If there’s one thing I need before hopping on a morning Zoom call with Chelsea Peretti, it’s coffee. But not just because it’s early in the day; the comedian, writer, and now director—of the appropriately titled First Time Female Director, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this month—has not made any secret about her love of a little java. Before viral iced coffee memes and TikTok’s obsession with cafe culture, there was Peretti’s “Coffee Crankin’ Through My Sys,” an anthem that played on her podcast for years. She’s even written several songs about the beverage, which appeared across her two 2020 EPs.
“I’m waiting on mine, I’m trying to get on your level,” Peretti responds after I tell her that I’ve had my coffee and I’m fully energized. “But as soon as I do, you’re going to feel it.”
Peretti might be a bit groggy, but neither she nor First Time Female Director could possibly be described as “low-energy.” Her film, which will stream on Roku next year, is a chaotic romp from start to finish. It follows the titular amateur director, Sam (played by Peretti), as she mounts a play at a community theater in Glendale, California. Sam is determined to make her play, Rain’s Comin’ In—a rural, Southern drama in the vein of Tennessee Williams—a success. But in order to do so, she must wrangle the theater’s loyal troupe of performers, whose gigantic egos and pernicious personalities keep getting in her way.
Rain’s Comin’ In started out as an excerpt of a play that Peretti performed at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in 2017, a hilarious but affectionate tribute to the types of stage dramas that she fell in love with as a theater-loving child. “My mom took me to so much theater when I was a kid,” Peretti recalls. “She took me to Berkeley Rep, A.C.T. in San Francisco, and put me in classes at Mosswood Park in Oakland. She nurtured a passion, so I was very familiar with so many tropes of theater. It was such a fun night [performing Rain’s Comin’ In] and then the addict in me was like, ‘What more can I do with this?’”
The eventual result was First Time Female Director, which sends up both regional theater culture and the types of maudlin melodramas that Peretti says she loves just as much as any objectively great play. Despite the film being an indie movie with an economical budget, Peretti’s script attracted Amy Poehler—who came on as a producer—as well as a considerable cast of comedy stars to round out the fictional play’s group of actors. The film is chock-full of familiar faces, from both film and television (Megan Mullally, Max Greenfield, Natasha Leggero, and Poehler) and the digital comedy scene (Kate Berlant, Meg Stalter, and Benito Skinner).
“So much of the time, with my friends in this business, I’m like, ‘I feel like I see something in you that I don’t think this industry sees in you, or I don’t feel like your reps see in you,’” Peretti tells me when I ask about how she devised such a delightfully motley crew. “I don’t want to be a manager, but I wish that people’s reps saw XYZ in them. So the casting process for me was a fun piece of that. There was a lot of me just asking my friends if they would do this. It was a hustle because in these situations, you are asking them to do a low-budget movie and they have to feel like it’s going to be fun, or it’s going to be funny.”
“That script was so tight,” Leggero, who plays a Leona Helmsley-like, rich theater benefactor named Thimberly Paris, tells me during a Zoom with her, Greenfield, and Skinner. “[Chelsea] had been working on it, honing it, changing it, and cutting it. That’s the best way to do it: to have the funniest, tightest, best script you can have, and then let all these hilarious people improvise.”
“It’s so true,” Skinner says. “When I read it, it was like what could I possibly add to this?” In First Time Female Director, Skinner—who is perhaps known better by his Instagram handle, Bennydrama7—plays Rudie, a pompous gay man who is right in line with the collection of sketch comedy characters in his online videos. “Every line that she wrote was so funny, Chelsea’s a fuckin’ genius.”
In an effort to keep the film moving at a rapid-fire pace, Peretti refused to keep things too close to the script, even if it meant having to sift through a first cut of her film that was well over two hours of overlapping jokes.
“I really don’t think anyone else could’ve directed this movie, aside from Chelsea,” Greenfield says. “Because these sets, especially when there’s a freedom to improv, they can get really competitive. One person starts going, then the next person starts going, and you’re so far outside the story that you’re telling, that [the director gets into] the editing room and they’re like, ‘What is this shit? We can’t make a story out of this.’
“Because we had Chelsea, who was so locked in to what the movie was, she’s guiding you in improv, she’s giving you sort of an area to explore, and knowing that that’s usable stuff. And I think it brought out the funniest versions of everybody, and within the story that we were telling. Having Benny, Meg, and Kate—who are the next generation of comedic voices—getting to experience [them] and be around that energy was so much fun.”
“For us to watch these legends, that’s why I went into this so nervous,” Skinner says. “Day one on the call sheet it was like me, Amy, and Chelsea. I was like, ‘I’m gonna fuckin’ die!’ I broke in so many scenes. These are geniuses that I have looked up to forever.”
Those geniuses include director Jordan Peele, who has been married to Peretti since 2016, before he made his directorial debut with Get Out one year later. “It’s funny, I married this Key & Peele guy, and then all of a sudden, I’m married to this horror auteur,” Peretti tells me, laughing. “I’m like, ‘Woah what a whirlwind.’ And just to see him being silly and everybody cracking up, it was really special.”
I wonder whether it’s at all intimidating for Peretti to be putting this film out, in a media landscape that seems primed to measure her success against her husband’s for clickbait. But that’s the kind of thinking that First Time Female Director is partly skewering: that a woman doing the same job as a man will always have a more difficult time.
“I think both of us kind of put our heads down in terms of our relationship,” Peretti says assuredly. “We don’t really try to engage much narrative about it. We have our own work to do internally, [so] we can’t be listening to anyone else’s takes. I try not to do that because I just feel like we’re different animals; just as I try not to measure my success against anyone in my life. I had someone who used to give me guidance who said, ‘There’s enough for everyone.’ I try not to operate from any scarcity model.”
That confidence is well-earned. Peretti’s been working steadily for over a decade, and was an early adopter of emerging forms of online comedy—despite her reluctance to embrace our current state of technological hyper-saturation. (“I don’t use Venmo, I wish I didn’t have an iPhone,” she tells me with the utmost conviction. “You have to fuckin’ set up an account to get a massage!”)
Peretti’s comedy group, Variety SHAC, was uploading hilarious sketches to YouTube long before Instagram or TikTok put a built-in audience in performers’ palms. Her podcast, Call Chelsea Peretti, was wildly popular before most people even knew what the word “podcast” meant. And that’s not to mention her Netflix comedy special, Chelsea Peretti: One of the Greats and fan-favorite character on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Gina Linetti. Watching the kinetic energy of that performance is the perfect amuse-bouche for something like First Time Female Director.
“I love physical comedy. There’s this moment when Paul Scheer played a villain on Brooklyn and he chewed an olive villainously, but it didn’t make it into the episode, and so a weird mantra for me was, ‘I want that olive moment!’ I want things to play out that would be cut for time on network TV.”
First Time Female Director is filled with that kind of distinct, character-driven humor, but the brilliance of Peretti’s script is in the small pockets of relatability that she finds among the barrage of laughs. The film poses thoughtful questions about artistic humility and imposter syndrome, which seamlessly blend with the humor.
“It’s such a universal creative experience, where you go see someone’s show and you feel like it just blows yours out of the water,” Peretti tells me. “Over the years, talking to people, I feel like so many people think they’re a fraud internally, on some level. You just have to believe in yourself so much that you go, ‘Maybe I’m just lying to myself?’ You can be genuinely happy for someone, and also internally reflecting on yourself, too.”
But that contemplation comes second to the laughter. If audiences come away feeling like they’ve seen themselves in her work, all the better.
“One of my influences was Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Partly why I loved that movie was that they just really let the story be simple, which I feel like people don’t do anymore in comedies. They become so, so set piece-y, with these ‘all is lost!’ moments. I feel like what’s beautiful about that movie is they let those characters shine so much, and the story is so simple: They want to get home. Who can’t relate to that? Then, things just keep going wrong. Life feels that way, for the last three or four years, like you can’t get a foothold—as soon as your foot lands on something, it crumbles.”
Later, we circle back to that analogy, as we talk about the WGA strike, which Peretti will wait to be resolved before she starts on her next project. (In the meantime, though, Call Chelsea Peretti will be returning very soon, she assures me). “It’s just a feeling of so many systems that we’ve established are failing people,” she says. “My brain goes bigger, and bigger, and bigger thinking about it. I’m such an existential dread person. I hope that we fight the good fight!” She says this through laughter, but it’s clear she means it. “I just hope that something comes together, and all these sacrifices that everyone’s making really make a difference.”
In the meantime, maybe she can release a first-time female director’s cut of her film, I suggest.
“Do people still do that?” she asks. “My opus. ‘Come to my five-hour screening!’ I do all the voices, because I know all the lines at this point. They’ll be like, ‘She’s lost her mind!’”
Or maybe they’ll say it’s her greatest work yet.
“That’s optimistic,” Peretti says, laughing. “But I’ll take it.”
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