Jennifer Prediger On ‘Apartment Troubles,’ Working With Jess Weixler [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

Jennifer Prediger made her directorial debut with Apartment Troubles, an indie comedy about unlikely roommates that features an impressive roster of comedy talent.

Jennifer Prediger On ‘Apartment Troubles’

Prediger developed Apartment Troubles with fellow actress Jess Weixler, with whom she connected through mutual friends. “Jess was working on the Good Wife and she was living in LA and needed a place to live. Someone connected us in that moment and it was just kind of a perfect fit,” Prediger told uInterview in an exclusive interview. “She lived in my crazy illegal sublet apartment and then I double-illegally sublet it to her, and so she was there and I was in Connecticut and we just kind of bonded from afar over the apartment.”

“She and I lived together for about a month in this apartment. And within the first week, we just kind of got inspired and we just started writing,” Prediger explained. “The apartment was like this real inspiration for us. So we had a month of overlap there, and then we started writing back and forth from New York and LA and we were watching a lot of movies at the time, like The Odd Couple and Withnail and I and you know just got inspired.”

After Prediger and Weixler decided that they really had something with Apartment Troubles, they went about recruiting actors to fill out the cast. Prediger managed to get her Life of Crime costar Will Forte onboard, while Weixler was able to get her Somebody Up There Likes Me costar Megan Mullally to join the project. And, Weixler’s agent had a hand in getting Jeffrey Tambor to take a part.

Getting the top-notch cast together was a breeze for Prediger compared to dealing with the loss of her cat while trying to get funding for Apartment Troubles – and then ultimately working it into the script.

“My cat had a heart attack and so we were still actually writing the script and so this cat heart attack became a big theme of the movie. My cat’s name was Pigeon and the cat in the movie is named Segal,” Prediger revealed. “So, in a way anything related to the cat was incredibly hard for me to write because I was like really grieving the loss of like the cat with the biggest heart in the world.”

Shooting the burial scene for the cat, according to Prediger, was not only difficult on an emotional level, but on a technical filmmaking level as well.

“What we do to bury the cat was kind of actually one of the most difficult things to shoot and act,” Prediger revealed. “It involved fire on a rooftop in New York City. So shooting with live flames and also on a low budget makes acting and directing all of it very challenging. You’re on a windy roof, there’s a ton of lighter fluid and you’re grieving the loss of a cat, so those were some of the greatest writing and acting challenges.”

Apartment Troubles will be released in theaters and on iTunes March 27.