“You always kind of brace yourself for working with children on set,” says Sex Lives of College Girls actor turned producer Pauline Chalamet, but that wasn’t necessary with Gordon Rocks, the lead in her new short film Lemon Tree, which premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. “He doesn’t have that, like, child actor vibe at all,” Chalamet tells me, admitting she was bracing herself for having to work with a stage mom. “This was the opposite of that.”
Gordon, 14, was the only professional actor in Lemon Tree, joining a cast made up of costume designers, set designers, and even the DP’s ex-girlfriend. Inspired by a story the director, Rachel Walden, had heard from her grandfather about a road trip he had gone on with his own father as a little boy, the film takes viewers through a chaotic, dark, and devastating journey toward lost innocence. Taking place on Halloween, a father steals a rabbit from a magician at a funfair to impress his son, but when he then starts taking drugs, it’s on the boy to get all three of them home safely.
Walden, 30, and Chalamet, 31, who is the actor Timothée Chalamet’s sister, met while developing What Doesn’t Float, a dark comedy about New Yorkers at their breaking point, and created the production company Gummy Films in 2019, also with their friend Luca Basler (who directed What Doesn’t Float).
Then, in 2021, “Rachel sent this one-page document, and it was this free-form story of this adventure that had happened in her family,” Chalamet recalls. “It was such a strong short film that then could so easily also be a feature-length film.”
The story Walden first showed Chalamet turned into a visual outline, and everything in the film was improvised. “It was a lot of rehearsal. There’s no written dialogue,” says Walden.
“It was very flexible, and we were shooting on film with a very low budget,” she continues, noting that she opted to use film because of her “interest in capturing the memory of this event or evoking this kind of feeling that this is a retelling of an early experience of trauma as a child.”
Lemon Tree is now being considered for an Academy Award, and Walden and Chalamet are using it as proof of content for a longer film—just as Chalamet had originally anticipated.
The Metrograph Theater, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, will show Lemon Tree on Friday, December 15
Clara Molot is an Associate Editor at Air Mail
