Zoe Lister-Jones On Her New Film, Music and Marriage Comedy 'Band Aid'
The actress talks about hiring an all-female crew for filming and the vulnerability of making music.
The actress talks about hiring an all-female crew for filming and the vulnerability of making music.
Zoe Lister-Jones has been acting in, writing, and producing her own work for nearly 13 years, but her latest film, Band Aid, is the artist’s first foray into directing her own material. “It was something that scared me and that’s why I felt that I had to do it,” she notes. “I think for any artist that’s really what it takes to grow.”
The film chronicles a feuding married couple that forms a band to help process their unresolved issues. “The power dynamic within any relationship, but especially long-term relationships, is a concept that I personally navigate and am interested in exploring in my art,” Jones explains. “[In many films] you see either the beginning of a love story or the end of a love story, but all of the mess that lies in between is slightly underexplored.”
The movie has its share of sex scenes, but it was shooting music rehearsals (in which she sings and plays bass) that really fostered the intimacy Lister-Jones shares with costar Adam Pally. “It’s such a vulnerable experience to make music with another person,” she says. A host of frequent collaborators—including her husband, Daryl Wein, along with Colin Hanks, Brooklyn Decker, and Jamie Chung—helped relax the mood on set. She also sourced a crew made up entirely of women: “It was definitely deliberate to hire an all-female production crew, because being both in front of and behind the camera, I’m pretty aware of how underrepresented women are on film and TV.”
That the Women’s March coincided with the weekend of the premiere proved even more apropos for the group. “My mom flew into Park City and I marched with her on her birthday,” she recalls. “That more and more women are choosing to lend their voices to a larger movement is a really beautiful and exciting thing.”
