Look, just about the last thing on earth that anyone is craving nowadays is more COVID-19 talk. No one wants mask jokes or commentary on toilet paper shortages nor do they want to deep dive into the horrors of having lost 550,000 Americans and counting to a pandemic that quickly became a hot-button political issue. And yet, Mallory Everton has managed to make a pandemic-set COVID comedy that feels rejuvenating and alive, maybe disproving the age-old adage that laughter is the “best” medicine (vaccines still probably have it beat) while underscoring enduring importance of comedy in a time of crisis. 

A frenetic road trip rescue mission movie, Recovery is gassed by the uncut comedy stylings of Everton and real life best friend and professional collaborator Whitney Call. As the two in-movie sisters travel across country to rescue their nana from a nursing home with a COVID-19 outbreak, they encounter all types of small time shenanigans from finding a temporary foster home for an increasingly problematic class mouse to figuring out next steps after a perfect tinder date (right before lockdown) to dancing yourself clean in the desert. 

But it’s the easy-going silliness and buckets of chemistry between Everton and Call, who’ve been friends since childhood and have worked on BYU’s sketch comedy series Studio C for years, that drives Recovery forward. I had a chance to speak with Mallory Everton about breaking out during a pandemic, her first SXSW experience, the joys (and not-so-joys) of making a movie with your BFF, and what’s next for her.

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So how was SXSW for you? This must have been a huge coming out party of sorts.

Mallory Everton: It’s a little strange because it was all online so I just watched most of the movies in my bed. We premiered our very COVID movie in a very COVID way. It only felt appropriate. It was a lot of fun though. I’m very tired because I just crammed as many movies into the past six days as I possibly could but it was really fun.

What were some of your favorites that you saw?

ME: I really loved Ninjababy. I think that one was my favorite across the board. I thought it was so fresh, like a Norwegian ‘Knocked Up’ but more surprising and modern. I loved it and thought it was so fun. I really loved ‘The Fallout’ as well, which almost goes without saying since it won the Grand Jury Prize, but it was just so well done and an incredible movie that’s done with so much heart and great human emotion. It was funny and heartbreaking and perfect, just so good.

In terms of ‘Recovery’, you guys have also made a big splash so I’d love to talk about that process. Your go-for-broke comedy style, from ‘Recovery’ to your social media pages, is very zany and throw everything at the wall approach. What are things and people that you find funny in real life and how does that shape your comedy? How is the essential Mallory as a comedian?

ME: I’ve never tried to sum it all up before but I grew up watching a lot of sketch comedy – ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway’ and obviously ‘Saturday Night Live’. Right when I started to pick up a camera was when The Lonely Island joined ‘Saturday Night Live’ so I will always consider Andy Samberg one of my big influences as well as Edgar Wright. I fell in love with him as a teenager and I feel like the frenetic pacing and when they go for a joke they go for it a thousand percent and it’s fun to see that commitment. For me, even though it’s risky, and a few people have told me that they like our “bold” approach but I didn’t really even think of it that way. Like if you go for something one-hundred percent at least people give you respect: “I respect how you went for it even though I didn’t laugh”. That’s kinda how I feel about it.

I’d say you guys put 110% into the bit in just about every scene. So you’re coming to this from a sketch comedy background, and years put in working with Studio C. How do you take that background and your familiarity with sketch into making a feature? For you, is it as simple as a sketch is five pages and a feature is one hundred, or was it more complex than that?

ME: I feel like it’s kind of both. When [co-writer and co-star] Whitney [Call] and I have been trying to crank out a feature together or work on some other narratives for a few years, but other jobs come up and you need to make money so other work takes priority. But then when the pandemic hit, it was like, well we don’t have anything else to do. Should we work on that feature that we’ve been talking about writing? We got excited about the idea of writing something so small that we could even just do it all ourselves. So the way that we approached it was let’s come up with an outline so we know we have a movie. We had also talked about doing something in line with like ‘Airplane’ or the ‘Monty Python’ movies that are essentially just sketches that weave into each other that are connected by some surrealist through line but we wanted to make sure that there was a story here and then take each scene and figure out the comedic gains in those scenes, similar to what we would do with a sketch. We wanted to treat it like a mix between having to move the plot forward and a sketch. The joke in the scene and the point is this funny thing but can we move the plot just like one inch while doing it, which is what we were doing most of the time.

I would imagine that when you’re shooting what you’ve described as a bottle movie in a pandemic at lightning speed, an obvious concern is just getting the pages filmed and getting everything done but I would imagine that there were some – if not many – logistical hurdles due to the pandemic, how willing and able were you to shift gears and be more improvisational and work around the difficulties imposed by a pandemic? What was that like for you?

ME: I do think we had to be extremely stretchy and adaptable the whole time. From the beginning, writing the script even. Sometimes when you’re writing a screenplay, you have this big idea but we were more like: what do we have? We have our bodies. We have a car. We have FaceTime. Can we make a story with those things? It was much more about being resourceful than acting out some kind of dream. The whole time I felt like it was: okay, we lost this thing, we lost this location, we’re switching it out. For example, the dog breeder scene with Steven, who plays Evan, we had lost the location for that scene the day before. We blocked it for that location but we showed up that morning and kind of had to rewrite that whole scene just based around this new location. We kept some of the jokes but it shifted a lot. So I’m really grateful for our sketch background and that we do have some improv skills – we aren’t improv comedians proper. We were brought up writing sketches in the dark and putting it in front of crowds after painstakingly trying to make them as good as we could. But we did have to adapt to conditions constant. It’s like, that’s out the window, we have this funky thing left over. How do we make it shine as much as we can and polish it up? It was really a fun creative endeavor because of that. It was less about making something perfect and more about making the best thing we could with the paltry things we have.

I don’t want to dive into the minutia about filming with COVID precautions, because no one wants to hear more about that, but from your perspective were there any innovations that actually came out of this where you were able to think of things in a different way or approach something in a more untraditional fashion because there were these parameters in place

ME: At the very least, creatively, it was a breakthrough for me for sure. As a lot of writers would say, I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I feel like this forced me to not be that way. I think it was a huge innovation for me personally. How can I be more focused on finishing something that is as palatably as possible rather than making my perfect thing that I could fret over for eight years before I get it out. So on a personal level, it definitely felt kind of groundbreaking for me. As far as the other limitations went, there were some happy surprises. One thing was that, from my experience in film school and the scripts that I’ve tried to write from even like a decade ago, I always try to do too many things at once. I feel like, on a whole, this movie forced us to boil things down to their elemental parts and say, okay, is this simple thing, this scene between two girls, do we need other elements? Do we need other people? Do we need big explosions? I think all in all, it reminded me that boiling things down to their root is a great way to get something done because we lose track of the root when you have all the bells and whistles and we just didn’t have any of those.

It could be argued that when you are dealing with a film like yours that is based on relationships and the comedic chemistry you have with Whitney Call, that it is addition by subtraction. You’re just getting that essence of two funny people being funny. In terms of your and Whitney’s relationship, I’ve read that you were childhood friends and then went to college together and were both involved in Studio C, what are the joys and potential hurdles of working with such a close friend on something as high stress as making a movie?

ME: You know, I think some of the joys are pretty obvious. It’s super great to have your confidant there with you when you’re stressed. To say like, “You’re my hype man, help me get through this, this is really hard,” and to be able to do that for each other when we’re asking “Are we idiots for trying to do this?” I feel like I love running and I think of running when a partner: when one person is kind of lagging, the other person motivates that person to keep going and that’s kind of how I feel making a movie with friends like this. I think honestly a broad strokes issue working with people you’re so close with is there is always going to be a certain amount of emotional labor because you’re keeping track of a close friendship as well as keeping track of the product. It’s good because we should always treat each other with the kindness that we would a best friend but it’s super easy to not do that when you’re frustrated with your professional collaborator. But when your professional collaborator is also your husband, which is the case with Whitney and [co-director] Steven [Meeks], or your best friend, or your best friend’s husband, then you go the extra mile to ensure that everything is communicated healthily. I am grateful for that but it is more work.

What is your takeaway from all this? You moved to LA right before COVID, cranked out a movie during the pandemic, got it into SXSW – and arguably more important than that – you’ve received largely good feedback and positive buzz. What has that been like and where do you take that next?

ME: It’s hard not to just chalk it up to a really crazy pandemic that has forced everyone to shed like eight layers of skin and figure out who they really are and what they’re really capable of. What they really need. The main takeway for me is that we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously and should just do more without fretting or worrying about it too much. Trust yourself to be smart throughout the process of something rather than being too scared to start. It was more than just the pandemic, there were other things in my life that I was able to do because of the massive amount of free time. I would trade this pandemic in a heartbeat if I could but I’m grateful for the things that I’ve learned and what it has taught me. And this film is honestly just one of them. It was a whole crazy year outside of this movie experience and I feel so lucky and grounded and grateful. I’m just hoping to be able to embrace the times and seasons that are coming next in my life.

For all our coverage of SXSW 2021, click here. 

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