Fantasy and then fallout

“There’s a sort of contract you enter into with someone, a sort of unspoken contract that’s formed in the beginning under the circumstances in which a relationship starts,” says Austin Chick, writer and director of “XX/XY,” a reflective film about the nature of love in the time of confusion. That is, in these our modern times. “And that can affect the relationship for a really long time.”

On a visit to Los Angeles from New York, Chick -- his real name -- is a pale, lean fellow sporting a shaven head and a sweatshirt. “XX/XY,” which opens Friday in L.A., is his first film. It’s not unusual for debut creative endeavors to be autobiographical, especially from someone as young as 29, but while aspects of the film are autobiographical, it isn’t about himself, he says.

For example, the first part of the film takes place in the early 1990s among a group of Sarah Lawrence College students -- Coles (Mark Ruffalo) meets Sam (Maya Stange) and Thea (Kathleen Robertson) at a party and feels drawn to both. Chick attended that school during an era characterized by easy sex and plentiful drugs.

However, he cautions, “none of the characters are based on any specific person. I’m not Coles, that’s not my story, but the world of Sarah Lawrence during that time is something I’m familiar with.” And yes, the XX-XX-XY love triangle was something he experienced. “I did go to bed with two women once, and it really was a miserable experience, and somebody started crying, like in the movie.”

This trauma, he says, was “the starting point for writing the script -- taking a situation which is thought of as every man’s fantasy and turning it on its head and looking at how awkward and uncomfortable that can actually be. Then going further and looking at the outcome, the mutual mistrust that was built into the relationship between Coles and Sam.” In the film, those two carry on for some time afterward -- in real life, the two women went off to be lovers for seven years.

Finding film as his outlet

Growing up in New Hampshire, Chick attended a Waldorf school as a child. The school employs a method not unlike Montessori that emphasizes creativity and introduced him to the importance of the arts. When he entered Sarah Lawrence, he expected to major in liberal arts with a focus on pastel drawing and painting. That was New York in the early 1990s. “Being exposed to the art world there, I revised my position,” he says. “It just felt like a very small, kind of insular, elitist world, and I decided I wanted to do something that was a little more accessible.”

So he dropped out, traveled, and when he decided film was the more accessible art form he wanted to pursue, he enrolled at State University of New York at Purchase, to major in film.

He began writing scripts, tossed out one, then completed “XX/XY” in the summer of 1999, a year after graduating. Getting financing was a more daunting task, but Chick had deliberately written an intimate story that could be shot easily and cheaply on digital video.

As the start date approached, things began falling into place. Panavision offered a free 35-millimeter camera package, Kodak gave them a deal on film stock, and more money came from one investor, so Chick took the leap to film.

Still, these strokes of luck didn’t put cast and crew on easy street. They squeezed in a week of rehearsals -- “which was great because most indie films don’t even have time for that,” says Robertson -- and four intense weeks of shooting. Chick slept sometimes only three hours a day, and after a motorcycle accident, he finished shooting in leg and arm braces.

“I don’t know if there’s anything that can prepare you for making your first feature,” he says. “I think back to what I went through and wonder how I managed to get it done.”

Actors relish the roles

But make the film he did, with a cast he feels especially proud of.

Ruffalo, perhaps the film’s best-known actor, signed on early. “We had mutual friends,” Chick says. “I got the script to him and he liked it and was committed to doing it.”

“I just felt I had to play the part,” says Ruffalo, speaking by phone in Los Angeles. “And then I had to convince him I was the only one who could do it!” The fledgling director was taking a chance too, because at that time “You Can Count on Me,” which was to propel Ruffalo to art-house popularity, had not been released. The actor liked that the key characters were “complex, multilayered people who are struggling with the difficulty of being a human being and the perimeters of relationships in the modern world.” And Coles, with his straying eye, “would be a challenge to do without the audience hating him.”

The actresses were located through casting director Ellen Parks. Chick says, “I feel we got a really nice balance between the actresses we found. They’re all attractive but in very different ways.”

Because of the bare-bones budget, Chick says, “we’re really lucky that people responded to the script. I think there are not a lot of interesting roles for women.”

Robertson agrees. “It’s hard to find a script you’re interested in from beginning to end,” she says. “I loved the character of Thea -- she undergoes such a transformation over the course of the film. It was something I wanted to try.”

Both actors are happy with the results -- Ruffalo plans to make a second film, “Love Is Easy,” with Chick later this year.

Before shooting began, Chick visualized the film with director of photography Uta Briesewitz and production designer Judy Becker.

“The first half I wanted to shoot very tight, keeping it very close,” Chick says. “I wanted to give it a sense of claustrophobia. It’s a very contained world these people lived in, and we tried to work with mostly blues and yellows. The second half becomes Pottery Barn, beige and ochre and very subdued colors. It opens up a lot, too.”

Indeed, the look reflects the adult world the characters have entered, a world in which behavior has more consequences and weight. “The second half is also a world I think I know,” says Chick, “where people try to come to terms with what it means to be in a serious relationship, what it means to settle down.”

Chick’s favorite films tend to be French dramas by the likes of Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis and Benoit Jacquot, filmmakers who tend to focus on “everyday stories about people and their relationships, their problems, their dreams and hopes.” He also acknowledges he kept in mind American films about the sexual revolution, “Carnal Knowledge” and “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” during the shoot, but insists his is a different product.

“One of the goals in making the movie was to show more complex relationships than you typically see in standard Hollywood fare,” he says, “and try to look at the idea of love or true love in a complex way.”

“I don’t think people realize how few movies are made like this,” Robertson says. “It doesn’t go where you expect it to go.”