In the final days of a criminally close campaign cycle, a pair of political ads stirred up so much controversy among conservatives that former President Donald Trump jumped in to have his voice heard by taking a jab at none other than Julia Roberts.
“I’m so disappointed at Julia Roberts…she’s going to look back at that and cringe. Did I really say that?” Trump said to the Fox & Friends hosts over the weekend in reference to the viral ad Your Vote, Your Choice narrated by the Oscar winner. It features two women standing opposite one another at the voting booth while they check boxes for Kamala Harris, seemingly against the wishes of their waiting husbands. “What happens in the booth, stays in the booth,” Roberts says in the spot from left leaning voter advocacy and education group Vote Common Good.
A companion piece, Remember Who We Love the Most When We Vote, flips the script and focuses on men who cast their ballots for Harris in secret as a way to honor the women in their lives while bucking pressure from their male peers. “You can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know,” Clooney says. “What happens in the booth, stays in the booth.”
The ads’ focus on privacy and permission structures at the polls struck a nerve and inspired countless headlines and social media posts in recent days. Turns out they were produced and directed by a pair of filmmaker siblings, Colin Keith Gray and Megan Raney Aarons, through their company GRAiNEY Pictures. The pair were quick to credit a creative brain trust that includes Vote Common Good’s Doug Pagitt, writer Dode Levenson, former Jimmy Kimmel Live! producer Jill Leiderman and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart scribe Rob Kutner. They were also swift in revealing the backstory of how the complementary spots came together despite shoestring budgets and tight deadlines, what it took to get Roberts and Clooney to lend their voices, and how the content aligns with their work at GRAiNEY Pictures.
We’re talking on the heels of former President Trump weighing in on Fox News about one of your spots. How did that feel?
AARONS Colin and I have a thread going with the writer of both spots and Vote Common Good executive director [Doug Pagitt]. It’s funny because we’re all sharing [intel] and I feel like every two seconds another message is populating the thread. When the Trump update came in, Colin put this perfectly by quoting one of our friends, a Washington D.C. insider who we’ve worked with and who Colin has been collaborating a lot with this autumn. He said, “It’s the holy grail when you get the opponent to speak about a campaign ad.” It’s a bit of a mic drop moment. In general, we’re blown away at how this has ruffled feathers for factions of the right. It’s overwhelming, to be honest.
GRAY It’s overwhelming also because of the fear and misogyny that it’s revealed on the other side; fear of women voting their conscience in the privacy of the voting booth. It’s shocking how threatening that appears to be to the other side.
AARONS Exercising your right to privacy in the voting booth then leads to conversations on the extreme, conversations around abolishing [the 19th Amendment], a woman’s right to vote. We’re seeing conversations like this happening on camera, on Twitter and other places. A pastor recently talked about how it shouldn’t be about a woman’s right to vote, she should vote the way of her husband, and if there’s no husband, then her brother. People are actually speaking like this, and they’re coming out of the woodwork. It’s shocking.
I hear there’s an interesting story of how these political ads came to be. How did you get involved?
GRAY I moved to Michigan this summer to be in the thick of it. Our company, GRAiNEY Pictures, has been making a push to be a part of these social impact stories, leaning into projects that tackle difficult subjects or create engagement around these challenging discussions. We had done a bunch of work for Business Forward, and we were speaking with other groups about possibly doing some other ads. But we’re not part of the Harris-Walz campaign or the Future Forward ecosystem. We’re just a bunch of concerned filmmakers who wanted to do whatever we could for the cause. Because we had already been working on a feature documentary about swing states, we got connected via Jill Leiderman, a former producer on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, to this incredible writer, Dode Levenson who had come up with this really interesting campaign ad.
They noticed some data around Evangelical voters. They typically vote as a block and are more pro-Trump, pro-conservative but the data showed that five to 10 percent of them could be persuaded to vote their conscience. The insight that Dode had, which was fascinating, inspired the creation of this ad based around this permission structure. Initially it was for a women-targeted ad but expanded to a similar ad aimed at working class men who are also facing acute pressure from tribal loyalties for vote for Trump as well. When we got connected, that’s when it all kind of took off because Dode had been starting to work with Vote Common Good, which I’m giving them some props by wearing this baseball cap [motions to colorful baseball hat]. We’re this small, sort of scrappy outsider team that came together to start bringing this to life.
AARONS What’s so amazing about the groundswell that happened is that we were attracted to the story in part because it was data-driven. Research had been put in to uncover this niche audience that could value and respond to a message like this, and Dode turned in this really interesting script. We’ve built GRAiNEY Pictures from the ground up, and we’re a small but might group — a global collective if you will — of change agents. We seek solutions through impact storytelling, and it’s something we’re really passionate about. It’s woven into everything we do, whether it’s scripted or unscripted. And, so, here was this moment where we see a script and an opportunity to do that. I also saw an opportunity as a woman, as a mother to speak to an audience that probably was not having a lot of content geared toward them. We had very little time and very little money to pull something together but we leaned into our years of experience in Hollywood to get it done.
On short notice, we got a top flight team together. We called our go-to casting director, Lesley Wolff, who works with a lot of comedic actors. Overnight we had an amazing team but it was short-staffed. I was doing my own art department and wardrobe sourcing. The infamous [bedazzled] hat, which is hilarious, was a fast source via Amazon. Colin and I are nerds who like to do research so we wanted to make sure that not only the look and the messaging was correct but that the casting and the feel of it read as authentic. We were able to secure a location and everyone on the team worked for zero or very low rates because everyone believed in the message.
How did you get Julia Roberts as narrator?
AARONS Our editor David got it in the can and when he started turning in cuts, we knew it was working and that there was something there but we didn’t have a release plan. We knew that Vote Common Good was behind it but there wasn’t a budget for ad buys. We started talking about who could be a good narrator, and we really wanted it to be a female voice, someone who could connect to flyover states, to swing states and voter we were trying to target. We’ve been in the industry a long time, and we’ve made a lot of interesting friends. I was lucky enough to be able to put in a call to Danny Moder, Julia’s husband, because we’ve known them in our circle for 20 years. But we’ve never made an ask like this. Once she saw the spot, she was ready to jump on board. We expected maybe a team to be guard-railing this but she really believed in it. She had just returned from a visit to Georgia and was like, “Let’s go.” She even offered to put it out on her socials.
GRAY We really felt it was vital to target male voters, especially working class, blue collar voters in some of these swing states. So, we created another script focusing on a similar permission structure. Obviously, I’m a little biased because I’m a girl dad, but I thought we could reach men as a way to address this permission structure through the lens of a dad with a daughter and another voter with women in his life without having to get into all the politics or even calling it out, but just showing it visually. You see this young daughter at the polling center, and you see another guy look at his phone and on it is a picture with his mother, wife and daughters.
AARONS By the way, the 4:20 time stamp on the phone was accidental but caused another [stir].
GRAY Totally accidental and it exploded among people who thought we were calling out the marijuana legalization efforts in different states. It was not deliberate at all, but it’s now become a whole sort of meme on the internet about these ads. But it was really powerful because I think what’s resonating is that again, the tribal loyalties that voters face and the pressures they face, this is giving them an opportunity to embrace the privacy of the voting booth to vote with their conscience.
The ad featuring women touched more of a nerve than the second. Do you think that’s a timing issue or that it speaks to gender dynamics in this country?
AARONS I think it speaks to gender dynamics in the country. It’s harder to go after a dad for doing right by his daughter than it is, strangely, for a woman to show her own agency in the privacy of the voting booth. I think it also touched a nerve with the slight comedy of two women looking at each other. I don’t know if that added fuel to the fire or not but, unfortunately, it has infuriated the deeply misogynistic elements on the right who maybe would not have voiced the things they are now starting to say. In a weird way, I’m happy that it’s unearthed this dialogue so that we can all come to grips with where we are as a society. It’s exposed that there are these huge factions of women who feel they can’t speak freely in their own home about voting their conscience, and it’s a statement of where we are in this country that it’s so divisive right now.
GRAY It’s alarming. But for us as GRAiNEY Pictures, we really love creating these kinds of campaigns and content that catalyze discussions. Now, some of it has been pretty ugly, but it certainly has created a big dialogue around this issue. Some people are saying that, in many ways, the election is coming down to matriarchy versus patriarchy. I don’t know if I would be that reductive of where we’re at, but at the same time, like Meg said, it struck a really raw nerve and we’re happy that we’re exposing some of this thinking and hopefully also catalyzing some positive discussions around this too.
How did you end up getting George Clooney?
GRAY First of all, I’ve got to give some serious props to our production services team in Detroit, Full View Productions. We literally had met with them a couple of weeks prior because they were helping out with our swing states documentary. We called them up to say that another spot would be coming. That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, we got the green light and were filming three days later. They had to scramble but they do incredible work and had to pull together free locations, casting, etc., all within a matter of days. Davide Fiore edited the second piece as well, and did an incredible job.
After [Your Vote, Your Choice] dropped on Monday, we got a final cut for [Remember Who We Love the Most When We Vote] and similarly, we were trying to figure out who should narrate. We had a line into George Clooney and thought it just seemed perfect. We knew it was a hail Mary but we sent in the ask on Tuesday.
AARONS With a caveat that we only had 24 hours.
GRAY Or less. Literally within a few hours, he had the thing recorded on his cell phone. We asked him to give us a few different options. He sent it in by Tuesday afternoon. We cut it that night and it went out the next day.
AARONS It is head spinning — absolutely head spinning. But I do think we are in a unique position because we’ve been working towards this for a very long time. We’ve been straddling the divide between long form and short form storytelling and working with companies on branding while striving for impact messaging in the work that we do as a company by bringing on partnerships and teams with top-tier teams all over the nation, and now Canada and the U.K. It’s a perfect marriage of who we are and where we’ve been. It’s also very funny that we’re sibling filmmakers, a brother and sister, with a female perspective and a male perspective. It happened in a natural way. A project like this needed people who could wear a lot of hats; we both could produce, executive produce and direct and also pull together great teams.
In what ways does your work complement one another and the creative projects you work on together at GRAiNEY Pictures?
GRAY We really do have different experiences. We grew up together but Meg is my kid sister and I went off to University after spending my formative years growing up in Canada. I have always been so focused on documentary filmmaking, social justice and social impact storytelling. That’s always been the North Star for me. Last year, we released our seventh feature doc, Unzipped: An Autopsy of American Inequality, which is about the affordable housing crisis. We had a companion impact campaign, and that reflects my drive as a storyteller — to lean into stories that challenge the status quo. That comes from our mother, in many ways. She was very active in the civil rights movement. She was a community organizer, a social work and community work professor. I was a poli-sci major, and I’m a huge nerd. I love research, I love synthesizing complex data and trying to create compelling narratives. Megs brings a different wink and sensibility and is now really more focused on the scripted side of our company.
AARONS I had the benefit of this academic upbringing with our mom and her grassroots social worker, community worker vibe. I was then able to watch Colin as he moved into doc filmmaking, and he gave me my first shot. He thrust a camera in my hand and said, “You’re going to DP this documentary.” I came up from originally as an actor and then through the camera department, very much always thinking about visuals. On the backbeat, always focused on impact, how to make the world a better place through telling thought-provoking, interesting stories. I trained with the Groundlings, and I sometimes do stand-up, so there can be a comedy element to what I do.
I’ve got a couple different features in the works, and there will be an announcement coming about a feature film that I’m attached to direct. That’s really exciting. There’s another book being optioned out of the U.K., along with another U.K.-based project. There’s all this brewing for me, and one of the things we complement each other on is the ability to be about facts, data and nuance. Colin brings the historical side, I bring the visual side, character beats and performance. We both were trained as actors, and we both are very passionate about authenticity on the screen. Even though our interests have gone in different directions, we remain a sounding board for one another. We’re famous for asking each other for a gut check.
Colin, you mentioned the swing states documentary. Can you share details?
GRAY It’s early days, but I can tell you it’s called Swing States: Fear, Fallout and Voting in America. It will be a postmortem to the election. We are getting some initial coverage with Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to start and then focusing on the aftermath of the election. Where are the biggest trouble spots in the certification process? It’s very exciting, very topical and a real investigation of this Byzantine electoral college system and like a 101 of how it all works. It’s very complex. Most people can’t describe it. We’re trying to highlight the system, how it works and why is that you can win the popular vote and lose the election? It’s also a way to showcase the stakes, the threats to our democratic process, but also these heroic secretaries of states, attorneys general and election workers who put themselves on the frontline to buttress this and make sure we have free and fair elections.
Speaking of Nov. 5, where will you be?
AARONS Colin and I are going to be on two very different ends of the spectrum. I am hunkering with my husband and my kids nail biting and realizing that I’ll probably go to sleep without clarity.
GRAY I’ll be in the thick of it. We are going to be all over Detroit filming at various poll centers. We are with Secretary of State Benson at her evening press briefing. We are going to some watch parties in Detroit and capturing the excitement and fear around what’s going to happen, especially in an epicenter like Michigan and Detroit, which is right on the front lines of what could decide this election, not just for president, but for House and Senate. I don’t think I’ll go to bed knowing what the results are either, but we will have at least documented the people on the front lines trying to make sure we have a safe process, voting process.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
English (US) ·