Will Ferrell’s early days as a “Saturday Night Live” cast member in 1995 were not promising. “A lot of the writers looked at him and said, ‘I don’t know what to write for this guy. We’re not sure he’s funny; we think he’s the dud,’” recalls Josh Greenbaum, who directed and produced the documentary “Will & Harper.”
This story, told in the Netflix documentary about Ferrell’s cross-country road trip with his pal Harper Steele as she eases into her new life as a transitioned woman, has a happy ending, in part because of Steele, who joined the show as a writer the same time as Ferrell. As Greenbaum explains, she saw Ferrell’s potential early on, realizing that “this guy is a little quieter than your usual guy,” and “went back to the writers’ room and said, ‘Don’t write him off.’”
That connection — a shared “love language in comedy,” as Greenbaum calls it — forged a decades-long friendship and is at the core of the doc. But “Will & Harper” is not the only film this awards season that pivots around a key friendship: “Nickel Boys,” “Challengers” and the stop-motion “Memoir of a Snail” also focus on friendships, while “A Real Pain” keys on cousins who are close enough to be considered pals.
Setting such relationships as the centerpiece for a movie can be risky; audiences may have the expectation that friends don’t have as much potential for drama or roller-coaster emotions as people who are in love. In “Challengers,” a love triangle does divide Patrick and Art, two childhood friends and tennis stars, but the film is as much about their connection with each other as it is about the woman they both covet.
“There is a lost art of the movie of male friends,” says the picture’s screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, calling out “The Big Chill” as a film “that makes you feel like you’ve known these guys for 15 years.”
“With friendship in a movie, you’re not meeting anybody cold. You’re meeting them already next to somebody else who has a whole world and history of opinions about them,” Kuritzkes adds.
In “A Real Pain,” cousins David and Benji — close since childhood but not quite brotherly — take a pilgrimage to Poland to see their late grandmother’s former home. Along the way, their bond serves a critical story point that illuminates their characters, as producer Ali Herting says.
“Friendships can be a mirror for yourself,” she says, calling close pals “a foil for ourselves.”
“They’re so often emulating the things we wish we had in ourselves,” she says. “It’s a great way to cinematically and narratively understand ourselves better, through friendship dynamics.”
When there’s a long, shared history, as is the case with David and Benji, two people can “hold each other accountable” and deal with confrontation in ways rarely explored in film otherwise, she points out.
That ability to confront and hold accountable without turning to real violence is important, particularly among men, suggests “Nickel Boys” director RaMell Ross. In “Boys,” Elwood and Turner are locked up in a reform school in 1960s Florida and become allies and friends quickly to survive.
“For men to have someone who can challenge and respect you is quite difficult, because a lot of violence comes from lack of language,” says Ross. “To have someone who can challenge you and go back and forth verbally and have it turn into something that’s not violent is a way of improving oneself.”
Friendships between two women onscreen can be powerful in their own ways. Pedro Almodóvar explores one friend helping another with a euthanasia decision in “The Room Next Door,” while writer-director Adam Elliot returns to the intergenerational friendship dynamic of his 2009 stop-motion film “Mary and Max” with “Snail.” In “Snail,” a traumatized and lonely young Grace risks becoming a hoarding hermit until she bonds with the older Pinky, who is the essence of joie de vivre.
“We all desperately need friends and underestimate how important friends are,” says Elliot. “The love between two friends is sometimes stronger than the love between lovers. You love friends because they’ve taught you life lessons or how to love yourself. It’s all about enlightenment.”
Seen that way, friendships are love affairs, if platonic ones — and just as much of a roller coaster as romantic ones. “In ‘Will & Harper,’ we see two people who are deeply intertwined in each other’s lives — not through romantic entanglement but through the support that only two friends can offer — and that’s worthy of exploration,” says Greenbaum.
“It’s often our friendships that carry us through the hardest, most transformative moments in life. We rely on them in ways that can go unspoken. Will is there to remind Harper that she is absolutely worthy of love — not only from others but from herself.”
