Independent’s Day

To hear Lisa Krueger and Mary Kay Place tell it, the entire production of “Manny & Lo”--a micro-budget, independent feature film written and directed by Krueger and starring Place--was a perpetual lovefest.

“We just instantly clicked,” says Place, sitting next to Krueger on a couch at the Bel Age Hotel in Los Angeles, where the two are conducting a series of press interviews. Together, they’re irrepressible, leaping into each other’s sentences, while relating the process of getting “Manny & Lo” made with a palpable joy.

The film--released by Sony Pictures Classics in L.A. on Friday--tells the story of two sisters, Manny and Lo (short for Amanda and Laurel), aged 11 and 16, recently orphaned and on the run from the system that wants to separate them and put them into foster care. Determined to keep moving so they “won’t get nailed,” the girls camp out in vacant suburban model homes, subsisting on shoplifted Twinkies and Cheerios.

When Lo’s pregnancy--which she’s denied until her belly is ready to pop--forces them to settle down in a cabin tucked into the countryside, the two begin to research what they’ll need when the baby comes.

Enter Place as Elaine, a clerk in a local baby store, with her titian-colored hair neatly piled on top of her head, her body crisply wrapped in a starched nurse’s uniform. Elaine, as she’d be the first to say, has never been wrong when it comes to infants.

Lo decides to kidnap baby expert Elaine, forcing a hunting rifle into her back and locking her feet together with a bicycle chain. Once in custody, the girls figure, Elaine will help them. But once captured, Elaine turns out to be not quite how the girls imagined, and an intense triangular relationship develops between the three characters.

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More fantastic than the arc of the film’s story, however, is how swiftly the 36-year-old Krueger--an untried filmmaker--had her vision realized from screenplay to completed film.

Krueger had submitted the script, her first feature, to the Utah-based Sundance Filmmakers Lab and was accepted into the directors lab in June 1994. A little over a year later, Krueger was on location shooting her film with a complete cast and crew.

Formed to encourage alternative filmmaking, Sundance offers fledgling filmmakers a chance to collaborate with working film professionals--including actors, directors and screenwriters--to develop their projects. As a Sundance fellow, Krueger was invited to rehearse, shoot on video and edit scenes from “Manny & Lo” over the course of four weeks. It was John Lyons, serving as the casting director for the Sundance lab, who suggested that Krueger have Place play Elaine at the lab.

“My jaw dropped,” Krueger recalls. “I couldn’t believe he’d uttered those words. I said, ‘If Mary Kay Place will do this, that will be an absolute dream come true.’ ”

For her part, Place had been moved by the script and was anxious to try it out. A writer-director herself (with writer credits including TV’s “MASH” and director credits including “Dream On” and “Friends”), Place says she’d written a history of Elaine even before she came to the lab.

The women didn’t meet beforehand, but before the lab began, Krueger hosted a reading at her house, and within minutes Krueger knew Place was Elaine. “I said, ‘This is a real actor I’m listening to and hearing,’ ” Krueger says. “It’s a totally different thing than reading it yourself in your head. It’s suddenly like it had some kind of weight in reality.”

Once the lab ended, Krueger and Place returned to their respective homes, each with different impressions of what would happen next.

“My instinct was that this film was going to be made come hell or high water,” Place remembers. “I knew after we’d worked on it at the lab that Lisa was going to be making this film the next year.” What Place wasn’t so sure about was her own involvement. “I wanted to do it, but I didn’t know if I was going to be invited to do it,” she recalls.

“I assumed she knew,” says Krueger, almost apologetically. “I was telling everybody that she was attached to the project! In fact, I was telling prospective producers that there were two givens: My brother [Tom Krueger] was going to be the cinematographer and Mary Kay Place was Elaine.”

Krueger, who had met with various producers beginning in November of 1994, finally hooked up with producing team Dean Silver and Marten Hecht, who were enthusiastic about the project. Silver’s producing credits include “Spanking the Monkey” and “Flirting With Disaster,” while Hecht’s include “Wigstock: The Movie.”

With Silver and Hecht willing to make a commitment, Krueger decided to see how serious they really were. Knowing that the part of Lo--a fiercely independent and troubled young woman--would be the toughest to cast, Krueger said to her producers: “I know we just met, and I know we just decided to make this movie together, but we have to start looking for that girl now.”

“And the next day,” Krueger says, “I got this call from [casting director] Ellen Parks telling me she wanted to get going. So by early spring of last year, she started looking. She went to parks, to high schools, because I knew that the kind of girl I was looking for rarely goes into acting. And sure enough, she saw a couple of girls in Washington Square Park [in New York City] who were perfect for Lo but who couldn’t have been less interested in being in a movie.”

Parks finally remembered 14-year-old Aleksa Palladino, who’d auditioned for her about two years previously, but Aleksa’s mother was concerned because Aleksa had dyed her hair to look like Courtney Love’s. “That was great,” Krueger recalls, “because she was one of the models we were looking for.”

The casting calls for the younger character, Manny, proved educational for Krueger. “It was really important for me that Manny be just this side of the bridge to the sexual world, and when I say ‘sexual,’ I don’t mean sexually active, I mean aware of yourself as a sexual being. So it was amazing to see these actresses come in to read who had just crossed over. They have this shadow of a doubt that they carry with them.”

Scarlett Johansson captured just the right amount of self-confidence to play Manny, a character Krueger feels stands in for the audience, as a nonjudgmental observer. Johansson’s screen credits include “North” and “If Lucy Fell.”

With her cast and crew in place, it was decided that the film would be shot on the East Coast rather than Northern California, where Krueger is from and where she had imagined the story taking place.

“We shot in Upstate New York because of Dean and Marten wanting to be close to their families,” Krueger says. “We were looking for this strange mixture of rural America meets suburban nightmare. Dean had shot ‘Spanking the Monkey’ and ‘Flirting With Disaster’ in New York and he thought it was a great place to make a low-budget film.”

The budget, which was less than $1 million, and the five-week shooting schedule didn’t seem to trouble either Krueger--a former script supervisor for Jim Jarmusch and James Ivory--or Place.

“You have to have done your homework [to work that fast],” Place says. “It’s like riding a bike, where if you think about it, you fall over.”

“Our schedule was tight particularly due to the fact that we were working with two minors, and we were only allowed to shoot a certain number of hours a day,” says Krueger, whose script supervising skills came in quite handy. “Suddenly I’d realize that we only had time to do two shots for the scene instead of five. And it came pretty easily for me to figure out what those two angles would be, just because of having done that job and having to constantly see how the film was going to be cut in your head.”

It also doesn’t hurt to have your younger brother as your director of photography. “He was a great collaborator for me,” Krueger says of her brother Tom. “We’d just say, ‘OK, we have an hour to shoot this,’ and we’d figure out how to block it. Mary Kay is wonderful at blocking because she’s a director, and that helped a lot. She thinks a lot about what the frame is doing and what feels right for the character.”

Place also had a huge influence with her fellow actors, who looked to her for guidance during the filming. “She really insisted that the kidnapping be hard-core,” Krueger recalls.

“They [Palladino and Johansson] were afraid to be serious about it!” Place interjects.

“It was such a marvel to see Mary Kay in rehearsal, not even in front of a camera, begging this 14-year-old to jam her onto the floor, just to get there and get that feeling,” Krueger continues.

“Mary Kay taught me a lot,” Palladino says. “She wants everything to be real, no tricks.” To further achieve authenticity, Place really had her feet locked together with the bicycle chain, forcing her to shuffle across the set.

“I’d be annoyed with my pregnancy suit,” Palladino says, “and I’d see her struggling in those chains, and I just couldn’t feel sorry for myself.”

Also authentic was the close relationship between the two girls. “We got along wonderfully,” says Johansson of her association with Palladino. “On breaks we’d go off and explore, eat wild raspberries and talk.”

For Palladino, who’s an only child, it was like having a little sister. “I felt like her older sister, and I still do,” she says.

Both young women had tremendous say in the development of their characters. “We kind of created the character together,” says Johansson, whose real-life family plays a cameo in the film. “We created a past for Manny and what would happen to her afterwards.”

The development of Elaine was a seemingly endless process. “Mary Kay has this great innate [sense] that comes from her being a writer,” Krueger says. “For a director, it’s a godsend. But she was on my case the whole time. She never let anything slide. If something felt false for whatever reason, she wouldn’t do it.”

Next up for Place is a role in the upcoming “Citizen Ruth” opposite Laura Dern, which is due out this fall. Krueger--who just received the 1996 Independent Feature Project Gotham Open Palm Award for “Manny & Lo”--is working on her next script.

But for now the lovefest continues. “Do you ever get signs from the universe that you’re doing the right thing?” Krueger asks. “One of them for me was that Mary Kay--whom I adore as an actress--turned out to be all the things that I was trying to make a movie about.”

And all Place can do is smile in return.