, Kathy takes him to the local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) lodge herself, while complaining about the electric bill.
When Kathy and Cody return to April's house the next day, they discover that Del has run an extension cord across the driveway from his house to theirs. Later, Kathy and Cody visit Charlene, a local realtor, to list the house. Kathy balks at taking Charlene on a walk-through, but after Charlene tells her that the house does not need to be presentable she relents. When Charlene sees the inside, she understands why Kathy had reservations.
That night at the motel Cody asks Kathy about April, whom she did not know well since April was 12 years older. The next day, Cody meets two other neighborhood children while cleaning some furniture in the driveway. Cody also sees two other boys, Brandon and Reese, imitating professional wrestlers. The boys' grandmother, Linda, comes to greet Kathy outside. Linda recalls that April was a nice woman who did not want anyone to come into the house.
Kathy and Cody check out of the motel and start sleeping in the house. Del helps Cody bury a dead cat, and takes him to bingo at the VFW.
Linda one day offers to watch Cody while Kathy does some errands, but he does not share Brandon and Reese's love of wrestling and vomits from anxiety rather than wrestle them. He runs out of Linda's house and back home. Del sees him and recalls how he, too, vomited once as a younger man while on a troop ship to the Korean War. Thereafter, Cody spends more time with the quieter Del.
Kathy eventually gets the house clean enough to live in, and holds a yard sale. She suggests to Cody the possibility that instead of selling the house they move into it, which he supports. At the same time, Del's daughter, a judge in Seattle, tells him space has become available in a nursing home near her.
Cody invites Del and the other neighborhood children to his birthday party at a local roller rink; when Del is the only invitee to show up they relocate to the VFW lodge and celebrate with Del's friends.
Cody tells Del that he and his mother are planning to move in, and Del tells Cody he will be moving to be closer to his daughter and her wife. Upset, Cody runs off, but Del later finds and comforts him. Later, on the day Del moves out, he and Cody have a last conversation on his porch. Cody says Kathy told him they could still take the long trip to visit Del. Del jokes about Cody hitchhiking across the country, leading Del to recall a similar hitchhiking trip he took with a friend after leaving the Army, and ruminate about how it has since seemed like so many years have gone by so quickly but how he would not change much of it.
Cast
Hong Chau as Kathy Lucas Jaye as Cody Brian Dennehy as Del Christine Ebersole as Linda Jerry Adler as Rodger Stan Carp as Lester Bill Buell as Tom Robyn Payne as Charlene Samantha Jones as Lisa Sophia DeStefano as Anna Jeter Rivera as Miguel Jack Caleb as Brandon James DiGiacomo as Reese Joe Felece as Bingo Caller Jennifer Delora as Cheryl Laurent Rejto as Cashier
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. "I thought, 'I got to ride with this guy.'"
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.
Preproduction
Ahn had considered many scripts before Joe Pirro sent him Driveways. After reading it for the first time in a crowded coffeeshop, he realized he needed to read it again, alone, at home, to fully appreciate it; when he did it brought tears to his eyes. "I was blown away by how human it felt." Thematically, he said, "it explores what it means to connect with someone else ... that despite these barriers between us, we can find something really human and soulful."
Ironically, for Ahn, given his initial desire to do something as unlike his first film as possible, he suggested that Kathy and Cody be written as Asian rather than White in order to emphasize their otherness in April's community, which gave some of the existing dialogue, such as Kathy's first meeting with Linda, additional layers. The producers, Ahn recalled, were excited by the idea.
Other than that, the film does not reference their ethnicity, something Chau appreciated. "I certainly would not have signed up for the film if Kathy and Cody were just two-dimensional characters who existed solely to experience blatant racism or microaggressions, so that the audience could be delivered some clunky message about how racism is bad." Ahn also found some items that seemed like distinctly Asian items for April to have hoarded, but did not actually suggest any to the film's production designer.
The story was originally set in western Illinois, where writers Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen had grown up. Ahn found the move to the Hudson Valley of New York, to also be ironic since it led to principal photography taking place mostly in and around Poughkeepsie, where Bos and Thureen had met as students at Vassar College. The script did not require much revision to reflect that change.
Where Spa Night had been difficult to finance due to its subject matter, relying in part on money raised through Kickstarter, Ahn said, Driveways utilized traditional American independent film financing, which depended on the actors attached to the project. Dennehy had been one of the first actors to commit to the film, after he liked the script. Hong Chau, after seeing Spa Night at theaters, had emailed Ahn and told him she would be willing to do anything he wanted her to do in his next film; Ahn had coffee with her and came to believe that "she would bring that humanity to the character I was looking for." Maven Pictures soon took the film on.
Ahn was not comfortable beginning production in 2018 until a pair of houses, both with porches, separated by a driveway, could be found to serve as the film's primary location. "I really wanted an authenticity of space and place", he explained. "That continuity was important for the actors, that they could walk in and walk out of a space and not have to separate between the two. We wouldn't have to shoot one part of the scene in one location on one day and then another part of the scene at a different location on another day." Ahn, the producers and the location scout searched all over the Poughkeepsie area; ultimately they asked a local real estate broker, who turned out to not only know exactly where there was a pair of houses that fit the film's specifications, but was familiar with the families that lived in them.
It was important to Ahn as well that it be clear the neighborhood, while residential, was not in a city. He believed a "small-town feel" would accentuate the initial wariness Kathy and Cody felt, especially as minorities, who mostly live in cities. "At the same time, we also wanted to capture the natural beauty of the space." Ahn drove around looking for some of the other locations since he wanted to be as familiar with the area as possible in order to portray it effectively.
Lucas Jaye, who had previously had a recurring role in Fuller House but had not been in any films before, was the last of the three leads to be cast; his parents almost missed sending in his audition tape by the deadline as they had forgotten to send it before a family trip to Disneyland.