Snow Angels







A story of love lost and found in a small town, Snow Angels is a heartrending portrayal of three couples in various stages of life, orbiting around each other in search of connection and meaning. An unexpected act of violence disrupts the lives of these intertwined couples, revealing the profound moments in which they each realize how precarious and remarkable life can be. Starring Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale, Michael Angarano, Griffin Dunne, Amy Sedaris and Olivia Thirlby. Written and directed by David Gordon Green (Undertow, All the Real Girls), based on the novel by Stewart O'Nan.

Snow Angels • by Writer/Director David Gordon Green

Think about those moments when the sight of someone makes your heart thump or the memory causes your stomach to feel like it’s either starving to death or it’s stronger than ever. For me, it’s always a bizarre adventure when the emotional meets the physical. I reflect on what could have been if only someone had been hungry to take a risk…or maybe I wish we hadn’t. When I read a good book, I pull from impressions of my life. I’m sure we all do. We attach ourselves to scenarios, or see ourselves in the leading role and we discover that these self-indulgent illustrations are drawn from a swirl of our experience and imagination.

When I first read Stewart O’Nan’s book Snow Angels, I was immediately stung not only by the characters he had created, but also in the world I could personalize. Here were three generations of love stories, but not burdened with the clichés of a traditional romance novel. They felt genuine in their connections and disconnections. The humor and optimism were not forced and the treatment of emotional gravity was presented with awkward recognition as it often is in reality.

It made be want to make a film that painted the somewhat distant charms of my early love and tackled the anxieties I have as I’m settling into the highwater slacks of adulthood. In as much as we all have different interpretations of the landscape and subject matter of a story, I was given the opportunity to make decisions and aim the film version of the project toward my own aesthetic. It was an exciting and uncertain road that became a labor of love.

With the script as a blueprint, and the book as a resource, we recruited wonderful actors like Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby that embraced the intimate, peculiar details beyond the page and were willing to expose elements of their own lives and understandings through substantial improvisation.

Snow Angels is a film that we wanted to be a grounded portrait; the evolution from the naïve to the cynical and the strange beauty of the heart in between. My goal was to open a window and look back at the relationships of our youth and peer forward to the mystery of the ever-changing dynamic of those we hold close.

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