Director India Donaldson ’s first feature film , “ Good One ,” is, on the surface, a pretty simple story: A family camping trip in upstate New York gets considerably more awkward when it ends up being only father-daughter pair Chris (James Le Gros) and Sam ( Lily Collias ) and Chris’s longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) spending three days in the woods. Sam’s about to head off to college, while Chris and Matt can’t seem to escape the emotional trail loops, as it were, that they’ve already blazed for themselves. What happens on the trip sets down some of Sam’s path as an adult in ways that feel both heartbreaking and necessary.
But just because something is simple doesn’t mean it was easy . Donaldson only had 12 days to shoot the film, most of it spent outside in the Catskills — on 300 privately owned acres near the Mohonk Preserve and Minnewaska State Park, to be more precise — and with an Airbnb as a basecamp for the cast and 15-person crew. They’d use the Airbnb to charge batteries and then take UTVs into the woods for each day’s shooting.
Weather and light, factors that are often sculpted by cinematographers and colorists , were partly controlled by, well, the weather and the light on “ Good One .” Having to accommodate their environment, however, allowed Donaldson and her cinematographer (and producer) Wilson Cameron to be all the more responsive in the kind of textures and details that the camera — and through it, Sam — observes. “ G.