Director Tiffany Paulsen is thrilled to talk about the luck she had casting Wednesday star Jenna Ortega in Winter Spring Summer or Fall as the romantic drama is about to be seen by audiences for the first time.
After all, Ortega—and, oddly enough, her Wednesday Season 1 co-star Percy Hynes—started filming Paulsen’s film a mere three weeks before Wednesday premiered on November 23, 2022. Once the tidal wave of viewership hit Netflix, Ortega was catapulted into superstardom as Wednesday went on to become the most-viewed series in the history of the streaming platform.
“It’s an interesting story in that we started shooting on Halloween day of 2022,” Paulsen recalled for me in a recent Zoom conversation. “In order to get Jenna for the movie we had to do backflips and cartwheels and jump through so many hoops … we only had a little window of time. I think it was 11 days.”
Then, Paulsen added, she did something that most filmmakers try to avoid—but this time it was for a good reason.
“We had to shut down production for three weeks in order to allow her and Percy to do all the Wednesday press. I think Jenna went to the Brazil Comic-Con and she was traveling,” Paulsen recalled. “Then Wednesday premiered and she came back to us as this global phenomenon had exploded and we shot the rest of the movie. So, we got her at this very interesting and monumentally exciting time in her career.”
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Making its world premiere Thursday at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Winter Spring Summer or Fall stars Ortega as Remi, a driven and hyper-disciplined high school senior who has her mind set on attending Harvard after graduation.
Then, by mere happenstance, Remi runs into her neighbor’s best friend, Barnes (Hynes White), a free-spirited senior who is about to take a gap year before he decides what he wants to do next.
Determined at first to proceed with her plans, Remi gives into her heart and falls for Barnes even though his future is uncertain. Barnes, who is equally as smitten with Remi, is hoping that the couple can make the relationship work without drastically affecting the path she’s determined to take.
However, as Remi feels a sense of freedom that she’s never had before yet is quietly uncomfortable with the unfamiliar change, Remi and Barnes relationship takes different twists turns over the course of a year—through winter, spring, summer and fall.
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Paulsen is well-versed in the romance genre, having written the screenplays for the Emma Roberts romantic comedies Holidate in 2020 and About Fate in 2022. Prior to that, the filmmaker wrote the scripts for Roberts’ 2007 mystery adventure comedy Nancy Drew, as well as the 2016 reimagining of the classic 1987 family comedy Adventures in Babysitting.
The filmmaker was excited at how adept Ortega was in romantic drama space, considering that many audiences associated her with horror in Ti West’s X and Radio Silence’s Scream and Scream VI prior to their work together. As such, Paulsen—who makes her directorial debut with Winter Spring Summer or Fall—discovered immediately that Ortega had much more to offer as an actor who is capable of bringing characters to life in a wide array of genres.
“In the first couple of days of shooting, I felt for my first movie I had really won the lottery to have this girl and her talent and this story,” Paulsen enthused. “I don’t know what more I could have asked for.”
After a pause, Paulsen then added with a laugh, “Maybe a little more in the budget.”
Paulsen Says Ortega and Hynes White Have ‘Lighting In A Bottle Chemistry’
While Tiffany Paulsen was lucky enough to cast Jenna Ortega in Winter Spring Summer or Fall, the filmmaker also knew that she had to find a screen partner to create chemistry between them for the romantic drama to work.
Fortunately, all of Paulsen’s worries were sent adrift when she cast Percy Hynes White.
The interesting thing for Paulsen, however, is that she didn’t have an opportunity to see Ortega and Hynes White act together in Wednesday before she started directing them in Winter Spring Summer or Fall. With the premiere of the series a few weeks away at that point, Paulsen didn’t realize that the two actors had already established a rapport together working under the auspices of the series’ director, Tim Burton.
“It was magic,” Paulsen said, beaming. “We were so over the moon that first day to go, ‘Oh, my gosh. These two have lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry and how lucky are we to have this right now in this moment?’ It was really special.”
Of course, great dialogue can make a film pop, and screenwriter Dan Schoffer’s script certainly does illuminate the story in Winter Spring Summer or Fall. But the performances—enhanced by Ortega and Hynes White’s chemistry—take the Winter Spring Summer and Fall to another level not so much by Remi and Barnes say but in the way they communicate through subtle gestures and facial expressions.
As such, you can feel Remi and Barnes’ hesitancy and resistance to their feelings of true love even though their circ*mstances shouldn’t allow for it. You can also see the wheels turning in their minds as they try to navigate the unexpected circ*mstances they find themselves in.
In short, Ortega and Hynes White’s portrayals capture the essence of true love and unfortunately, the heartbreaking bumps in the road that go with it.
“The things that attract me to stories and romances especially are—and I’m a writer, first and foremost—those moments between the dialogue,” Paulsen explained. “It’s magical to watch those moments and see them coming alive and wondering what your characters are thinking. Both of them really captured that and built the silence with such interest.”
Considering the prospective audience for Winter Spring Summer or Fall, Paulsen is confident that’s it going to appeal to a much broader field of viewers beyond the generation that has helped usher Ortega to stardom.
“One of the beautiful things about this movie is, yes it’s Jenna’s audience and you could say it’s a Y/A love story, but we also felt we were crossing genres and crossing [the boundaries of] where you might put [the movie] a certain age category,” Paulsen said.
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Winter Spring Summer or Fall is, after all, a love story, and since adult viewers were young adult viewers once—and certainly have experienced those feelings of love that Remi and Barnes feel in the film—the relatability to the story is certainly going to be there.
“We were all in high school and all felt those feels, so we feel like it’s this familiar, warm macaroni and cheese love story to everyone—not just putting it in this box as a teen love story,” Paulsen said. “It feels very timeless and that was the magic for me of what John Hughes did and Cameron Crowe did. They really made films for everybody. Not just teens.”
Winter Spring Summer of Fall—which makes its world premiere Thursday at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City—is still awaiting a release date.
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