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”.
“Ooh, I love that,” coos Marks, cooped up during the pandemic with her parents, her boyfriend and four dogs (two French bulldogs, “some kind of chihuahua terrier” and an elderly yorkie). “I’m gonna steal that!”
Another thing critics have been saying is that Banana Split is “the new Booksmart”, another “womance” celebrating teen female friendship. The comparison is flattering enough but, considering Marks first started on the script so long ago, could be galling. Marks is a – youthful – industry veteran, having just directed her second film, acted in films including The Runaways and The Amazing Spider-Man and in TV shows such as Ugly Betty, Weeds and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
In her slightly weary, deadpan style, she points out that, yes, she was shopping her script around well before Booksmart existed, but, no, it doesn’t bother her to be seen as part of a trend. “Why not have a bunch of these female-centric movies right now?” she shrugs. “Part of me worried we were too late – but I think everything worked out just fine.”
Beyond that initial spark, Marks insists that the rest of Banana Split is fictionalised, the result of reworking the script with her friend and co-writer Joey Power. April and Clara get up to all sorts of hi-jinks, while the unsuspecting Nick comes to feel like a well-groomed plot device. Obviously the zeitgeisty question is whether Marks had her own epiphany over time, realising that a man didn’t need to be at the centre of her story.
Yes and no. The only child of an actor mother and businessman father, she says she always had a feminist education; she cites as inspirations Lena Dunham’s pilot episode of Girls, or Frances Ha, which are both nearly a decade old. If it did take her a while to figure out the true angle, she sees it more as gaining storytelling experience. “I was so wrapped up in my own emotions as a teenager – you’re still trying to figure yourself out,” she reasons. “But as a writer, when you have a couple of years away from it and you get perspective, it becomes very clear what the actual story is. The truth kind of emerges.”
In the final edit, April comes across as goofy and neurotic, alternatively sardonic and sweet-natured, and Marks says: “I really am April in so many ways.” However, almost as an aside, she adds: “I’m probably a little more ambitious than April, because I did go out to get this movie made” – and that is clearly no small thing. Marks’s mother, Nova Ball, appeared in lots of adverts and on TV, and it inspired the young Hannah to follow her; she spent much of her childhood acting, and was mostly home schooled. She has only ever done prom or graduation on-screen, but she is pragmatic about that. “I got to have prom three different times, and I was pregnant at prom twice!
“As a kid, I had such a great time; I was actually working. But then it got a lot harder, because even when you’re a teenager this business will tell you you’re too old … and that really messes with your head and you just feel bitter and jaded at such a young age.”
Like many others, she did in part turn to writing to gain some autonomy, but then, she adds: “Writing – especially screenwriting and directing – is just as competitive as acting. I didn’t realise I was entering these new careers that were just as challenging … !” Another droll sigh. “But the biggest thing that shifted my mindset, without naming names, was that I would see people who were so, so successful, with careers that I would kill to have, and they were so miserable. And I just knew that I didn’t want that for my life any more.”
In 2018, Marks directed the romantic drama After Everything, which she and Power had also co-written; now she has finished another, Mark, Mary & Some Other People, a solo project that she is currently editing via Zoom. It’s a sexy comedy inspired by the vagaries of an open relationship, but this time, she swears, it isn’t autobiographical. “I’ve never had an open relationship – I’ve always been too much of a jealous romantic.” Anyway, it sounds positively trad compared with her next script, which she announces is a “robot road-trip movie” – or, more precisely, “sort of like Before Sunrise, but if Julie Delpy were a robot”. Umm, how did that come about?
“Agents were telling me, ‘maybe write something bigger, something that isn’t two characters sitting’,” she relays. “And then, of course, I wrote another movie with two characters sitting – it’s just one of them is a robot!” Never mind, I tell her: those movies are often the best. “I’m really glad to hear you say that,” she says happily, “because that’s probably what I’m gonna keep making.”
• Banana Split is on digital platforms from 8 June.
