Sundance: ‘Plainclothes’ Filmmaker on Casting Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey as Undercover Lovers

Sundance: ‘Plainclothes’ Filmmaker on Casting Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey as Undercover Lovers

The details of Carmen Emmi’s filmmaking career paint a picture of a true Sundance success story — and the film festival has barely just started.

A native of Syracuse, New York, Emmi earned a degree in film from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts before turning his attention to the page in an effort to get his Hollywood career off the ground. Inspiration came from a curious set of circumstances that seemed to converge around the same time. Emmi, who came out as gay during his college days, was still reconciling with that journey while his brother was preparing to enter the police force.

Then a close friend shared a story about a relative who was doing undercover work in Florida busting gay men in a sting operation. Emmi couldn’t believe it was real, and his online research led to more troubling cases, including one in Long Beach, California, where gay men were being targeted by authorities for engaging in consensual encounters. In 2016, he started writing what would eventually become Plainclothes, his debut feature as both a writer and director. The film follows a promising undercover officer assigned to lure and arrest gay men who winds up defying orders when he falls for a handsome target.

Good fortune followed and Emmi secured financing, a roster of resourceful producers, a starry cast led by Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey and eventually a spot in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival lineup. It’s the stuff of a film school grad’s dreams. Below, Emmi details his creative path, the intentions behind everything from the film’s sex scenes to the music choices and why his hometown (and his family of farmers) are so important to him. “To be a filmmaker that comes from Syracuse who is telling this queer story, I think would’ve meant a lot to me as a kid,” says the 34-year-old. “Even though I come from a conservative place and a family of farmers, I can still be who I want to be and I get to do it now with my family.”

In your Sundance director’s video, you held back tears at one point just thinking about the fact that you got into the festival. How are your emotions now a few days away from the premiere in Park City?

I mean, with everything going on right now, it’s tough. I spent a lot of time in L.A. so my heart is there. It’s tricky to feel excited when people are in so much pain. Obviously today, with the inauguration, depending on who you voted for, it can also be a hard day. But this has been my dream since I saw Little Miss Sunshine at Carousel Mall with my family. I’ve always wanted to go to Sundance, but I kind of pushed it out of my mind because I didn’t want to be heartbroken. When I got in, it was a dream come true. My family is coming, so are my friends from college. It’s so special.

A fun fact in your filmmaker bio jumped out at me: You come from a family of farmers.

My family has been farming since the ‘40s. My dad’s been working on the farm since he was 7, and he still works on the farm. I was the first grandson in our Italian American family. I wasn’t pushed into the farm but I spent a lot of time with my grandfather while he worked. I learned almost everything from my grandfather in the greenhouses especially, though I think he knew that I didn’t have a green thumb when he left me there for a week to take care of the plants and he came back and it was destroyed. [Laughs.] I’m really grateful for the family business. My family still runs the farm stand, and I come home in the summers to work there. I help with the seeding in the greenhouse, and it really helps with my writing, actually. It’s very meditative. This is my first screenplay, and I think my upbringing helped me really hone in on it in some ways.

What type of crops does your family farm produce?

Corn and tomatoes are a big crop. We start by planting in the greenhouse — we seed tomatoes, basil, parsley and all the greens first in the greenhouse — and then we move it outside once it’s warm enough. Strawberry season is my favorite; it’s the most hopeful. It feels like Christmas Eve. I get very excited for summer. I feel really privileged to be able to [do this work as a filmmaker] but then also pitch in back home. The customers don’t really care that I’m working on a screenplay or anything.

This is your first screenplay, and it started with an idea that sprang from a Los Angeles Times article about “a handsome undercover cop” in Long Beach. Did you know right away that you wanted to explore the subject matter in a deeper way as a screenplay?

My friend Vincent told me about his friend’s brother, who was a police officer in Florida doing this kind of undercover work. This was in 2016, and I immediately thought that it wasn’t real. I did some research and was browsing online for anything related to the subject, and that’s when I came across the LA Times article. It was wild. I interviewed the man who sued the city of Long Beach, and I started interviewing officers. I love Syracuse, where I grew up, but I didn’t always feel like I belonged. Even in high school theater, it didn’t feel like there was a space for my queer identity to really come forward, so I kept it at bay. I didn’t even acknowledge it until I was 20-something. I ended up coming out a bit later in life, during film school. When I read that article and started the research — a moment that coincided with my brother becoming a police officer — all of these feelings came back. I didn’t know where to put them, I couldn’t take a photograph of it, so I had to write. Through that, the screenplay was born.

Was the screenplay part of your USC education?

No, I studied production at USC. We learned how to write shorts but not features. The education was more focused on learning how to make a film rather than write one. I had to learn how to write after film school. I really wanted to go to graduate school for it, but it’s so expensive.

Did you teach yourself, or lean on any books?

I tried to read so many books, and I don’t want to shit on any screenwriting books but it felt impossible for me to learn that way. Instead, I watched a lot of movies. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation really helped me, and so did Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan [written by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John J. McLaughlin]. I watched Steven Spielberg’s [1971 film Duel] which taught me about the emotional approach to structure.

Then one day, I was lying on my floor in Brooklyn when I realized while looking back on my coming out experience that it wasn’t linear. It was very fragmented. That’s when I knew that I wanted to approach this film as if Lucas were thinking back on his coming out experience in the same way, from when he first met Andrew all the way through to receiving the letter. I knew it had to emotionally make sense but it didn’t have to go from A to Z. I see my own coming out experience almost like a shattered mirror. It’s beautiful but it’s not a simple picture. I wanted the screenplay to reflect that.

How long did it to write?

I started in 2016, and that was really just character development. I was freelancing at the time; I did branded content and also worked as a cinematographer. I had to work in order to afford to live in L.A. and then New York City. I couldn’t afford to take a few months off to write. I always had work, and I still do, so I was juggling it in between jobs. I really started in 2018, and finished the first draft on my birthday, April 30, in 2020. I spent a year revising it and the next year trying to raise money.

How hard was that process?

I was lucky. My college roommate at USC was dating a man who produces films in the U.K., [Arthur Landon], who is a partner at Lorton Entertainment, a film production company. He’s a friend, and he read one of my first drafts and said, “If this doesn’t get made, it would be a shame.” At the time, he was working on two other films but he suggested I keep chipping away at it and we would eventually find a way to make it happen. I thought he was just being nice, but I kept chipping away at it. I didn’t know if we would end up finding the financing for it, and I was fully prepared to shoot it on my phone and with my Hi8 camera. I shot three proof of concepts because I wanted to work out for myself how to represent Lucas’s inner mind.

When I finished the third test, I showed it to Arthur, who was ready [after having finished his other films]. He ended up financing it himself because it was tricky to get financing otherwise. I got very lucky in that way. But it took three years.

If I understand the timeline correctly, you also entered some screenplay competitions and got some recognition that way. Did it help?

Arthur is a dream investor who always believed in me, and I’m very lucky. But having others notice was helpful. The competitions didn’t help me in terms of getting representation but it was an honor to be in the top 50 of the Academy Nicholl Fellowships. I really, really wanted to get in the top 10. I think the fourth time I applied, they were just like, “No, you’re done, girl.” [Laughs.]

Let’s talk about the cast, Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey. In the Sundance festival description, senior programmer Basil Tsiokos credits Tom with a “breakout performance.” How did you cast them?

Bernard Telsey cast the movie for us, and we saw a lot of people for Lucas. It was tricky because Lucas was always a combination of me and my brother in a way, and that made it more difficult. Then Tom came our way, and I met him on Zoom. As soon as he popped up on the screen, I just can’t describe it, I just knew. It’s his eyes and it’s his [Julliard School] training, and there was something about him when he looked up on the Zoom. I knew there was a story behind his eyes.

I saw his clips, and I went to see the new Hunger Games. I hadn’t seen the [other films in the franchise] so I went in thinking it was like a Jumanji-esque adventure comedy. It’s not that, it’s very dark. Seeing that film, I knew he could do something like this because he carried that movie. I went up to Calgary where he was shooting Billy the Kid because I didn’t want to cast this off of Zoom. We were supposed to have a one-hour meeting but it ended up being five. We got coffee, and cast members from Billy the Kid kept stopping by, and I saw the way he interacted with them. They all loved each other. He’s a natural-born leader, and I knew that for my first feature, it would be key for the lead actor to be someone who could lead the cast in that way. We ended up going out until 4 a.m. together, and he walked me to my door and we just kept hugging. He was a dream to work with.

Russell was kind of a last-minute casting choice. Again, I was very hesitant because I had thought about this character for so long. He was loosely based off of a man that I had met, right down to his [occupation]. I came out at the same time Looking was on HBO, so I always held that cast of men on a pedestal, especially Russell. When one of my producers, April Kelly, who is British, suggested Russell, I was like, “Absolutely not. He’s never going to do this. He’s a legend!” I don’t think I knew it at the time but she sent him the script and told me that he would meet with me. I spit out my water. It was an immediate yes.

He’s just one of the best actors today, honestly. People always say, “Don’t meet your heroes,” but whoever said that has never met Russell. Honestly. He’s truly an incredible person. The same with Maria Dizzia, the icon. As soon as she hopped on the Zoom, she told me that the screenplay reminded her of The Conversation, and I was, like, “You got it. You got the job.”

Maria is so great in this. This is a spoiler-y question: You give her a great moment during the film’s climax to respond to what has just unfolded. The weight of it falls on her face, and it’s a powerful scene. What do you hope audiences take from that response?

I want people to leave on a hopeful note. I hope it reads that way. I’ll never forget filming that day. My niece was there, she’s a little blonde girl who can be seen in the beginning of that scene. The whole room was electric. Maria brings so much to a shoot. I posted on Instagram that she makes people’s hearts sing, and she did that for us.

The sex scenes seem very intentional. The interactions between Lucas and Andrew as well as the cruising sequences are not explicit just because. There’s no full frontal, no gratuitous nudity. There’s a little bit of flesh but the focus feels more on the relationship and their interactions. I should ask you if it was intentional? How did you approach what you asked of your actors?

Well, my dad is in the film, too, he plays Lucas’s dad. So, I knew that I would be intercutting the dad’s footage in some of those moments so I kept asking myself how far I should go. But also, I don’t know, there’s something more sexy about holding back in some ways. The landmark scene in the film when Andrew asks Lucas, “Can I touch you?” That, to me, feels even more sensual than the car scene [when they’re having sex]. The actors were really down for anything but I am never going to be the kind of guy that’s like, “Now we’re going to do this,” in terms of the nudity. I wanted everyone to feel safe. You have to feel safe. We’re making a movie. It’s not like surgery. I had a very detailed spreadsheet that I sent their teams. They approved, a lot of it was character-based. Would Lucas be naked here? Would he feel comfortable to take off his pants in a locker room? Tom and I didn’t think so. We were lucky to work with an intimacy coordinator named Joey Massa, who helped me choreograph those scenes and helped everyone feel comfortable.

Let’s also talk about the music, which, again seems so intentional and thoughtful. What was your approach to picking the right songs and soundtrack to pull it together?

Music was so key. I have a huge playlist that I gave to the cast and crew before we shot. Music was probably one of my main inspirations, especially Lana Del Rey, R.E.M., the Cranberries. When it came time to figure out who the composer would be, I knew we wouldn’t be able to afford those kinds of artists because were very low-budget. The music supervisor sent me the work of Emily Wells, who I ended up meeting with and it was amazing. While I was shooting the film, I would just listen to her music. All these cues from her naturally helped inform how I wanted to approach the edit. I used all of her music as a temp, and we were really lucky because she owns her music. Once she saw it, she said she wanted to score it. It was an incredible experience working with her. She kind of made a sound library. We used Tom’s real breath for instruments, we used her voice in parts, too. It felt very organic and I want to work with Emily for the rest of my life. She’s incredible.

You got into Sundance, which is an accomplishment. The next obvious question is about distribution. Have you shown it to distributors yet? What are your hopes?

We’ve been very careful about who we send links to, and we want distributors to see it in a theater. We did a lot of test screenings here in Syracuse, and the feeling in the room is that it’s just so special. I don’t think you can replicate that by watching it solo. We’re hoping distributors come to our screening. I’ve been working on this project since 2016. I am a slow burn, so I don’t want to put pressure on it but I really, really want a wider audience to see our movie. That’s the ultimate goal. I want people to experience it in a theater.

Interview edited for length and clarity.