The picture was shot in Los Angeles locations in only twenty-nine days. But before the shooting, crucial to the making of the film, Christine Lahti took the cast through two weeks of sustained rehearsal.
"It was important to me that each actor understand the full run of their characters evolution," Lahti says. "The story is about two people who get a second chance. Every step of the way, I wanted to work towards honest emotion and the small specifics of behavior, that characters use to cover up emotions they are afraid to show. Their humor is all about hiding pain. If we didn't get that, we'd lose the heart of the piece and settle for sentiment." Rehearsal gave Albert Brooks and Leelee Sobieski a chance to take risks and to ask questions: to learn for themselves what their characters really wanted and needed.
With such distinguished directors as Sidney Lumet, Ulu Grosbard and Jonathan Demme as mentors, Lahti saw her role as the guardian of the core of the story:
"Shooting a movie is a chaotic experience in managing pressure from all sides. If you let the process take you over, it's all too easy to spend twenty-four hours a day making sure 'the problems' are dealt with, and yet miss out on what is most important: telling the story, shot by shot, beat by beat, nuance by nuance."
Christine Lahti's passion for the piece was infectious. In the year she spent with Jill Franklyn, developing the script, they worked closely to hold on to the center of the tale. Lahti sees the picture as "a two-way Pygmalion story a mutual bringing to life; he gives her a future, she restores to him his past."
Screenwriter Jill Franklyn has already made a contribution to American popular culture as the Emmy® nominated co-writer of the famous "Yada,Yada" episode of Seinfeld. "Yes," Franklyn says, "My First Mister is all about me. I never thought I would get it made. About five years ago, I was a struggling writer, and struggling with other things, and I was sitting in my very dark one bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, and I just started writing about a relationship about an older man and a younger girl. It's not a true story, but there's a lot of truth in it."
Christine Lahti brings her authority as a performer to the task of directing her first feature film. She has recruited a virtual repertory company of focused and inventive American actors. Even Leelee Sobieski, seventeen years old when cast in the lead, comes to the picture with Emmy® and Golden Globe® nominations and a featured performance in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
The combination of a powerful script and a potent woman director proved a strong calling card. The actors felt they could trust the emotion to come through. For Leelee, the part was a chance to experiment with a different way to be seventeen. She saw the opportunity as liberating: "Since Jennifer is going through her rebellious teenage phase, I don't have to go as far in real life... I don't have to be pierced and tattooed—I had it all for two months and I'm done."
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