Wedding Date on Sep 2, 2023

Max and Amanda met in the second grade. As they like to tell it, Max was immediately smitten. Amanda didn’t even know who he was. One day in second grade English class, they were working on a question and answer form. On that paper, they gave them the prompt “Who are you going to marry?”. Max wrote Amanda’s name. The two of them grew up together, but they wouldn’t finally start dating until their senior year of high school. They chose Italy not only because they got engaged there, but because Amanda visited often throughout her childhood. It became one of their favorite places - one that they wanted to share with their circle of friends. They chose to have an intimate celebration in an estate nestled in the Tuscan countryside. Their weekend kicked off with a welcome party where they treated their guests to pizza and a wine tasting at Il Palagio, a winery owned by Sting. The rehearsal dinner took place the next night at their venue, a private villa called Podere La Specola, where they had a private chef cook a multicourse meal for them to enjoy in the lawn of the estate. Max’s parents made a toast at the beginning of the night, introducing two specialty wines they brought to serve - two vintage wines, each from the year Amanda and Max were born. At the farm table under the twinkling lights, Amanda and Max gave their welcome speech and spoke about what they had learned from the love of the generations before them. They each spoke about their parents and their grandparents and what they would hope to bring into their marriage after learning from them. The weekend closed out with their wedding day - the ceremony held within the olive trees of their villa. Their wedding ceremony was perfectly reflective of the intimacy of their weekend - one of their friends officiating and each one of their siblings being invited to give a reading. After the ceremony, they enjoyed an extended cocktail hour complete with live music and a mobile Prosecco bar cart as the sun set on the horizon. As intimate and quietly beautiful as their day was, their reception was nothing short of the kind of party you would expect for people who had been waiting for this day for 9 years. They ate a four course meal prepared by a private chef (the main dish was cacio e pepe!), danced to Mamma Mia on stone tables, and partied so hard that you would think it echoed off the rolling hills around them. As much as we pride ourselves on being storytellers, it’s the couple that’s the true author of their story. The first third of this film reflects our getting to know Amanda and Max over the first couple of days. The editing is more obvious and our hand in telling the story is more direct. The second section works as a bridge building up to the wedding day. Towards the end we take our hands off the editing process a bit and hand things over to Amanda and Max to finish telling the story in their own words. By this point in filming we had the chance to get close to Amanda and Max; seeing their love and bright personalities so clearly. The “story”, the “love”, was right there in front of us, palpable and bursting with every quick glance, in every giggle. There was no point in over editing. The heart of this story was playing out in front of the camera, not behind the computer. Going into this edit we took a ton of inspiration from some great Italian cinema of the 1960’s. A director from that time, Alberto Sordi, once said, “I adopt a very simple approach. I observe and reflect real life and ordinary people and sooner or later that raises a laugh.” Swap “laugh” for “feeling” and that about sums up our approach. As we continue to develop as filmmakers and as people that capture the lives of real people, we’re growing more confident in the long-take. The filmmaking process becomes more about creating a space for the couple to be their authentic selves and to feel the freedom and comfort to show their full range of emotions. We then merely need to capture it and play it back.