‘Sunlight’ Filmmaker Nina Conti on How Getting Cast in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Han Solo Film Helped Her Directorial Debut

The feature directorial debut of actress and comedian Nina Conti, “Sunlight,” reimagines Monkey, one of the characters she performs in her ventriloquist act, as the human-sized alter ego of a woman on the run from a toxic relationship. In addition to wearing multiple hats behind the scenes of the film, Conti wears two costumes, playing both the woman and the monkey.

“The monkey is much easier,” she tells Variety.

Principal photography took place in Albuquerque, N.M., just a few dozen miles from the Santa Fe International Film Festival, where the film screened on Oct. 19 with Conti and executive producer Christopher Guest in attendance. Speaking in the El Dorado Hotel lobby right after the screening, she exuded a joyful relief that “Sunlight” was well-received by festival attendees; the film’s completion and current festival run marks the payoff to a journey that began more than 20 years ago when she first found a monkey hand puppet on a shelf in a Woolworth’s.

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“He found me and then gave me a voice in comedy for years,” Conti explains. “And then over that time you start to realize that you are projecting the strongest part of yourself out through this avatar.” She clarifies that the prop she’s used for decades is a much different animal — no pun intended — than the iteration that commands the screen in her film. “That monkey’s more of a real guy than this, which is much more a construct [for my character] to get by in the world.”

Part of the reason for that difference is the scale of the character. On her arm, Monkey is a mischievous id that stage performer Conti reckons with on behalf of her audience. But in the film, it’s a full-body get-up that protects and empowers Jane, her character, from the unhappy life that she tries to leave behind. Conti says that it was a gig on a “Star Wars” movie that made it possible for her to level up her furry scene partner. “I had a tiny, non-speaking part with a puppet in the Han Solo movie, which ended up changing directors and getting re-shot without me,” she says. But I’m in the creature department at ‘Star Wars,’ and I saw these full-sized, amazing creatures walking around, and I asked, ‘Would you be able to upscale the monkey to Chewbacca size?’ [Supervising animatronic designer Vanessa Bastyan] said, ‘of course! That’s what we do’.”

To that end, Conti wanted to create a Monkey that was also expressive in the same way as Chewbacca — meaning it’s got a mouth to articulate (or pretend to articulate, anyway) its thoughts, but is otherwise low-fi as far as animatronic characters are concerned. She says that the transition was an intuitive one. “It was stepping into this tiny character that I’d been talking to for years, so I didn’t have to think about the way it moves or do any sort of physical practice,” Conti reveals. “The puppet doesn’t move — he’s got floppy arms that don’t even have fingers — but I just felt, this guy’s in my gut and I know how he is.”

She ultimately breathed life into Monkey so effectively that she realized that delaying the reveal of Jane’s human face would make the moment that much more impactful. “I didn’t want it to be a big hair-tossing shampoo advert where she comes out,” she insists.

In the film, Jane embarks on a road trip with a suicidal radio host named Roy (Shenoah Allen) after fleeing her controlling stepfather, Wade (Bill Wise). The two develop an unexpected accord after Roy agrees to help her raise funds for her dream business: pulling people around a nearby body of water on a giant banana-shaped flotation device. Collaborating on the script with Allen, with whom she maintains the improvisational podcast “Richard & Greta,” Conti realized that wearing the full-sized suit allowed her to tap into deeper emotions than the rhythms of the quirky rom-com her premise superficially suggests.

“I decided I wanted to write a love story about a woman who can’t come out of the monkey, because if you feel like you express yourself really well in there, it’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in reverse,” she observes. “You don’t want to get out because you’re better as that — and then you’re then faced with a problem.”

Although Conti courted several filmmakers to helm the project at a higher budget than they eventually had, she subsequently decided to direct it herself, a process she calls “difficult and terrifying,” but which enabled her to retain tighter control over what the project would become. She also leaned on Guest, the seasoned “Waiting for Guffman” and “For Your Consideration” director she’d worked with in the past, for guidance how to navigate the responsibilities of her new title. “I remember freaking out about certain things early on, thinking, I don’t know how to block a scene. What if I don’t know where the camera should go? And Christopher saying, ‘It’s not really your job’.”

Guest says he trusted her fully, but provided insights unique to his own skill set — in particular, telling a story that is often in flux because of the improvisation of the performers on screen. “She has all the gifts,” he says. “When I do my films, they’re not done in the way normal films are done. It’s different every time. But once Nina understood the real fundamental technical things, then it was just her doing what she does.”

Conti compared the experience to student filmmaking. “We were doing our own makeup,” she says. “Shenoah’s dad had an Airstream [we used]. Somebody else ran a place we could use as a location. So it was really sort of homespun. And the even better thing was then it was all ours and there was no influence. We could go really into our own atmosphere and protect that, and we never had to do something because someone else told us to.”

One of the choices she made to protect that atmosphere was to select a soundtrack featuring bands like Radiohead and the Pixies, whose songs would under normal circumstances be far too expensive for a production like hers to afford. “But I managed to get to one of the band members through six degrees of separation, and he watched the film and said, ‘You’ve got to have this’,” she remembers. “And then he said, ‘You’ve got to have that Pixies track — I’ll give you a number of somebody who I know knows them’.”

“I just put those tracks on the edit because I thought we’ll replace them later and it’ll be very upsetting,” Conti admits. “But then we didn’t have to replace any of them. That made me feel I was reaching something special.”

Characterizing the finished film as “a little bit like ‘Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid’ or ‘Thelma and Louise’,” Conti suggests that the experience of watching it mirrors the process of making it more closely than she originally expected. “Monkey, Jane and Roy are there for the journey,” she says.

“It was a tall order to set up to direct my first feature and then to do it in a monkey suit. But I thought, ‘Well, this is kind of perfect. I’ll just make it really hard for myself and somehow that will make me laugh all the way through it, enough to find the way forward.”