Dakota Johnson Shares Reaction to Premiering Her Directorial Debut at TIFF: “I Don’t Know What We’re Doing Here”

At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, actress, producer, and now director Dakota Johnson presented her short film Loser Baby with writer, star, and good friend Talia Bernstein. Johnson took her experience on the sets of other directors’ films — “all different kinds of direction and methods of direction” — and applied it to her own, where she and Bernstein worked with all of their best friends on a short film she never intended to premiere at TIFF.

“I don’t know what we’re doing here, honestly,” Johnson laughs, admitting that their friend and Loser Baby‘s producer, Ro Donnelly, submitted the short without either of them knowing. The surprise turned out to be a smart move when the 23-minute queer comedy was accepted and celebrated its world premiere at the festival. Bernstein, who’s penned episodes for popular series like Fresh Off the Boat and Ghosts, says she wrote the script about “a very real depiction of gay relationships, and very specifically of gay people in their mid-thirties, where they’re not young and crazy anymore, but they’re not older and have their life figured out.”

Johnson and Bernstein stopped by the Collider media studio at the Cinema Center at MARBL to discuss the film with Steve Weintraub. The duo shares what it was like to improvise on set with their friends, how it felt to find out they were heading to the festival, and what their futures look like as far as directing and acting again. Bernstein talks about working on Ghosts and How I Met Your Mother, and Johnson teases her upcoming projects with Oscar-nominee Celine Song and Mike Covino.

You can watch the conversation in the video above or you can read the full transcript below.

What Is Dakota Johnson’s ‘Loser Baby’?

COLLIDER: I really want to start with congratulations. This is your directorial debut as a short. You’ve done a music video before, but this is your first film. I really want to say congrats. I thought you did a great job, and it’s because you teamed up with [Talia]. No one will have seen [Loser Baby] yet, so how have you guys been describing the film to friends and family?

DAKOTA JOHNSON: Oh god, you take that one. Thank you, by the way. That was nice.

TALIA BERNSTEIN: Thank you for saying that I’m the reason it was really good.

JOHNSON: [Laughs] It’s the truth.

I think it’s a combination of the two. It’s your performance and script and your direction. It’s a combo.

JOHNSON: How would you describe this?

BERNSTEIN: I would say that it is a very real depiction of gay relationships, and very specifically of gay people in their mid-thirties, where they’re not young and crazy anymore, but they’re not older and have their life figured out. They’re sort of in that middle ground. So that was the inspiration for why I wanted to do it — I just wanted to showcase that and showcase real relationships and what they look like, and that they can look all different ways.

JOHNSON: Also, Talia’s an incredible comedy writer. When we read it, it was sort of like a little short, a little piece of her work. Ro [Donnelly] and I, my producing partner, read it, and we were like, “We have to make this,” because it’s so good and so poignant and so special. It also was really perfect to cast all of our best friends in all of these roles. It was great for me because I just got to sit around and tell all my friends what to do for three days.

That’s exactly what I wanted to know. Everyone felt so comfortable together. How was it with casting? Everyone in frame, are they all people that you’re best friends with?

JOHNSON: Yeah.

BERSTEIN: Yeah, basically.

JOHNSON: Yes, and my little sisters are in the background. Some people who work in our office are in the background at the party. It was a family affair, for sure. And because Blake [Lee], who plays Devon, and Talia are best friends, we’re all best friends, they really do have that kind of banter. So, I was able to track them and let them improvise. I know their strengths as comedians, so I felt like I could amplify them in moments where maybe it wasn’t there in the script. And then I had to really rein them in because they’re so stupid.

When you’re making a short film like this, you need to accomplish so much in such little time. How much before you stepped on set were you rehearsing or blocking, knowing you had a limited schedule to make it?

BERNSTEIN: I remember I went to your house.

JOHNSON: You became an absolute monster. She was like, “I’m a diva. I need a lot of attention.”

BERNSTEIN: That’s right. I started that. That’s how I started.

JOHNSON: “What is my deal? How many points on the back end?”

BERNSTEIN: Exactly. “When it goes and becomes like a roller coaster, how much of that do I get?”

JOHNSON: “When I blow up?”

BERNSTEIN: [Laughs] But no, I went to Dakota’s a week or two before we were going to shoot it, and we went through the scenes one by one. We were sort of just chatting about how we could make it better or shorter and more punchy or whatever. So we did that once or twice before we actually got to set.

JOHNSON: But we didn’t have time to do blocking and proper rehearsals or anything. It was all really free, a lot of improvising. The DP that I work with, Cristina Dunlap, and I have worked together multiple times and have a really shorthand communication, so it flowed really well. A lot of people did us favors because they thought the script was great. So, it was good.