This year’s Sundance Film Festival sweetheart made its way into LACMA’s Bing Theater and brought both incontrollable bursts of laughter as well as teary eyes from the crowd. The Film Independent at LACMA screening of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl was accompanied by a conversation with the director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and the quirky/odd acting trio of Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler and Olivia Cooke.

The title characters in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl are like mismatched socks that somehow, surprisingly, fit really well together. The most common sentiment between the team was how much they could relate to the characters. When Gomez-Rejon first read the script the subject matter hit home in a very private way. “I really identified with the character of Greg. I was dealing with personal loss myself—my Dad had passed away a year before. Back then I just threw myself into work, but you can only do that for so long. When I pursued this film, I felt like I really had to accept it and integrate it into my life.”

For Mann, who plays the main character, Greg: “I had read the script a year before they started casting and it was rare that I found a character that I felt was the person I was in high school; a modern teenager that’s very self-aware, somewhat self-deprecating. I knew Alfonso already and when I heard he was directing it, I got really excited.” For Cyler (Earl), the script felt even more personal. “When I got the script I thought, this is RJ on paper, it’s actually me. I thought: did they follow me throughout life and then just make it look like a coincidence?”

Although the film deals with difficult subject matter, Gomez-Rejon made an effort to not over-dramatize the tone and not allow it to become excessively sentimental. For him, one of the hardest challenges was balancing the drama and comedy in the film. Yet, in the same way, the film presented interesting and contrasting characters, as well as a unique blend of genres.

As one of the closing questions, Film Independent Curator Elvis Mitchell asked the actors about their experience at Sundance. For Cooke (who plays Rachel, or the Dying Girl), the festival was both overwhelming and magical: “When you laugh in unison with 600 people and then cry in unison, it’s just electric”.

Cyler took his parents and “it was the first time in years I had seen my Dad cry like a little girl. It was like, ‘Oh! I think we did a good job in this movie.’” At last night’s screening, it’s safe to say the audience had that same feeling.

Lorena Alvarado / Film Independent Blogger