Indie Star Joe Swanberg Never Really Left — but He’s Definitely Back Now

We haven’t seen a feature from mumblecore godfather Joe Swanberg in nearly a decade, but it’s not like he was just slacking off in the years since 2017’s “Win It All” debuted on Netflix.

In 2019, Netflix also aired the third and final season of his relationship comedy series “Easy,” a heavily improvised and critically acclaimed look into the sex lives of self-absorbed adults. In other words, the indie, do-it-yourself genre he pioneered with movies “Kissing on the Mouth” (2005), Greta Gerwig breakout vehicle “Hannah Takes the Stairs” (2007), “Nights and Weekends” (2008), and “Uncle Kent” (2011). His 2013 ensemble comedy “Drinking Buddies” gave us one of the best Olivia Wilde performances and afforded the indie director primary exposure.

But all of these, even “Easy,” feel like a very long time ago.

Swanberg’s retreat from feature directing happened around the time of the pandemic, and after his two-decade marriage to fellow filmmaker Kris Williams ended. Swanberg pivoted to for-hire TV directing jobs, work on his subscription-based video store Analog in his hometown of Chicago, and acting in front of the camera in microbudget projects. Despite what appeared to be a long absence from feature filmmaking, it’s not like the guy who used to churn out an indie movie practically every year, made with his own money and with his own friends, wasn’t busy.

His latest film, “The Sun Never Sets,” is a return to form for the director, already earning great reviews (including on IndieWire) and starring his regular collaborator Jake Johnson, plus Dakota Fanning and Cory Michael Smith, in career-best performances from nearly everybody.

Shot on-location last year in 35mm in Alaska, this wry and bittersweet romantic triangle centers on a terrific Fanning as Wendy, whose age-gap relationship with divorced hedge fund manager Jack (Johnson) is coming apart. When Jack insists the pair take a break so that she can possibly find a partner better suited to her needs, she runs her into her once-toxic ex-boyfriend Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), and their feelings are reignited all over again, leading to a messy arrangement in which feelings are all over the place, both flourishing and wounded.

Ahead of the film’s premiere at SXSW over the weekend, where the film is currently seeking a buyer, IndieWire caught up with Swanberg to, well, catch up on everything he’s been up to since “Easy” ended in 2019.

We discussed his thoughts on the shifting landscape of indie film and film festivals, and how the ad-libbed sexual frankness his films were once known for is not really possible anymore in a post-#MeToo world. That reassessment of onscreen sex and nudity, with the introduction of intimacy coordinators, came right around the time Swanberg’s feature filmmaking output went quiet. You won’t see much sex at all in “The Sun Never Sets,” though as Swanberg explained, his actors did not want to bring an intimacy coordinator on set.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

IndieWire: “The Sun Never Sets” was announced only last summer in 2025. How quickly did the film come together?

Joe Swanberg: We announced it after we had already shot it. Sometimes, these announcements go out and they’re like, “We’re about to make this movie!” In fact, we had already filmed the whole thing in May and early June, and it got announced in August or something.

Just to get a predictable question out of the way, it’s been some years since you had a feature film. You completed Season 3 of the Netflix series “Easy” in 2019 and had this novella-length film “Build the Wall” in 2020 with Jane Adams. But we’d have to go back to 2017 to see the last feature, “Win It All” at Netflix.

And we shot that 2017 movie in 2015, so it was 10 years between features.

What were you up to in that time?

I was pretty spoiled. Honestly, I had the greatest time of my life making “Easy,” and coming off of that show, it was difficult to imagine ever having it that good again. Netflix was so awesome to work for. My executives loved the show, gave me total freedom. I felt supported. Global, same-day release. I felt like maybe a wave I’d been surfing the last 15 years has finally peaked. I directed some TV for hire and kind of kicked around but the truth was, I was not inspired to rush into a new project. I was tired, too.

Honestly, “Easy” was the best, super fun show to make, but a lot of work. I wrote, directed, and produced every episode of the show. I meant to take some time off after “Easy” ended, and then because of the pandemic and various other production slowdowns, it ended up being way more time that I took off. I didn’t have a career strategy. I’ve been producing a lot, acting a lot, and I opened a video store in Chicago. When I look back on those years, I was busy the whole time. It was funny to be back on set and be like, “Wow, I haven’t made a feature in forever.”

‘The Sun Never Sets’SXSW

Video stores aren’t that lucrative. Did the TV directing work and “Easy” enable you to stay afloat financially?

100 percent. The comfort of “Easy” allowed me not to feel stressed to rush back into something. Otherwise, yes, I would’ve been, for pure survival reasons, putting out more stuff, no doubt about it.

You mention this great working relationship with Netflix. Were you talking with them about another project? Their model for working with independent filmmakers now has completely changed.

A little bit. There was nothing specific. Between Seasons 2 and 3 of “Easy,” they were like, “You can do Season 3 of ‘Easy,’ or we’ll do a different show with you. We could develop something internally.” I just loved “Easy” so much that it was a no-brainer for me. I had one meeting with them afterwards to sort of check in, and the vibe at that meeting was “We would love to work with you, but we’re not doing something like ‘Easy’ again. We’re not doing another improvised show. If we do another show with you, it’s going to be a traditional development process the way we build other shows.” I’m not opposed to doing something like that. Certainly at the time, I was a million miles away from that sounding appealing.

What you’re describing on “Easy,” those days are over at Netflix. You’re debuting “The Sun Never Sets” in a completely different independent film world than we had 10 years ago.

I don’t know if I personally would have marched into the world to make a movie if Jake [Johnson] wasn’t already on board with that. He and I have historically put our own money into our movies, and then work with other financiers to complete that picture. Same situation with this one. It will be super interesting for me to be at SXSW with a movie that’s for sale and to reorient myself with that indie landscape. Coming off of “Happy Christmas,” Eddie Linker and I started a financing company [Forager Films]. We did several of Alex Ross Perry movies, we did a Lynn Shelton movie.

I felt, from 2015 to 2018, very up to date on who the buyers were, what they were looking for, what prices they were paying for things. By 2019, I went back to that group of investors here in Chicago and said, you guys, I don’t know what’s going on out there, I have to be honest. I don’t have a good handle on it anymore. It was clear to me that streamers were going to start producing in-house rather than acquiring at festivals. I purposefully stepped out of the game at that point.

At this point, I will be reorienting almost like a first-time feature director. There are a lot of people at these companies I probably have never met, and streaming is as confusing to me as it ever has been though the rumblings that I’m hearing is that they are moving toward acquisitions again, at least on the feature side, maybe their in-house productions aren’t going the way they wanted.

Cory Michael Smith, Joe Swanberg, Dakota Fanning and Jake Johnson at ‘The Sun Never Sets’ Premiere during the SXSW Conference & Festivals held at ZACH Theater on March 13, 2026 in Austin, TexasHutton Supancic/SXSW Conference & Festivals

Was it easy to get financing? You’ve mostly self-financed going back to your early mumblecore movies.

On the financing side, I’m happy to report we were able to raise the amount of money we needed, and people were enthusiastic about the film. Whether that will happen every time out, I don’t know. At least getting this movie made, I think everybody was excited. People wanted me to make another movie. Jake and I kicked around some ideas in the intervening years, but we were really excited to work together again.

What was the personal germ of the idea for “The Sun Never Sets”? You and Kris Williams divorced in 2019, so between this film and the three seasons of “Easy,” it would seem you’ve put a lot of your own marriage into your work.

I started kicking this idea around in 2019, post-divorce, as I was dating a younger person and really sort of wondering on her behalf whether our relationship was all that satisfying with me being so set in my ways. I really came out of the end of my relationship with Kris feeling like I never want to get married again, I never want to have more kids, if we couldn’t make it work. I was in that relationship with Kris for 20 years; we were 18 to 38. I was young still, but also I [felt] a little old and almost calcified. “I don’t want to be alone the rest of my life, but I don’t think I want to do this whole big thing with a new person.”

I was imagining a movie during that time period about a woman who was dating someone like me, which provided some stability and comfort, but also was dating someone who was younger and a little more on her wavelength, and a little more adventurous and outdoorsy, and then she sort of felt like, “My life is perfect with these two guys in it. Neither one is the answer, but if I can just date both of them, together they kind of complete my life.”

Ashley Sneed called me and was like, “Do you want to make a movie in Alaska? There’s this beautiful time period where we could shoot before the tourist season starts. Do you have any ideas we can do?” I always imagined the movie in the Pacific Northwest… I started talking to Jake [Johnson], pitching him that idea, telling him about a breakup I was going through at the time with a different person. As often is the case, he was taking a lot of my raw input and helping shape that into a story. I always cast super early on, so then Dakota [Fanning] and Cory [Michael Smith] came on board, then a lot of the writing happened.

You wrote it in 2019, but it’s very contemporary in the sense that we’re seeing more heterosexual open marriages.

I documented it in “Easy”; all three seasons of the show there’s this couple in an open relationship, so I was pulling a lot of that stuff from my own marriage. Post-divorce, I couldn’t imagine being monogamous again. It felt like not really the type of relationship structure that I was going to exist in in my forties. I’ve had plenty of experiences since then that I’ve sort of re-evaluated monogamy as potentially a nice thing as opposed to a restricting thing. Definitely all of that stuff was factoring in there. With “The Sun Never Sets,” I do feel like in 2026 everyone is in open relationships, there is still a sense of ick around it or a feeling of “oh, you’ll change your mind.”

This movie, while not being an open-relationship movie, it’s a very polyamory movie where Dakota is in the midst of all this stuff, you feel how someone could be in love with two people at the same time. Even though we didn’t set out to do it in this movie, we weren’t having open marriage or polyamory conversations, when I was editing the movie I was like, “This is what I would show to somebody who was confused about that.” Doesn’t it make sense to you that she could fully love Jake but also fully love Corey and be in love with Corey and be confused about those feelings?

‘The Sun Never Sets’SXSW

Your early movies were known for their frankness in terms of sex and nudity and with your own friends. With the #MeToo movement, which was around the time of your last feature, came more scrutiny around these scenes and a reassessment of sex onscreen through intimacy coordinators. How did that affect your work?

It  hasn’t really changed it. We shot Season 3 of “Easy” in 2018, so we were almost done with the show when a lot of that stuff came in, and nobody brought up intimacy coordinators. It was not really a position that existed. My last big burst of productivity was right before all of that, and then coming back and doing this movie, my collaborations with Jake are inherently not ever super sexually focused. The four movies we’ve made together just don’t go there. The test will come next time, to see whether that’s something that is affecting the type of storytelling that I’m doing.

My own personal interest in the sex lives of characters, and especially characters my age, hasn’t really changed. So I imagine in the next year or two, I’ll probably start putting together the first movie where producers or other people are going to want to have the intimacy coordinator conversation. I asked about it on this movie, and my actors did not want that, and I won’t name names, but some of them were specifically like, “I don’t want to work with an intimacy coordinator. I don’t like that. It makes me uncomfortable.”

Have you had experiences with an intimacy coordinator?

I’ve worked with them as an actor, not as a director, and it made me feel weird. It was a movie being directed by a woman [the 2025 Tribeca short “Chasing the Party” by Jessie Komitor], and the first meeting we had with the intimacy coordinator I was like, “I don’t know who this person is. I’m here because of you and your script and I trust your vision here.” That was my first time dealing with that, and I would’ve preferred to work directly with the director. It’s TBD where that role ends up situating itself in the industry. I remember reading that Sean [Baker] didn’t use one on “Anora,” and there have been other test cases of actors deciding not to do that.

As an actor, I would never have a lawyer represent me who was brought on by the studio that I was negotiating with, and as an advocate. If that role on set is going to become an advocate for me, then I should hire that person, not the studio that I’m negotiating against. As long as the intimacy coordinators are being hired by the studio, my view of their role is that their job is to coerce the actors into doing things, as opposed to advocate on their behalf against the studio. So I think if there was a shift that I would like to see in the industry, it would be that intimacy coordinators, like managers or agents, became a role that an actor would bring into the equation and that the actor would pay. And as long as we’re in a situation where the studio is paying the intimacy coordinator, I view that person as antagonistic against me, not as an advocate for me.

Many of your peers and past collaborators have gone to on to work for studios, like Adam Wingard, Greta Gerwig, Olivia Wilde, and Ti West. Do you want to stay in the indie lane?

In the wake of “Drinking Buddies,” I signed on to two studio comedies: one at New Line, and one at Lionsgate. They were $25-million studio rom-coms. I ended up quitting both of those projects. I reached a point that I felt we [were] not going to make a great movie. I’ve never really been money-driven; I really feel like my career has gone so much better than I thought it was gonna go. also have recognized I’ve made so much work. I recognize the gap between the movies that I still really love, that I’ve made, and the ones that I feel whatever about is really [about] how passionate I was at the time about the project. In a marketplace right now where to get an adult-oriented, introspective drama out into the world is already a challenge, I know that unless I really am deeply invested in the movie, that challenge becomes even harder. So I think I’m doing what I love still.

I’ve never really had aspirations to work at the studios or anything like that. And “Easy” was really the sweet spot where Netflix allowed me to do my thing. I’m always looking for opportunities like that, and if there’s places for me to fit in the bigger picture, then I’m always open to that. But you know, when I wake up in the morning and I’m just living my life here in Chicago, it’s really these characters, these portraits, that are fascinating to me and keep drawing me in.

“The Sun Never Sets” screened at SXSW 2026. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.