The
Actor turned writer-director on her Booksmart-esque ‘womance’ Banana Split, and why her next film will be a
Robot road-trip
When Hannah Marks was in her late teens, she went through her first breakup, as many do, and grieved it deeply, as many do. Then the actor met her ex’s new girlfriend at a party – and rather liked her. Marks, acting professionally since she was 12, knew a good idea when she saw one. “What happens when you don’t vilify that person, and then you actually like them and you become friends?” she asks down the phone from
Los Angeles, a decade later. “That was really interesting to me, that platonic love story.” As she points out: “Usually, in movies, these two
Women would hate each other.”
The result is Banana Split, a fizzy, oddball romcom that the 27-year-old Marks stars in, co-wrote and co-produced. The relationship between April (Marks) and Nick (Dylan Sprouse) is an amuse-bouche, sped through early on in a montage, before diving into the story proper – the giddy rapport, developed behind Nick’s back, between April and the new woman Clara (Liana Liberato). In its celebration of two-fingers-up female friendship, critics have somewhat inevitably dubbed it a “womance”.