“You have to have something you can subvert or undercut”: Directors David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano discuss ‘I Don’t Understand You’

Posted On June 5, 2025June 5, 2025

Co-writers, co-directors, and real-life couple David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano used their own experiences as the jumping-off point into their jet-black, horror-tinged comedy, I Don’t Understand You, but only to a certain extent.

The story mirrors the ups and downs they endured in adopting a child, and several scenes were directly inspired by a trip they took to Italy, but Nick Kroll’s Dom and Andrew Rannell’s Cole take things to extremes by failing to master the local tongue, misunderstanding many cultural customs, and accidentally leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake in a vacation that invites disaster at every turn.

The couple take a trip to celebrate their tenth anniversary, which also helps to take their minds off the life-changing phone call they’re hoping to receive with parenthood looming on the horizon, only for a combination of poor directions and a complete lack of Italian language skills leaving them stranded overnight at an isolated restaurant where everything that could go wrong does.

It’s been over a year since the film premiered at the 2024 South by Southwest Film Festival, and with I Don’t Understand You releasing theatrically on June 6th, 2025, the duo are more than ready to share the fruit of their labour with the world. “We always call it the ‘fourth stage’ of filmmaking,” Craig explained. “The first stage is writing, the second stage is shooting, the third stage is editing, and the fourth stage is giving it away.”

“It’s like divorce,” Crano joked. “There’s that great [Alfonso] Cuarón quote: ‘All my films are like my ex-wives; I’m glad they exist, but I don’t get to see them anymore.’” From Craig’s perspective, it no longer exclusively belongs to them: “It becomes everyone else’s story now,” he said. “Which is both exciting and nervous.”

That said, it belongs to them more than anyone else. After all, the first act in particular is heavily inspired by things that happened, and it didn’t take Craig and Crano long to realise that their sojourn to Europe had the makings of a feature, albeit with some creative and dramatic flourishes.

“It was pretty organic,” Crano elaborated. “The way that we write typically is to figure out the first act and what the characters are up to, and what they what they need, and then in the first draft of the writing process, improvised the movie a little bit so that at every turn you’re where they are on their journey. Obviously, we knew where we wanted the movie to end, but everything else in between, we discovered along with them as we were writing it.”

“I also think because we had this personal experience, it was fairly easy to connect to the characters at every point,” Craig interjected. “What happened in the middle of the movie could have clearly been the end of the movie. But we just decided to write even further past that, because we knew we could keep the characters as real as possible, and just keep sending them into worse and worse situations.”

I Don’t Understand You is Craig’s feature-length debut as a director, but he and Crano have worked together on numerous occasions in various capacities. The latter directed the former in Permission and the TV series What to Expect, and they co-directed an episode of Las Santeras.

However, did their first movie as a shared creative mind offer a more difficult or challenging process than usual, especially with a narrative that not only touches base with so many wild and crazy incidents, but is also based on several story points from their real lives?

“Brian might have a different opinion, but it was pretty organic, I think,” Craig offered. “We were a couple long before we were a writing and directing pair, and we both worked in different capacities in the industry prior, but we would always have each other as a sounding board, and we have a very similar voice. And so it was nice to have 100% allegiance with the person that you were working with, because we think the same way creatively. So for me, it was organic and also really relieving to have a second brain that operated the same way that I did.”

“The thing I think about a lot is, oftentimes, when your partner is succeeding, you hear about it, but you don’t get to watch it,” Crano chipped in. “And so that was really cool to watch, to watch him kick ass as a director.” Another interesting caveat about I Don’t Understand You is that by casting the characters of Dom and Cole, the filmmakers weren’t only Kroll and Rannell’s writers and directors, but they were effectively their onscreen surrogates as well.

“As much as they’re inspired by things that happened to us, it’s certainly a heightened idea of privileged, annoying Americans,” Crano clarified. “In terms of working together, they’re both so smart and cheerful and happy to get into it. It was very easy, and they were always so collaborative.”

It helped that the two stars have been friends for a long time, with Crano acknowledging how “having that years-long friendship between them really did translate, and they really do love each other as people, and you can see it on the screen,” with the co-director going so far as to describe it as a “huge cheat.”

“Usually, in a movie, you’re like, ‘This is your husband, say hello’, and it doesn’t work all the time,” he said. Beyond that, Craig started to realise during production that art began to imitate life in more ways than one when the directorial duo were passing on suggestions to their stars.

“Early on, we realised that Andrew had a lot of similar ways of receiving notes that I would, and Nick had a lot of ways of receiving notes the same way that Brian would, and we both didn’t understand how to direct the other one for the first week of production. And then we suddenly realised, ‘Oh wait, if we just understood how each other took a note, we could actually communicate with the other person on set.’”

With the on-set dynamic established, it became a matter of tone. I Don’t Understand You dabbles in family drama, romantic comedy and black comedy at various points, often within the space of the same scene, with lashings of thriller and horror thrown in for good measure, a melting pot the directors wanted to stir from the start.

“Our favourite kind of scene is when two characters are physically in the same scene, but each of them is in a different scene in their own experience,” Crano shared. “In terms of balancing tone, if you pursue each one as hard as possible, and don’t worry about it too much, the tone will emerge magically in the middle. So we allow them to be as funny as they can be. We want it to be as scary as it can be. If you don’t make the characters do anything that is beneath their intelligence, then the tone sorts itself out.”

“I think that speaks to the circumstance of the scenes,” Craig took over. “I think a lot of times, scenes are played for a joke in the scene, rather than the actual circumstance of the scene. To go off of what Brian said, if you’re playing the scene for real, it could be the funniest scene in the world, even though they’re playing it as dramatically as possible. And I think that that’s just what we thrive on. And we thrive on surprise, too. As long as we can surprise ourselves, we feel really excited about it.”

The ‘romantic getaway gone horribly wrong’ is a setup that audiences are familiar with, but I Don’t Understand You presents it in a new light. On paper, it’s got a classic feel, but it’s laced with modern sensibilities, a middle ground that occurred naturally when the script and shoot were coming together.

“I think that it’s very important in the way that we like to, if you’re going to deliver a surprise, the predicate beat has to be really established,” Crano mused. “You have to have something that you can subvert or undercut. So, for us, it was very important that ‘We’re here in Italy. It’s beautiful. It is romantic of its own accord. Let’s make sure we really lean into how beautiful and picturesque and romantic all of that stuff is, so that we can completely fuck with it as we go forward.’”

“In terms of the modern take of it, I think we had the luxury of, I’ve never seen a queer couple’s adoption story told in this way,” Craig suggested. “So I think we had a fun luxury of being able to ruminate in being able to educate an audience on what the process actually is, even if it’s in a sort of psychotic way that we’ve portrayed it! Aligned with that, I think just in our core, we are ’90s movies kids, so like we, we thrive on movies that in the ’90s you were given but loads of money to go and make whatever you wanted.”

In Craig’s words, instead of a movie where “you threw Jamie Lee Curtis into a world in which she became an action star from being a housewife,” I Don’t Understand You reflected the filmmakers’ desire “to take a really small, typical romantic comedy and just throw it on its head, just because that’s our normal, everyday lives, that’s how Brian and I operate.”

Outside of Kroll, Rannells, a supporting role for Morgan Spector as Massimo, and a small-but-pivotal part for Amanda Seyfried as the mother of the child Dom and Cole are hoping to adopt, the rest of I Don’t Understand You‘s cast is Italian, as are most of the production crew, which was the way Craig and Crano always wanted it to be.

“We always say we made an Italian movie in English,” the former agreed. “That’s sort of our tagline.” As for the latter, there was an inherent wariness about American archetypes, which he wanted to embrace and subvert both in front of the camera and behind it.

“Their film culture is so wonderful and rich, and they’re so proud of it. And what we realised is a lot of American crews will go over there and be really pushy about, like, ‘No, we’re gonna do this exactly how we would do it at home’. And just David and I were like, ‘That’s crazy. Like, there are seven Americans in the movie and 150 Italians.’ I think we got a lot farther with our crew by being like, ‘How do you guys want to make the movie? And like, what do you think is funny?’”

By “empowering the crew to really help us tell the story,” Crano enjoyed the “really pleasant experience” of witnessing “things that would never happen with an American crew,” which made it more collaborative. “Everybody on the crew in Italy had read the script, from department heads to assistants, and that just doesn’t happen here in the same way,” he revealed.

As a result, “you would show up and everybody would know what the work was and they would be ahead of you.” That gave I Don’t Understand You a crew that was “really fast and really plugged into the storytelling in a way that I haven’t experienced in my career,” which has left him eager to return to Europe for any future project that presents the opportunity.

Another welcome benefit? Lunch. “They honour meals in a real way,” Craig said. “They honour the time that they have lunch, they honour the time that they have dinner. Here in the States, we could do split days. We did four weeks of straight nights because we had to honour that schedule, but because of that, they gave us more days. It was just a great learning experience. And I think as long as you’re willing to cooperate and not demand it, it becomes an absolutely amazing experience.”

With that in mind, if there were an entirely hypothetical sequel – I Still Don’t Understand You, for talking’s sake – the directing duo know exactly where they’d head. “Denmark,” came the reply in almost perfect unison, with Craig drilling into why.

“We think, just the idyllic setting of, like, of, sort of ignorant, I won’t say stupid, ignorant Americans abroad, travelling to a country like Denmark. Specifically, we travelled to Copenhagen, and it’s such a completely….” He trailed off, but Crano stepped in to underline their shared thought process.

“It’s a collectivist society. A society that’s interested in people, everybody doing well, and that is so fucking foreign to us.” Reiterating that point, Craig thinks “the miscommunication of Americans being in a society that takes care of itself would be a very good setting to put ignorant Americans, so we may be working on that.”

As mentioned earlier, I Don’t Understand You has similar DNA to many established comedies, but Craig and Crano shot it through with their own experiences and comedic flavour. Still, there were touchstones the pair looked towards for inspiration. Two stood out, and they both starred John Candy.

“I’m like the biggest evangelist of this film that nobody talks about, but it’s this Eugene Levy movie called Once Upon a Crime, and it’s so wonderfully silly, and the characters all have deep needs and deep problems, and they’re these big comedic performances. That’s a movie I always think about, just because it brought me so much joy in my life.”

“As a two-hander, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is definitely a touchstone of two competing heads that just keep getting into deeper and deeper shit as they’re going,” Craig said before dropping in another cherished film. “And then one of my all-time favourite movies that just goes there, and also speaks to the classism and relationships, is Death Becomes Her.”

It might have been smooth sailing for Craig and Crano to get on the same page to write and direct I Don’t Understand You together, but when pressed to name which movie would be their dream directorial project, a stark difference in their formative filmic experiences suddenly appears.

“I would remake this French film called Tell No One, which I love,” Crano said. “It’s a big, exciting thriller. That’s what I would make.” Knowing what was coming, Craig prefaced his answer with a telling, “Brian’s gonna rip me to shreds for this.” Why? Because he dreams of redoing 1986’s SpaceCamp, which features an early role for Joaquin Phoenix.

“Wouldn’t it be a great remake now?” came the entirely rhetorical question. “I just think it could be amazing, and also, all I want to do is make a space movie, and the IP is not available. We’ve checked. So I guess I’m going to have to make my own space movie. But if I could wake up tomorrow and it were in my hands, that would be what I’d make.”

On one hand, an intense French thriller. On the other hand, SpaceCamp. Why not combine the two? “Maybe the next SpaceCamp is also a French thriller,” Craig pondered. Surprisingly, Crano wasn’t against the idea: “My wife is dead, and I’m in space camp. Yeah, exactly.”

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