David (Clayne Crawford) looks down the barrel of a gun one second, and in the next he hops into his truck to spend time with his children. The Killing of Two Lovers teeters on this eerie dichotomy to share the story of a father who does anything he can to hold on to that title he is so proud of.
Writer-director Robert Machoian said that a lot of David’s struggles developed out of experiences he’s seen his friends and family go through regarding separation and maintaining their role as a father.
“My sister had separated and my brother-in-law and I were talking and he said to me, 'You know, sometimes the ex-husband would call and be really mean to her,’” Machoian said.
“And he's like, ‘There's nothing I can do about it because if I do, if I take any action, it will end our relationship.’”
Machoian said there is always that risk of losing everything. That tension is exactly what he wanted to display in the film through David.
“He can leave at any period of time and go to the baseball game, soccer game, recital, whatever it is,” Machoian said about David’s character.
“He's chosen this life to allow him to be a very, very good father. And now he's at risk of losing the thing that he's chosen to define himself by.”
Machoian also built David’s character off the types of men he saw in Utah. He didn’t start fully dissecting masculinity and fatherhood until he interacted with these fathers, who epitomized masculinity yet had a soft spot for a family that contrasted with the performance of indestructibility they uphold.
“What you meet are these men who, due to resources; for example, they work on their own cars, they work on their own houses, and they’re very much the definition of what we look at as masculinity,” he said.
“But yet they’re very open in their expression of how much they love their wives, and they will weep while discussing their children.”
The script began as a short film called The Drift. After a call with Crawford, who Machoian had been trying to work with for a while, he was encouraged to develop the short into a feature. Machoian recalled Crawford’s response as, “Can you just make it longer, we just do a feature and I’ll finance it?”
The short was still included in the feature script as a comedic pause.
“We have a couple at odds with each other and there are really tough emotions here, and then I want to put this comedic short, this almost short film in the middle of this dialogue,” he said.
The scene built off the idea of having a waitress interrupt a conversation. Except instead of a waitress it’s the boyfriend and the tension comes from the separated couple watching from a parked car as their children interact with this new man trying to enter the family with flowers in hand.
Machoian’s experience writing the feature from the short film, as Crawford proposed, was vastly different than most situations. He explained that typically, writers don’t have many limitations to location, actors and more. However, he went into writing it with a budget in mind, influencing how the story developed and where it took place.
He looked toward the words of Edward Burns on the process of writing and directing The Brothers McMullen.
“In one of the things I read he was like, ‘There’s not much more reel or film ends on the front or back of every scene you’re watching when you watch The Brothers McMullen,’” Machoian said of Burns.
“He’s like, ‘The edit is where I normally hit stop.' And I really considered that."
Although Machoian was conscious of the budget when writing, it did not limit his ability to craft nuanced characters. His collaboration with Crawford allowed him to explore David even more.
“Working with Clayne was the first time I got to work with people who are pursuing acting professionally,” he said.
“And so all of a sudden I was dealing with somebody that had so much more range and so many more octaves than what I had experienced in the work I had done earlier.”
He noticed himself learning to write more abstractly, with deeper ranges of emotions. It’s something that is incredibly apparent in The Killing of Two Lovers. In each scene, no matter what speed it went, the screen showed questions flow through the eyes of David. How does he keep it together? How does he be a good father? How does he protect his children? Machoian’s writing and directing allowed the complex struggles of fatherhood to tug and guide people through David’s story.
“I learned to really be able to push those things and further scripts after that; I’ve been a lot more nuanced,” he said.
“I can tell more complex stories."
The Killing of Two Lovers is currently in theaters and on demand.