Brittany Runs a Marathon: The Real-Life Friendship That Inspired Amazon's Dramedy
Writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo was inspired by a friend who completely transformed her life.
By Yohana Desta
By Anna Kooris/Amazon Studios.
Brittany Runs a Marathon stars Jillian Bell as the titular Brittany, a 27-year-old who starts running as a means of bringing order to her chaotic, clubby life. Brittany the character was inspired by Brittany O'Neill, a close friend of Marathon writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo. The two grew up in Georgia and reconnected when they were in their 20s in New York. O'Neill needed a roommate, Colaizzo needed a place to stay—and a friendship was reborn.
"She was the funniest person I'd ever met," Colaizzo said in a recent interview. The timing of the move-in was also fortuitous: By the time they started living together, O'Neill had decided to reshape her life in a number of key ways, including by taking up running. Colaizzo, an aspiring playwright who would go on to pen off-Broadway plays like Really, Really, was inspired by O'Neill's resolution. So inspired, in fact, that he began writing a script about a woman named Brittany who decides to change her life by becoming a runner. Then, he told O'Neill his idea.
"She wasn't weird about it at all," he said. "She was excited and kind of honored."
It helped that O'Neill was involved in the arts herself. At the time, she was the managing director of the Naked Angels theater company in downtown New York, an organization with founding members like playwright Kenneth Lonergan and actors like Mary Stuart Masterson. As he wrote, Colaizzo would show her drafts of the story; "I got her notes on the script," he said with a laugh, acknowledging their unusual, hyper-meta collaboration. The final product focuses on a heavily fictionalized version of O'Neill, which allowed her to separate herself from the project and help Colaizzo craft the script. There were only a few sticky moments, like when the character partakes in some pretty explicit behavior at a nightclub (you'll know it when you see it). "She never did that," Colaizzo said, chuckling. "That was the one thing where we were like, 'Are people gonna think you did this?'"
For years, Colaizzo thought Workaholics alum Jillian Bell would be perfect to play O'Neill, even though they look nothing alike; O'Neill is a brown-eyed brunette with a wide, toothy grin, while Bell is blonde and baby-faced. But that didn't really matter since Brittany wasn't an actual biopic.
"I've been a fan of hers for a long time, ever since 22 Jump Street," he said, referring to Bell's breakout role in the 2014 comedy blockbuster. "I remember leaving a screening thinking, I wonder if that will be Brittany one day…"
Bell instantly took to the script, which began a new kind of journey. This was the actor's first time leading a film—she appears in just about every scene—as well as Colaizzo's first time directing a movie. Six months before filming, they worked on building trust, so eager to form a bond that they brainstormed different fast-tracking methods—including, but not limited to, jumping out of a plane together. They nixed that idea and settled on something more earthbound: meeting once a week and going over the script line by line. Bell also decided that in order to really portray the character, she needed to mimic O'Neill and start running herself.
"She actually went on the weight-loss journey of the character on her own," Colaizzo said. Bell lost about 26 pounds leading up to the film, and 11 pounds during its actual filming. "I didn't ask her to," he added. "I thought that'd be a weird ask."
The original plan was to film Bell as she was, and use prosthetics to signify her weight-loss journey (which still ended up happening). Colaizzo wants to be clear, though, that Brittany Runs a Marathon isn't about a woman who decides to get thin. Though her quest is prompted when a doctor demands that Brittany lose 55 pounds, her transformation is also about making other changes in her life, like easing up on drinking and drugs and pursuing a different career. (The real O'Neill worked her way out of debt, got a new job, and lost 80 pounds over the course of her journey.) In other words, it's all about interior transformation. Running is one of the ways that transformation manifests.
"I thought it was important that the film never have a point of view about her weight loss," he said. The filmmaker tried to leave the judgment up to the viewer; for example, there's a scene in which Brittany, after having lost a lot of weight, has a door held open for her by a man. Colaizzo decided there should be no music in the scene, because he didn't want to tip the movie's emotional hand one way or another. "If we made that a victorious moment, it would feel like we were saying, 'How great, a guy held a door for her!'" the writer-director said. "When in reality I wanted to present it as, 'This is what happened when she did this, period.'"
The film premiered at Sundance this year, where Amazon acquired it for a whopping $14 million. In multiple ways, that premiere was the end of an era, the grand denouement of a project Colaizzo and O'Neill began working on all the way back in 2011.
"She cried and we hugged," Colaizzo said of O'Neill at that first screening. "You never have a postmortem on a phase of a friendship, [but] the whole last year and a half has been that for us…there was an existential gratitude."
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