“I’m not ashamed to say I cried from terror”: writer, director, and star Matthew Shear on his feature-length debut ‘Fantasy Life’
Having spent his career thus far as an actor, most notably as a frequent collaborator of Noah Baumbach in While We’re Young, Mistress America, The Meyerowitz Stories, and Marriage Story, Matthew Shear has taken the next step by writing and directing his feature-length debut, Fantasy Life.
Shear, who also starred in M Night Shyamalan’s Old and spent two seasons as a main cast member on the Primetime Emmy-nominated period thriller The Alienist, pulls quadruple duty on his first film from behind the camera by executive producing and playing the lead role of Sam.
Fantasy Life follows Sam, who gets laid off from his job as a paralegal before being hired as the babysitter for his psychiatrist’s grandchildren. Their parents are Amanda Peet’s actor, Dianne, and Alessandro Nivola’s still-wannabe rockstar, David, who aren’t enjoying the happiest of marriages.
Sparks quietly begin to fly between Sam and Dianne, but it’s far from a conventional love story. Instead, Fantasy Life deals with a myriad of issues, from personal and professional malaise to midlife crises, via loneliness and mental health struggles, making it as much of a character study as it is a dramatic comedy.
It’s been a long time coming for Shear, who admitted that the movie’s March 27th, 2026, release date is the culmination of a long journey, and not only because the premiere was held at South by Southwest 12 months previously. “It’s a surreal and happy moment,” the first-time filmmaker acknowledged. “Especially thinking back on beginning writing the script, which was around 2018.”
Fantasy Life didn’t just premiere at last year’s SXSW, though; it won the ‘Narrative Feature Audience Award’. He’s not just a debut director, then, but an award-winning debut director. “Yeah, it was just very surprising,” Shear confessed. “I just didn’t know what to expect. Even being accepted at SXSW was such a huge deal for me.”
Peet also claimed a prize after winning the ‘Special Jury Award for Performance’ for her turn as Dianne, which was a big deal for both of them. “That meant a lot to me,” he recalled. “Because I was so, so proud of her work in the film, and I know for her that meant a lot, since she hadn’t ever won an award, somehow, for acting, and so that was a real surprising delight.”
Shear’s original plan wasn’t to direct the picture himself, but after being talked into it by producer Charlie Alderman, he still suffered from the expected nerves. “I’m not ashamed to say that I cried from terror,” he proudly declared. “Just, you know, the amount of money, the amount of people who have jobs on the film, to be suddenly, the leader of the creative end of the film, was something I hadn’t fully pictured for myself.”
It wasn’t something that had crossed his mind when he started working on the script, but after some words of encouragement from his wife, “She told me to chill,” Shear had calmed down significantly by the time the cameras started rolling. “I felt good,” he reflected. “I’d hired all of these lovely people to be around me, and so that buoyed my ability to start to make decisions and collaborate.”
With almost two decades of acting experience under his belt, Shear has spent plenty of time on different sets being surrounded by different types of directors, and while he’d always had an inkling that he wanted to turn his hand to filmmaking eventually, he described those feelings as being held “in a private and somewhat repressed way.”
As a lifelong film fan who said he’ll go to any showing whenever he’s invited, it was a progression that he always saw himself making in one way or another. “Once it kind of clicked, I did have this sort of natural connection to something I’d been cultivating, but kind of without knowing it,” he revealed, with his downtime between seasons on The Alienist providing the opportunity.
The show was shot primarily in Hungary, and with the second season not premiering until 16 months after the first had concluded, the New Yorker found himself trapped in a purgatory that many actors will recognise, waiting to hear if the TV show they star in would be picked up for additional episodes.
Making the most of the downtime, Shear found his way into Fantasy Life. “My entry point was within the process of writing, my approach, which I hadn’t really engaged with before, this being my first screenplay,” he explained, but it wasn’t too different from his acting methodology: “You try and stay in the present, have the moment-to-moment experience really drive the performance.”
“As a writer, I eventually found Dianne,” he continued. “Because in the first act of the movie, she’s kind of talked about, but not seen. And so when I got to the point where she is introduced, it was a natural redirect to developing her character.” As a female actor in her 50s struggling to reconcile with the chance that her career’s best days are behind her, Peet’s arc isn’t exactly what you’d call autobiographical.
However, much of Fantasy Life is drawn from Shear’s personal experiences, but once he began writing, one hand organically began feeding the other. “I would say the personal aspects of the script were the entry points for my writing, the development of the story,” he mused. “It was then fun, sort of like me being the audience of the writing to see, ‘Oh, if I bend the truth here, do I still believe it?’ Because there’s something about real experience; you can tell when something has a like grain of reality in it.”
Asking himself the question, “Can you go from one point to the next and still believe that it’s reality?” he began wrapping the other layers of the story around Sam. A visit to his psychiatrist, played by Judd Hirsch, lands him a new job, even though he’s in no way qualified to be looking after young children.
Still, Dianne takes a liking to him, and he becomes a core member of the extended family. David still remains suspicious of him, and Sam’s increasing feelings for the mother of his charges threaten not only to cause issues for their platonic bond but also to increase the pressure on the rocky patch Dianne and Sam are going through as a married couple.
It’s a showcase for Peet, in what’s also her first role in a feature for ten years, and Fantasy Life doubles as her first-ever producing credit on a movie. Naturally, there was plenty of collaboration between the two to refine the story, not only in the producer/director relationship, but also in their status as the two leads.
“It was such a pleasurable and productive relationship from the very beginning,” Shear beamed. “She had ideas about the script that were really sharp, and she wanted to imbue it with some of her experience as an actor, and just she’s a good writer herself, and so we started to work on a few things together, right off the bat, and that set the tone for our collaboration.”
When they were performing scenes together, the pair “developed a shorthand for making adjustments and trying something again and doing something in the opposite way that we did it,” and the end result, as he put it, “was awesome,” with one scene in particular drawn from an unfortunate real-life scenario.
At one point in Fantasy Life, Dianne is thrilled when a fan approaches her and asks for an autograph, only to discover that she’s accidentally been mistaken for Lake Bell. It’s something that genuinely happened to Peet, and when Shear found out about it, it was incorporated into the script in a fortuitous scenario, since it’s perfectly in keeping with the film’s tone and themes, and the trajectory of the character.
“I had written a scene that resembled the moment,” Shear offered. “When Amanda first read the script, she was like, ‘Oh my god, this happens to me all the time with Lake Bell.’ And I was like, ‘That makes sense, and it’s funny.’ And she was like, ‘Put it in there, I want it in there.’ It. She has a taste for finding kernels of reality and putting them in her performance and her writing; I think we share that taste. But it’s a great moment.”
As mentioned, what Sam and Dianne have is obviously more than a friendship, but it’s not quite a romance, either, with Shear relishing the prospect of building such a complex and complicated dynamic between two characters who are constantly surrounded by other people, but still constantly feeling alone at the same time, especially when conventional movie wisdom would suggest an outright love story.
“That was a facet of the relationship that really interested me,” he concurred. “When I first was developing their dynamic, I was thinking a little bit about the history of this kind of thing in movies, the ultimate example being The Graduate, which is like the kind of very sort of sexy, domineering older woman, and the naïve student in Dustin Hoffman, and I just was curious about what that might look like in a reality that I could imagine.”
The conclusion he reached was an eminently simple one: “If I actually ended up having feelings for a very beautiful mom that I was working for, it wouldn’t look like The Graduate; it would probably look more like Fantasy Life,” which is about as close to hitting the nail on the head as you can get, since he wrote, directed, and stars in the latter.
David’s presence obviously complicates things, but they’re three sides of the same coin. He’s still chasing his rockstar dream as a middle-aged father, Dianne is contemplating a return to acting, and Sam’s law school dreams are a distant memory, uniting them as people who are struggling and trying to get to grips with a life that they’re beginning to think has passed them by.
“It was not exactly intentional to have them share that theme,” Shear clarified. “As I was writing the script, for whatever reason, I felt compelled to explore this tension between who you wanted to be or think you are, and who you actually are. It ended up kind of aligning as a theme.” It may not have been deliberate, but it forms the backbone of the narrative, and to Fantasy Life‘s benefit.
Beyond the central trio, the movie possesses a murderer’s row of esteemed legends in its supporting cast. In addition to Hirsch, the roster also includes Bob Balaban, Andrea Martin, Jessica Harper, and Holland Taylor, all decorated veterans of stage and screen, which makes you wonder how a first-timer managed to recruit them all.
“I mean, it’s still hard for me to fully believe,” Shear noted of his ensemble. Thanks to his 20-year friendship with casting directors Doug Aibel and Stephanie Holbrook, who’ve worked extensively with Baumbach and Wes Anderson, they were able to vouch for the script and get it to the right people.
When Peet came on board, she sent the script to her long-time friend, Balaban, and Nivola, who she’d known for three decades. “It sort of became an organic thing,” the filmmaker marvelled. “And once a core group came on, it started to naturally evolve,” even if he’s downplaying his own role somewhat.
After all, Nivola had previously shared that Baumbach had read the script and insisted that he play a part in Fantasy Life, with Shear grateful for the guidance he received along the way from his most frequent directorial collaborator and four-time Academy Award nominee.
“It’s been a big influence for me,” he said of Baumbach. “Over the years, he’s remained in my life. He read an early draft, gave me notes. He watched a cut, gave me notes. He’s really been a creative mentor and someone who’s been generous,” something Shear will always be appreciative of, since the auteur gave him his “first big role in a film” in Mistress America, which “really made an impact on how I wanted to run a set.”
With his award-winning feature debut on the cusp of release, does Shear officially consider himself an actor/filmmaker? He hadn’t until now, but Far Out gets the exclusive. “I will say in this interview, for the first time, that I am officially an actor/filmmaker!” he decreed. “The experience has been life-changing, and I have no other choice but to continue to pursue it, because it was just such a rewarding and fun and challenging experience.” And I know it’s going to continue to be that way, and I’m game, because it was just, you know, that meaningful.
Still, that doesn’t mean he’ll be abandoning his actor-for-hire days: “I mean, I’m writing my own stuff, and I hope to continue on that path, but I’m open, you gotta make a dollar, too, so I’m trying to use this opportunity to keep going forward.” Hypothetically speaking, what’s the dream? In a full-circle moment, Shear tied it back to a pivotal scene in Fantasy Life where Sam and Dianne’s bond is forged.
“As you may have clocked in Fantasy Life, there’s a Battlestar Galactica reference,” he teased. “I do have a real taste for sci-fi. One of the things about Battlestar that was so unique is that it certainly had a high concept structure, but they really valued a kind of reality and sharp dialogue.”
“It was not just the special effects that made that show, and I would be interested in a sci-fi project that delved into a different aspect of that kind of filmmaking,” Shear pondered. “I’ve watched it through three times in my life, at seminal and challenging moments, like my wife and I watched it during Covid, and it is a useful show. It has some emotional resonance that is comforting in a way, even though it’s about billions of human beings being murdered by AI.”
That doesn’t sound topical in the slightest, but with Battlestar Galactica struggling to get another reboot off the ground after several failed attempts, the most recent from Mr Robot creator Sam Esmail, maybe they should give Shear a call and see if he’s got any ideas.
