Fran Kranz hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since dreaming up Mass, his writing and directorial debut that premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. “That knot in my stomach, it’s just not going away,” he tells Vanity Fair. “I wake up and I feel the stress as if I’m still writing, or shooting, or editing. I just feel like I’m working 24/7 on this movie.”
Kranz’s preoccupation with Mass is understandable, given the tense subject matter at its center. The riveting drama focuses on the aftermath of a school shooting, anchored by career-best performances from Ann Dowd, Martha Plimpton, Jason Isaacs, and Reed Birney, who play parents of both the tragedy’s perpetrator and one of its victims. Kranz reflects on fighting for his film’s most affecting scenes, and working through his own complicated feelings about its release, with Little Gold Men’s Katey Rich. Earlier on this week’s LGM, Katey, Richard Lawson, Rebecca Ford, and David Canfield take stock of the Oscar frontrunners for best actor and actress, deconstruct Dune’s box office haul, and preview a few other major releases.
Take a listen to the episode above, and find Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. You can also sign up to text with us at Subtext—we’d love to hear from you.
Read a partial transcript of the Fran Kranz interview below.
You talk about this movie being a hard sell, and when you’re making an indie film, you just have to sell it over, and over and over again. So what was the process for you in pitching it to people? Did you kind of perfect a one-line thing?
It’s funny, I never had any question about how it needed to be presented. This has to be a real-time conversation. From the very beginning, it was: I don’t want any music other than the practical music of the piano lesson and the choir. I want to enter the room in real-time and leave when the characters leave. The audience has to be stuck in the room because we have to see the work that they do. We have to live through it and feel the sort of strength, and the endurance, and the exhaustion, and the challenge of all that they do, because to have any conveniences of film would be to undermine the extraordinary thing that these people do.
And I’m speaking generally about anyone that meets face-to-face with people they disagree with, or feel blame or hate towards and work through that to find some kind of common ground or forgiveness is extraordinary. I felt like it was something we need more of today in this country, and so it was critical that we just don’t compromise that vision. I sort of stuck with that and I said, “Look, if the conversation is compelling enough, people will sit through it.” The logline [is]: “The parents of a school shooter meet with the parents of one of their son’s victims.” It’s striking, it’s disarming. And I would say that to people and I’d say, “Look, you’re interested and we want to know how and what happens in that room. So just let’s just have faith. If you think the script is there, let’s have faith, and let’s find the actors, and let’s see it.”
You’ve had this really overwhelming year, the ups and the downs of getting this movie out there. Now, the movie is out. Ann Dowd, in particular, is on this pretty visible awards campaign circuit. How are you feeling about being a filmmaker, maybe doing another one of these?
It’s exhausting, it’s emotional, I feel like I have a knot in my stomach, or I’ve had one for three years. It feels like a heavy weight, this movie. I have a lot of insecurity and concern about the real communities, and the real survivors, real families because I don’t have any direct experience with this. I’ve had the real honor of meeting people over the course of the journey and I met a parent the other week in New York, who lost a child at Sandy Hook. I’ve spoken with mothers or women that lost a brother and a mother that lost a son in another situation of gun violence. And I’ve spoken with journalists.
But I worry, I don’t know, and I just don’t know what to expect. And I feel this emotional…burden is the wrong word, but just sort of a responsibility to push this as hard as I can, promote it as much as I can. But it’s also coupled with this kind of fear of, “What have you just done and are you a spokesman for any of this?” No, probably. So while I want to speak passionately and from the heart, I often find myself thinking, “Dude, shut up, get off your soapbox.”
Do you ever wish you’d just stayed acting and spoken other people’s words and stopped being so hard on yourself?
I told my manager, we were out in London and I said, “I have this dream that if I ever make a movie, I will do no press…”
Be Terrence Malick, just put your movie out there and vanish.
Like I said, that emotion, that knot in my stomach, it’s just not going away. I wake up and I feel the stress as if I’m still writing, or shooting, or editing. I just feel I’m working 24/7 on this movie still, so that’s a lot. I mean, you mentioned Ann and the Oscars and all this stuff, and I try not to pay attention. Ann sort of feels like someone who’s due. She’s in that cultural conversation and Handmaid’s Tale and she’s incredible and she’s been around. She’s the kindest, most empathetic actor I think I’ve ever known. She’s sort of this open channel with her emotions and with character, and deserves it.
Then at the same time, I have four incredible actors in this movie, with four equal size roles. They’ve sort of been submitted as supporting actors, so it kind of hurts me, to think these four are competing with each other, or there’s not enough room to recognize or honor them all. And I wrote these characters as myself, I fought for each of them, I believed in each of them, none of them were bad. There was no antagonist, I had four protagonists. I had four people I believe were good human beings under these tragic circumstances. So there’s a part where it’s hard to say, “Oh shoot, the legacy might not be these four beautiful actors doing their thing, it might just be one person [who] gets recognized.” But at the same time, the fact that this little…what started as a $250,000 movie, might get an Oscar, is just a joke. It would be absolutely amazing to witness that.
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