Juliette Lewis and Her Costars Talk ‘By Design,’ the Movie Where Her Soul Inhabits a Chair

You’ve never seen a movie like Amanda Kramer’s “By Design.”

A woman of limited means played by Juliette Lewis becomes besotted by a chair in an antique furniture store. Besotted by its form. By its materials. By its inherent quality and the skill of its craftsmanship. She becomes so besotted by it that her soul jumps into the chair and resides there.

“I commend you for trying to explain the movie because I can’t,” Lewis said in an interview alongside Kramer and her costars Mamoudou Athie, Samantha Mathis, and Robin Tunney, at the IndieWire Studio at Sundance, presented by Dropbox. “She wants to become, she wants to inhabit an inanimate object. I connect with it on an emotional level, and it’s sort of someone who needs and wants to disappear from themself to fully be found or fully come alive. And she feels so alive to be wanted and desired by being this object.”

Her rich friends and regular lunch companions, played by Mathis and Tunney, could have just bought her the chair! But instead, they let the chair get bought by someone else.

“I think it was a little bit like the evil stepsisters,” Mathis said of her and Tunney’s characters. “I mean, we’re friends, but we’re sort of frenemies. They’re not the most loving, compassionate people, although they stick with her to the very end and they are there for her when it all comes to a head.”

“They are friends with money, and they could buy anything in the showroom,” Kramer said. “But they also never buy. They never buy because they could have anything — which is a thing.”

The official Sundance logline for “By Design” says that Lewis’s character actually becomes more popular as a chair. The chair certainly becomes irresistible to musician Olivier (Athie), who falls in love with the chair and has a full-on romance with it, perhaps because Lewis’s character’s soul resides in it.

“I think about Olivier and the first thing that I think of is desperation and longing,” Athie said. “I think he’s lost, or at least you find him in a period of his life where he is lost. He’s unable to commit to anything. He’s not fully committed to any kind of career or his girlfriend or his life even. And he’s just lost. And he sees or feels something with this chair, it just, I wouldn’t even say gradually. Within that first scene, he is like, ‘No. This is the love of my life.'”

As far as the Lewis character’s newfound popularity as a chair, Tunney had particular thoughts.

“It sort of feels like an allegory for social media,” Tunney said. “You put up a post and you think you’ve connected with people and they’re like writing stuff, and you’re like, “I saw that person,” where you’ve had zero connection, you have no idea what’s going on in that person’s life. For all you know, they’re a chair.”

“I actually read somewhere once that Brad Pitt buys many single chairs,” Kramer added. “He is a collector of many single chairs. I have nothing to say about that. From a soulful place, we will make our own assumptions. But I love the idea of a person who is like, ‘I’m going to spend my money on beautiful single chairs because why not?’ I would love to be a person who buys chairs. And when you start thinking like that, you’re like, ‘I would love to be a person who is a chair. Maybe I could write something beautiful about a woman who becomes a chair.'”

“By Design” world premiered in the NEXT section at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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