A road trip leads to possible life-changing revelations in Director Christine Swanson’s romantic drama, Albany Road.
Swanson’s film tells the story of Celeste Simmons, a New York executive on her way to the most important meeting of her career. Forced to share a rental car with her ex-fiancé’s mother, she discovers that the mother is hiding a major secret about her ex.
On November 23, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Swanson discussed the making of Albany Road during a Q&A moderated by Director Shaz Bennett (Alaska is a Drag). She also spoke about the film in a conversation moderated by Director Malcolm D. Lee (Space Jam: A New Legacy) following the New York screening on November 30.
Asked during the Los Angeles conversation if she changed the order of scenes in the edit Swanson answered, “I don’t do those kinds of charts because I know the story, I know the actors, we just need to know what the goals are. I’m typically very clear and so are the actors so we just aim for that. I trust it’s all gonna come together because I wrote the script. We’re just building and we do it scene-by-scene. Sometimes when I direct television, we’re overwhelmed with big sequences and stunts. So, I get the part about previsualizing and I do a lot of that. But really, it’s the question that comes up ‘How do you eat a brontosaurus?’ ‘One bite at a time.’ And it’s how I approach directing. Just be in the moment and if we can do that as Directors the energy of the actors pick up. So, if I’m worrying if the pieces will come together the actors feel that. So, I just focus on the moment at hand and let’s build these scenes and make sure we’re emotionally connecting where we need to be.”
Swanson’s directorial credits include the feature films All About You, All About Us, For the Love of Ruth and Love Under New Management: The Miki Howard Story; the movies for television To Hell and Back and The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel; and episodes of Chicago P.D., P-Valley, MacGyver, FBI, All American, All American: Homecoming, Bel-Air, Found and Roswell, New Mexico.
Swanson has been a DGA member since 2018.