The Trick Who Came Home :: Tom Dolby on 'Last Weekend'

"Last Weekend," a terrific, revealing movie shot in one of the most pristine slices of nature, opened recently. Tom Dolby, scion of the fabled Dolby Sound clan, along with his college chum and co-director Tom Williams, offers the quirky family drama.

Anxious matriarch Celia Green (crackling good Patricia Clarkson) has decided that it's time to ring down the curtain on her tribe's tradition of marking the end of summer at their sprawling Lake Tahoe estate. This weekend her adult gay son Theo ("Keep the Lights On" co-star Zachary Booth) has brought along his latest trick, Luke (one-time ACT student Devon Graye), and the perky one-night-stand has his own ideas about how the script will play out. This sharply observed portrait of an upper-income West Coast family is enlivened by a resourceful ensemble, including Joseph Cross, known for his high-wire comic turn in the film version of Augusten Burroughs' "Running with Scissors."

The fun begins as Celia welcomes Theo home for the holiday. This acerbic, heavy-drinking kid, just turned 30, is more like his mom than either of them is comfortable admitting. Theo is accompanied by a young man of humble origins who turns out to be a lot more formidable a bed-partner than any of his recent bar conquests.

"You have to meet Luke."

"He's the boyfriend?"

"No, he's not my boyfriend!"

"Okay, just lover?"

"Hi, I'm Luke."

"I suppose I could say I've heard so much about you, except I can't, because Theo never tells his parents anything."

"I've been busy!"

"Roger and Vanessa are bringing all the food I ordered. I hope they get here soon or we might have to start eating our limbs like the Donner Party. And that enormous car! Where did it come from? I just don't like you driving, you've never been completely comfortable behind the wheel. I only want you to be safe!"

Theo and Luke enter their bedroom, where Luke grabs Theo's arm and remarks, "I thought you said your mom was crazy."

"Most people have trains of thought. My mom has, like, 15,000 post-it notes."

Early this May, when "Last Weekend" was having its maiden hometown screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival, I enjoyed a Japantown hotel group-chat with filmmakers Dolby and Williams, along with cast members Joseph Cross and Devon Graye.

David Lamble: The wonderful Lake Tahoe house we see in the movie was a house you actually lived in.

Tom Dolby: I spent summers and some winters growing up there with my family, particularly growing into my teens.

What was it like to shoot there?

Dolby: It was challenging, yet you get such an incredible degree of realism. I remember Patty [Clarkson] telling us in the first week, "This is fantastic! You look out the windows and you see trees, you see the lake." If you were shooting on a stage, there's no way you could recreate that.

Where does this story come from?

I grew up in a family where I'm the gay older brother, my younger brother is straight. It came out of that, but then developed in its own way as a story. Celia's not my mom. Celia developed on the page. Then as Patty took on the character, she brought her own flavor to it.

How did the ensemble grow so large?

Dolby: It's because we were a little naive.

Tom Williams: We did want to show that there's nowhere you can really go. We noticed that the only place you can go to get away from everyone is the bathroom. So we have characters going into the bathroom just for a moment, but we did want it to feel claustrophobic, that every bedroom is occupied.

Which characters are best at coping in a family like this?

Williams: One of the best-adjusted is Luke, Theo's boyfriend. He knows himself best. A lot of the characters are in denial in certain aspects. Luke and Vanessa are probably the most self-aware.

I relished Joseph's Roger, who conceals the fact that's he's been fired from a financial firm by tossing the business section of the paper, knowing that the house has no WiFi. So his deceit will likely go undetected for the weekend. Did your house not have an Internet connection?

Dolby: It does now, but until two years ago you had to do a dialup AOL, complete with those funky modem sounds.

That's a real retreat from the world!

Dolby: Right. Cell service was really spotty.

Williams: You had to wander all the way out onto the dock.

Joseph, your character is hiding the fact that he's been fired because of a slip-up that cost his firm $30 million. This character is so ill-at-ease, yet he really belongs in that house with that mother.

Joseph Cross: He's in a really bad place when you first meet him. He's slightly better off afterwards. He finally tells his father what happened. Another character tells him that maybe the firing is a blessing in disguise, which it really is, but Roger's not hearing that.

You have a impressive stunt, pulling the handyman out of the water.

Cross: I thought I was going to throw up. The water's very cold, and I jumped in and pulled him up to the beach. It's very high altitude, so if you do a lot of exercise it's difficult.

Dolby: We did it once and didn't think we could do it any better.

Williams: We were never afraid to make Roger petulant or annoying because at the end of the day, he saves two people's lives in the movie.

You get beneath the superficial details and give us an amusing but pointed insider's story.

Dolby: There are things about the Greens that are very different from my own family, but the heart of what I tried to convey about that kind of people is there.

Talk about Zachary Booth's Theo.

Dolby: That character's not particularly likeable. He's self-centered, he drinks too much, takes pills, and he's very critical.

He treats his boyfriend shabbily at first.

Devon Graye: The movie's not about a gay relationship, it could as easily be a girl and a guy. I think that's the next level of filmmaking: not highlighting the gay story, but normalizing it.

But your boyfriend is in the habit of picking up a lot of guys. You're part of a chain of one-night-stands.

Graye: This time it's a little different. I have to meet his family, he has to be a little more vulnerable with me.

And you have to assert your dignity, because you don't want to be treated like a one-night-stand when you're in that environment.

Graye: Exactly. My character is not just asserting himself with Theo, but as a person in general.

There's that moment when Luke has an allergic reaction to salmon, and the mother doesn't want to get out the kit that might save his life because it's part of her "bee-sting kit" for a different kind of emergency.

Graye: It's always fun to have a near-death experience at a dinner party. Luke's excited to be there initially, but halfway through, the curtain pulls back to reveal what this would be like for him, and he says, "I don't belong here, I don't want to belong here!"