Premiering at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Lemonade Blessing is a biting coming-of-age comedy about John (Jake Ryan), freshly tossed into a private Catholic high school by his devout mother, who falls head over heels for a devious classmate ready to push his faith (and morals) to the brink with a series of increasingly uncomfortable actions, all in the name of love.
Written and directed by New York filmmaker Chris Merola, a recent graduate of the MFA Film and Television Production program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Lemonade Blessing marks his feature debut. As the film prepares its debut screenings at Tribeca, he spoke with our Peter Gray about balancing his comedic and dramatic sensibilities, exploring his own truth as a storyteller, and why he doesn’t adhere to the notion that social media should dictate feature casting.
One of the things that I really loved about Lemonade Blessing is that it’s walking that tightrope between raunchy comedy and sincere spiritual crisis. How did you approach striking that tonal balance without undermining the comedy or the drama at the same time?
I super appreciate this question. This is something I talked about a lot when we were making the film. I think what made it a hard film to make, and what made it a really interesting challenge, is the balance between the sacred and the profane. I really believe that. I remember in film school, my first film I made in one of my first semesters was about a guy who had a panic attack and runs away from his wedding and traps himself in a bathroom stall. Then some guys are trying to use the stall and they debate about how to get it open. I really feel like you can take people’s emotions and greater aspirations seriously, while also acknowledging that we are material beings. We piss and we shit and we fun, and that’s all just as real as the fact that we have childhood wounds and we’re trying to be the best we can. We’re trying to transcend those things. I think that there’s so much humour to be found in cutting between things that are, in my mind, equally valuable. You can have a childhood trauma and then cut to the kid masturbating in a bathtub 10 years later (laughs). And that’s all equally valid.
I really like that herky-jerk feeling, because I think being a child of divorce (and) having parents who are very different, you’re constantly in different environments, right? My mom was very religious, very principled. My dad was very not and very entrepreneurial, and joked around. I think that the very contradictions at the heart of my parents’ marriage and their very different personalities came through me and my own personality. That was imbued into the film. I always feel very much pulled between two worlds. And so I wanted the tone of the film to reflect that dichotomy.
When it comes to comedy around religion, in any matter, is there a way for you to define a successful laugh? Do you want the laughs to sting? Is there joy in the taboo?
That’s such a great question. Of course, the script is written in such a way that comedy is, in some sense, like mathematical. It’s that literal negative to positive, where one character wants something, another character wants something else, right? So Lilith wants him to say “Fuck Jesus”, and he’s trying to say it in a way where he doesn’t have to say it. It’s literally like he does the negative, she does the positive. Say it. Don’t say it. Say it. Don’t say it. On the script level, it’s designed with a certain amount of comic structure in mind. If I ever got the sense that someone was trying to be funny or going for a laugh, I just can’t focus on that. You just have to go for the truth of it.
I really do think that the unconscious mind and us just living truthfully is the funniest thing. It feels like we’re just witnessing reality. And reality is really funny because we recognize things of ourselves in that. I would say all I tried to do on set was just create an environment where people could be truthful. And then also we rehearsed relatively extensively. We had six days of rehearsal, so that gave us a very limited amount of time within our indie-film-condensed-20-day-shooting schedule. I’m happy to say that about 10 to 15% of the film’s final dialogue is improvised, and I think that gives it a lot of life.
It’s interesting that you mentioned Lilith. She’s particularly charged. She’s the rebel and the provocateur challenging John’s faith. In any way was her character representing a broader critique of organised religion?
I would say that Lilith is definitely her own character. But I think the reason why she came about is because I was trying to find a way to externalise feelings that I had of sexual shame. In becoming sexually active when I was in Catholic High School, and the feelings of betrayal that I (had). I thought I was almost betraying what I thought my really devout mom wanted for me. I think sexual guilt gets dealt with in film very often. And, of course, it’s a visual thing. It’s a behavioural thing. That’s interesting and that’s engaging, but I thought one way we could take it to the next level was by crafting a character who was so angry about her sexist, patriarchal religion that’s been brought upon her, that she reacts against that by being sacrilegious. And we could merge the sacrilegious with the sexual and literally have those two things together. That, with every escalation of the sexual relationship, I think was actually probably more of a way of externalising internal conflict than it was a critique of organised religion. I don’t actually really have that much beef with organised religion. I think it’s just a man-made tool that can be used for good or ill.
Speaking of Lilith and John, with her I liked that she avoided the tropes we almost expect. She could’ve been the manic pixie dream girl or the bad girl, but she avoids that. How did you find Jake and Skye for these roles? How was it working with them to find the nuances of these characters?
I will say, when you cast, it’s 90% of it. It’s a cliche, but it’s absolutely true. I always talked about when I was working with my casting director, the idea of a spine or an essential quality. When people talk, there’s just one or two overarching flavours that they give you when you interact with them. That, to me, is their essential quality. I don’t believe in forcing a square peg into a round hole. I think that a lot of modern movie casting is misguided in that producers are looking at social media followings, and they’re pairing two popular, super hot people together. Then all the fans go to the movie, and these are talented people, but chemistry is an ineffable thing. I believe that chemistry comes from people recognising in the other what they lack in themselves.
I was really looking for both when I wrote the characters. When I cast them, I was looking for two people who had interesting commonalities, but also interesting differences. Skye is a person who very much emotes less in her face. She’s much more internal and withdrawn, and she’s great at just letting a little crack of what she’s feeling through. Whereas Jack is more. It’s just all in his face. This man cannot hide an emotion to save his life. So we did a traditional casting process. We looked through several hundred people. We had about 14, 15 hours of tapes. It was very clear that (Jake and Skye) were the people. They absolutely nailed it in the chemistry reads. They were doing such amazing improv. So the process was traditional, just trying to be open to who these people are, and pairing them with the role so that it can feel like they were made for it.
It’s interesting hearing you talk about the social media side of things, because it’s something I’ve read about and it’s very frustrating. Followers over talent is frustrating. When I was watching this it reminded me of Superbad, where you watch Emma Stone and Michael Cera and you just knew they were going to be massive stars. That’s how I felt watching Jake and Skye. This feels like the start of something so much bigger for them. They’re so perfect in this.
I’m really happy you feel that way. I always felt like it’s so important for a rising tide to lift all boats. And I want to work people who feel like we’re all in the same camp and we want to fight, you know? I’m really happy to say that a lot of really talented people tried out for these roles, and we turned away some people with literally 10 to 15 million followers combined across all their social media. They’re incredible performers, but they were not right for it. We just wanted to go for truth. Let’s risk everything on this. Let’s go for truth and see where the chips fall. It’s super rewarding to hear that you feel this way. I don’t want to ride on the coattails of someone’s prior success. That didn’t make sense to me.
As you spoke about finding the truth in comedy. You might as well go for truth in casting. And, for you, did you find there was a specific exploration at all? There’s this critique here of both the religious system and coming of age. Did you look at this story as a way to comment on the pressures of today’s youth? Or even the difference in religious households and the pressures put on boys versus girls?
Absolutely. Yeah, I think a lot of these explorations end up being almost incidental to the pursuit of just doing something that feels honest to my experience. Your subconscious is so much smarter than your conscious brain. So all I did was write down memories from growing up and of high school. I paired together things which looked like they could be plot threads, and then I wrote it out of order and slowly merged it and shaped it into something. All the themes in the story are just due to the fact that I went to a Catholic High School and it was really sexist. It takes a really long time to undo sexist messaging, and it can affect young boys and young girls. But I was a young boy, so I told a story about a young boy, because that’s what I have the most authority to tell, for better or for worse. I think those themes are present. It wasn’t like I just woke up and thought I’d do this story. I just followed my heart.
And before I wrap up, do you feel there’s a sequence or a moment that captures your voice as a filmmaker most clearly?
Oh, that’s so interesting. Voice is such an interesting thing. There’s a few answers to that. I think juxtapositions are really strong. Like, I love the editing juxtapositions. I do love that we established the film’s grammar within two minutes. By the one minute 42 second mark, we’re doing the hard cut that jumps 10 years. I really enjoyed that. From a visual language standpoint, the panic attack scene, with the confession, I was so happy with the fact that the storyboards worked out. Everything I was planning out with these storyboards ended up coming through into reality. It was a really hard sequence. We shot it over six different days, across state lines. Part of it was in New Jersey. Part of it in New York. So much continuity to keep in mind, but it was so important to me that we were able to heighten the drama of what he was feeling internally.
I think there is something epic and grand in the intimate, and maybe there is some humour in the fact that it’s such a bombastic score for something that’s as silly as ostensibly throwing a wafter in a toilet. Those feelings are real. I really like the subjectivity of taking what one person feels seriously and projecting that. Giving people a simulation of that experience. I think the panic attack is probably one of the best simulations of that subjectivity. I don’t take myself that seriously at the end of the day, so I think those two moments are most representative of voice.
Lemonade Blessing is screening as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, running between June 4th and 15th, 2025. For more information on the festival, head to the official site here.
