‘Fantasy Life’s’ Matthew Shear on His Directorial Debut

Matthew Shear’s “Fantasy Life” is, for all intents and purposes, his first real screenplay. “I had dabbled,” Shear says. “[But] I’d never completed anything.” 

So it’s all the more impressive that the film, which expands to theaters nationwide Friday, is his debut feature as a writer, director and star. 

A New York City-set spin on the classic romantic comedy formula, “Family Life” follows Sam (played by Shear), an anxious law school dropout who finds himself falling for Dianne (Amanda Peet), the mother of the children he begins babysitting. And while that dynamic already poses challenges to begin with, it becomes all the more complicated considering Dianne, an actress, is married, with a musician husband, David (Alessandro Nivola). David also happens to be the son of Sam’s psychiatrist, who puts him up for the job in the first place. 

In many ways, though not necessarily intentionally, Sam is an embodiment of Shear. The actor, who has appeared in films including M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old,” Nathan Silver’s “Between the Temples” and Noah Baumbach’s “Mistress America,” first set out to write the film when he was “having a tough moment in my acting career, which is a euphemism for not working,” he says. “I just needed something else. And my wife had called me out on wanting to write something or talking about it a lot, and encouraged me to write. I just dove into this story, and it ended up weaving a lot of elements of my life into it.” 

One point lifted from Shear’s life was his experience working as a Manhattan family manny (a male nanny). While he hadn’t been thinking this way at the time, in hindsight, the job allowed Shear to be absorbed into a different world than his, which proved to be a uniquely perfect narrative tool. “It occurred to me that I could access a certain sort of class and milieu of New York by telling the story through my eyes as a babysitter,” says Shear. “I was committed to doing something that reflected New York right now. Like, who is actually living in these brownstones? So I thought, ‘Oh, I had that experience.’” 

Despite the similarities, originally, Shear didn’t claim the role of Sam for himself, and even shopped the part around to other actors. In part, Shear explains, that was because the experience of writing, separate from acting, had become “really rewarding.” “As a result, I hid the fact that I had written this part of Sam for myself for a long time. My wife at one point read the scripts, like, ‘Are you crazy? This is obviously for you.’ And so at a certain point, I kind of owned it.”

Given Shear took on multiple roles within the film, he had to lean into collaboration on set. “I would really depend on my cinematographer and script supervisor to give me feedback on my performance, even though that’s not exactly their job,” says Shear. “We ended up having a dialogue going about my performance, which was really useful in terms of letting go of it and being able to be the director for the other actors.”  

Beyond the tangled romance, the film gives audiences an intimate look into the intricate life of a family that, to the outside world, might seem to have it all together, while also offering a truthful glimpse into the reality of dealing with mental health issues. Both Sam and Dianne deal with chronic mood disorders, despite their different circumstances. 

“It’s human to be uncomfortable in all kinds of circumstances, whether it’s this sort of fulfilled version of life, or a more humble one,” says Shear. “What movies can be about, and why they can still be fun when the people are rich and beautiful, is because there’s vulnerability there still. It’s not perfect.”