Amanda Peet and Alessandro Nivola Discover a Fantasy Life with Matthew Shear

Amanda Peet is not her character Dianne in Fantasy Life. While the fictional creation bears some similarities of also being an actress and facing the eternal insecurities and foibles of this industry, Peet is not a person so stricken with anxiety that it caused her to be away from the screen. In fact, Peet works constantly, including on shows like Brockmire, Togetherness, and The Chair, the latter a Netflix series she co-created. Still, when we sit down to discuss Dianne and everything else about Fantasy Life, a Matthew Shear comedy-drama which would go on to see Peet win the SXSW Special Jury Prize for Performance, she notes there are certain overlaps.

“I found out it’s been 10 years,” Peet admits to us when considering how Fantasy Life is the first time she’s been on the big screen in a minute. “I didn’t know that, and it wasn’t really a happy moment.” Nonetheless, it was a happy moment to be there in Austin with a role she was proud of and a collaborator who believed in her.

“I want to thank you here publicly for giving me my middle-age break,” she says half-jokingly to Shear before adding, perhaps more earnestly, “It’s like you’re my Jewish grandmother right now.”

Shear, taking it in stride, quips, “I’m definitely a grandmother type.”

He’s certainly a filmmaking type with an emerging voice. While Fantasy Life marks his first time in both the writer and director’s chair, Shear has also been working prolifically as an actor over the past decade, including in Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America and The Meyerowitz Stories and M. Night Shyamalan’s Old. Still, he concedes he was stepping into a personal space when he conceived of the story of Sam in Fantasy Life, a thirtysomething paralegal with such crippling anxiety that he winds up working as a nanny for Dianne and David (Alessandro Nivola), two well-to-do creatives living with three young daughters in a Brooklyn brownstone.

“It was really this hybrid creative exercise where I was bringing a lot of myself into the story but also having a lot of fun finding tangents that were kind of dramatic and fun,” Shear says about the genesis of Fantasy Life. Hence creating a protagonist so insecure and anxious that in one of the first scenes, Sam admits to his psychiatrist (Judd Hirsch) that he is a Jewish man terrified by the idea of having Antisemitic thoughts.

“That was a good expression of obsessive compulsive disorder,” Shear muses. “There’s a tendency to go into thinking that is so opposite to your moral sense [that you’re almost] challenging your ability to tolerate it. It kind of scared me and amused me.”

It was also the scene that won over Peet to do the movie.

“I mean it really felt like Matthew wrote [the role] for me,” Peet says. “But when I read it, I was bowled over and wanted to get at it as soon as possible. As soon as I read the shrink scene where he’s having these intrusive, self-hating Jewish intrusive thoughts, I went, ‘I’m in!’”

In the film, Dianne and David are obviously in different stages of their lives. They’re happy(ish), if perhaps a little complacent and beset by what could be called midlife ennui.

“David is just completely distracted by what’s going on in his own life,” Nivola says about the state of the marriage when the characters first meet Shear’s Sam. “He is like an amiable guy and he likes Sam and treats him almost like a confidant when they first meet, almost winking at him like they’ve known each other all their lives, but he leaves him completely unprepared for the job of looking after his children.”

As Nivola muses about the nature of the piece, “One of the nice things about the movie is that the film has compassion for all the characters in it, even when they do stupid stuff…. there is a feeling that these are good people who are kind of suffering.”

Suffering is, indeed, perhaps the best way to explain the unlikely connection discovered between Sam and Dianne. While not entirely romantic, per se, these two people find unlikely kinship in the fact that the world does not see them suffer from feelings of alienation, loneliness, or even panic.

“Sam is in this pretty lost place where he’s just been fired from his job [and] he’s just mixed up and falls into this job babysitting,” Shear considers. “It’s kind of like being a fish out of water, like he thinks this is the worst fit in the world, but then it quickly becomes maybe the best fit in the world. And that comes to a head when he finds Dianne and realizes that he has this almost spiritual connection to her that is sometimes unspoken, and it develops into a friendship that has sort of romantic touches to it.”

It transforms into what might be a fantasy life for both people—albeit one no less messy or complicated than the real thing.

Fantasy Life premiered at the SXSW Film and TV Festival on March 8.

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