Directors Sarah Lazarovic, Geoff Morrison, and Ryan J. Noth have created a feature film, No Heart Feelings, that is a mumblecore love letter to lazy, hazy Dundas West summer days. We talked to Lazarovic about the inspiration behind the film. No Heart Feelings is screening at The Royal Cinema this weekend, starting Friday at 9 pm.
Where did the idea for the film come from?
Ryan used to edit my short films, and we both wanted to make a feature, and we knew we wouldn’t get the money to make it through conventional means. We’d both seen a bunch of movies about Brooklyn that we loved, and we wanted to do that about Toronto. We just started concocting-it grew organically.

How did you decide what locations to include?
We’d give ourselves little exercises, like ‘How come no one’s ever shot a scene in front of the Redpath Sugar Factory?” We definitely wanted Trinity Bellwoods, which we put in. We all lived within three blocks of each other between Harbord and College, we loved the tree covered canopy streets. We wanted every place we shot in to be a place that we do spend our time in.

How did the characters come to be? How much input did the actors have?
We wrote character sketches for them, and they had their characters and scenes defined, and parameters, and the ideas they needed to articulate, but we never held them to it if it didn’t feel organic or natural.

What was the most difficult scene to shoot?
All of the romantic scenes are kind of hard, because you’re among friends, and it’s just us. Kind of awkward. A lot of our cast were just friends that we recruited to be in the movie.

Why did you decide on a summer love story?
We all want to do a winter movie now. It’s so hard to shoot a movie as is. We wanted the movie to be a summer movie. The easiness of summer in the city, everyone looks so forward to it, we wanted to capture that vibe as much as we wanted to capture the different ideas.

What were some ideas you really wanted to include?
The urban family. We’re in our mid- to late twenties, and yet we live these weird urban existences that are kind of awesome but kind of also groundless. We wanted a romance, It ended up being a much more subtle portrait, a generational moment. A post-post coming of age story. We’re coming of age, but we’re not fifteen, we’re 28.